Martinez is so tired of serving this kind of processed meal, in fact, that a few years ago she went searching for information about what her district used to serve kids, hoping that she’d find old recipes for scratch-cooked meals tucked away somewhere. She flipped through heavy binders full of menus dating back to 2010 and found only disappointment: Hamburgers, pizza, chicken patties, the very meals she was rotating through every week had been staples for years, probably decades.

“You don’t see passion in these menus,” says Martinez. “You see the status quo.”

Zena Martinez. (Photo courtesy of the Chef Ann Foundation)

Since then, Martinez, who oversees school food in nine high schools, began offering at least one meal every week that required more than reheating. Entrees like baked ziti and a chicken and rice bowl began popping up as lunch specials. Now, at least 10 percent of her menu involves what those in school food call “speed scratch” cooking, meaning she uses fully cooked ingredients such as chicken breasts and tomatoes, to produce a dish that’s less processed than frozen patties on a bun. A diet heavy in processed food is linked to less physical fitness in kids as well as a wide range of health problems including diabetes and cardiovascular disease in adults.

Martinez wants to boost her speed scratch cooking to 40 percent by next year, and she dreams of cooking only meals with raw, fresh ingredients two years after that.

“I believe that it’s fully achievable,” she says.

Her determination is exactly what the Chef Ann Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to promoting scratch-cooking in schools, was looking for when it created the Healthy School Food Pathways Fellowship, a year-long program that aims to create a new generation of school food leaders eager to abandon the heat-and-serve model. Martinez was among the 24 inaugural fellows selected out of about 60 applicants from districts around the country.

Mara Fleishman, Chef Ann Foundation’s chief executive officer, says she conceived of the fellowship after noticing the same small group of people showing up at events promoting scratch cooking in schools, including founder Chef Ann Cooper, the foundation’s founder. Fleishman says the fellowship was intentionally advertised to mid-level managers, with the hope that after completing the fellowship, the fellows would stick around their districts, ascend into leadership roles, and establish lasting change.

“We can put them through a comprehensive 12-month program where we’re helping them understand the tenets of scratch cooking. Not just how to lead a scratch-cook program, but what does it mean?” she says. “What do their choices mean for the nutrition of a child and the impact on the environment—and for the food system?”

The fellowship aligns with a larger movement to include more fresh ingredients in school food. According to the USDA’s latest farm-to-school census from 2019, about 43 million children participate in farm-to-school programs every year, and nearly 68,000 schools feature local foods on their menu.

Still, the fellows face unique challenges rippling outward from the pandemic. Labor shortages persist, of course; but also, during the early days of COVID, the federal government made lunch free to all 50.6 million public school students nationwide. Last fall, the universal meal program expired in most states. A recent School Nutrition Association (SNA) survey of more than 1,000 school meal program directors found that among programs that must now charge for meals, there was an a 23 percent drop in breakfast participation on average and a 13 percent decline in lunch.

In Martinez’ district, the drop has been even more dramatic. “We have probably lost 38 percent participation [for lunch],” she says, adding that at one high school where last year they were serving 1,900 daily lunches, “now, we’re lucky to serve 800.” According to the SNA survey, about 60 percent of school meal program directors said that they were now charging students not eligible for free lunch.

And of those charging for meals, nearly all have experienced an increase in unpaid meal charges or debt, a burden on school district budgets, not to mention families struggling to keep up. Lower participation combined with unpaid meal debt means less money available for school food programs, limiting meal program directors’ ability to experiment with more labor-intensive or expensive approaches to meals.

For all these reasons, it may seem like bad timing to launch new, healthier school menus. But the 24 fellows, including Martinez, plan to do just that.

Fellows Can’t Fix It All

Nick Vedia, the district sous chef at Virginia Beach City Public Schools, oversees 82 kitchens and says a speed scratch recipe might taste great at one site, but another site might not get it right, and kids wind up snubbing the meal. “That is my challenge,” he says, “making sure I’m getting as close to a consistent product to our children.”

As another aspect of its work to address the need for skilled cooks, the Healthy School Food Pathway program includes a separate but related apprenticeship that recruits and trains cooks specifically in cafeteria-scale scratch cooking. California invested $45 million in the program and is the only state where it’s currently up and running, though Colorado and Virginia are exploring adopting it as well.

California also invested in 12 of the fellows, while funding for the other 12, who work in districts ranging from Virginia to Arizona, came from the Whole Kids Foundation. Over the next year, the fellows will visit districts that have incorporated scratch cooking into their menus, take classes, and receive $5,000 to implement a project in their home district that will steer menus toward healthier offerings.

Martinez also wants her project to focus on building community in the cafeteria. “I want to offer meals reflective of all students,” she says. “We have students from Sudan and Cambodia. I want parents to submit recipes and we can sample them at school.”

Other fellows are contemplating how to add salad bars that kids will look forward to, following their inspiration to try hydroponic farming, devising 10 scratch-cooked recipes that can be taught to their staff over the summer, and more.

Then, two years ago, the senior at Creighton University in Omaha was looking for something to sacrifice for Lent and decided on a whim to give up meat, not just on Fridays as all Catholics are called to do in the stretch between Ash Wednesday and Easter, but for the entire 40 days. He was surprised to find that it wasn’t hard. And once he learned about the climate benefits of his choice, he decided to stay away for good. “I don’t buy meat for myself at all,” he says. “This industry is responsible for so many emissions.”

Nearly 40 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions stem from our current global food system, with meat and dairy production largely to blame. Like many of his Gen-Z peers, Glynn is deeply worried about the climate crisis and wants swift action that will curb greenhouse gas emissions quickly. He believes 50 million U.S. Catholics (about one-fifth of the American population) could help if they returned to forgoing meat on Fridays, an act rooted in religious observance that was abandoned by most Catholics in the U.S. more than 50 years ago.

New research supports Glynn’s take. Earlier this year, researchers at the University of Cambridge released a study that measured the environmental impact of meatless Fridays in the United Kingdom. In 2011, Catholic bishops in England and Wales revived the practice of abstaining from meat on Fridays year-around for spiritual reasons. The study, which is awaiting peer review, found that while only about a quarter of the region’s 4 million Catholics obeyed the church’s edict, that relatively small shift still likely resulted in an estimated reduction of 55,000 tons of carbon annually. Researchers equate that to 82,000 fewer people flying round-trip from London to New York over the course of a year.

Shaun Larcom, a professor of law, economics, and institutions at the University of Cambridge and the study’s lead author, says if Catholics in the U.S. adopted year-around meatless Fridays, the reduction in emissions could be as much as 20 times greater. While Catholics are a minority in England and Wales, the 62 million U.S. Catholics make up the country’s largest single religious institution. “Americans also consume a bit more meat than people in the U.K.,” adds Larcom.

Glynn believes meatless Fridays are the “babiest of baby steps” Catholics can take to lessen their carbon footprints. But he’s also keenly aware that American Catholic leadership has largely ignored climate change, despite an increasing number of the church’s members living in the Southern half of the U.S., where the population is at a heightened risk of experiencing climate-fueled natural disasters like droughts, floods, and hurricanes. “It’s like, ‘We don’t know about it; it’s not our thing; why would we talk about it at Sunday mass?’” he says. “I would love to see a church that looks at its environmental mission in a concrete way.”

Meatless Friday: An Ancient Act

At around the same time, the Second Vatican Council, which sought to modernize the Catholic church, released a decree that allowed bishops to accept other forms of Friday penance, such as charity work, instead of abstaining from meat. By 1966, U.S. bishops no longer recommended year-around meatless Fridays, though some bishops in the U.K. stuck with the practice well into the ‘80s.

Larcom, who is a practicing Catholic, lived through the return of meatless Fridays in England. As an environmental economist, he was curious about whether the 2011 guidance in England and Wales may have put a dent in greenhouse gas emissions over the last decade, even if meatless Fridays weren’t recognized by everyone.

Larcom had noticed other institutions recently calling for reducing meat consumption, including New York City mayor Eric Adams’ announcement that city’s schools would serve vegan meals to its 1.1 million students on Fridays, and California recently dedicated $100 million for plant-based meals in schools. He hoped that by linking tangible environmental benefits to the Catholic church’s meatless Fridays, perhaps bishops in countries outside the U.K. with large Catholic populations might follow suit. In the U.S. and elsewhere, giving up meat once a week for health and environmental benefits is the center of the Meatless Monday campaign, which has been growing in popularity since it started in 2003.

“I’ve been working on these issues for quite a while now and it seems like so many governments, for whatever reason, are unable to make any big inroads,” says Larcom. “Maybe it is time that religious institutions and NGOs step up and make a difference.”

Larcom and his fellow researchers surveyed hundreds of Catholics in the U.K. to gauge how diligently they adhered to meat-free Fridays. About 28 percent reported changing their dietary habits following the 2011 guideline. Of those, 41 percent stated that they stopped eating meat and 55 percent reduced their meat consumption. Still others said they weren’t even aware of the new guidelines.

Regardless, they drew on past research to estimate that the average high-protein, plant-based diet in the U.K. results in approximately one-third of the greenhouse gas emissions per kilo compared to a diet high in meat. When Larcom arrived at the 55,000 ton number, he found it significant for two reasons, even though it amounts to just .013 percent of the U.K.’s annual carbon emissions.

“For one, it’s a permanent change,” he says. “If people take this on, it’s a year-on-year change that’s embedded in society, it continues for a long time.” He also thinks it highlights the fact that “small lifestyle changes that are pretty minor, really, can pay off and make a difference.”

Co-opting a Spiritual Practice?

Dan DiLeo, a Catholic theologian at Creighton University, doesn’t believe U.S. bishops will echo this sentiment. In a study he co-authored last year, he found that U.S. bishops have largely stayed silent on climate change, despite Pope Francis’ recent call for radical action on the crisis and the church’s history of advocating for environmental protection.

“Francis’s teaching on climate change was reiterating 30 years of papal precedent from John Paul II, reiterated by his successor, Benedict XVI, reiterated now again by Francis,” says DiLeo. “It makes it even more stunning that the bishops in the U.S. would so blatantly ignore the teachings.” (The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops did not respond to requests for comment.)

In analyzing 12,000 columns published by bishops in 171 of the 178 U.S. Catholic dioceses from 2014 through 2019, DiLeo found that only 93 columns mention climate change at all, and of those, only 14 discuss climate change policy. And yet those bishops weren’t shy about other political and social issues; hundreds of columns mentioned abortion and healthcare.

DiLeo says over the last several decades, since Roe v. Wade legalized abortion, the Republican party and many U.S. Catholics—especially bishops—have formed a “symbiotic relationship.” In 2015, when Pope Francis released a 184-page document titled “Laudato Si: On Care for Our Common Home,” he emphasized the environment in crisis and the harm of economic systems that favor the wealthy and hurt the poor. DiLeo says the message was seen as “challenging” American cultural values.

“There has been more appropriation of conservative priorities into the social visions of lots of U.S. Catholics, including U.S. bishops. So, when Laudato Si came out, it directly challenged the Republican Party’s position on climate change, on fossil fuels, on market-based growth.”

While there are efforts among environmentally conscious Catholics to address the climate crisis, including one to retrofit the church’s 100,000 parishes, schools, and hospitals to renewable energy and net-zero emissions, DiLeo says he thinks many parishioners in the pews would bristle at a recommendation to limit meat for environmental reasons. And the perceived progressive politics of the act aren’t the only reason why.

Meatless Fridays were originally rooted in a spiritual practice, and DiLeo fears reinstating it for environmental benefits might appear like “co-opting” a religious observance. However, he says, much like the bishops in the U.K. embraced meatless Fridays for the good of the planet, it would be a fairly easy for bishops in the U.S. to connect the act of spirituality and sacrifice with the fate of “God’s creation.”

For many young Catholics, like Glynn and his friend Emily Burke who recently graduated from Creighton, the transition to a more plant-based diet is underway, even without official guidance.

“There’s a lot of collective energy among young people that’s really taking off,” says Burke, adding that she hopes that as more young Catholics talk about the benefits of a low-meat diet, and show up to potlucks with tomato soup in lieu of beef chili, perhaps the movement will expand to the more traditional corners of the church.

The post Catholics Used to Forgo Meat on Fridays. Could Bringing the Practice Back Help the Climate? appeared first on Civil Eats.

Chavez, a native of Tonaya, Mexico—where mezcal is produced—grew up with agave growing in every direction and learned the skills of a jimador, or agave farmer, from relatives. He’s leasing the plot from a family that used to grow grapes there. Three years ago, the family he works for ripped out the vines in an effort to conserve water and gave him the green light to plant agave. Now, as the West grapples with the worst drought in more than 1,000 years, he’s among a small but growing group of farmers in California, Arizona, and Texas who are turning to these hearty plants, which can survive with little to no water.

As many farmers in drought-prone regions are re-thinking what they grow, there are some other familiar workhorse crops that require little irrigation and could step in to keep bare land from turning to dust—such as winter wheat, legumes, and safflower. It’s agave, however, that has captured recent interest and momentum with its promise of drought resilience and a path into the potentially lucrative world of spirits.

A perennial succulent native to the arid Southwest U.S. and Central and South America, agave plants, with spiky leaves as stiff as cartilage, can grow to weigh up to 110 pounds, and the distilled spirits, made from the plant’s hefty heart, or piña, are soaring in popularity. Since 2003, tequila and mezcal volume has increased by more than 200 percent, with a significant surge in demand over the last five years.

In California, Stuart Woolf, president and CEO of Woolf Farming & Processing, a prominent operation that grows massive tracts of almonds, pistachios, and processing tomatoes, has emerged as agave’s biggest champion. Over the summer, Woolf donated $100,000 for an agave research center at University California at Davis.

Woolf, who used to rely on the state’s network of canals to deliver “surface water” to most of his 25,000 acres of farmland, hasn’t received a full allocation in years. He can pump from his wells to make up for that loss, but a sweeping 2014 California law, the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, aims to curb that practice.

“In all likelihood,” Woolf says, “I’m going to end up with more and more of my land being unable to farm because I just don’t have enough water.”

That’s how, three years ago, as the 63-year-old sipped on tequila, Woolf’s mind landed on agave, plants that are incredibly drought tolerant thanks to a twist in plant physiology. Agave plants keep the openings in their leaves (the stomata) closed during the day to avoid water evaporation, reopening them at night to collect and store carbon dioxide, and engage in photosynthesis come dawn.

“All I have now is a test plot, land, and a desire,” says Woolf.

A New Climate Crop?

Unregulated pumping of groundwater over decades has resulted in depleted aquifers, sinking land, and thousands of dry agricultural and drinking water wells. A recent study by the Public Policy Institute of California estimated that climate change and California’s water shortage will require the permanent retirement of at least 500,000 acres of heavily irrigated land in the San Joaquin Valley in the next 20 years.

All across the Southwest, the fallowing of land, with the hopes that rain will eventually once again allow for planting, is already underway. In 2022 alone, California farmers left hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland unplanted. In New Mexico, the state legislature allotted millions of dollars to pay farmers to idle fields. And in Arizona’s Pinal County, 30-40 percent of the 250,000 acres of irrigated farmland has been fallowed due to cuts in the water supply from the Colorado River.

Jimadors must use a special tool that looks like a long paddle with a sharp, round blade to dig out the piña and slice away the leaves. (Photo credit: Craig Reynolds)

“By next year that number is expected to rise,” says Paul Orme, an attorney for several irrigation districts in Pinal County.

Doug Richardson, an agricultural consultant who owns Drylands Farming Company near Santa Barbara, California, is an agave enthusiast, and not just for their ability to thrive in arid and semi-arid climates. “They’re fire resistant,” he says. “We’ve done a lot of farm design where we do agave as a perimeter crop to act as a buffer, a line of defense. Just a row of these succulent plants can keep a wildfire from encroaching.”

For nearly 20 years, Richardson encouraged mostly small-scale growers in the West to incorporate agave into their operations, and within the last 10 years he says his business has soared, with new clients in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona all seeking a less water intensive crop.

Ian Beger, the farm director at Castle Hot Springs, a luxury resort north of Phoenix, worked with Richardson to plant about three acres of agave so that the resort could offer hyper-local spirits. Water savings was not Beger’s main motivation, but he believes if he and other well-resourced growers, like Woolf, can work out the kinks and better understand the viability of this novel crop, that may help bring other farmers along. “Unless it has significant promise, no one is willing to risk their livelihood to grow it,” he says.

Julie Murphree, outreach director at the Arizona Farm Bureau, says farmers in Arizona have been searching for alternative, drought-resilient crops for decades. She says in Pinal County, where alfalfa and cotton fields have been fallowed, there’s not a lot of talk of agave. Rather guayule, an evergreen shrub that grows in arid climates and can be used in rubber products is catching attention, with tire giant Bridgestone funding research.

Whether its guayule or agave that catches on, Murphree says before farmers can take the leap, they must be certain soil types and temperature are right, and that there’s a profit on the other side. “Until a market is truly developed,” she says, “it’s hard for them to make a switch.”

‘Agave Spirits’ on the Menu

On a cloudless, bright autumn morning north of Sacramento in Yolo County, Craig Reynolds walked through around 1,000 agave plants that are planted on a gentle slope. Olive and nut trees used to stand here, but about eight years ago when the landowner, who is a friend of Reynolds’, had to start rationing water, he agreed that planting agave made sense. An almond orchard requires about four-acre feet of water, and Reynolds estimates an agave plot of the same size requires about a tenth of that amount, and most of that water is needed right when the plant is first establishing roots.

Founder of the California Agave Council, a trade group of 40 growers, distillers and retailers formed this year, Reynolds is a newbie farmer who worked in California state politics (and witnessed a lot of handwringing over water shortages) before retiring.

While there are hundreds of agave species, he has planted mostly blue agave, the variety used for tequila. Harvesting the piña, the pineapple-shaped heart of the plant that gets fermented for distilled spirits, demands patience, as agave can take six to eight years to mature. Still, Reynolds says over time farmers can build up their acreage so that every year there are plants ready to harvest, and he’s found a lucrative, boutique market in craft distillers. “I can get $15,000 per acre, which is a lot compared to most crops,” he says.

Primer, the food and nutrition services director at San Luis Coastal Unified School District in San Luis Obispo, California, is down 13 people on a team that typically totals 40. About 200 miles north, in the Santa Clara Unified School District, bus drivers pitch in to help serve food, as do some older students. The pandemic has left school kitchens across the country in dire need of workers. Last fall, 95 percent of school districts reported labor shortages in a School Nutrition Association (SNA) survey.

When Primer learned of a program that would recruit school kitchen trainees and pay them to learn the tools of the trade, she immediately volunteered to host and train a few of the inaugural participants. The program is known as the Healthy School Food Pathway program (HSFP), and was created by the Chef Ann Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to increasing healthy scratch-cooked meals in schools.

Mara Fleishman, CEO of the Chef Ann Foundation, says the program officially launched last year as a three-year pilot program in California. Fleishman says HSFP aims to address a problem the organization has repeatedly run into during its 13 years supporting schools trying to boost scratch cooking. “We were going in, helping districts change for two or three years and then the food services director would get a job at another district, and they wouldn’t be able to fill that position with someone who had scratch cook program experience,” she says. “There wasn’t someone below them to move up.”

Primer, who strives to prepare at least half of the district’s meals from scratch, had worked with the Chef Ann Foundation before and saw HSFP as offering two advantages at once: it added to the number of available on-deck hands and it helped cut a path toward a more skilled workforce overall.

“If we really want to talk about moving the needle of school food, elevating our programs, we definitely need that skilled labor,” says Primer.

While HSFP teaches the basics of school food—portion size, nutritional guidelines, procurement—its main mission is to create a pipeline of cooks ready to tackle the daunting transition of moving hundreds, maybe thousands, of meals a day from mostly pre-packaged food to scratch cooking using as many fresh ingredients as possible.

As Civil Eats has reported, the consequences of this heat can be deadly. Farmworkers, who are a majority migrant and Spanish-speaking workforce, die of heat-related causes at a rate of 20 times more than other professions.

In 2004, a worker in the valley died from heat stroke after he spent 10 hours picking grapes in 105-degree weather, prompting California to enact the first heat standard in the nation. It requires employers to provide water and shade when temperatures climb above 80 degrees. Fatal heat-related illnesses have decreased since, according to the state’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration, though a recent investigation found understaffing makes it hard to enforce heat protocols, and deaths have continued. At the national level, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration is in the initial stages of creating a federal heat injury and illness prevention.

As climate change drives more extreme heat in California, Angel Santiago Fernandez-Bou, a postdoctoral scholar in environmental systems at University of California, Merced, says extended heat waves like the one coming up will only increase.

He co-authored a report released earlier this year that predicts the annual temperature in the valley will increase 4 to 5 degrees by mid-century, and up to 8 degrees by the end of the century. On a day when Merced was set to hit 107 degrees, Civil Eats spoke with Fernandez-Bou about what this means for farmworkers and agriculture in California.

How will more extreme heat in the San Joaquin Valley impact workers who work in the fields?

Historically, here in the valley, there have been four or five days of extreme heat, and the projection is that by the end of the century, there will be 15 times more, so there will be two months of extreme heat.

You will see a big impact on farmworkers because no one will be able to work under those conditions, and with the law restricting farmworkers exposure to extreme heat, it will make it more challenging to rely on farm work as a profession. It would be inhumane to be working in such extreme heat.

I don’t want to speak for farmworkers, but I can give you an idea of the things I’ve heard. One of the main problems that farmworkers have is language barriers. It limits them to access information that is essential, such as standards to protect them against extreme heat. There are many grassroots organizations that are trying to reach out to farmworkers to tell them they have rights, that their employers have to implement those standards for them. That’s really good, and while obviously no one wants to work in extreme heat, some have to work because they have no other option; they do it because they need to.

Can you speak to how heat will also change the ability to grow certain crops and could alter agriculture as we know it in the San Joaquin Valley?

Heat destroys a lot of crops. But in terms of farm work, I think crops that rely on a lot of farmworkers will be effected. For example, raisins. In the San Joaquin Valley, raisin production is going down because there  aren’t enough farmworkers to pick up the raisins when they need to be picked up.

Farmworker scarcity is due to several factors, but definitely extreme heat is discouraging for anyone. For context, raisin farms require a lot of specialized farm work, maybe 30 or 40 people for 100 acres. The truth is that no child dreams of becoming a farmworker, and professional farmworkers are going to become more and more scarce.

I’ve heard of farmers losing whole yields because they couldn’t find farmworkers to pick up raisins before a sandstorm. Then the sand covered all the raisins, the sand grains got inside the wrinkles of the raisins and they’re not edible anymore. Raisins may be a crop that disappears from California.

Can you talk about how warming winters will impact agriculture in the valley?

If there’s a lack of cool or chill hours, the trees don’t rest during the winter, and they may not produce enough yield. For example, pistachios have female and male trees, and if they don’t have enough chill hours, the pollen is not released when the flower opens and then there’s no pollination of the pistachios.

Pistachios are hearty trees. They can be watered with very low-quality water. They are resistant to drought, and they can be planted in soil that’s very bad for many other crops. But they need about 800 to 1,000 chill hours. There are regions of the San Joaquin Valley where the heat is increasing so much that maybe one day, they won’t be able to be grow pistachios because of a lack of chill hours.

They can’t plant almonds (in place of pistachios) either because while almonds can survive with few chill hours, the soil has too many salts and almonds are very sensitive to water quality. So, this is a conundrum because farmers won’t be able to plant pistachios or almonds (in these rapidly warming regions). Those are crops that produce the highest revenues in the San Joaquin Valley.

By the nature of their job, farmworkers are at highest risk for heat-related harm, but can you talk about how extreme heat touches entire communities?

People in rural, disadvantaged communities don’t have the means to pay for air conditioning which is a big problem. It makes them less resilient to extreme heat. And at the same time, they cannot open the windows because they have extremely poor air quality around them because of conventional agriculture. We have talked to people living in rural communities, who are not working on the fields, but near the fields, who told us their nose bleeds when the nearby orchards are sprayed with pesticides.

Dust is a major problem, too, because it often carries pesticides that are in the soil, and it can trigger asthma and even Valley Fever. Also, fracking and heavy transportation [in rural, disadvantaged communities] affect air quality.

And if it’s a hot night, they don’t rest and they go to work more tired, and this is a cumulative problem. If you spend one day in the heat, it’s bad, but if you spend a week in extreme heat, it’s much, much, much worse.

What can be done now to prepare for this very hot future?

This year was very hot, and last year was really, really hot, and 2020 was the hottest year on record, tied with 2016. We are seeing extreme heat all over the United States.

We need to worry about what’s happening tomorrow. I think increasing mechanization could help. The manual labor in extreme conditions is very dangerous. These farmworkers can be trained to operate the robots or be the ones who operate the machinery.

And I think one of the most important things to incentivize is agricultural sustainability, especially regenerative agriculture. Regenerative agriculture contributes to healthier soils that can hold more water, more carbon, and access more nutrients for plants and food, while preventing aridification.

Regenerative ag can also create habitat for nature and better environmental conditions for everyone by suppressing pesticides. It improves air quality and creates safer work conditions for farmworkers. Regenerative agriculture can help mitigate climate change and its effects.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The post The Heat Wave Crushing the West Is a Preview of Farmworkers’ Hot Future appeared first on Civil Eats.

While Spanish is the dominant language for 62 percent of farmworkers in the U.S., pesticide labels are typically only printed in English. “We’ve been fighting for bilingual pesticide labels for 15 or 20 years,” says Jeannie Economos, pesticide safety and environmental health project coordinator with the Farmworker Association of Florida. “It’s very frustrating.”

Some of the more powerful pesticides used in agriculture may come with one small message written in Spanish. Under the Spanish words advertencia or aviso, which mean “warning,” the labels typically include one sentence that reads: “If you do not understand the label, find someone to explain it to you in detail.”

But advocates say the chances that a worker will find someone to translate these labels before they apply the pesticides are low. And farmworkers are often under immense pressure to work quickly.

In the last few decades, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has taken steps to better protect farmworkers from pesticides, but Economos says when it comes to bilingual labeling, advocates have “gotten nowhere.”

Now, change may be on the horizon. A recent petition from the Center for Biological Diversity urging bilingual labels reignited the issue, although one of the primary arguments against bilingual labels has been the fact that printed labels are already too long. Technology, however, can address that. “Farmworkers may not have a decent place to live or transportation, but they have smart phones,” Economos says. “They could scan a QR code and see the important parts of the label in Spanish.”

This precaution could ensure Spanish-speaking workers have access to safety precautions, and information about what protective gear is best and what to do if something goes wrong. And while agricultural chemicals also come with safety data sheets, which are also sometimes translated into Spanish,

About a year ago, the Farmworker Association of Florida helped a woman who experienced a sudden blurring of vision and patchy, irritated skin after spraying a pesticide at her job in a central Florida nursery. A native Spanish-speaker, the woman couldn’t read the label to find out whether her symptoms aligned with those listed. She took a photo of the label, and with Economos’ help, confirmed her symptoms. A year later, her eyes still aren’t fully healed.

A recent study showed that people of color are more likely to suffer harm from pesticides than their white counterparts. According to the research, 90 percent of pesticide use in the U.S. comes from agriculture, endangering the majority-Latinx workforce. The study cites English labels as one reason for this disproportionate risk. While the “EPA approves pesticides assuming that all pesticide label directions can and will be followed,” the study reads, the agency doesn’t ensure the label is in a “language the user can understand.”

Though it’s difficult to link harmful pesticide exposure directly to a worker’s inability to read the label, research conducted in Washington state analyzed public health data between 2010 to 2017 and found that 79 percent of 630 farmworkers with pesticide-related illnesses drew a connection to either a lack of access to the chemical’s label or a lack of understanding of what it said.

“This is an environmental justice issue,” says Mayra Reiter, project director of occupational safety and health at Farmworker Justice. “Two-thirds of the people who are exposed to pesticides and suffering the health effects can’t understand the informational label so they can’t take the precautions they need to take.”

‘Twenty Years of Conversations’

In theory, that’s what the LIP is for. Established in 1980, the program was created to require pesticide registrants to revise their labels to keep health and safety information as robust as possible. If the registrant didn’t comply within a specific time frame, its product could be withdrawn under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIRFA), the law that controls the approval, sale, and distribution of pesticides.

In 1984, LIP required several changes to 16 fumigant product labels, including a Spanish warning statement on the front panel and statements about flammability. J.W. Glass, an EPA policy specialist with the Center for Biological Diversity, says that initially the EPA proposed codifying LIP into its existing regulations, but by the late ‘80s, he says, “industry groups objected to the codification of the program,” and LIP’s potential power fizzled.

The program remains, but Glass says it’s rarely utilized and was last used in 1994 to amend labels for rat bait. The Center for Biological Diversity’s petition for bilingual labeling is also requesting the codification of LIP to lock in a more established, orderly process for label improvements that could better protect both people and endangered species.

Reiter says that starting around the late ‘90s, as Mexican and Central American immigrants began comprising the majority of the farmworker population, advocates realized that pesticide labeling had not caught up. “There has been 20 years of conversations around this,” she says.

In 2009, the Migrant Clinicians Network and other farmworker interest groups petitioned the EPA to require all pesticide labels be printed in both English and Spanish, and in 2011, the agency opened the proposal to public comment. Advocacy groups filed their support, as did the Arizona Department of Agriculture, the ambassador to Mexico, several doctors, and multiple public health agencies. Pesticide manufacturers and some agricultural trade groups resisted the change, citing extra cost and lengthy approval times for the updated labels at both the federal and state level.

Syngenta, a global pesticide giant, was an outlier. It supported the translation of key portions of the label, including personal protective equipment (PPE) requirements, first aid, precautionary statements, and other safety instructions. (Civil Eats contacted Syngenta and Bayer, another large pesticide manufacturer, for this story; neither company responded to questions.)

In the years that followed, the EPA took some steps to better protect farmworkers from dangerous chemicals. In 2015, the agency improved its Agricultural Worker Protection Standard (WPS), increasing the frequency of pesticide safety trainings for fieldworkers and pesticide handlers and mandating that they are offered in languages workers can understand, placing age limits on who could apply pesticides, as well as other measures, such as educating workers on ways  to protect family members from pesticide residue.

For instance, they recommended that workers leave their work boots outside their homes. (According to the study looking at pesticide harm in communities of color, agricultural operations are rarely monitored for WPS violations.)

In 2019, the EPA also released a Spanish Translation Guide for pesticide registrants that want to display labels in Spanish. Margaret Reeves, senior scientist at the Pesticide Action Network (PAN), says now that that guide is in place, requiring bilingual labels is the logical next move. “Spanish language labels [for restricted-use pesticides] are already available in Puerto Rico,” she says. In Canada, pesticide labels have required both French and English language for over a decade.

But in December 2020, in the final days of the Trump administration, the EPA decided not to propose a rule that would mandate bilingual labels.

The EPA leaves it up to pesticide manufacturers to decide if they want to provide a Spanish language label in addition to one in English. In an email, an agency spokesperson pointed out that for some highly toxic pesticides, including pyrethroids, the EPA requires a small portion of instructions in Spanish, including a warning not to pour products down the drain, keeping the chemicals out of water treatment facilities. The spokesperson also pointed to their updated Worker Protection Standard and Spanish Translation Guide as evidence of their efforts.

“EPA recognizes the need to provide agricultural workers and pesticide handlers, including Spanish-speaking individuals, with the information they need to protect their health and safety in a clear and understandable manner,” said the spokesperson.

Follow the Label

California’s trainings, she says, go beyond what is federally mandated. Pesticide handlers in California also must be trained on the specific pesticides they’re going to use. But, Blecker says, those trainings typically occur in one day, and may take place months before the pesticides are actually used.

“I guarantee that if you train someone on the safety elements of a label in February and you don’t apply it until May, they’re not going to remember everything,” she says. “What if they forget a specific glove type because there’s eight different types of chemical-resistant gloves? Sometimes the PPE is technical so it would be really great if someone had the opportunity to refer back to the label.”

Furthermore, according to the most recent National Agricultural Workers Survey, when roughly 2,170 farmworkers were asked whether, at any time in the prior year, their current employer provided them with training or instruction in the safe use of pesticides, about one-third said no.

Agricultural workers, like everyone who works near hazardous chemicals, should see what’s known as a safety data sheet on site that provides details about what chemicals are being used, the environmental and health hazards, and clean up instructions. Whether they arrive at 4 a.m. or in the middle of the night, they’ll find these sheets posted, typically at the edge of fields.

Blecker says those sheets do occasionally come in Spanish, but she estimates that “95 percent of the time” they’re printed in English. Furthermore, she says, the sheets are a requirement of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and are not as thorough as EPA-approved pesticide labels, which instruct workers how to prevent drift and keep chemicals out of water. Also, Blecker says, the PPE listed on the safety data sheets are recommendations intended to prevent illness or injury from exposure to chemicals in general. But labels outline specific PPE required for those applying or mixing pesticides, and her own research has shown that pesticide handlers in California who report illness often lacked the proper PPE. “If you’re going to translate [the data sheets],” she says, “translate the label.”

Reeves, with PAN, says Biden’s EPA seems open to either regulatory or legislative action requiring bilingual labels. “We are hopeful we will finally get movement on this,” she says, though she and other advocates know that, even if it happens, it won’t be a cure-all change.

For one, bilingual labels wouldn’t help the roughly 10 percent of farmworkers who are Indigenous and don’t speak or read Spanish fluently. And ultimately, Economos says, an environment free of toxic chemicals offers better protection than bilingual labels.

“Farmworkers are the most vulnerable and the most exposed, so they get top priority in my book,” she says. “The reality is we really need an alternative to pesticides.”

The post Most Farmworkers Speak Spanish, but Pesticide Safety Labels Are Often Only Printed in English appeared first on Civil Eats.

https://civileats.com/2022/08/15/farm-to-school-california-school-meals-supply-chain-pandemic-nutrition/ https://civileats.com/2022/08/15/farm-to-school-california-school-meals-supply-chain-pandemic-nutrition/#comments Mon, 15 Aug 2022 08:00:00 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=47927 Olsen ramped up the purchase of fresh fruit and vegetables from nearby farms, first with the help of a grant and, when that expired, she started a nonprofit. She currently spends $80,000 every year buying vegetables, fruits, and nuts, up from around $1,000 spent on fresh produce before her arrival. Roughly 65 percent of the […]

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When Cathy Olsen started her role as nutrition services director for the school district in Winters, California, in 2006, she found salad bars collecting dust in storage and students picking at lunch options that came mostly from cans. Olsen, a former chef who grew up on a small farm with an abiding passion for locally grown produce, wouldn’t stand for it. “The carrot that came out of the ground yesterday tastes better than something that’s been sitting in storage for a while,” she says.

Olsen ramped up the purchase of fresh fruit and vegetables from nearby farms, first with the help of a grant and, when that expired, she started a nonprofit. She currently spends $80,000 every year buying vegetables, fruits, and nuts, up from around $1,000 spent on fresh produce before her arrival.

Roughly 65 percent of the produce she serves is harvested from local farms. Kids eat a lot of strawberries when they’re in season. Same goes for asparagus, carrots, and, come August, when school starts up again, Olsen’s kitchen staff will spend hours slicing melons.

The 2022-23 California state budget includes $60 million for farm to school grants, a significant jump from $8.5 million just two years ago.

Olsen is what Lena Brook, director of food campaigns at the Natural Resources Defense Council, calls an “early adopter” of farm to school (F2S) practices. In other words, 16 years ago, even before F2S grew in popularity, Olsen was among a dedicated crew of school food service directors chasing public and private dollars to start and maintain F2S programs.

Now, Brook believes another big wave of F2S adopters is coming in California, thanks to a large investment headed for the state’s school kitchens. “There’s this really comprehensive suite of investments,” she says, adding that she hopes that money “will really shift” a wider swath of the school food system toward healthier, more locally sourced meals.

The money Brook is referring to is included in the 2022-23 state budget Governor Gavin Newsom signed in June. It includes $60 million for F2S grants, a significant jump from $8.5 million just two years ago. (California far outpaces the federal F2S grant program, which doled out $12 million in 2021.)

California’s so-called “incubator grants” can be used in a variety of ways—school gardens, the purchase of locally grown produce, or educational activities. And the awards can range in total from $20,000 to $250,000, depending on the size of the district and proposed plans. Brook says these grants are what lure districts into F2S. This past spring and summer, with about $26 million available for grants, 264 applicants requested $58 million in funding. “That shows there’s huge demand,” says Brook.

The pandemic put incredible pressure on school kitchens, forcing them to package food for pick up and get creative with ingredients when supply chains bottlenecked. Also, many districts were serving meals to a growing number of families in need. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) recently extended its pandemic school meal waiver, which has helped school kitchens adjust to those challenges, and Dominic Machi, director of food and nutrition services at Mt. Diablo Unified School District, about 50 miles away from Winters, believes these last two years have created an opportunity for districts to see the benefit of procuring food locally. “Because of supply chain issues, this is driving directors to produce more food in-house, so they have the food ready to feed their students,” he says.

While Brook anticipates that California’s significant funding will successfully encourage the next wave of F2S adopters, she’s still hesitant to declare it a sure victory. Without permanent funding for these projects, she worries that once the grants dry up, districts will give up, as not all nutrition service directors have the capacity to launch nonprofits, like Olsen, in order to maintain F2S programs. “What I don’t want to happen is for farmers and districts to get excited to make changes to begin to form these important new relationships and supply chains and have it fizzle out once the money stops,” she says.

It’s not unusual for districts to give F2S activities a go, only to let the program fade. One recent study analyzing F2S census data found about 26 percent of participants eventually ended the program.

A Growing Movement

The F2S movement has grown tremendously nationwide over the last several decades. The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, which was championed by former First Lady Michelle Obama, created a grant program to increase more farm to school activities. According to the USDA’s most recent farm to school census from 2019, about 43 million children participate in F2S every year, and nearly 68,000 schools feature local foods on their menu.

California produces over a third of the nation’s vegetables and two-thirds of the country’s fruits and nuts, so it has some inherent advantages. Even without an official F2S program, all California districts likely serve at least some fruit and vegetables grown within the Golden State, and provided by the Department of Defense Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program. 103 districts participate in a program known as California Thursdays, a partnership between public schools and the Center for Ecoliteracy that serves healthy meals made with California-grown food once a week.

But in 2020, First Partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom took the lead on expanding F2S. She helped form a working group and advisory committee that spent more than a year determining how to improve and grow the program in California, as well as address known barriers that limit a school’s ability to procure and serve fresh food.

According to a recent State of School Lunch report by the advocacy group Friends of the Earth, California school districts spend more than $1.5 billion dollars a year to provide 540 million school meals to nearly four million students, much of the food coming from industrial meat and dairy operations. The report notes that school meals have the potential to act as “a critical intervention to address racial and socio-economic health disparities among children who lack access to health food at home.” Half of the $60 million in F2S grant funding is reserved for Title I schools.

“School food is so complicated. It’s so heavily regulated, and it’s not well funded, and then you face everything that everyone in the food industry is facing [related to the pandemic]—staffing shortages, supply chains, a lot of turnover, and it can be hard to maintain awesome staff.”

The efforts of the working group culminated in an ambitious plan released earlier this year. It not only urges more locally grown food in school meals, but encourages school districts to buy from organic, sustainable operations as well as small, BIPOC-owned farms to create a more climate friendly, equitable school food system.

Feeding kids is not easy, though. “School food is so complicated. Few people understand all the intricacies. It’s so heavily regulated, and it’s not well funded,” says Alex Emmott, culinary manager in the student nutrition services department at San Francisco Unified School District. “And then you face everything that everyone in the food industry is facing [related to the pandemic]—staffing shortages, supply chains, a lot of turnover, and it can be hard to maintain awesome staff.”

Emmott says some food service directors simply aren’t equipped to incorporate freshly grown produce into their meal programs. “Take for example winter squash. A lot of times you can get cheap winter squash,” she explains. “But most of my kitchens don’t have the staff trained to break down winter squash and it’s pretty hard. You’ll get blisters on your hands from doing a couple of cases.”

A school garden in Winters, California.

Realizing that F2S might stall without adequate support, Governor Newsom budgeted $600 million for school kitchen upgrades to address those challenges, as well as new training programs for kitchen staff. Also included in California’s budget: $3 million that will create 16 regional positions dedicated to matching growers with schools and providing technical assistance with F2S implementation.

In Winters, Olsen has spent years developing relationships with local farmers who are willing to drop off boxes of apricots or plums and crates of zucchini at the district’s central kitchen, and she’s fortunate that she serves a modest 1,400 meals per day at just six schools. Mt. Diablo’s Machi must produce meals for 53 schools.

The F2S program he has been running since 2017 requires much more coordination. “There’s not one farm that can support the 20,000 meals a day that we do. We [work with] multiple farms,” says Machi, adding that the logistics of that can be daunting for food service directors of large districts. “What you need is a middleman, like an aggregator.”

He recently found a produce distributor that acts as his “food hub.” The distributor works closely with a range of local growers to fill the produce needs of Machi’s schools, and the distributor can even help clean, chop, and bag the food, if need be. Food hubs have been around awhile in California but some, like the Spork Food Hub in Sacramento, have formed specifically to work with schools.

Jacob Weiss, Spork’s general manager, says linking farmers to schools comes with multiple challenges. “Kids are the pickiest customer base,” he says. “If a mandarin is a little green, a kid might not want to take it.”

Last year, California passed a Farm to Community Food Hub Bill with the goal of supporting and creating more food hubs that can act as intermediaries, connecting growers to institutions serving meals, such as hospitals or schools. A study analyzing participation in farm to school programs found that when a food hub is present in the county, the likelihood that a school will maintain a farm to school program increased by 3.4 percent.

Getting Kids to Eat

On a recent June day, Olsen watched as kids dug tongs into leafy greens and shredded carrots, making small heaps of salad alongside pizza and local apricots. “They’re doing well with salad today,” she said, nodding approvingly. Tomorrow, she’ll serve shredded raw zucchini mixed with cherry tomatoes and sliced cucumber. “They love it,” she says, in a high-pitched tone meant to convince the doubtful.

A successful F2S program involves a lot of trial and error. Cooking with fennel, Olsen says, was a disaster. Over time, she’s learned how to encourage adventurous eating. She passes out stickers to elementary-aged kids who clean plates, and there’s a “hall of fame” wall for the young and the willing who eat asparagus.

Debbie Friedman, founder of Food Climate Strategies and former program director at Conscious Kitchen, says as farm to school expands in California, it’s important to analyze what’s working and what’s not. Friedman is part of a large team of researchers that is conducting a multi-year evaluation of California’s F2S incubator grant program. They want to better understand the environmental and economic impacts of F2S, as well as why some food service directors struggle with the program.

“It is definitely a goal of ours with the research to uncover barriers, to understand them, to identify enabling conditions and then create a suite of recommendations,” says Friedman, “so that we’re not reliant on an individual who, when they leave, the whole program just goes away.”

Though rigorous research on long-term impacts of F2S is limited, some research shows that the longer programming lasts, the greater the vegetable and fruit consumption among students. Olsen, who was thinking about retiring back in 2006 before she took the Winters job, worries that when she finally does step down, the program could vanish. “It falls a lot on a person like me,” she says.

The moment school ended for the year, Olsen was busy planning her annual fundraiser—an outdoor “summer feast” on a historic, tree-lined ranch. Last year, Olsen was one of the state’s roughly 60 F2S grantees who were awarded money. Her total: $20,000, about a quarter of what it costs her to purchase fresh food and maintain the elementary school’s garden. “The lumber to rebuild the beds cost $3,500 alone,” she says as she stands near a cluster of leaning tomato plants.

That fundraiser will help ensure her F2S program can endure. Brook, with NRDC, knows not every school food service director has the time or interest in fundraising. “That’s so much work for something that should be foundational,” she says.

Brook is excited that a new wave of F2S adopters is likely on the horizon thanks to millions in incubator grant funding and investment in technical assistance as well as kitchen upgrades, but she still sees many districts approach F2S like a “pilot” project, something that may or may not pan out.

With so much effort being put into expanding F2S in California, she thinks the next step should be pledging long-term support to individual programs like Cathy Olsen’s. “We’re giving farms and schools the ability to forge connections, to forge new supply chains by supporting local procurement,” she says. “In order for these goals to be realized we need a long-term funding commitment from the legislature.”

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]]> https://civileats.com/2022/08/15/farm-to-school-california-school-meals-supply-chain-pandemic-nutrition/feed/ 1 https://civileats.com/2022/06/07/will-californias-new-groundwater-rules-hurt-small-scale-farms-and-farmers-of-color-sustainable-groundwater-management-act/ Tue, 07 Jun 2022 08:00:00 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=47114 Update: In July, 2022, the California State Legislature passed a series of bills that include over $43 million in  investment in drought relief for small-scale and historically underserved farmers. “We hope to see swift action in allocating these funds to farmers who need immediate relief,” said Paul Towers, executive director at Community Alliance with Family […]

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]]> Update: In July, 2022, the California State Legislature passed a series of bills that include over $43 million in  investment in drought relief for small-scale and historically underserved farmers. “We hope to see swift action in allocating these funds to farmers who need immediate relief,” said Paul Towers, executive director at Community Alliance with Family Farmers.

 

Annie Main has always known water, or the lack of it, loomed as the greatest threat to Good Humus, her 30-acre farm in rural northern California in an area known as Hungry Hollow. Located west of Sacramento at the base of hills that turn crisp and golden each summer, she and her husband, Jeff, have been growing organic apricots, vegetables, flowers, and herbs for nearly 40 years on land that relies on a well for irrigation. In May 2021, their well started “sucking up air,” as the water table had dropped below the well’s pump. “Without water, we can’t function,” she says. “It’s a vulnerable feeling.”

Main wasn’t totally surprised, though. Over the last 10 years, she’s watched new almond and grape orchards cover thousands of surrounding acres and she has seen hundreds of new wells put in to extract the water needed to quench those crops.

The year Main’s well quit working, nearly 70 percent of water used for agriculture in Yolo County, where Good Humus is located, came out of the ground, with the rest provided by irrigation canals or creeks. That was an unusually high amount. The year before, groundwater supplied less than half. Still, throughout California, in a typical year, about 40 percent of the state’s total water supply comes from groundwater. During a dry year, that number inflates to 60 percent.

“Without water, we can’t function. It’s a vulnerable feeling.”

Decades of unregulated agricultural pumping combined with a warming climate and prolonged droughts have wrung California dry and left a massive water crisis. A landmark law, the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), which was passed in 2014 and will be fully implemented over the next 20 years, is supposed to cut groundwater withdrawal and stabilize water levels. If it succeeds at doing that, it could be a win for all who depend on groundwater, in theory.

But a report recently released indicates that as local agencies try to figure out how to achieve that balance, some of the tools being proposed—including fees, limits on pumping, and water trading programs—may harm historically marginalized farmers and small-scale farms.

The report titled “SGMA and Underrepresented Farmers,” by Clean Water Action, Community Alliance with Family Farmers (CAFF), CivicWell, University of California Agriculture & Natural Resources, and the Leadership Counsel for Justice & Accountability, also questions whether all local agencies charged with devising Groundwater Sustainability Plans (GSPs) are adequately including small farmers and farmers of color in the planning process.

“This report highlights that there needs to be equity in (SGMA),” says Ngodoo Atume, a water policy analyst with the advocacy group Clean Water Action. The report analyzed 14 GSPs from basins located on the central coast of California and in the San Joaquin Valley, an agricultural powerhouse spanning 8 million acres that has sucked up so much water that land has been sinking and water quality continues to deteriorate.

SGMA is a complicated law and the GSPs are dense, hundreds of pages long, and hard to understand without an expertise in hydrology. The local agencies that create those plans have tried to incorporate farmers in the process, using listservs and posting public notices about meetings. Advisory committees that help guide GSPs reserve spots for growers. But Main says most small farmers are stretched too thin to stay fully plugged into a years-long slate of meetings and presentations. In 2021, CAFF surveyed their members about SGMA and found that of those who responded, only one-third had even heard of it.

“We’re doing all the work on the farm, all the books, all the HR, we are all of that,” Main says, adding that at the meetings she has attended, she has noticed that some of the large farms send property or orchard managers. “They’re not the owners or growers.”

Without small farmers meaningfully engaged in the SGMA process, the report found that their needs are often being neglected. For instance, many of the GSPs reviewed aren’t noting depth of irrigation wells, an oversight for small farms relying on shallow irrigation wells that, especially during drought years, are often among the first to go dry. Also, none of the reviewed GSPs figured out whether monitoring wells—which are used to help gauge how quickly a basin is running dry—were located near those vulnerable shallow irrigation wells, helping to possibly flag a problem before it’s too late.

Roughly 80 percent of farms in California are considered small, meaning their gross income totals anywhere from $1,000 to $350,000. Of those farms, nearly a quarter are farmed by BIPOC, refugee, and immigrant farmers growing a diverse range of crops, from green beans and lemongrass to blueberries and eggplants.

Equality vs. Equity

Annie Main on Good Humus Farm.

Good Humus’s Main knew that her three grown children wanted to take over the farm. But to do so they would need water, even in dry years. She had heard of the SGMA in passing over the last few years, but last summer, rattled by a sudden lack of water and forced to pay a couple thousand dollars to drill her well deeper, she threw herself into learning about the law and the GSP process. She likens her shift in mindset around the SGMA to that of a “mama bear feeling threatened.”

She learned that where she farms on the western edge of Yolo County is of “special concern” to the local agency devising her GSP, but that there was a lack of knowledge about the specific dynamics of the water table.

Main also learned that one reason small farmers may have fallen through the cracks since the SGMA passed in 2014 was that while the law requires all who depend on groundwater, including domestic well users and cities, to be considered when making plans, all agricultural interests were lumped into a single group as one large, uniform beneficiary. This is the case despite the vast difference between a small, diversified farm and a massive monocrop operation.

“It just basically says that agriculture is a stakeholder,” says Dave Runsten, a senior policy analyst with CAFF. “There’s no explicit instruction for anybody to single out small farms. I think that’s been a problem.”

Some advocates say this lack of recognition runs counter to the Farmer Equity Act of 2017, which calls on the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) to ensure the inclusion of farmers of color and others who have historically been marginalized in the development and implementation of agriculture law and regulations. (According to the report, farmers of color tend to earn less money on average and receive 36 percent less in government funding than their white counterparts.) The Farmer Equity Act also states that CDFA should work with other agencies, including those in charge of SGMA, to keep equity a priority.

But Runsten says in agriculture, equality and equity often get confused. “With equality everybody gets the same thing,” he says. “Equity is recognition that some people have been disadvantaged, marginalized, discriminated against, and need [additional] consideration.”

Take water allocations, for instance. Many GSPs are proposing putting a cap on the amount of water that can be removed from basins and tacking on fees for violators. Runsten says that puts large farms at an advantage. They can afford pricey drip irrigation systems that make the most of every last drop. And they can buy water from neighbors or other irrigation districts. A more equitable approach, he says, would work in tiers, for instance giving “everyone enough water to irrigate 50 acres and ratchet down beyond that,” he explains. (Of course, then you’d have to have a mechanism in place to make sure large farms aren’t subdividing land into 50-acre plots.)

“Land fallowing is only really an option for someone with hundreds or thousands of acres.”

Aaron Fukuda, director of the mid-Kaweah Groundwater Sustainability Agency in the Central Valley, says he’s not familiar with the Farmer Equity Act, but his job is already hard enough simply trying to strike a balance between keeping agriculture alive and the region’s aquifers stable. To him, prioritizing one set of farmers over another would feel like playing favorites. “As far as I’m concerned, if I give everybody the same allocation that is equitable,” he says.

He had to do just that earlier this spring. Though Fukuda had estimated water allocations might be necessary sometime in 2025, entering into yet another year of drought, his agency capped groundwater pumping at 2.5 acre feet per acre across his GSA, no exceptions. This marks the first time the mid-Kaweah GSA has enacted pumping restrictions.

Beyond water allocations, Ruth Dahlquist-Willard, the small farms and specialty crops farm advisor at University of California Cooperative Extension, says other tools being proposed to achieve groundwater sustainability also may inadvertently harm small-scale farmers. She says land fallowing—i.e., leaving some land without crops—is only really an option for someone with hundreds or thousands of acres. Someone whose sole income comes from 30 acres? There’s not that flexibility. “You need all 30 acres to make your living,” she says.

Also, she says, the groundwater trading programs being proposed can be executed in a variety of ways—and some are much fairer for small-scale farmers than others. If the trading isn’t anonymous, for instance, growers of one particular crop might agree to only trade with one another to help their industry survive. Or, if small-scale growers aren’t carefully considered, a basin may end up trading a bunch of water away from where they farm, putting their wells at risk of drying up, year after year. Last month, the California Water Commission released a white paper highlighting the importance of including small- and mid-scale farmers when devising groundwater trading programs.

Dahlquist-Willard works with many Southeast Asian farmers in and around Fresno who grow specialty crops, such as lemongrass and bok choy. She estimates that 80 percent of them rent their land. As water becomes more scarce, and pumping limits are enforced, she fears many of these tenant farmers may wind up having their land taken from them as owners decide the price of water is way more valuable than what they earn from leasing it.

“Imagine a situation where there’s an allocation associated with each parcel of farmland and you can now buy and sell that allocation,” she says. “What is to prevent [a land owner] from deciding to sell the allocation with a piece of rented land instead of continuing to rent it? [Tenant farmers] are the people I’m most worried about.”

‘I’m as Important as a Larger Grower’

Dozens of GSPs have yet to be approved by California’s Department of Water Resources. Many have been deemed incomplete largely due to technical issues and concerns with adequate protection for drinking water wells, but Runsten, with CAFF, says DWR hasn’t cited a lack of consideration for small farms as a reason for not giving full approval. That’s partly because SGMA itself doesn’t include language specifying the needs of small growers or growers of color.

That said, it’s unlikely that legislators will opt to rewrite SGMA. Earlier this spring, a group of 12 state assembly members signed a letter including a $10 million request for SGMA outreach and engagement with those farmers in the state budget. A decision on that funding should come this summer. The state has a nearly $100 billion surplus and Atume, with Clean Water Action, says prioritizing small farmers will help ensure the most vulnerable growers don’t get left behind. “It’s more than an income for them,” she says. ”It’s their family and their life.”

“The fear is that this will not move fast enough—that communities will point fingers and not come together. The fear is that [people will say], ‘We can just bring the water in from someplace else,’ or ‘We can just drill deeper.'”

Since last summer, Annie Main has started organizing other farmers in her area to get involved with SGMA. She sees the water crisis not as an individual farmer problem, but one that spans the entire farming community. Her local groundwater sustainability agency, she says, has expressed gratitude that farmers who for years didn’t know much about SGMA are finally chiming in. Maybe, Main hopes, small farmers in her basin can continue to thrive even as water grows more scarce.

Still, a few nagging worries linger. “The fear is that this will not move fast enough—that communities will point fingers and not come together. The fear is that [people will say], ‘We can just bring the water in from someplace else,’ or ‘We can just drill deeper,’” Main says. Although she’s a small grower, she asserts, “I’m as important as a larger grower.”

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]]> https://civileats.com/2021/06/02/a-tiny-pest-a-big-crossroads-for-california-citrus/ Wed, 02 Jun 2021 08:00:36 +0000 http://civileats.com/?p=41879 Gorden is relieved. About crumb-sized and the color of dusty farmland, the psyllid carries a bacterial disease called huanglongbing (HLB) or “citrus greening disease,” which destroys fruit and kills trees. The disease has wreaked havoc on Florida’s citrus industry over the last decade and California citrus growers are on heightened alert. Though citrus greening has […]

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Jim Gorden stops his truck at the edge of one of his orange groves in Tulare County in the foothills of California’s Sierra Mountains. After 50 years as a citrus grower and pest control advisor in the San Joaquin Valley, the 81-year-old is “mostly” retired, but still vigilant about pests that may harm his fruit. A yellow sticky trap, about the size of a birthday card and speckled with insects, hangs from a branch. He leans in, eying each insect closely. None appear to be the Asian citrus psyllid, an invasive pest that poses the biggest threat to citrus growers in California.

Jim Gorden inspects a sticky trap for asian psyllids. (Photo by Anne Marshall-Chalmers)

Gorden is relieved. About crumb-sized and the color of dusty farmland, the psyllid carries a bacterial disease called huanglongbing (HLB) or “citrus greening disease,” which destroys fruit and kills trees. The disease has wreaked havoc on Florida’s citrus industry over the last decade and California citrus growers are on heightened alert.

Though citrus greening has not yet been discovered in commercial orchards in California, Gorden and other growers feel it’s only a matter of time. Last year, an unusually high number of psyllids were detected in nearly 120 locations around the San Joaquin Valley, home to about 80 percent of the state’s 267,000 acres of citrus. And this winter, a time when psyllids typically die off in the valley, three separate detections occurred.

To kill off psyllids and avoid the possibility that a roaming, infected psyllid could spread disease, most growers treat their groves with a widely used but controversial class of insecticides—neonicotinoids or “neonics” for short. In one year alone, California citrus farmers applied (or more likely had their workers apply) nearly 55,000 pounds of the neonicotinoid imidacloprid.

Beneficial insects, like honeybees and butterflies, inadvertently take up neonics through pollen and nectar. Research shows the systemic insecticides harm pollinators, lowering their immune systems, dimming their navigational skills, and weakening their ability to reproduce. That’s important because about 75 percent of the world’s flowering plants and 35 percent of the world’s crops depend on those pollinators.

But California may soon be one of the first states to drastically limit the use of neonics in agriculture. Last year, the state released a draft proposal that would require citrus growers to essentially cut their use of imidacloprid by about half the label rate. Furthermore, growers could only apply the pesticides once a year, down from the current three to four applications. While some states have pulled neonics from retail stores to curb their use in home gardens, California’s proposed action would be among the most restrictive in the nation, significantly limiting the overall quantity used. “It’s huge,” says Jen Sass, senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), an advocacy group that has pushed for a complete ban on neonics.

California’s department of pesticide regulation (CDPR) is scheduled to release an updated proposal restricting the use of pesticide this fall, with formal adoption scheduled for late 2021 or 2022. And while there are other tools to combatting psyllids— predator bugs that target them, organic sprays, and protective netting that blocks the pests from accessing trees—these alternatives can be pricier and not as long-lasting as neonics. For this reason, many farmers and pest control advisors are pushing back. The agency has received nearly 9,000 emails, letters, and voicemails in response to the suggested cuts. In written comments and during public forums, farmers and others in the industry have called the quantity of neonics they’d be permitted under the suggested guidelines, “worse than worthless” and “overreach.”

The Psyllid’s Curse

When left unmanaged, psyllid populations balloon rapidly, allowing them to become super-spreaders of citrus greening, which originated in China more than a century ago. As the name implies, the disease turns fruit green, bitter, and misshapen.

The pests feast on plants with piercing, sucking mouths that function like something between a needle and a straw. If the psyllid carries HLB, it can pass the pathogen from its gut to the tree while eating, and that can be fatal for the tree.

“It’s a pretty nasty vector,” says Matt Daugherty, a cooperative extension specialist at the University of California, Riverside. “Their populations can get roaring pretty quick.” A female psyllid can lay 500 to 800 eggs. In a sinister twist, psyllids that do not carry HLB are attracted to infected trees, Daugherty says, conversely those that are infected tend to prefer healthy, uninfected trees. And in California, citrus is everywhere, with trees lining farmland and dotting residential yards. “That’s bad luck on our part,” he says.

In the late ‘90s, psyllids arrived en masse in Florida. Since then, the amount of citrus acreage growing fruit has dropped by roughly half.

Gorden, who has white hair, a mustache, and an unfussy, gentle manner, believes HLB in California orchards could prove even more devastating than what unfolded in Florida. Florida citrus is used primarily for juice, meaning that the fruit doesn’t have to look perfect. California’s $2 billion industry produces bright, whole table fruit. The San Joaquin Valley alone grows about 4 million tons of citrus every year. “We live by the quality of our product,” Gorden says.

A Useful Tool

The first Asian citrus psyllid in California was discovered in August 2008 in San Diego County. A few days later, Gorden met with other citrus industry leaders. At the time, Gorden was vice chair of California’s citrus research board, a grower funded organization.

A keychain with four psyllids encased in plastic. Gorden uses this to show growers what the psyllid looks like. (Photo by Anne Marshall-Chalmers)

That year, the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA), scientists and citrus leaders started building a multi-pronged approach to control psyllids and prevent the spread of HLB. Sticky traps, like those in Gorden’s grove, help monitor their whereabouts. Tarps on trucks carrying citrus restricts psyllids from drifting off loads and easing into orchards. Neonics and other pesticides, meanwhile, provide what Gordon calls the muscle to “knock ‘em down.”

According to the CDFA, the psyllid’s presence in California has caused a significant ramp-up in the use of neonicotinoids in orchards over the last decade. A soil-application of imidacloprid, usually in late summer, moves up into the plant’s stems, leaves, and flowers, ensuring nymphs and adult psyllids that feed on new growth will encounter the toxins. The neonics stay in the plant’s system for several months, providing lasting protection from pests. According to a recent CDFA evaluation of neonic use in California, under the proposed guidelines, farmers would have to abandon routine soil applications as the permitted amount of imidacloprid wouldn’t be effective.

Growers also rely on foliar applications of neonics, both before harvesting fruit and when psyllids appear in groves unexpectedly. Growers can also use a class of insecticides known as pyrethroids. Should the use of neonics be restricted, growers worry over-relying on pyrethroids may result in pests that build resistance to the chemicals.

In 2014, the California state legislature required CDPR to determine what risk neonics posed to honeybees and other pollinators, and to follow up with mitigation measures by 2020.

The CDPR partnered with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Canada’s pest management agency on a number of studies assessing the impact on bee colonies from exposure to four different neonicotinoids in hopes of determining a level of exposure that bees could tolerate. The agency then compared those levels to residue levels typically found on pollen and nectar in fields, with extra scrutiny given to crops that are highly attractive to pollinators, such as nuts, apples, and citrus. CDPR determined the amount of neonics currently allowed on certain crops was too high, and this past fall issued the proposal limiting usage to a wide range of crops.

Frustrated citrus growers have pointed out that last year, during the Trump administration, the EPA used the same suite of studies as CDPR and issued an interim decision that greenlit five of the most popular neonics with minimal restrictions. One reason, says Lucas Rhoads, a NRDC staff attorney, is that when analyzing risks like pollinator health and groundwater contamination versus the economic benefit farmers gain by using cost-efficient neonics, Trump’s EPA “emphasized the benefits but downplayed the costs.”

‘A Bunch of Bums’

Bees visit citrus orchards as their perfume-y, white blossoms open to collect nectar and pollen for food, and in turn create a distinct, light golden orange blossom honey. Citrus trees don’t need bees, as they self-pollinate, but they play a vital role in much of California agriculture.

According to the Pollinator Stewardship Council in Colorado, about 90 percent of the country’s commercial honeybees travel to California in the winter for almond pollination.

Over the last 15 years, beekeepers have reported dramatic colony loss, occasionally as high as 40 percent. From January to March, when California is home to more than a million colonies, anywhere from 170,000 to 230,000 of those colonies will collapse, according to recent U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) surveys. Dan Raichel, a staff attorney with NRDC, says neonic use exploded in the mid-2000s, around the same time colony losses spiked. “Research has long indicated this is more than a coincidence,” Raichel says.

Developed in the ‘90s, neonics were offered as a safer alternative to more toxic organo-phosphate chemicals. Applied to corn, cherries, lettuce and many other crops, neonics are now the most widely used insecticides in the world, representing 25 percent of the insecticide market.

In California, neonic use has exploded, growing 70 percent between 2007 and 2016. David Bradshaw, a second-generation beekeeper in Tulare County, says he knows when his honey bees have been exposed. “They turn into a bunch of bums,” he says. “(Neonics) don’t kill them outright but it messes with their navigation, their foraging.”

Research has shown neonics also harm aquatic invertebrates and grassland birds. Last year, medical experts and scientists sent a letter to the EPA urging more research into possible developmental harm to humans from repeated exposure to neonics through food and groundwater. The coalition requested a ban on neonic-treated seeds, a currently unregulated practice of coating corn, soy, and other seeds with the insecticide.

Bradshaw, who is tall with floppy brown hair, glasses, and a weary grin, has been a beekeeper for 40 years and says it’s getting harder every year. Habitat loss and the Varroa mite contribute to colony loss, but he says widespread neonic use shares the blame. “This stuff takes on a life of its own,” he says. “It’s in the soil, in the rivers. There were things that were more toxic, but they sprayed them on plants, then you waited three hours and it was gone. It doesn’t affect the bees anymore.” But neonics linger; they’re in the plant’s circulatory system for months on end.

Another Way?

On a sunny morning in Exeter, California, Seth Tillery walks through his 10-acre organic citrus grove. His two barn cats—Slim and Sister—follow him, slinking around Valencia and navel orange trees as if playing hide-and-seek.

Tillery grew up surrounded by citrus; his dad transported it, his mom worked in the administrative offices of Sunkist. His decision to try organic came after working with organic growers on the marketing and packing side. “I was raised to spray it, kill it, and not worry about it,” Tillery says.

A ladybug on Seth Tillery’s farm. (Photo by Anne Marshall-Chalmers)

Instead of neonics, Tillery wards off psyllids and other pests by relying on horticultural oils combined with products containing potassium salts of fatty acids or potassium silicate. He recently started using a spray made from the extract of garlic and cinnamon. “The effectiveness of it is like 48 to 72 hours and then it will kind of dissipate,” he says. Because organic methods are so short-lived, growers must apply them far more frequently than conventional pesticides. “It costs me 20 to 25 percent more to grow [citrus] organically than conventionally,” Tillery says, adding that the cost is offset by his fruit’s higher price.

Tillery is not opposed to conventional growing, but he’s excited by the “ecosystem” he’s created. He places large ceramic pots of roses around his property to lure beneficial bugs. “Look at that,” he says, pointing to a ladybug on a tuft of leaves. “That’s what we want. They’ll go after little pests.”

In 2012, a tiny parasitic wasp called the Tamarixia radiata was introduced to California from its native Pakistan to help control psyllid populations. The wasps eat nymphs and, sometimes, parasitize them by laying eggs on their waxy, miniscule bodies. CDFA releases millions of tiny parasitic wasps every year, primarily in southern California. The wasps have helped control psyllids in residential settings, decreasing the likelihood that rogue backyard populations will wander to commercial groves.

On agricultural land, however, it’s up to growers to decide how they manage psyllids. “[The wasps] are too expensive to be used like an insecticide,” retired farmer Jim Gorden says. And introducing wasps into commercial groves where neonics are used could harm or kill them.

Chemical companies traditionally respond to regulation by swapping one insecticide for another. For a long time, strawberry growers in California relied on methyl bromide to control soil-borne pathogens and weeds. When that chemical was phased out due to its impact on the ozone layer, most growers simply turned to chloropicrin and other fumigants as replacements. Growers, like Gorden, are expected to deliver a low-cost piece of fruit that looks impeccable. “The ugly stuff gets left behind,” he says. Insecticides offer a cost-efficient route to achieving that goal, the cost often playing out over time.

But Jen Sass with NRDC wants to see wide-scale change in response to the potential phase down of neonics in California. “The solution should not be another chemical,” she says. “And farmers need help to get there.”

Jessica Shade, director of science programs at The Organic Center, a Washington D.C.-based nonprofit dedicated to researching the benefits of organic farming, says she’s hearing from conventional citrus farmers seeking to incorporate methods beyond neonicotinoids, and it’s not just because of possible regulations.

“Because those pesticides have been used at such high doses and so frequently, it’s accelerated the selection process for psyllids who are resistant to pesticides,” she says. In other words: with a life cycle that only lasts a few months, psyllids can quickly evolve to resist the toxins. And yet, the transition to organic can be difficult. Farmers must stop using synthetic fertilizers or pesticides three years before they can achieve certification, and the change can lead to lower yields.

Last year the USDA funneled $45 million to a number of research facilities studying non-chemical techniques for protecting citrus trees from psyllids and HLB. A research team at the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agriculture Sciences, for instance, is working on creating a transgenic or genetically engineered tree that could be resistant to the disease.

There are also hopes of finding an HLB vaccination for trees, or effective therapeutics, such as an injection or spray of an antimicrobial peptide found in Australian finger limes that reduces the pathogen’s presence in citrus trees. In Florida, planting cover crops that improve soil health and, in turn, a tree’s ability to fight off citrus greening, is showing promise. Scientists in Florida and California are also focused on selective breeding to create trees that are naturally resistant to the infection, but that solution is likely years, maybe decades away. And Gorden says it’s only a matter of time before HLB hits commercial groves in California.

An Urgent Threat

In a lemon grove outside of Moorpark in Ventura County, a German shepherd runs alongside a row of trees. A handler in sunglasses keeps pace. The dog suddenly halts mid-row and sits at the base of a tree, still as a statue, awaiting a reward. The dog is trained to detect the scent of the bacterium that leads to HLB.

It’s July 2019, the leaves of the tree the dog has identified will be sent to a lab and tested for the HLB infection. The result? Negative. HLB infects trees slowly and in erratic patches. But it’s possible that the specific leaves sampled were negative for the disease, and the tree was indeed infected.

John Krist, CEO of the farm bureau in Ventura County, says these “four-legged pest control advisors” were trained in Florida through a USDA grant and help the county detect HLB early.

Since 2019, Krist says, of the thousands of trees the dogs have sniffed, they’ve only detected the bacterium in “7 to 8 percent.” The presence of bacterium doesn’t necessarily mean they have the disease, and not all the trees have been tested. But Krist says: “Odds are extremely high that HLB is here.”

Neil McRoberts, a professor of plant pathology at UC Davis, says that California’s climate may impede the psyllids’ ability to spread the disease. “Winters are colder than they like. Summers are hotter and drier than they’re used to,” he explains. But that climate is changing. Temperatures are trending hotter in California, and that could mean increased pest populations, and an increased reliance on pesticides.

When asked about the threat psyllids and HLB pose to California citrus, a spokesperson for the California Department of Food and Agriculture wrote in a statement: “It has been an urgent issue in California for 13 years and has remained a high priority for CDFA.”

Awaiting a Decision

In addition to negative responses to the proposed reduction of neonic use in California, CDPR has received hundreds of letters advocating for an outright ban. “Science does not support pollinator protection based on ‘safe’ exposure levels to systemic insecticides,” reads one line in a 55-page letter submitted by the organization Beyond Pesticides.

Syngenta, a manufacturer of neonic products, disagrees. In a letter to CDPR, the company states that applications of various neonic products when plants are not in bloom could be used without harm to bees. Meanwhile, a letter from Bayer’s crop science division questioned how CDPR interpreted the data.

Even the USDA’s Office of Pest Management, which usually doesn’t weigh in on state level regulations, submitted a letter expressing concern that limiting neonics would hit California’s citrus and grape industries especially hard.

“I think it’s an inescapable conflict that has to be resolved,” says McRoberts with UC Davis. “There are valid arguments on both sides and that’s what makes it such a tricky policy for the state legislature to decide and CDPR to rule on.”

Leading up to the decision, trade group California Citrus Mutual and the grower-funded Citrus Research Board, hired scientific consultants to meet with CDPR and review its methodology. Casey Creamer, president and CEO of California Citrus Mutual, says he’s “optimistic” that CDPR will ultimately decide to ease up on the limits being proposed.

Jen Sass with NRDC says all eyes will be on California this fall when the state decides whether it will rein in neonic use in agriculture. “California is such a big ag state and their ag is so diverse and their climate is so diverse. It’s such an amazing testing ground,” she says. “If California can do it, anyone can.”

The post A Tiny Pest, a Big Crossroads for California Citrus appeared first on Civil Eats.

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