Based in the San Juan Islands, the group has united scientists, foresters, and farmers who see soil fertility—and specifically biochar—as an important answer to some of the planet’s most pressing challenges.

Kai Hoffman-Krull, who founded Forage in 2014 and is its CEO, stumbled on charcoal’s soil benefits in 2012 soon after he had cleared the wood from his land on Waldron Island to make way for a house and garden. With almost three acres of freshly cut forest, Krull found himself with a big problem: He had thousands of tons of unmarketable wood scraps scattered across his property.

Kai Hoffman-Krull.

“People on the island were laughing, they were so amused,” recalls Krull. “They were also concerned about where all that biomass was going to go, and wanted to help me find a solution.” While he could’ve used the wood as firewood, his neighbor and lifelong organic farmer Steve Bensel had another idea.

Bensel suggested burning it down to charcoal and adding it to the soil. When carbon-based organic material such as wood is heated under low-oxygen conditions, called pyrolysis, the production process emits much less carbon dioxide. Bensel had already started making small amounts of biochar on his own property and experimenting with applying it to his garden.

Biochar also came under the scientific community’s microscope, after Cornell University professor Johannes Lehmann published research in 2002 that showed how its application had helped shape the famously fertile, greenhouse gas absorbing terra preta soils of the Amazon Basin. That research led to an upsurge in university-funded studies to determine biochar’s effect on soil health.

Intrigued by the preliminary research as well as the blackened evidence of the Coast Salish people’s use of charcoal in the San Juans, Krull jumped headlong into studying biochar. His findings so far have been encouraging.

Exciting Results

To expand his research, Krull connected with the director of University of Washington (UW)’s School of Environmental and Forest Sciences (SEFS), professor Tom DeLuca, who studies the effect of biochar in forest ecosystems. This spring marks the beginning of the third growing season in which Krull and SEFS has organized biochar field trials on farms in the San Juans. Under DeLuca’s leadership, UW Ph.D. student Si Gao has spent two years of her graduate program commuting to the islands to take soil samples and help Krull to organize the experiments.

The researchers examined both plain charcoal and “charged biochar,” which is mixed with fertilizer. In 2015, the farmers grew beans. The following year, winter squash. The team found around a 65 percent increase in potentially mineralized nitrogen (the type of that is most available to plants) from the biochar plots when comparison to the control plots. They also saw 160 percent increase in plant available phosphorus, another essential ingredient for plant growth. But that wasn’t all.

Corroborating previous work that shows a 30 percent increase in yield for vegetables and legume crops such as peas and beans when biochar is applied, the San Juan Islands study found in 2016 that the average crop yield of winter squash also increased 30 percent.

Soil that was treated with biochar also held as much as 20 percent more water, creating an opportunity for farmers to use less water on their crops for the same yields. Biochar has a porous structure that was shown to help soil aeration; so whether a drought or a flood year, it can provide benefits.

“It was incredibly exciting to do this research in an actual on-farm setting, outside of a lab environment, and find a series of results that were shown across all these different farms,” said Krull.

Because charcoal is very slow to decompose in soils, it can serve as a tool to sequester carbon. The San Juan Islands study found a 35 to 45 percent jump in total carbon levels for the biochar plots, and that number doubled with the charged biochar. To put this in perspective, Forage’s website cites a previous study from UW that shows that for every pound of biochar put in the soil, almost three pounds of carbon dioxide are kept from the atmosphere.

“The notion of farming in the age of climate change terrifies me,” said Krull. “So we need to find ways to create more resilient, robust, healthy plants that can withstand variation. I really feel like the whole charcoal phenomenon fits so well, because of its well-rounded approach to soil health.”

Gao is more cautious: “We have found some exciting results, but this is just the beginning of understanding what’s happening in this one ecosystem,” she said.

Building Both Sides of the Biochar Market

Despite these exciting results, the reality is that biochar is still a niche product, used by very few farmers.

Forage’s next step is to help strengthen the market for biochar, by providing marketing and branding materials for biochar producers and connecting them with buyers.

The Forage website demonstrates how simple and quick it is to make biochar, and Krull says ideally farmers produce their own biochar for themselves or at least off of their own land. It can be economically unfeasible if they don’t want to make it themselves: Bensel recommends applying 40 cubic yards per acre, once every season; Home Depot currently sells biochar for the hefty price of $27.97 per cubic foot.

“I think biochar has real market applicability,” says Krull. “We think about the stock market, the notion of investing, all the time.” Whereas most farmers add fertilizer and other nutrients to their fields once a year and the plants use it up, he says “char is structuring [soil fertility] more like a mutual fund: you put it on once and then you’re accruing organic matter, biological activity, nutrients. And then that benefit gets to keep maturing and evolving over significant amounts of time.” As a result, Krull says farmers who use biochar will invest much less money in fertilizer over time.

Carson Beebe Sprenger.

Biochar also presents an intriguing opportunity for foresters. For Carson Beebe Sprenger, based on Waldron Island, the problem Krull originally had with his tons of unmarketable wood arises constantly in Sprenger’s sustainable forestry business, Rain Shadow Consulting. It’s called “slash,” he says, referring to the thin, weak wood, “And it’s a huge problem in forests in Pacific Northwest due to poor forest management over the last century. This woody material needs to be managed to reduce natural forest fires, and the strategy of open burning is not popular.”

To make slash—which is often processed into woodchips—marketable, or at least find a sustainable use for it, Sprenger says, would be significant. He envisions either having his customers pay him to produce biochar for their personal use, or else offering to produce and sell it for them.

However, while Rain Shadow Consulting is currently making biochar, they haven’t had easy access to a market. Krull hopes to help connect interested buyers to find suppliers online, although his next big hurdle is creating a standard price for biochar.

Forage is not alone; they are many organizations across the country experimenting with producing and selling biochar. New England Biochar for example has a similar mission of providing education and selling biochar, and has also developed a system of making the biochar that harnesses the energy produced by the flames and reduces emissions. There are also companies investing in other uses for biochar, such as its capacity to remove heavy metals from stormwater runoff.

Producing biochar is not the difficult part—it’s getting farmers interested. But results like the ones Krull and SEFS have seen in the San Juans may just be the tipping point.

Bensel, who grew up in California’s Central Valley and still visits friends there who are conventional farmers, says, “The role of carbon never used to be discussed, but now even [conventional farmers] are appreciating carbon and talking about it.” He continues: “If they decide they’re interested in that benefit and all the other aspects of biochar, well then this thing takes off.”

Photos courtesy of Forage.

This article was updated to correct the name of University of Washington’s School of Environmental and Forest Sciences.

The post Is Biochar a Game-Changer for Sustainable Farms? appeared first on Civil Eats.

It’s been years since the fish served at the wharf, or in the larger Bay Area, came exclusively from local waters. And for Pennisi, who catches local groundfish—species like rockfish, sand dabs, and petrale sole—the relationship between the fishermen and the local market is all but broken at a time when most consumers prefer shrimp, salmon, and tuna.

Now, in an effort to empower fishermen and reconnect them with local buyers, Pennisi is working to reach customers directly.

U.S. fishing regulations are currently some of the strictest worldwide and fees, restricted water access, and close in-person monitoring often make it difficult for small-scale fishermen to survive. And the regulations don’t stop once they reach the dock. In federally managed fisheries, fishermen are not legally allowed to sell their own fish without going through a third party, generally a large-scale distributor that must hold a “first receiver” license.

“The buyers hold the purse strings to the whole operation,” explained Ian Cole, co-founder of a community-supported fishery, Ocean2Table in Santa Cruz, who buys fish from Pennisi. “Typically, a boat like Joe’s would offload to a single buyer and that buyer would have the most say in setting the price. And because of that, the fisherman doesn’t end up with a good share of the profit.”

To cut out this regulatory step, Pennisi in mid-March acquired his first receiver license from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), with the aid of the Monterey Bay Fisheries Trust, to sort through months of paperwork. This is very unusual in a federally managed fishery—just two other fishermen in the area, Steve Fitz and Geoff Bettencourt, based in Half Moon Bay, own first receiver licenses.

“Joe’s taking the matter into his own hands, and that’s what he needs to do,” said Sherry Flumerfelt, the Trust’s executive director, who has worked on numerous projects with Pennisi in Monterey in the past. “Even though he’s not landing in Monterey Bay right now, we’re happy to help him get back up and running and fishing. We ultimately just really want fishermen like Joe back on the water.”

Long History of Trouble for Local Fishermen in California Waters

The fracture in the local fishing industry began back in 2000, when the federal government declared the Pacific Groundfish Fishery an “economic disaster” due to stocks collapsing and tightened regulations. Many fishermen went out of business; with no boats on the water, local buyers turned instead to international sources and the aquaculture industry began to grow by leaps and bounds. Today, Americans eat more farmed fish than wild, and the vast majority— over 90 percent—comes from outside the U.S.

In recent years, groundfish stocks have rebounded, but fisherman such as Pennisi have been slower to recover their businesses.

Innovators in the nonprofit sector have been trying to help small-scale fishermen market the sustainability of their current practices, and community-supported fisheries—subscription services that connect these fishermen with individual customers—have been springing up locally, helping to build consumer awareness.

But it has remained difficult for fishermen to break back into the local market and to compete with global prices set by large-scale fishing operations that don’t necessarily abide by regulations as stringent as those in the U.S. There just simply aren’t many buyers that can purchase and process the large amounts of fresh fish that trawl boats like Pennisi’s can bring in.

“If you imagine the fishing industry as a mirror, throw that mirror on the ground and that’s what we have left—fragments,” said Pennisi. “We used to have all these companies to buy process, and distribute fish, but now all the infrastructure has been fragmented into smaller operations or else lost, and there isn’t anywhere for the fish to go.”

In this fishing environment, and with his hands tied by the predicament of fragmented infrastructure, Pennisi started thinking outside of the box.

A Breakthrough: The Floating Fish Market

In the last week in March, just days after Pennisi was given his new license, he went out fishing with his crew. The weather was bad, so the fishermen only dragged their net through the water twice. But Pennisi came home with 33,000 pounds of 22 different species, including rockfish, sole, and skates. Pennisi and his crew then delivered the fish to around 100 wholesale and retail buyers that he had spent weeks lining up.

Part of the haul on Pennisi’s first trip out with his first-receivers license.

Cole and his business partner at Ocean2Table Charles Lambert, drove 80 miles from Santa Cruz to Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco to collect 600 of pounds of rockfish. He’s optimistic about the endeavor. “Joe was running out of options; you see all these boats leaving the industry because it’s just not profitable anymore. We’re doing everything we can to help him succeed.”

Pennisi’s ultimate vision is to be the first fisherman to sell his fish right off of his boat on a “floating fish market”; he already has self-engineered some scales and other equipment to do so. “Fish is so good and has so many different flavors, but because that flavor drops off after a couple days most people don’t even know that,” he said. “I want them to have that full experience.”

While Pennisi is currently delivering his fish from his boat, the Port of San Francisco has asked him to first get approval from the city before he starts selling directly off his boat (although legally, he could start that now). Rip Malloy, who works for the pory and manages Pier 39 and Fisherman’s wharf, says he’s “all for the idea,” and hopes it will bring more locals to the wharf and bring more activity year-round.

It’s Pennisi’s hope that other fishermen will be encouraged to get first receiver’s licenses and join him to sell directly to buyers and individual customers at the wharf. He and his crew have collected signatures from 75 other fishermen, a handful of local business owners, and members of the public, for a letter to the city stating their interest in selling fish directly of off the fishing boats.

“It doesn’t work if we don’t all do it together,” says Pennisi. “We want there to be all different kinds of boats bringing in fish so we have diversity and consistency. This is a process of rebuilding relationships between fishermen, between fishermen and the restaurants, and customers.”

Innovating to Increase Both Sustainability and Profitability

The fact that Pennisi even has fish to sell is testament to his innovation and stoicism. “I just resist and resist selling the boat,” Pennisi said.

Although he took a brief hiatus from fishing and got his contractor’s license to make ends meet in 2005, he returned to his boat full-time in 2011. That was the year when, like many fisheries in the U.S., the groundfish fishery adopted a “catch share” system, which allows state or federal regulators to set a total allowable catch over a certain time period and then divide it into shares intended for individual fishermen and companies to purchase.

That’s also when the Monterey Bay Fisheries Trust formed to fend off larger commercial businesses by buying up quota and then leasing it to fishermen at more affordable prices. Despite steep federal fees—Pennisi pays more than $500 per day for a federal observer to monitor his boat while he’s on the water, for example—the catch share system did encourage Pennisi and other fishermen to figure out ways to reduce their bycatch so they could bring in a greater amount of marketable fish with each trip.

Pennisi with some of the gear he uses for his lighter-touch trawl system.

Pennisi quickly proved himself a skilled engineer and innovator. In 2015, he partnered with the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) to develop his concept for “light touch” trawl gear that would have a lesser impact to the seafloor, reduce the amount of bycatch and also minimize fuel consumption.

“The magnitude of the difference between the two gears was fairly striking, with respect to the alteration of the habitat attributes,” said California State University Monterey Bay scientist James Lindholm, who has studied the effects of trawling on ecosystems for 15 years and worked with EDF to test the impacts of Pennisi’s designs. “Gear like the gear Joe’s working on is a way forward for us. Our study demonstrates he can catch fish and simultaneously minimize impacts to the bottom—not get rid of the impacts, but at least minimize them.”

Through his work with EDF and his own ongoing adjustments, Pennisi has managed to reduce his bycatch by 99 percent, decrease his fuel consumption by 50 percent, and lighten his boat to avoid ever scraping the ocean floor. And whereas his crew used to spend hours sorting through the too-small fish or unwanted species, the new gear means almost all the fish they catch are marketable, and they can get them on ice extremely quickly.

While many fishermen have had to make modifications in order adjust to the regulations, it’s rare to have the level of resources or encouragement Pennisi has had to experiment. Given how essential these innovations have proved to the survival of his business, he has worked to spread his successes with the rest of the industry—for example, giving a presentation for a gear modification workshop held in Oregon in 2016 by the West Coast Trawlers’ Network.

What Now, Joe Pennisi?

Once Pennisi gets approval from the city of San Francisco to sell fish directly off of his boat, he hopes to set up his “floating fish market” and cook up sample fish right there for people to taste; he also envisions being joined by his fellow fishermen and hopes that both tourists and San Franciscans alike start to think of the Fisherman’s Wharf as the best place to buy fresh, local fish. (Down the line, he also wants to donate a portion of his catch after each trip to charities such as Children’s Miracle Network.)

So far, he’s pleased that his experiment is resonating with the local community. “People saw those fish I brought in, how beautiful and fresh they were, and that they [flew] right off of the boat,” said Pennisi. “My phone has been ringing off the hook.”

Photos courtesy of Giuseppe and Grazia Pennisi.

The post The Fisherman Who Wants to Transform SF’s Fisherman’s Wharf appeared first on Civil Eats.

The filmmakers tell the story of innovative farmer Marty Travis and his family in Central Illinois, taking the viewer through the successes and challenges of each season on their tiny, diversified, and chemical-free farm. It also looks at the big picture of agriculture in the U.S., weaving in analyses from food and agriculture experts—including cookbook author and former New York Times columnist Mark Bittman, Blue Hill chef and author Dan Barber, Rodale Institute’s Executive Director Mark Smallwood, and John Ikerd from the University of Missouri.

Travis and his family have found a niche for their organic food in Chicago’s booming farm-to-table scene. By working closely with successful chefs and bakers, Spence Farm has become a uniquely diversified operation. On 160 acres, the family produces maple syrup, raises Guinea hogs, grows and mills heritage grains, and focuses on unique vegetable varieties tailored to their customers’ culinary needs.

The opening scene of the film follows Travis’ truck as he stops at more than 30 restaurants across Chicago to make deliveries. Travis’ success is not just his own—he founded the Stewards of the Land, a group of local, small-scale farmers who collaborate to grow and market their products together. Since creating this network, he has increased the diversity and quantity of produce delivered to the city and has provided economic opportunity for many farmers in his community.

“Measuring wealth is not always about counting your dollars,” says Travis. “Sustainability is measured in a lot of different ways. For me personally, I think it’s the relationship we have between ourselves and our friends and our clients that makes me feel very rich.”

“Sustainable” contrasts Travis’ exemplary land stewardship and business practices with his neighbors’ conventional farms. The film describes the ecological and health effects of the pesticides and monocultures used—and also the economic hardship many conventional farms face as they struggle to make ends meet in the Corn Belt. It’s clear that, while neither farming method is necessarily raking in the big bucks, the Travis family’s hard work and ingenuity earns them more economic stability.

In the film, Beth Rinkenberger, a farmer and member of the Stewards of the Land, described the reaction she received from a conventional farmer when he found out she was selling lamb’s quarters, a common weed, to Chicago restaurants “to the tune of 40 pounds per week.” The farmer couldn’t believe it because he was paying for Roundup to kill the same plant. Members of the Stewards of the Land can easily sow new varieties each year, adapted to the needs of the chefs with whom they have personal relationships. The farmers around them, however, are confined to a prescribed formula growing just a few commodity crops with a designated set of herbicides and pesticides.

In this still from the film, Marty Travis and his son, Will, visit with one of their guinea hogs during winter chores at Spence Farm.

Will Travis, Marty’s son, explains: “[Conventional farmers] get a bad corn crop and they’re complaining that the crop is trash but their prices go way up. Then they have a really amazing corn crop and they’re complaining because their prices are falling out the bottom. That’s what happens when you’re relying on someone else to set the prices.”

While the Travises say that Spence Farm is making $2,200 per acre, their conventional neighbors count on $400 per acre. If conventional farmers didn’t have huge swaths of land and receive subsidies, they wouldn’t survive. In 2016 the U.S. paid $20 billion in subsidies to farmers growing corn, soy, and other commodity crops.

“We started off with something that made sense,” Ikerd says in the film.

He describes the promise he once felt about industrializing agriculture: It made economic sense to improve the efficiency of agriculture and to free the hands of more people to work higher paying jobs. But, he says, the goal to provide greater food security failed. The food was no longer healthy and nutritious.

“I don’t hold it against the farmers that got into that system,” he adds. “I hold it against the people who failed to see that that system failed to do what we designed it to do.”

Will Travis steals the spotlight towards the end of the film, as a young man who is already deeply committed to his family’s business. None of the images in “Sustainable” make as much of an impression as the image of Marty and Will working side by side.

Marty tells the filmmakers, “This whole idea of doing something to pass on, to pay it forward, to make the community a better place, that’s what all this is about.”

The post An Organic Farm Going Against the Grain in the Corn Belt appeared first on Civil Eats.

Still in the planning stages, the Monterey fish hub could take many forms—it could be a facility, entirely virtual, or simply shared marketing. But the idea is a transparent business that brings Monterey fish, identified by the region and by the name and practices of fisherman who caught it, to both individual customers and large institutions in the area.

“Fishermen need a place where we can actually meet the public and introduce our products, and it can’t just come from one source—it needs to be a community effort,” says third-generation fisherman Giuseppe “Joe” Pennisi, who first generated the fish hub idea with Fisheries Trust Executive Director Sherry Flumerfelt back in January, 2015. Based out of the port in Monterey, Pennisi says he has no local market for his catch.

The Fisheries Trust—which was founded by the city of Monterey and the Monterey Bay Aquarium in 2013—kicked off the fish hub discussion a few weeks ago, inviting board members and informal advisors including the city’s harbormaster, national environmental organizations’ representatives, business owners, and of course, fishermen, to weigh in. 

“Everyone always asks me where they can find good local, fresh fish,” says Monterey cook and fishermen Kevin Butler, who attended the first Fisheries Trust meeting. “I tell them, ‘Well you’re going to need a boat.’ It’s that hard to find.”

Butler hopes establishing a fish hub will help reignite local demand. He brought a clear vision to the first meeting. In a perfect world, he says, he comes back in from fishing, and then goes directly to one, central location to first sell his fish to a distributor and then have it prepared by a fishmonger (like a fish butcher). And just a doorway away, there’s an open market with all the local fish, laid out on heaps of ice, in front of the customers. No endless phone calls while he looks for a buyer and his fish heats up in the sun; no frantic ice runs; no selling his fish to a middleman for the cheapest price and sending it off to a place where no one knows where, how, or who caught it.

“A proper local fish market that actually focuses on the local could make a difference,” Butler says, citing Pike Place Market in Seattle as a shining example. “Everyone who lives here is proud of being here,” Butler continues. “They’d walk into a place that’s half consumption and half education about where exactly that fish was landed, and with that knowledge there would be pride.”

While there are just a handful of other fish hubs across the country (there’s Red’s Best in Massachusetts and the Alaska Community Seafood Hub) to look to as models, successful food hubs are paving the way. With more than 350 across the country now, the number of food hubs has doubled in the last eight years. With both for-profit and non-profit structures, food hubs initially began aggregating local food products at facility-based distribution centers; now, some websites are also serving as virtual hubs.

Karen Karp, a consultant who has helped launch local food projects for over 25 years (including the big new food hub in New York), is in the process of conducting an initial assessment of a fish hub’s feasibility in Monterey. Funded by the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, as well as a supplementary grant from the Monterey Bay Aquarium, her report is expected to be complete by late spring this year.

Although fish hubs in other areas have been successful, Karp recognizes the importance of tailoring a system to its particular community. “Often groups believe food distribution is so broken that there’s no opportunity to be using or leveraging the existing distribution mechanisms to achieve the goals they have,” Karp says. “Our first goal is always to understand what problem they are trying to solve.”

A Fishery Rebounds, But Not the Demand

In 2000, the federal government declared the West Coast “groundfish” fishery a disaster and began enforcing some of the strictest regulations on the industry worldwide. Over the last decade, the groundfish fishery—which includes popular, bottom-dwelling species like cod, flounder, and sole—in Monterey has rebounded, and is now considered a success story among scientists and environmentalists.

But the local fishing industry has been slow to recover: fishermen are buried under regulatory costs, processing infrastructure has deteriorated, and many consumers, who still believe the fishery to be unsustainable, remain alienated. While the market is slightly better for Dungeness crab, salmon, and squid in the region, these fisheries are not as resilient and reliable as the groundfish fishery, which now can provide fish year-round.

Pennisi was one of the few in his home port who refused to sell his boat during the difficult years. After taking a hiatus from fishing and getting his contractor’s license to make ends meet, he returned to his boat full-time in 2011. Nevertheless, Pennisi’s “Pioneer” was the only groundfish trawl boat that left the dock this year out of Monterey Bay ports—and it only went out twice. (Pennisi spent the rest of his season working in other fisheries, in regions such as Alaska and Oregon, where he was guaranteed a good market for the salmon and crab he caught .)

Rather than trawlers like Pennisi’s, which pull in greater loads of fish with big sweeping nets, the Fort Bragg-to-Monterey coastline is primarily occupied by “hook and line” fishermen who are taxed less for their smaller boats that typically have a lower environmental impact. But they also bring in significantly less fish. And, unfortunately for everyone, they are forced to compete with lower global prices when they do bring in a catch, because no one is willing to pay a premium price for local, sustainably and ethically caught seafood in Monterey—yet.   

Building Capacity for Wholesale Buyers

While Butler is a hook-and-line fisherman and Pennisi a trawler, they seem to agree on one thing: the small and big boats need to work together to create one, consistent local market. While Butler may only be able to come back with a couple hundred pounds of rockfish, he could add this to Pennisi’s catch for a large-scale buyer.

How large are we talking?

Butler is also the operations manager at Real Good Fish, a Monterey-based community supported fishery (CSF) that, since its founding in 2012, has provided local seafood direct to consumers in the area through a subscription service that works similar to a community supported-agriculture (CSA) program. But founder and CEO Alan Lovewell, who is also serving as an advisor to the fish hub project, points out that his business can only grow so much—there simply isn’t enough fish in the area right now for Real Good Fish to sell to large institutions. “This project is completely aligned with what we are trying to do,” says Lovewell.

In order to gain insight on the art of scaling up production while still staying true to good fishing practices, the Fisheries Trust has referred to those with experience in sustainable agriculture. Advisor Brett Melone, who helped start ALBA Organics Food Hub in Salinas, CA, and is now the director of lending for California FarmLink, summarizes it well: “It’s amazing that fishermen are struggling like farmers were struggling 15 years ago. There’s interest in producing and harvesting fish that has an identity and that is done in an environmentally responsible way, but that identity and that value isn’t being passed on through the value chain.”

Melone emphasizes that it’s important to keep the identity and the story behind the food attached to the product throughout the different steps of the supply chain, and to make sure that information reaches the customers.

As the initial stage of the fish hub is set in motion, the Monterey Bay Fisheries Trust hopes to stay true to Melone’s advice. The best resource they have on hand is a tremendous story of a fishery rebounding and the fishermen and women who have committed their lives to being its stewards.

There’s so much enthusiasm from everyone around the fish hub, Flumerfelt says. “The point is, they’re landing this fish that should be recognized as sustainable, and ‘Joe caught it yesterday!’ —but instead it’s getting carted off to another town where it’s being merged in with fish from all over, where it loses its identity and its value.” She makes it clear that, one way or another, she’s out to keep the fish in Monterey.

Top and bottom photos courtesy of Joe Pennisi; middle photo courtesy of Corey Arnold.

The post Can Fish Hubs Rebuild Demand for Local Fish? appeared first on Civil Eats.

Lovewell had created a community supported fishery (CSF) subscription service called Real Good Fish, which provides local seafood direct to consumers, in much the same way that community supported-agriculture (CSA) works for produce. The program enjoyed quick success after it launched out of Monterey Bay in 2012 (it now supplies more than 1,000 members with weekly shares). But Lovewell wasn’t satisfied. In his mind, he had a long way to go to build a regional food system.

The young entrepreneur shifted his focus toward supplying seafood to public K-12 schools, particularly in districts where the majority of students receive free or subsidized meals. In 2014, Real Good Fish partnered with the nonprofit Center for Ecoliteracy to pilot the “Bay2Tray” program in California’s Monterey Unified School District. After a significant number of students reportedly chose the fish tacos over pizza, the team at Real Good Fish knew they had some traction. Bay2Tray quickly spread to three more school districts in the state.

“Looking at the maps [in California], the irony is that most of the areas that produce the nation’s food are in fact food deserts,” says Lovewell, who was recently named a White House “Champion of Change for Sustainable Seafood.” “I realized that the missing piece was schools and children: they have the lowest income and lowest access, and obviously, they are the ones with the vested interest in the future of our oceans.”

The Bay2Tray program is not alone. Across the country in seaside states including Oregon and Massachusetts, schools are piloting a range of models of “boat-to-school” programs. Most of these programs feature an educational component as well as an edible one; organizers provide ethically caught seafood, and an understanding of where and how that seafood was harvested.

In 2015, Real Good Fish received a $6,000 grant from the outdoor clothing company Patagonia to bring the fishermen into the classroom. Fisherman Ernie Koepf, who has a lifetime of experience catching herring in the San Francisco Bay, contributes his spare time. After answering the typical, urgent questions about whether he’s seen a whale—or a shark!—Koepf focuses on making the basic connection between local fish and the food on the kids’ plates.

“When I come into the classroom, I speak to them about seafood [from] the perspective of the food chain—how fish end up on their plates, and how we catch them,” says Koepf. “And they find this very fascinating. It’s a very rewarding experience.”

Building Local Seafood Markets

Consumer awareness and interest in local, sustainably caught seafood has grown in the years since the first CSF, Port Clyde Fresh Catch, took off in Maine in 2008. The fishermen in that community mobilized in response to the decimated stocks of signature New England species like cod and flounder and the resulting tightening of federal fishing restrictions; to save their livelihoods, they abandoned their wholesale markets and sold other, less popular species directly to their community.

CSFs are the first “building blocks for a community to take more control over the [seafood] supply chain,” says Brett Tolley, who comes from a four-generation commercial fishing family and is now a community organizer for the advocacy organization, the Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance (NAMA).

Falling into step, schools and other institutions have a huge role yet to play, notes Tolley. He says he’s starting to see a shift “toward institutions paying fair price and committing to buying a large volume collectively from many smaller, independent businesses.” It’s a change that “stands to make an enormous, game-changing difference to family fishermen and fishing communities, who are right now struggling to survive.”

For fishermen often unable to find a domestic market for their product, the benefits of the local support from boat-to-school programs cannot be overstated. Koepf says he’s looked for outlets for his herring for years—without success—and so he had been selling it exclusively to Japan until Alan Lovewell approached him about Real Good Fish.

Koepf’s story echoes big picture statistics. The U.S. imports 91 percent of its seafood and selling a third of its domestic catch abroad. This global conundrum arises not from a lack of domestic fish—the U.S. successfully adopted stronger fishing regulations in recent years, with healthier fisheries as a result—but rather from our domestic market’s taste for a select few species. Remarkably, shrimp, canned tuna and salmon accounted for 55 percent of all seafood consumed in the U.S.

Companies like Real Good Fish have their work cut out for them, therefore, to introduce new species to students and their members. “We really want children to engage and make that connection between their lunch and the natural world,” says Maria Finn, Real Good Fish’s marketing director. “And we really want our members to be aware that there are seasons in seafood,” she continues. “There are things that have an impact. For instance, if it’s stormy out, they’re probably going to get oysters, clams, or abalone because fishermen can’t go out in the ocean.”

Boat-to-School Programs in Oregon and Massachusetts

Organizations in other states have followed in Real Good Fish’s footsteps. In Oregon, the Seaside School District is piloting a yearlong boat-to-school program run by the Oregon Albacore Commission (OAC) and funded by a $15,000 farm-to-school education program grant from the Oregon Department of Education.

The curriculum kicked off this October, themed “salmon month,” and includes fieldtrips to a local hatchery, presentations from fishermen, taste tests, and even ingredients for a take-home dinner for families. Students will also explore crab, tuna, pink shrimp, and groundfish such as cod, flounder, halibut, and sole, based on the season

“This is an outlet for us as an industry to tell our story, to talk about the changes that we’ve made, the things that we’re doing right, and to allow children to try something that’s very close to home,” says the OAC’s Vice Chair Christa Swensson, who helped spearhead the grant and who also does marketing for Bornstein Seafood, another supplier and program funder.

In another state where fish is close to home, Deborah Jeffers, the director of Salem, Massachusetts’ Food and Nutrition Services, is sourcing local seafood by using federal funding. Once a week, Jeffers serves Salem high school students with local fish from the nearby Cape Ann Fresh Catch Fishery, which was one of the first CSFs started by the Gloucester Fishermen’s Wives Association back in 2008.

Jeffers plans to extend the program to the elementary school and provide local fish to all 3,800 students across the 12 schools in her district.

The Benefits and Challenges

For schools, supporting fishermen to catch otherwise unmarketable species can have unexpected cost-cutting benefits. For example, Lovewell convinced black cod fishermen to sell Real Good Fish grenadier, a fish they mostly throw back because, as Finn says, it “has zero markets—it’s really ugly.” For $5 per pound however, the mild, flaky white fish is perfect for fish tacos in schools.

“This is a lesson farm-to-school advocates learned in the apple industry: People started selling cider apples, the really small ones, to schools because they were perfect for little kids,” says Simca Horwitz, the Eastern Massachusetts director for the Massachusetts Farm to School project, reflecting on similar uses of underutilized, abundant fish in east coast schools. “In a lot of ways, schools turning to local seafood today is where we were with land-based agriculture about 10 years ago.”

While all three boat-to-school programs have received strong enthusiasm from students, cost and distribution issues often stress the programs. On the supply side, Real Good Fish now uses a third-party distributor so schools don’t have to coordinate with multiple vendors. But this makes the program almost cost-prohibitive for the company. To help fund the effort, Real Good Fish’s CSF members now have the option to add $1.25 per week to support a school lunch.

Food Services Director Deborah Jeffers in Salem also confirms her costs per portion are higher when she serves fish, but she uses the commodities provided by four U.S. Department of Agriculture lunch programs to supplement the effort.

In a similar strategy, the Oakland Unified School District’s farm-to-school supervisor Alexandra Emmott supplements some of the meal’s protein requirement—a standard of the National School Lunch Program—with a side of rice and beans—in order to serve small portions of fish.

Both Jeffers and Emmott have had to train cooks and cope with the under-resourced kitchens in their districts as well. The entire district serves over 30,000 lunches per day, and many of the kitchens aren’t equipped to prepare food from scratch, let alone de-bone hundreds of pounds of fish.

The question of location is another big one. “I’m lucky, right down the road, we have Gloucester fishermen!” explains Jeffers. “But anyone who is in the center of the state, maybe they have it easier for farms, but where are they going to get their fish? It’s going to have to be delivered to them and maybe frozen.”

Brett Tolley of NAMA has a more optimistic viewpoint. It makes sense boat-to-school programs are piloted near the coast because it’s such a new model, he says. But there’s also a tremendous opportunity to match institutions’ need for healthy proteins with domestically caught fish.

NAMA collaborates with organizations like the Real Food Challenge, Sea to Table, and Health Care Without Harm, which are pioneering the way for institutions to buy large amounts of seafood while still holding suppliers accountable for ecologically sustainable practices.

“Institutions that are more inland and landlocked have been, in many ways, the most vulnerable to being exploited by the industrial seafood system,” Tolley adds. “They only get the fish that has been frozen three times over and traveled thousands and thousands of miles. It’s especially important that we can focus on those institutions.”

Photos courtesy of Real Good Fish.

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A Chinese state-owned company called China National Chemical Corp., or ChemChina, has bid $43 billion to buy Syngenta, the world’s third largest genetically modified seed and pesticide company—but the U.S. government is holding up the sale. Although it’s a Swiss company, Syngenta does more than a quarter of its business in the U.S. Concerned by the potential threat ChemChina poses to national security, the Treasury Department’s Committee for Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) is conducting a detailed review. The committee is bringing in the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to determine the impact on U.S. food security and the Department of Defense is evaluating the proximity of Syngenta’s facilities to military bases since some of the chemicals Syngenta produces fall under the Department of Homeland Security’s list of hazardous substances.

America’s Obesity Epidemic Hits a New High (NBC)

Two reports from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirm that rates off obesity in the U.S. have continued to rise in recent years. In the first report, based on a national survey of more than 5,000 adults, the agency found that 35 percent of men and 40 percent of women were obese from 2013 to 2014. The second study found that 17 percent of children and teens are obese, meaning they weigh more than 95 percent of kids the same age. There are many theories about why the obesity epidemic is getting worse. But one thing everyone can agree on is the fact that people who are obese have higher rates of heart disease, diabetes, some cancers, arthritis, and Alzheimer’s disease. Both the Trust for America’s Health and the CDC project that by 2030, the percentage of obese Americans will be above 40 percent.

Crops Rot While Trump-Led Immigration Backlash Idles Farm Work (Bloomberg)

Washington partisanship and Donald Trump’s proposed immigration policies may have already resulted in farm labor shortages. Bloomberg found evidence that some crops are not being harvested as immigrant laborers struggle to get work visas and are tied up by bureaucratic paperwork. (And no U.S. citizens appear willing to work for what most farms can pay.) In recent years there has been successful collaboration between agricultural groups and Democratic and Republican senators to increase the number of farmworker visas approved, but the numbers dropped last year. Trump, who tore down Marco Rubio and other reform-minded rivals, has effectively stalled the efforts to provide farmworker visas and to propose more ambitious guest-worker policies. Labor shortages will likely only intensify in the divided political landscape: An immigration policy focused on closing the border would shift agricultural production to other countries while a successful guest-worker program could make labor too expensive here. Meanwhile, farm owners watch carefully for a window to the labor market to open.

Coalition Launches Global Food Loss and Waste Standard (Marketplace)

This week, a coalition of international organizations led by the World Research Institute (WRI) and including the United Nations released the first-ever global standard to measure food loss and waste. Although the new standard is voluntary, it provides common definitions and reporting requirements for companies and countries setting food waste reduction goals. The new standard requires users to report the amount of food wasted by weight and track it over time. The new standard offers structure to a global effort to address the fact that an estimated one-third of food produced worldwide is wasted, which results in greenhouse gas emissions and, according to WRI, amounts to $940 billion.

U.S. Lawmakers Probe EPA Staff Over Possible Bias in Herbicide Review (Reuters)

Has the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) allowed personal bias to color its scientific review of glyphosate, the main chemical in Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide? The U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology launched an ongoing investigation last month to find out. What has lawmakers most concerned is the fact the agency has contributed to two primary scientific assessments—one for the WHO and the other for the U.S.—with contradictory results. The WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans.” Then, last month, the EPA’s cancer assessment review committee accidentally released a report that found glyphosate was “not likely” to be carcinogenic to humans. Last Tuesday, the congressional committee sent a letter to EPA requesting to interview four of the agency’s top officials who were involved in glyphosate reviews. An EPA spokeswoman said last Tuesday that the agency was reviewing the letter and would respond.

EU Countries Refuse to Back New License for Glyphosate Weed-Killer (Reuters)

This week, EU nations refused to postpone a decision concerning the future sale and use of glyphosate. While use of the herbicide is already largely obsolete and disapproved of in the EU, a ban could lead to increased regulation of the agricultural chemical industry worldwide. The EU executive’s original proposal, which hoped to renew the glyphosate license and protect its sales there for up to 15 years, was met with stark opposition. Compromising, the EU executive recently offered a 12-18 month extension to allow for further scientific investigation into the carcinogenic risks of glyphosate, which are disputed among EU and U.S. politicians. But EU nations rejected the compromise, instead threatening to withdrawal Monsanto’s Roundup and other weed-killers from shelves if no decision is reached by the end of the month.

Three Bible Quotes Later, No Extra Overtime Pay for Farmworkers (Sacramento Bee)

Last week, California lawmakers failed to pass a bill designed to ensure that overtime pay rules for farmworkers there. While California mandates that farm laborers receive overtime pay if they work more than 10 hours in a day or more than 60 hours in a week, the bill would have allowed laborers 1.5 times their normal wages for every hour they worked over eight in a day or 40 in a week. To put that in perspective, working more than 12 hours a day—a common practice during summer months—would have earned a farmworker double pay. The deliberation spanned over an hour and advocates challenged the idea that farmworkers were not entitled to the same protections given to other workers who put in long hours. Some contextualized the case historically, drawing parallels to slavery, sharecropping, and the farmworkers’ rights movement in California in the 1960s and 70s. But those arguments didn’t persuade the lawmakers, who insisted the measure would be devastating for the agricultural industry.

Novel Strategy Puts Big Soda Tax Within Philadelphia’s Reach (New York Times)

In a preliminary vote, Philadelphia’s City Council passed the second successful soda tax measure in America, alongside Berkeley, California. If the final vote next week yields the same result, the measure will enact a tax of 1.5 cents for every ounce containing sugar or artificial sweeteners. While countless other cities have proposed failed soda tax measures, the secret to Philadelphia’s success may lie in the mayor’s promotion strategy. Instead of presenting the tax as a public health measure, Mayor Jim Kenney framed it as source of revenue for popular initiatives, including expanded public prekindergarten, and renovations of city libraries and recreation centers. While not the primary argument for the campaign, experts suggest that the tax will also have substantial public health benefits, as did the soda tax in Mexico. Both Philadelphia and Mexico have substantial populations of low-income folks who buy and consume the largest amounts of soda and consequently suffer the highest rates of obesity, diabetes, and tooth decay. The success of Philadelphia’s soda tax measure in the face of strong opposition creates significant momentum for soda tax advocates across the nation.

FDA Too Slow to Order Food Recalls, U.S. Watchdog Finds (Reuters)

The Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Inspector General reviewed 30 recalls that occurred between 2012 and 2015, including two in which companies did not recall all affected items until 165 days and 81 days after the U.S Food and Drug Administration (FDA) became aware of tainted foods. In a report issued this week, the watchdog agency said: “FDA does not have adequate policies and procedures to ensure that firms take prompt and effective action in initiating voluntary food recalls. As a result, consumers remained at risk of illness or death for several weeks after FDA was aware of a potentially hazardous food in the supply chain.” FDA food safety officials called the report’s findings “unacceptable” and said the agency is “totally committed” to food safety. Provisions in the 2011 Food Safety Modernization Act that require companies to minimize food safety risks, and require companies to have a recall plan, will begin to take effect this fall.

The post All the News That’s Fit to Eat: Rotting Crops, More Obesity, and Philly’s Soda Tax Moves Forward appeared first on Civil Eats.