Their collective solution? Pre-programmed, customizable spreadsheets that guide them through seed purchases and planting and harvesting schedules. The spreadsheets are free, hacked together, and open source, in a sense. But, Chang told Civil Eats, “it seemed pretty complicated to me, even though I’m an IT person.”

Chang, who started farming eight years ago and works full-time in information technology off-farm, searched for a different solution for his 14-acre organic vegetable and cut flower farm in northeastern Connecticut, finding software aimed at CSAs, which he doesn’t run, or marketing and sales, which he didn’t need. Then he discovered farmOS, a free, open source record-keeping software built on the web platform Drupal.

At a time when a dense field of ag-tech startups—1,600 of them, by one estimate—are vying for market share and a number of venture capital firms now specialize in agriculture technology, finding alternatives is no small task. In 2018, tech startups along the entire agriculture and food supply chain securing nearly $17 billion in funding, with farm management and sensing startups alone attracting $945 million, according to AgFunder. The total investment haul was the highest amount ever—and 43 percent higher than the year before.

This abundance of tech can solve any problem a farmer may have, but the upfront costs and ongoing subscription fees can bring expenses through the roof.

Want to use satellite technology and other data to make decisions on irrigation and fertilizer application? Try Cropio, which costs 40 cents to $2 per acre per year. Seeking a business management solution to measure revenue and analyze field-by-field profits? Harvest Profit’s software runs $1,500 per year. (A consulting package that includes personalized calls twice per month goes for $10,000.)

Need a full-service solution that manages everything from worker punchcards to spraying events to RFID harvest tracking? Croptracker offers a per-service pricing plan that starts as low as $5 per user per month, but can easily run to hundreds of dollars per month for more comprehensive packages. Major names such as Granular, Conservis, Agworld, and others offer only custom quotes.

In the case of farmOS, on the other hand, Chang says, “Nobody is mining it or monetizing it in any way. It’s yours. You can export it in whatever way you want.” And it is infinitely customizable, if you’re tech savvy. “Since it’s open source, you can change the code, if you want to do your own customizations.”

FarmOS isn’t the only option for those seeking open-source alternatives, but it reflects the recent iteration of the open source farming movement, which emerged 15 years ago with a website on which farmers shared designs for hand tools and tractor implements. The scrappy movement has since evolved into an online community seeking to make the most advanced digital technologies of precision farming available to everyone, and not just Big Ag.

If it succeeds, the future of farming could be much more democratic. But it has a lot of catching up to do.

An Open Source Operating System

The open source software movement coalesced in the late 1990s, with programmers sharing software source code rather than sealing it off from users and forbidding its replication. The movement is known most famously, perhaps, for the Linux operating system, which was created by a disparate group of users connected only by the internet—a direct contrast to the sealed-in software worlds of tech titans like Microsoft and Apple.

Those using open source software in agriculture are up against similarly powerful companies. Farmers who scrap their cherished binders and spreadsheets full of records in favor of off-the-shelf farm management software often run the risk of losing control of their data to tech companies—or losing their data entirely.

Don Blair, a consultant who works with farmers setting up their own open source-based systems, knows farmers who have gone through just that. “They’ve experienced more than once that they’ve collected these records for years and the company goes out of business and there’s no way for them to get that data in a meaningful way,” Blair told Civil Eats.

To be sure, it takes longer for tech hobbyists and hacker farmers to collaborate on the development and maintenance of an open source program than it takes for a venture capital-backed team of a dozen developers working around the clock to spit out a shiny new app. Mike Stenta, who first created farmOS in 2014, concedes that much.

Farmier satellite view.

But, in exchange, farmers can remain independent.

“They are running the software themselves. They’re not dependent on another company, because companies come and go,” said Stenta, who apprenticed on organic vegetable farms in Washington state and Maine after college then started a CSA farm in Connecticut with a friend.

FarmOS users can host their data on an on-farm server, or pay for a hosting service from companies, such as Stenta’s own, Farmier. The company hosts a couple hundred farmers’ farmOS sites; an unknown number more host their own versions.

Anyone can contribute code to open source technologies like farmOS, and it’s that kind of knowledge sharing and community spirit that may help give small farmers a better chance of survival in the face of farm consolidation and climate change.

“The core technology is communication and collaboration,” said Dorn Cox, the research director at Wolfe’s Neck Center for Agriculture & the Environment, a leader in the open source farming movement. “The rest of it changes, but the ability to have those conversations and collaborations is most important.”

Developers are building additional farmOS modules—which will become open source—to help farmers organize additional activities such as animal movement through paddocks. Enterprising farmers can even hack together their own “smart farm” by connecting low-cost soil moisture sensors, greenhouse humidity monitors and other hardware to $35 Raspberry Pi computer kits that can feed the data into farmOS.

Stenta sees the potential for a rich marketplace of software products to provide additional features on top of the central farmOS databased—everything from data visualization to processing, recommendations. An application programming interface (API) enables other software to communicate with farmOS.

“If anything, farmOS allows for more competition and more innovation because the companies producing these solutions don’t have a monopoly on the farmer’s data itself,” Stenta said. “They have to work for their permission in order to keep access to the data. They have to prove they’re valuable. That’s different than if the farmer puts all their data in one platform. It’s going to be difficult for them to get out of that even if the company stops innovating.”

A Fully Connected Farm

Farmers adopting open source technology are now partnering with scientists who extend that collaborative ethos to their research projects.

OpenTEAM, a project Wolfe’s Neck Center announced this summer, will help make the vast array of open source technologies more usable for farmers by gathering that tech into an ecosystem. Farmers will collect data on farm activities, soil chemistry and other variables—then scientists will analyze it to find solutions for soil health and climate change mitigation. The project will push research out of the carefully controlled conditions of research sites and onto real farming landscapes. And farmOS will play an integral role in organizing that data.

OpenTEAM members, from left: Britt Lundgren of Stonyfield Organic, Dave Herring from Wolfe’s Neck Center, and Jeff Herrick, Research Soil Scientist, USDA. (Photo courtesy of Wolfe’s Neck)

“We can’t just keep doing research trials and [field testing] and then try to apply that across the landscape. We need to be doing research in place and that means working with farmers,” said Dorn Cox, who is also a coordinator of OpenTEAM.

Cox has blazed his own technology trail since he first started expanding his parents’ organic New Hampshire homestead in 2003. In 2004, he helped launch Farm Hack, a website on which farmers could share designs for physical tools, such as a drip tape winder, poultry plucker, and no-till seed drill. But as farming itself grew more digitized, Cox’s focus shifted to open source digital tools. He rigged up environmental sensors and devices on his farm, connecting them over a wireless network.

By 2018, a group of tech-oriented farmers had coalesced within Farm Hack. That year, around 50 of them, including Cox, got together at the Omega Institute in upstate New York for the first Gathering for Open Ag Technology, where they shared ideas and discussed the future of open source farming.

“We have really terrific research tools in isolation, and that includes everything from field measurements to modeling and remote sensing,” Cox said. “We have a lot of work to do to put it into a form that’s useful.”

The Ability to Compete

The open source technologies will help small farmers compete against the large operations that are currently showered with an abundance of technology options. At conferences and expos, such as the National Farm Machinery Show in Kentucky, the Farm Progress Show in Iowa and Illinois, and the World Ag Expo in Tulare, California, farmers can eye advanced machines with wonder, and then drain their wallets to bring the equipment home.

“Going to the [ag-tech] events, you’re definitely wowed by the technology that’s available. There are drones and self-driving tractors and software systems that integrate massive amounts of data,” Evan Wiig of the Farmers Guild and Community Alliance with Family Farmers (CAFF) told Civil Eats. “But the vast majority of tools that are being promoted at these events is geared towards bigger farms.”

CAFF is organizing the first-ever Small Farm Tech Expo in December to offer an alternative. The technology and tools at the event will be diverse: optimized hoes, complex software systems that track soil carbon content in fields, remote-controlled irrigation systems, complicated transplanting tractor implements, and sales software.

“We are moving into a very different age of technology in terms of online systems and online sales and the way consumers, both individual consumers and business distributors, are expected to do business,” Wiig said. “The days of keeping all your seeds in a shoebox under your bed and dealing in cash aren’t going to fly any more.”

Ryan Power, who grows 15 acres of certified organic vegetables and licensed cannabis in Sonoma County north of San Francisco, started farming with hand tools and horses a decade ago, but quickly upgraded to tractors, finger weeders, and power mulchers. Small farmers, he says, don’t need open source schematics to build their own hand tools, even though he has used a root washer based off a design from Farm Hack. Rather, small farmers need to use basic digital services to streamline management and track finances, such as Google forms and Slack to organize management and communicate with workers, and Quickbooks to manage accounting.

The innovation that would help Power the most would allow him to distribute his produce at a micro-regional level. Power has struggled to sell his vegetables to local grocery stores and restaurants in Sonoma County, where half a million people live, and he believes that halting the decline in small farms’ economic viability demands that technology seamlessly integrate those farms with distribution centers using trucks that never drive empty.

“The issue isn’t what creative ways I’ve made a special tool on my own,” Power said. “The issue is aggregation and distribution of the food I produce and how quickly I get food to the customer and how quickly that money gets into my bank account?”

Even though farmOS doesn’t yet have the ability to connect Power with his buyers, it could. Since farmOS is an open source project, anyone can contribute and write additional abilities into the platform. Stenta, the farmOS creator, said that an ecommerce module could be built into the platform using Drupal Commerce, or farmOS data could be pushed to third party ecommerce platforms.

Collaboration may be a slow process, but Stenta believes it often has more staying power.

“It’s kind of like the tortoise and the hare. The slow and steady tends to build a more stable product that outlasts the flash-in-the-pan products,” Stenta said. “I was raised into this ethos that code is sort of like a snowball and it helps to all work on it together. Why would you create one little thing when you can all make one big thing?”

Top photo: Clockwise from left: Some tools for open-source farming, including a double-rolling dibbler, a tilther, and a zipper. (Photos courtesy of Johnny’s Selected Seeds)

The post Open Source Technology Could Be a Boon to Farmers appeared first on Civil Eats.

Farmer Jay Hill nearly walked away from it all. It was 2011, Hill was on the verge of bankruptcy and public opinion about farmers’ impact on the environment was wearing him down. He was contemplating leaving the farm operation that began with 10 acres from his father at age 16, and that he has grown in the last two decades to 18,000 acres across two Southwest states.

“I thought, ‘Why the hell am I doing this?’” Hill recalled in an interview with Civil Eats. “I get on social media and see, ‘The farmers are destroying the environment and ruining waterways.’ And I think, ‘Look at all the things I’m trying to improve on and am improving on.’”

But Hill stayed, and today says he is deeply committed to leaving behind a sustainable farming operation for future generations. He believes he can sequester carbon in the soil, and has used cover crops, no-till farming, and a range of technology to reduce his carbon footprint. Subsurface irrigation pipes will soon improve efficiency, and sensors already catch leaks before they grow severe, saving 1.2 million gallons of water per day, he says.

Hill’s story—or a dramatic version of it that’s “inspired by actual events”—is featured in a new publicity campaign called 30 Harvests from the U.S. Farmers and Ranchers Alliance (USFRA), a group that represents many of the nation’s top commodity associations, meat producers, and agribusiness corporations. In the campaign’s video, Hill and his family put their farm up for sale and stay the night in a motel, where the sleepless farmer steps into the all-night lobby to hear a fellow farmer describe on a television news segment the urgent need to farm differently. He and his family return to the farm, and he tears the “For Sale” sign out of the ground.

Now, Hill is the public face of a campaign that positions farmers as heroes in the climate crisis—a campaign that marks a significant departure for USFRA.

The group—which was founded in 2010 in response to the Food, Inc.-watching public disenchanted with the destructive environmental and health impacts of factory farming—is new to the climate change conversation. From the get-go, USFRA has been a PR effort focused on bolstering Big Ag’s public image, and has sought to tell positive stories that “reshape the conversation” about agriculture to the tune of tens of millions a year. Climate change hasn’t fit into that story.

In fact, in a 2017 report focused on sustainable farming, USFRA noted how various farming sectors have reduced their environmental impact, carbon footprints, and greenhouse gas emissions, but in the course of 44 pages, mentioned climate change itself only once—when discussing media coverage of government regulations.

The 30 Harvests campaign, on the other hand, goes all in on climate, arguing that farmers can both solve climate change and feed the world, which is expected to be home to 9.7 billion people by 2050—or 30 crop seasons from now.

“If you had to take a bet on a sector to get this done, you have to bet on people-based change. This is a group that actually cares about the topic,” Erin Fitzgerald, the CEO of USFRA, told Civil Eats, adding, “Farmers are on the front lines, feeling the first effects of climate change. And they are also the solution.”

While the sustainable agriculture groups Civil Eats spoke to praised USFRA for joining the climate conversation, some also raised questions about what type of fixes the group will end up pushing for, and whether its efforts can—or are intended to—actually move the needle on making modern food production a part of the solution.

“Who is developing and owning the solutions? They really should be driven by farmers and frontline communities, and it’s not completely clear to me that that’s what’s going on,” Sarah Hackney, coalition director for the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC), told Civil Eats. “I want to see evidence that a farmer’s story is not just being used for a campaign.”

The Science of Sequestering Carbon

The idea of sequestering carbon in the soil is receiving a great deal of attention at the moment. Regenerative is replacing the word “sustainable” in many circles, and an array of people in the public and private sector are pushing ways to invest in carbon-friendly farming and step up its rates of adoption around the U.S. And it’s not hard to see why.

A recent report summary from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) outlined the dire prospects for the global food system in the face of climate change—and the need for better land and soil management to mitigate that threat. Though agriculture accounts for up to 25 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions from human sources, according to the United Nations Environment Program, a range of farming practices have the potential to hold carbon in the soil.

In a report that accompanies its new campaign, USFRA notes that U.S. soils store 100 times more carbon than the country emits in a year. USFRA also cites a study from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) that says that the agriculture sector is on track to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 46 percent, given today’s technology. With additional innovation and investment, the sector could reduce emissions 147 percent, making them net negative.

The USFRA report synthesizes data and assessments from an array of sources, in addition to NASEM, the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and United Nations groups including the IPCC, along with academic researchers. The report’s diagnosis of both the climate problem and other ills facing farmers is robust; and yet the report’s suggested solutions are mostly limited, with a focus on calls for additional research and greater partnerships.

The purpose of the campaign, said Chip Bowling, the chairman of USFRA, is to show that farmers are already taking actions that sequester more carbon and reduce the environmental impact of farming.

“We want them to see what a real-time farmer looks like. The public still thinks that the farmer is in a bib watching the cows graze,” Bowling told Civil Eats. “What is really happening is we have precision fertilizer placement and precision irrigation. We have climate-controlled houses for our cows and chickens. We have tractors that are using GPS technology.”

Better technology may make farming more efficient, and can help reduce inputs and resource consumption, USFRA notes.

With the precision agriculture market poised to grow from $4.8 billion in 2018 to $10.2 billion in 2024, it’s clear that there’s a lot of money to be made in selling precision agriculture tools to growers, including the data services that help manage production inputs. But not all the solutions to climate change have a business benefit. More complex challenges, such as reintegrating a perennial crop into the landscape, don’t increase profit margins, even though they sequester significant amounts of carbon.

Given this fact, Hackney, the coalition director for NSAC, says, “There’s a little bit of tension between, say, the business case for climate mitigation and what the science tells us is most needed for impacts and results.”

Lauren Langworthy, a farmer who is also the interim executive director of the Midwest Organic and Sustainable Education Service (MOSES) shares similar concerns. She operates a 153-acre farm raising sheep, hay, and cover crops in Wheeler, Wisconsin, and was encouraged to see USFRA discussing climate change. But Langworthy believes that farmers also need a network of peers to rely on for information and advice, and they need market and regulatory structures that incentivize them to adopt climate-friendly practices. It’s not clear whether the companies behind USFRA are interested in making that happen.

“The [30 Harvests] video implies that just by the farmer choosing to stay there everything is going to be resolved,” Langworthy said. But she notes that none of the issues farmers face are actually fixed in the video—climate change, the market forces, the financial pressures. “He just felt the weight of being a farmer and feeding America. I think that’s a dangerous method to keep putting farmers in a position where they are tasked with saving the world and we aren’t giving them the tools to do so.”

Pricing Carbon and Paying Farmers

To pay for climate change solutions and lower the risk of transitioning to more sustainable practices, farmers will have to rely on financial incentives. In California, the money for those incentives is coming from the taxes the state imposes on polluters for the emissions they release; a coalition of groups has advocated for a portion of those funds to go to farmers who practice carbon farming. Over the next year, $12.5 million will go to support those efforts.

Renata Brillinger, the executive director of the California Climate & Agricultural Network (CalCAN), says USFRA should support similar measures to back up its rhetoric.

“They need to get behind a federal campaign to price carbon. I don’t see any other way to achieve the potential in agriculture without that. There’s got to be money,” Brillinger said. “Farmers have to stay in business. I don’t think we as the global community can ask them to store carbon on our behalf without recognizing that there’s a cost to that.”

Fitzgerald, the CEO of USFRA, said the group cannot take positions on policy, such as a price on carbon. However, the American Farm Bureau Federation, which is represented on the USFRA board, openly opposes policies that would tame carbon emissions, including taxes on carbon uses or emissions, mandatory cap and trade provisions, EPA regulation of greenhouse gases, and any requirements for the agricultural sector to report those greenhouse gases.

USFRA’s 17-person board of directors is chaired by a representative from the National Corn Growers Association, while representatives from four state soybean groups and the United Soybean Board hold seats. Three representatives of the pork industry, plus representatives from the beef, poultry, milk, and egg industries, along with agribusiness giants Bayer and Corteva Agriscience, are on the board.

Producers of these crops and animal products can, of course, find ways to improve efficiency, reduce inputs, limit soil erosion, and even sequester carbon in the soil. But whether these types of large-scale operations can be truly regenerative is another question altogether.

Sara Tiffany, the senior manager of Climate Smart Farming at the California-based advocacy group Community Alliance with Family Farms (CAFF), says she sees USFRA as “trying to pair together corporate interests and farmer interests,” and adds: “At CAFF, we really don’t see it that way at all.”

Tiffany encourages the small and mid-sized farmers she works with, some of whom chose farming specifically to play a role in climate mitigation, to see their farms as integrated agro-ecosystems in which a diversity of plants, insects, microorganisms, and other creatures cycle nutrients in a closed-loop system. That creates healthy soil—and sequesters carbon.

Large farms tend to be more industrialized and mechanized, with more monocultures and less opportunity for crop rotation and diversity, Tiffany added.

“When you look at certain aspects of agribusiness and industrial agriculture, it’s extremely reliant on synthetic inputs like synthetic nitrogen and agrochemicals for synthetic pesticides and herbicides,” Tiffany said. “Any farm can take a step in the right direction to be part of the solution, but a lot of our problems of extreme soil degradation and loss of fertility and productivity have been because of those methods.”

The post Can Big Ag Be Part of the Climate Solution? appeared first on Civil Eats.

But another vision insists that animal slaughter will never expunge its inherently inhumane nature, and that only plants should feed a growing global population.

Which is more progressive? And which is more sustainable? In many communities, food activists are too busy combating new concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) or looking for alternatives to large-scale commodity crop production to debate the finer points of niche issues like local animal slaughter.

That’s not the case in Marin County, California, a stronghold of the organic and local food movements, where a recent choice by the county board of supervisors to allow small-scale local animal slaughter has fueled a fight over the meaning of sustainable food policies.

To some locals, the reversal of the ban on all animal slaughter that the board enacted in 2003 adds another positive chapter to the county’s storied local food ethos.

“If you do not encourage the model of more local, sustainable, transparent food systems, then you’re going to end up with Monsanto and Swift and the large conglomerates producing food in a manner that is unhealthy and environmentally completely inappropriate,” said Mark Pasternak, a rabbit farmer and the owner of Devil’s Gulch Ranch.

But to others, the very phrase “sustainable meat” is an oxymoron, an impossibility. By permitting any animal slaughter—even the small-scale, local kind—Marin County is regressing and papering over the sins of animal agriculture, they say.

Small-Scale Slaughter Permitted

The change in the code, unanimously approved by the board of supervisors last month, allows small-scale slaughter of poultry—less than 20,000 birds or rabbits per year—and permits mobile slaughter units for all kinds of animals, including cows, pigs, and poultry to visit farms. The county won’t be inspecting slaughter operations, said Jeremy Tejirian, a planning manager for the county, although the USDA inspects all slaughter units for cows and pigs, including the mobile units that Marin is now using.

Marin County had considered allowing brick-and-mortar slaughterhouses, but decided against it. Officials also thought about retaining a rabbit slaughter ban when some residents protested the killing of animals that are also popular household pets, but ended up lifting it as well.

Supporters say lifting the ban will allow them to keep a great portion of the meat supply chain local, while also growing new aspects of their businesses. The rule change also highlights the limited number of options for small farmers everywhere, even in a place like Marin County, where there exists both demand for and supply of locally raised meat. Previously, farmers and ranchers had to send their animals to sometimes far-distant slaughterhouses for processing. Some Marin poultry farmers send their birds to Stockton or Sacramento, nearly 100 miles away. And though the nearest beef processing plant is just over the Sonoma county line to the north of Marin, minimizing or eliminating animal transport is key to humane treatment of poultry and livestock.

And that Sonoma County slaughterhouse has taken over the operations from Rancho Feeding, which earned notoriety after employees admitted to slaughtering diseased and uninspected cows, leading to a federal recall of 8.7 million pounds of beef.

Fifty years ago, there were about 10,000 slaughtering facilities scattered throughout the United States. Then in 1967, Congress passed the Wholesome Meat Act, which mandated that state slaughter rules be at least as strict as federal ones. The act ended up driving major consolidation in the meat processing industry, and today, there are fewer than 3,000 slaughterhouses throughout the country.

Federal inspections are required for all large animal slaughter operations, and for poultry slaughter operations that process more than 20,000 animals per year. State regulations govern smaller poultry operations, and in California, only county rules cover poultry operations slaughtering fewer than 5,000 animals per year.

Across California’s 58 counties, rules regulating animal slaughter vary considerably, with urbanized areas generally having stricter limits, said Dave Runsten, the policy director for the Community Alliance with Family Farmers, a California advocacy group.

The Debate Rages On

People on both sides of the issue hold strong opinions.

Miyoko Schinner, an author, vegan chef, and animal rights activist based in Marin takes issue with the growing local, grass-fed beef movement. When applied to meat, terms like “local,” “humane,” and “farm-to-table” are just catch phrases that obscure the reality that meat will never feed the 9 billion people projected to populate the world by 2050, she said.

“Grass-fed may be more sustainable than CAFOs, but it’s not as sustainable as plants,” she said. “In my view, there’s so much more you can do with seven acres to grow plants and feed people.”

Lifting the ban on animal slaughter will encourage more meat consumption, Schinner said. “What that is doing is promoting the myth of sustainable animal agriculture,” she added. “It’s making people feel better about continuing to eat animal products.”

On the other hand, humane meat advocated say that allowing on-farm and small-scale animal slaughter enables farmers of pasture-raised chickens to retain more control over their product. It’s also a more humane alternative to industrialized slaughterhouses, in which dozens of chickens stream by on an assembly line every minute, making inspection difficult, Runsten said.

“It’s a thing that used to be done on farms all the time,” he added. “If more of them took the path that Marin took, and said this is a right of farmers to do that, I think it would open up more opportunities for people.”

Additionally, there’s a bottleneck in the local food supply chain under current practices as farmers end up having to reserve slots in slaughterhouses months ahead of time, said Pete Kennedy, who is on the board of directors for the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund, which advocates for less restrictive regulations on raw milk and small-scale animal slaughter. On-farm slaughter will help relieve the holdup.

Allowing local, on-farm slaughter “is really just a chance to improve the local infrastructure and better meet the demand for locally-produced meat,” said Kennedy, whose group is advocating for legislation that would legalize the sale of custom-processed meat.

In addition, unspoken don’t-ask-don’t-tell animal slaughter practices common in California leave farmers in legal limbo, said Pasternak of Devil’s Gulch Ranch. Better to explicitly approve slaughter, as Marin County has now done, he said.

“You need to know before you spend the money, time, and effort that you’re able to do it,” said Pasternak, whose farm is outside the areas zoned for animal slaughter. “It’s critical for young farmers, beginning farmers, and any farmers, if they want to invest the money in diversifying, in selling their products.”

Pasternak also pointed to aesthetic benefits of lifting the ban. Farms are commercial enterprises, and dirty, sometimes noisy activities—such as slaughtering animals, spraying fields, and driving tractors—are necessary to retain the open space Marin residents cherish. Many wealthy people in the area near his farm “want to look at nice green pastures with a cow, but don’t want any commercial activity with smells or sounds or dust,” Pasternak said.

But in Marin County, some residents worry animal slaughter could harm the local economy. “I think it has the potential to be an unmitigated disaster,” said Jon Haveman, an economist in Marin County. He said he doesn’t oppose all animal slaughter and just believes it needs to be done in more suitable places with fewer tourists and residents.

Declining residential property values could threaten the county’s budget, he said. Tourism could decline. Additionally, he worries about water use in a drought-prone area. Slaughtering requires large amounts of water–130 gallons per cow, and five to 10 gallons per chicken–and the guts and offal have to be disposed of lest predators cart them off. Less stringent inspection rules for smaller slaughter operations could lead people to cheat.

Some people in Marin County are already plotting legal recourse. “There are people looking at it pretty aggressively, and I’d be pretty surprised if there was not legal action brought,” Haveman said.

Marin Sun Farm photo CC-licensed by Carrie Cizauskas.

The post Marin County Decision to Allow Local Slaughter Fires Up a Debate appeared first on Civil Eats.

The Young Farmer Success Act (H.R. 1060) would offer a path to student loan forgiveness for farmers who commit to a decade in the profession. A loan forgiveness program already exists for young people entering professions that benefit society—such as nursing, teaching, and government and nonprofit work. This bill would add farming to the list.

During the last Congressional session, a similar loan forgiveness bill for young farmers accumulated 13 co-sponsors, three of whom were Republicans, but then stalled. The National Young Farmers Coalition (NYFC), which advanced both bills, is hoping to build on last year’s momentum, and eventually submit a Senate version.

“Regardless of how you feel about the results of the November election, no one is denying that we need to pay attention to the decline of our rural communities,” said Andrew Bahrenburg, the policy director at NYFC. One solution, he says, is creating more young farmers.

The bill was introduced by Rep. Joe Courtney (D—Connecticut) and is co-sponsored by Rep. John Faso (R—New York) and Rep. Glenn Thompson (R—Pennsylvania). Participating young farmers would be required to farm and make income-adjusted loan payments for 10 years, after which the balance would be forgiven.

“We must help incentivize more young people to pursue careers in agriculture,” Thompson, who represents a largely rural district, said in an email. “Farmers are stewards of the land and cornerstones of our rural communities … Investing in our nation’s ability to put food on the table for our neighbors is not a partisan issue.”

In the next 25 years, two-thirds of the country’s farmland land will change hands, according to NYFC. Without a new group of farmers to replace the generation facing retirement, the land could go out of production, or end up developed into housing tracts.

But farmland prices have risen steadily since the 1980s, doubling between 2004 and 2014. Many debt-saddled young farmers can’t afford to lease, let alone buy land. Student loan debt siphons off income that could potentially go to land, equipment, and infrastructure, and frightens off potential lenders.

“There are lots of young people that want to get into farming, but are prevented from doing so because of student loan debt,” Bahrenburg said.

In 2014, NYFC surveyed more than 700 members with student loans, and found they had an average debt of $35,000. Nearly 30 percent of those surveyed said they delayed or opted out of farming because of an inability to make loan payments on a farming salary. More than 50 percent were farming but struggled to make student loan payments.

To make ends meet, nearly three-quarters of all the farmers NYFC surveyed took jobs off the farm (nationally, that number is closer to half). Slightly more–82 percent–of first-year farmers relied on off-farm income.

Jason Grimm knows this reality intimately. Grimm, 31, grew up on his family’s farm in North English, Iowa and now rents about 10 acres from his relatives, though he’d like to be farming twice as many. He grows dry beans on the bulk of the land, with 1.5 acres devoted to produce and another two acres for pasture-raised chickens.

When he graduated high school, Grimm didn’t know he’d want to farm. He studied landscape architecture and environmental studies at Iowa State University, graduating with close to $40,000 in student loan debt.

Eight years later, he still has about $25,000 left to pay, and has been chipping away at it with payments of more than $400 per month. Both he and his wife work full-time jobs, and they live in town 15 minutes away from the farm. He farms on weekends.

“I could be investing $400 a month into a land payment, or larger equipment, so I could specialize,” he said. He wants to buy a bean combine to harvest unique varieties of beans that restaurants demand.

Grimm’s day job is as the food systems director at Iowa Valley Resource, Conservation, and Development. “Working with the beginning farmers, it’s amazing to see how many are coming out of college wanting to farm. I feel lucky having access to family land,” Grimm said. “I know many who are bouncing around from farm to farm.”

Such young farmers often have weak safety nets and little government support.

Since the Dust Bowl, the government has offered farmers crop insurance, but it can be expensive and doesn’t offer much for young farmers. Row crop and commodity crop growers can get insurance, but young farmers with less than four years of production history have to use trend-adjusted yields, which results in higher costs for the same coverage. Whole Farm Revenue Protection crop insurance for organic and direct-to-consumer growers requires three years of revenue history for beginning farmers.

The difficulty of launching a farm often forces rural high school students to make a difficult choice, said Bahrenburg, NYFC’s policy director. They can go to college, and probably not return to their hometowns, since few viable livelihoods exist for college-educated people, or they don’t go to college.

“Right now, we’re forcing rural students to make that choice, and we shouldn’t be,” Bahrenburg said. “We need to find ways for young people to pursue viable livelihoods in rural areas.”

Some states are taking steps to remedy this problem. New York has a program to forgive student loans if undergraduates commit to five years of farming. Similar bills are in the works in Wisconsin, New Jersey, New Mexico, and Montana, Bahrenburg said.

And at the national level, NYFC is hopeful the bill will make it farther this time around. The bill would amend the Department of Education’s Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program, as part of a re-authorization of the Higher Education Act.

“We expect to get more traction on both sides of the aisle as both sides grapple with the results of the election and try to connect with rural voters,” Bahrenburg said.

Photo courtesy of Jason Grimm. 

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