Those plants—and the pollinators they feed—have been there since long before Far North’s owners Mike Swanson and Cheri Reese took over Swanson’s family farm and built a distillery in 2013. But this year, they decided to start making their presence known to their customers by applying for a Bee Friendly Farm designation from Pollinator Partnership, a national nonprofit dedicated to protecting and promoting pollinators and the ecosystems they rely on.

For one, says Swanson, pollinators provide a lively entry point for talking with his customers about the way he and Reese run the farming part of their operation.

“Soil health, ecological diversity, sustainable ecosystems—all these things are very important to us. But I wanted a way to talk to people about what was going to be interesting to them,” he says. “When you’re talking about bees, that tends to pique people’s interest a little better. So, we’re able to talk about farming without talking about farming.”

Swanson is not alone in seeing the abundance of bees and other pollinators on his farm as a selling point, and a way to get his customers’ attention.

In fact, Americans are increasingly focused on pollinators, and they’re concerned about their well-being. In 2017, a survey found that 69 percent of respondents said they recognized pollinator populations are in decline and that number has likely grown as the news of the larger insect apocalypse—science that shows rapid decline in insect populations around the world—has been widely reported since then. In 2019, another survey found that 95 percent of respondents said they want to see designated areas where plants support pollinator health.

Pollinators are critical to food production: More than 80 percent of the world’s flowering plants—and around one third of the food crops—require a pollinator. And while it’s not clear exactly how many people are considering the plight of pollinators when buying groceries, a 2015 study found that use of the term ‘‘bee-friendly’’ had more economic value than other claims that advertised the absence of pesticides. And another study in 2018 found that consumers were willing to pay more (51 cents per dry liter) to buy blueberries and cranberries farmed in a way that supports wild pollinators.

Cal Giant Blueberries bearing the Bee Better Certified label. (Courtesy Xerces Society)

“Pollinated foods are some of our most nutrient-rich foods, some of our most colorful, and flavorful,” says Liz Robertson, who helps oversee the Xerces Society’s Bee Better Certified, another certification farmers are now seeking out. “There are wind-pollinated crops out there, but the nutrient-rich diet really depends on these animal-pollinated crops. And just over the last several decades, and increasingly in the last couple of years, there has been this real awareness and research on the decline of insects globally.”

All these factors explain why pollinator certifications have begun to appear in a growing number of grocery stores and corporate sustainability reports. The Bee Better seal is showing up on products sold by certified farms as well as on those from companies sourcing ingredients from those farms, says Robertson. Silk, Häagen-Dazs, and Cal Giant Farms are just a few of the brands that have sported the seal so far. Meanwhile, Pollinator Partnership’s Bee Friendly logo has appeared on a signature wine from Francis Ford Coppola Winery, and may soon make its way to more packaging.

Yet while the Bee Better and Bee Friendly certifications offer up similar wordplay, and similar stated goals—both want to see more diverse and flowering forage plants on farm landscapes and less pesticide exposure for pollinators—they are markedly different in multiple ways. One is reaching a smaller number of farms with a stringent, third-party certification, while the other is aiming for much larger adoption, especially among conventional farmers, and is asking less of participating farms by design.

Taken together, however, the two certifications provide a glimpse of some of the benefits —and the limitations—of using pollinator health to gauge the overall sustainability of a farm.

The Certifications

The Central Valley’s almond orchards rely heavily on millions of honeybees that are trucked in from the Midwest every spring—and many beekeepers have seen record-setting bee losses in recent years. As a result, the almond industry has moved to improve its image in the eyes of consumers.

“They really wanted to educate their growers and bring the industry in on bee-friendly practices,” says Dakin, who had studied integrated pest management (IPM) in the almond industry before taking the job.

Dakin was hired in 2020 and has been working with farms in California and across the country since, helping farmers add bee-friendly forage and habitat to their land and certifying around 250,000 acres of farmland and in the last two years. “We’re definitely expanding,” he told Civil Eats. “We have avocados, coffee, a whole bunch of different systems now certified.”

The Bee Friendly Certified program requires growers to pay $45, prove that they have forage “providing good nutrition for bees” (or are planning to plant it) on 3 percent of their land, as well as nesting habitat and water. They also must use Integrated Pest Management (IPM), a wide range of practices that can involve replacing pesticides with pheromones or simply identifying the location of pests before spraying to ensure that the application is targeted.

Once they are on board, Dakin says, “every three years, the growers have to provide us with compliance documents, and we review those.” He also conducts field visits on 6 percent of the farms every year.

“We’re not a prescriptive program,” he added. “We don’t tell them what to do or how to do it. We give them the criteria, and we help them meet that criteria in the way that works for them.”

Farms that receive Xerces’ Bee Better Certification, on the other hand, are independently audited and verified by Oregon Tilth, an organic certifier that has been in business since 1975.

Even before the certification launched, the Xerces Society had been working with the agricultural industry, both directly with larger brands and their supply chains as well as through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Natural Resources Conservation Service to help farmers to install pollinator habitat and engage pollinator-friendly practices such as pesticide mitigation on their farms, says Xerces’ Robertson. “The farmers who were doing the work were like, ‘How do we communicate this to consumers?’”

She adds that the certification’s parameters are grounded in peer-reviewed scientific research done by Xerces and other institutions that looks at everything from the best native plant compositions for pollinators to the impact of pesticide drift.

To date, Bee Better has certified more than 20,000 acres of farmland in the U.S., Canada, and Peru, with more applications in progress. Almonds are also a major crop for the certification, as are blueberries. Xerces is also in the process of bringing more certifiers on board so they can begin certifying farms in more countries.

In order to earn Bee Better Certification, farms must maintain pollinator habitat on at least 5 percent of the farm, and 1 percent of that habitat needs to be permanent year-round, meaning things like trees, hedgerows, and riparian corridors that include native plants. The certification also requires a “rigorous pest management strategy” that includes non-chemical practices as a first line of defense, targeted pesticide use, and limiting or eliminating the use of what Xerces calls high risk pesticide applications.

Changes on the Farm

Ceanothus serves as pollinator habitat on the Klickitat Canyon Winery. (Photo courtesy of Xerces Society)

But for the larger, conventional growers who sign up, pollination certification may require undertaking a paradigm shift.

Take Woolf Farming, a more than 20,000-acre, vertically integrated farming company based in Fresno, California, that grows a wide variety of crops, including massive tracts of almonds, pistachios, and canning tomatoes all over the state. Peter Allbright, the crop manager at Woolf Farming, says a business partnership spurred them to pursue Xerces’ Bee Better certification back in 2016.

“One of our almond customers is a very progressive European food company,” says Allbright. “They wanted us to look into pollinator habitat developments and that kind of thing, and they pushed us to work with the Xerces Society, so we were actually one of the first growers of theirs to be certified.”

Woolf Farming still has 3,000 Bee Better-certified almond acres, but the company has since chosen to put more than 7,000 additional acres of almonds into Pollinator Partnership’s Bee Friendly Farming program because, Allbright says, it’s much easier. Bee Better certification requires regular, multi-hour inspections that he describes as “more in-depth than an organic inspection” and maintains “a packet—a hefty list of rules.”

On top of the certification cost itself, Allbright says that planting pollinator-friendly habitat has also cost the company “well over a quarter million dollars in the last couple of years,” between buying the pants, irrigating them, and paying workers to weed them.

“Once [the habitat] gets established, it’s fine. It’s doable, but it’s extremely expensive to implement the Bee Better program,” added Allbright.

He says Pollinator Partnership’s Bee Friendly program has been much more flexible about where he can plant the additional habitat (they don’t require that it be in or near the almond orchard, for instance). And when a pest infestation looked like it could cut the almond crop on one of the farm’s properties a few years back, he says he struggled to get Xerces to make an exception that would allow him to spray approved pesticides aerially. Bee Better eventually made an exception, but he found the process frustrating. “Xerces is the gold standard. But you can’t blanket that across every acre of almonds in California,” added Allbright. “It’s not compatible. Hence, we haven’t done it on all of our acres.”

Pollinator Partnership, on the other hand, requires “minor bits of documentation to demonstrate that you’re not spraying insecticides during the almond bloom, those kinds of very common-sense things that most growers are already doing,” adds Allbright. He’s also concerned that Xerces, on the other hand, is so focused on supporting wild bumblebees and other wild pollinators that they may not always be looking out for farmers like him. As a conservation group, he added “They’re actively behind the scenes working against production agriculture.”

A metallic green sweat bee. (Photo by Amber Barnes, courtesy of Pollinator Partnership)

The fact that the organization advocated for the protection of wild bumblebees in California under the state’s Endangered Species Act—and that advocacy may have had an impact on the recent decision by the California Supreme Court to allow new protections for the pollinators—is one example that concerns Allbright. He believes the change will “severely impact almond production, because that really eliminates a lot of the tools we have for crop protection.”

However, Eric Lee-Mäder, an apple and seed crop farmer and the pollinator and agricultural biodiversity co-director at Xerces, says there’s nothing behind the scenes about the group’s work. “Xerces and other stakeholders have been open and transparent in examining the decline of California’s wild bumble bees precisely so the ag sector isn’t caught off guard. Ultimately the bees in question mostly do not even occur in agricultural areas.”

Dialing in on Pesticides

“We don’t ban specific active ingredients in pesticides, because to us, it’s more about integrative pest management, about the mindset behind using the chemicals,” says Pollinator Partnership’s Dakin, who says IPM can greatly reduce pesticide exposure to pollinators when done right.

“The goal is still to reduce or even eliminate chemicals in general, but what we’re trying not to do is make something that’s not achievable by most of agriculture.” If you eliminate specific chemicals, he adds “it actually closes the doors for a lot of farmers.” Instead, Dakin says the organization wants to have all farmers at the table, and even some pesticide producers.

In the latest example of the latter, Pollinator Partnership is partnering with Bayer Crop Science (the company that bought Monsanto in 2016, making it the world’s largest pesticide and seed company) and other local entities in a $1.7 million project with the USDA to “improve pollinator habitat and forage across California’s agricultural landscapes.”

These kinds of partnerships are far from unusual for Pollinator Partnership, which also founded and runs the North American Pollinator Protection Campaign, a large collaborative body that includes 170 scientists, researchers, and government entities, alongside Bayer and CropLife America, a trade group that represents manufacturers of pesticides and other agricultural chemicals.

In another example, Pollinator Partnership has initiated research a few years back into the toxicity of the dust that’s released by pesticide-treated corn seeds that received funding from Bayer Crop Science, BASF, and Syngenta—the very companies that manufacture the seed-coating pesticides that cause the dust at the heart of the research.

Xerces Society has also engaged the pesticide industry in dialogue over the years. However, says Lee-Mäder: “We’ve never taken pesticide money as an organization. We never would, and we would never plant habitat or create pollinator conservation features where we feel there’s a potential risk to counteract the work we’re trying to do.”

But that doesn’t necessarily make it easier to work with farmers on pesticides. And Lee-Mäder and Robertson acknowledge that, like Allbright, not everyone they work with is eager to change their practices when it comes to pesticide use.

“We don’t always have the leverage to change pesticide practices. But it’s something that we stay pretty laser-focused on,” said Lee-Mäder. “And we constantly make that part of the dialogue with the grower. Bee Better does provide really clear sideboards on what you can and can’t do. But outside of Bee Better I think [Xerces] is constantly making judgment calls about what we’re comfortable with and what we’re not.”

Willa Childress, who leads state-to-state policy organizing work at Pesticide Action Network, compares working on pollinator habitat with large conventional farms to harm reduction, a strategy that acknowledges that making systemwide changes can be difficult, and many farmers need to be met where they’re at if they’re going to begin to change entrenched patterns and practices.

But exactly where they’re at doesn’t always allow for a shift. “Having worked with many, many farmers over the years, it’s like people are on this pesticide treadmill and can’t get off; they can’t see their way out of it,” Childress said. “And they encounter challenges even when trying to move slightly away, because they’re already bought into a system and have all their acreage in [conventional] agriculture.”

Childress says she’s seen a number of examples in the policy arena where the focus on getting more habitat in the ground is politically much more palatable than reducing pesticide use.

“We’ve seen this approach over and over again, which is to separate these different impacts that we know are contributing towards huge pollinator and other insect declines: pesticide use, lack of habitat, and disease,” says Childress. “Policymakers and different constituents have tried to pry apart the three pieces of this problem and the result is that we’ve passed lots of legislation trying to address increased habitat. And yet we haven’t seen a measurable difference in how pollinators are faring.”

The pesticide industry has such a powerful lobbying presence all around the country, says Childress, that bills calling for reduction in pesticide use rarely make it very far. “Our legislation isn’t matching up to our science, and the only reason can be corporate control of agriculture and corporate influence,” she adds.

When asked directly, Allbright said he hadn’t reduced his pesticide use at all—and it’s clear that he doesn’t see that as a goal either on the land certified by Xerces’ Bee Better nor the land certified by Pollinator Partnership’s Bee Friendly program.

For Xerces’ Robertson, the hope is to reach a productive, if sometimes challenging, middle ground. “If you look at the two ends of the spectrum, you’re going to have a certification that is so incredibly rigorous that nobody adopts it. Then you’re not moving the needle at all,” she says. “On the other side, you can have a certification that is easy and anyone can adopt it without changing their practices. So again, the needle isn’t moving. Our goal is always conservation and we’re always evaluating where we’re at and adjusting and weighing in on: Can we get farms to nudge and move the needle and adopt these practices? And are we matching with the science that says, ‘This is what has to be done to help curb the biodiversity loss we’re seeing?’”

For Far North Spirits’ Mike Swanson, even the less-stringent Bee Friendly certification is an important start—a catalyst of sorts. He has about 50 acres of land set aside through USDA’s Conservation Reserve Program—which pays farmers to give their land a rest—and he says ever since he received the pollinator-focused certification he has seen his property through fresh eyes.

Before, Swanson says, he saw that land primarily as valuable because the plants growing on it kept his soil from eroding. Now, he adds, “I see that it provides not just pollinator habitat, but wildlife, birds—of all kinds of critters like to hang out in there! And I think that’s one of the big benefits of doing a certification like this; you start to look at property as an ecosystem rather than just a property.”

The post Coming Soon to a Food Label Near You: ‘Bee-Friendly’ Certifications appeared first on Civil Eats.

“All of those flexibilities, collectively, will disappear on July 1,” said Jillien Meier, director of partnerships and campaign strategies for Share Our Strength’s No Kid Hungry campaign. She worries that the shift could be, “absolutely catastrophic for schools, but even more catastrophic for kids and their families.”

With the waivers in place, schools served more than double the number of summer meals in July 2020 and 2021 compared to previous years. Share Our Strength estimates that the expiration could mean that children will miss out on 95 million meals this summer and that schools will struggle to feed children during the 2022–2023 school year. And it’s one of thousands of organizations—including the powerful School Nutrition Association—that have been pushing Congress to extend the waivers for months.

In March, Republicans prevented the provision from being included in a spending bill, and they have since (with some exceptions) opposed new measures introduced by Democrats and championed by Senator Debbie Stabenow (D-Michigan). Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has expressed support for extending the waivers, but the USDA’s authority is constrained by Congress. “This has become a partisan issue. We are not hearing [of] any compromises,” Meier said.

While those who oppose the extensions point to the fact that children are back in school, many parents are back to work, and meal programs should be able to go back to pre-pandemic operations, Meier said that in No Kid Hungry listening sessions, school nutrition directors are reporting that in some ways, they are facing even tougher challenges compared to two years ago. While quarantines and delivery meals have ended, COVID absences have meant lower participation in meal programs, which tightens budgets. Directors still can’t find many ingredients, and deliveries are inconsistent. With inflation soaring, they’re paying significantly more for food. According to a recent report from the Food Research & Action Center, more than half of districts surveyed identified supply chain disruptions, rising food prices, and labor shortages as significant challenges during the 2021–2022 school year. “There is nothing normal about the situation they’re operating under right now,” Meier said.

As the deadline approaches, many groups are turning to state policy advocacy as a pathway to expand school meal flexibilities in the absence of federal action. California, Maine, and Vermont have already passed laws guaranteeing universal school meals, while similar bills are moving forward in New York, Colorado, Minnesota, and Massachusetts.

Meier said those efforts are commendable but in the end, state action alone will likely just result in inequality. “Particularly in the South, where hunger is most acute in rural communities of color, they’re not going to get the benefits,” she said. “That’s my biggest concern: In the places where we already had a hunger crisis pre-COVID, we’re only going to see inequities get exacerbated.”

Read More:
The Pandemic Reveals Racial Gaps in School Meal Access
As School Meal Programs Go Broke, a Renewed Call for Universal School Meals
The People Behind School Meals Are Pushing for Free Access for All

A Standard for Salmon Welfare? While a wide range of animal welfare certifications exist for chickens, pigs, and cattle, fish farmed for food have not been afforded the same attention over the years. Now, Global Animal Partnership (GAP) is wading into new waters with its first certification program for farmed Atlantic salmon. GAP, which works closely with Whole Foods Market, is known for its five-step certification system that covers more than 400 million land-based farm animals around the world, from turkeys and laying hens to beef cattle and bison. It is a well-respected certification in the industry but has also been accused of “humanewashing” by some advocacy groups. The new salmon standard has three levels that include requirements such as minimum stocking density, water quality monitoring, and enrichments to the environment. In a press release, Ben Williamson, the U.S. Director of Compassion in World Farming, said, “The new GAP standards for Atlantic salmon are now the highest and most comprehensive available.”

Read More:
Will Fish Get Their Animal Rights Moment?
What the History of Salmon Can Tell Us About the Future of the Planet

Fighting for Farmworkers. To show his solidarity with immigrant farmworkers, Senator Alex Padilla (D-California) recently headed to the fields, harvesting and packing parsley and radishes alongside workers in Southern California. But the event once again resurfaced previous disagreements over immigration reform in the conversation around farm labor and justice. Padilla used the media opportunity to express his support for the Farm Workforce Modernization Act, a bill that would create a pathway to legal status for some undocumented farmworkers, expand the controversial H-2A guestworker program, and require employers to use an electronic verification system to certify immigration status. It’s supported by the United Farm Workers, who hosted Padilla in the fields, and by Farmworker Justice. But other food and farm labor groups firmly oppose the legislation, and this week, the Food Chain Worker Alliance reiterated its position on Twitter. “The Farm Workforce Modernization Act has not changed, it’s still a deportation and anti-labor bill that will hurt farmworkers for generations,” the group wrote.

Read More:
A Path to Citizenship is on the Horizon for Undocumented Farmworkers
The H-2A Guest Worker Program Has Ballooned in Size; Farmers and Workers Want it Fixed

The post The Field Report: Are Expiring School Meal Waivers a Looming Catastrophe? appeared first on Civil Eats.

Today, their neighbors are much more accepting. Fitzgerald and his parents have spent over 20 years building relationships in their region while a much broader cultural shift has also taken place.

In that time, Fitzgerald Organics has expanded to 2,500 acres and the family has started a consulting business to help other commodity farmers transition to organic. “Our farm has grown as the industry has grown,” Fitzgerald said.

Now, they’re transitioning another 144 acres with the help of the Perennial Fund, which is putting $10 million into expanding organic acreage and has already funded 10 farmers transitioning 5,700 acres. It’s one of a number of new efforts to increase the number of certified organic acres across the U.S. Last year, the Rodale Institute launched an initiative with Cargill, the country’s largest private agriculture company, and Bell & Evans poultry company to transition 50,000 acres of crops grown for organic animal feed. And just last week, Daily Harvest announced a partnership with American Farmland Trust and California Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF) to offer grants of up to $10,000 to more than 100 fruit and vegetable farmers looking to transition to organic.

Meanwhile, demand for organics continues to grow. The Organic Trade Association (OTA) reported that sales of certified organic products (from both food and fiber) increased a record 12.4 percent to $62 billion in 2020, and surveys show more shoppers than ever care about the environmental impact of their food choices.

The story of organics is one of a disruptive underdog industry that has been growing steadily alongside the old guard for ages and is finally approaching the mainstream. But as organic products make it into the hands of more consumers than ever before, it’s clear that the industry is also at an important inflection point and is struggling on many fronts.

While “USDA Organic” used to be the only label on the shelf that quickly communicated a promise of environmental sustainability, there are now many other certifications that serve as add-ons to that label, as well as labels offering competing benefits like low-carbon and regenerative.

In just a few years, conventional farm groups have swooped in and claimed the banner of environmentally friendly farming through “regenerative practices,” and an increasing number of private and government dollars for climate mitigation have begun flowing toward conventional farms using practices like cover crops and reduced tillage. Case in point: When Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack released a long list of climate-related actions his USDA took during its first year, the word organic did not appear once.

And while the USDA Certified Organic label is still the only one in the country that is regulated by the federal government with third-party certification, some consumers appear to have lost faith in the idea that the seal can guarantee that their food has been produced in a way that’s better for people, animals, and the planet. In November, The New Yorker published a lengthy investigation called “The Great Organic Food Fraud” that followed a Midwest grain dealer who sold a large volume of conventional grain as organic before he was caught and prosecuted. The story highlighted loopholes in organic inspection and came to conclusions such as, “there’s no way to confirm that a crop was grown organically.”

“It left the impression, almost, that the system completely failed,” said Laura Batcha, the CEO and executive director of the OTA. “The disappointment [I felt] when I read the story was really about the missed opportunity to look under the hood and do a real post-mortem on how it happened and what’s been done since then.”

The Fight Over Who Owns Organic

“We can’t say that the organic label is losing its luster because people are questioning it,” said Dave Chapman, an organic tomato farmer based in Vermont. “They’re questioning it because they should question it.”

Chapman is the executive director of the Real Organic Project (ROP), a nonprofit that offers a new, secondary organic certification to farms with practices in line with what he and others in the group see as “real” organic farming. Namely, it’s not just about the synthetic fertilizers and pesticides the farms don’t use; crops have to be grown in soil and animals have to be raised on pasture. To the farmers behind ROP, these components are the heart and soul of what organic means. They see the fact that the USDA has allowed hydroponic (soil-less) systems and large concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) to receive the certification as a betrayal of the movement. For the last two years in a row, ROP’s farms have doubled in number and the current network now includes 850 farms.

In their eyes, the root of the problem is that as organic gained market value, big companies wanted in on the profits and began finding ways to exploit the system, tilting the scales against the bulk of organic farmers, who operate small farms and prioritize biodiversity and soil health. For example, Costco and Walmart are now top sellers of organic food, and Cargill, Driscoll’s (which sells organic berries grown hydroponically), and Nutrien Ag Solutions (a major seller of chemical farm inputs) are all OTA members.

“They believe we need to build a big tent, and the bigger the tent, the [more likely it is] we’re going to change American agriculture,” Chapman said. “But I believe if you build a tent big enough for Godzilla, you’re going to change what’s happening in the tent.”

Batcha acknowledges there are disagreements among farmers, food companies, and organizations within organic, but she said it’s par for the course within a broad coalition and compares it to the way the Democratic party struggles to bring together progressives and moderates. But the differences within organic are further complicated by the fact that one of the partners in the coalition is a federal agency.

“From its inception, the law was so aspirational, and you’re taking these big aspirations and you’re trying to operationalize them in a partnership with the government,” Batcha said. “There’s a natural gap there.”

Despite all this, nearly everyone agrees on a few key things the USDA should do right now to ensure a brighter future for organic farmers, food sellers, and consumers. For starters, a rule that will strengthen inspections and tracking to prevent fraud is in final review at the agency. The other two rules that are most important to organic—one that closes a loophole hurting small dairy farms and another that will bring animal welfare standards in line with organic ideals—were moved forward under the Obama Administration and then stalled or withdrawn under Trump. Representatives of the National Organic Program (NOP) at the USDA told Civil Eats that both rules are “very high priorities” but would not comment on when exactly they might be finalized.

Batcha also pointed out organic is the only industry in which multiple stakeholders are arguing for more regulation, not less. In addition to pushing for rules that will make certification more rigorous, the OTA is lobbying Congress to pass a bill that would direct the USDA to act on future rulemaking more quickly and ensure certifiers are enforcing new standards consistently.

Still, policy change requires strong coalitions, and it’s unclear if this one can stick together around a common message. “With the emergence of interest in regenerative agriculture, the divisiveness within organic becomes more problematic,” said Kathleen Merrigan, who is now the executive director of the Swette Center for Sustainable Food Systems at Arizona State University and served as Deputy Secretary of Agriculture at the USDA from 2009 to 2013.

Will the Future be Regenerative, Organic, or Regenerative-Organic?

And yet, at this moment in the U.S, it’s not the climate-smart agriculture du jour. Part of the narrative gap is likely due to the organic industry’s own focus on “avoiding pesticide residue” in food as the key marketing message for years, based on survey after survey that showed people were motivated to buy organic out of concerns for the health of their families.

Whatever the reason, when the world started heating up and everyone started talking about sequestering carbon in soil, only the farmers knew that building organic matter had been a key tenet of organic farming since the get-go.

And equally important is how quickly the term regenerative was embraced in conventional agriculture, where powerful industry leaders recognized the pressure that the industry would face to reduce emissions and sequester carbon. The fact that regenerative practices like cover crops and reduced tillage can fit squarely into already established systems built around chemical inputs allows for speed and scale, and many farmers and advocates believe that those two factors are necessary to meaningfully move the needle. Some regenerative advocates also question organic farming’s ability to sequester carbon because many farmers rely on tillage to control weeds (but this effect has mainly been measured in the top layer of soil and research trials show organic soils may store carbon further down).

And so far, federal investment in climate-smart agriculture has supported the conventional regenerative track.

Secretary Vilsack has explicitly said the U.S. will not take any cues from the European Union’s plan for a more sustainable food system, which includes cutting farmers’ use of pesticides in half, reducing synthetic fertilizer use by 20 percent, and transitioning at least 25 percent of the E.U.’s farmland to organic production by 2030. The AIM for Climate initiative Vilsack launched at COP26 is so far primarily supporting industrial agriculture projects, none of which mention organic farming and at least one of which is in partnership with the pesticide industry’s trade group.

In an interview, NOP Deputy Administrator Jennifer Tucker and Senior Advisor for Organic and Emerging Markets Marni Karlin said the overall agency is committed to climate action and that “support for organic” is one of the many ways it is achieving that commitment. They also referenced additional cost-share payments for certification as an example of the kinds of support USDA is providing to organic farmers.

Karlin said one of her biggest priorities is “making sure that organic has a seat at the table in the big discussions that are happening throughout the department,” on issues like climate, equity, loan programs, and market development. At the same time, Tucker said she’s focused on both moving forward rules that are important to organic farmers and groups as well as putting “tremendous thought and resources” into improving compliance and enforcement alongside certifiers.

But neither Tucker nor Karlin could directly specify why organic had been left out of the climate initiatives outlined by Secretary Vilsack.

Way beyond the Beltway, out in the fields, some farmers are forging ahead to claim regenerative and its climate promises for organic farmers. Based in Boulder, Colorado, Mad Agriculture was created in 2018 to eliminate barriers that prevent farmers from adopting regenerative systems. The founders were on a clear climate mission, and after identifying financing as one of those barriers, they created the aforementioned Perennial Fund. Yet while their ultimate goal is to build diversified, regenerative farms, they identified organic certification as their baseline, and they’re using the bulk of the initial capital to help farmers finance the three-year organic transition period, explained Brandon Welch, the Director of Capital at Mad Agriculture. During this window, farms have to stop using synthetic chemicals but don’t yet receive higher prices for their crops.

Since such a large percentage of agriculture’s emissions come from nitrous oxide, “We wanted to focus on a form of agriculture that doesn’t use any synthetic nitrogen,” he said. Many of the farmers the group is working with, such as Matthew Fitzgerald in Minnesota, are thinking far beyond eliminating synthetics. “Our farmers are also cover cropping, they’re using a four-year [crop] rotation,” Welch said. “They also want to move away from the industrial corn and soybean system. They want to be growing other crops, they want to be growing food for people, and they want to do it in a way that’s improving soil health.”

So far, the 10 farms transitioning 5,700 acres represent half of the fund’s allocations, and Welch said he plans to distribute the other $5 million to farmers by the end of March. Eventually, Mad Agriculture’s ambition is to help transition half of the total land they’re working on to Regenerative Organic Certified (ROC), another add-on label to USDA organic (like the Real Organic Project certification) which includes stricter soil health, animal welfare, and worker rights provisions.

Buzz about ROC was bubbling up in 2019 and then seemed to quiet down for a while. But Elizabeth Whitlow, the executive director of the Regenerative Organic Alliance, which administers the certification, said the team has been making quiet progress over the last few years, just at a slightly slower pace than expected due to the pandemic. As of now, Whitlow said they have issued 45 ROC certifications to cooperatives that represent 27,000 farmers on 152,000 acres, largely in the global South.

However, Whitlow is convinced this spring is going to mark a turning point for the ROC label on farms in the U.S. Her team is bringing on five new certifiers, including CCOF, the industry leader. “We’re going to hit the ground running with them this year,” she said, explaining that many farms and wineries are waiting in the wings. Last year, Alexandre Family Farm became the first dairy in the U.S. to achieve ROC certification.

“Now it’s time to start looking outward and working on the consumer education part, and this is a really key moment for us, because there’s so much buzz about regenerative, but nobody really fully agrees on what it means,” Whitlow said. “For the Regenerative Organic Alliance, it means organic is the baseline, and you can’t be regenerative if you’re . . . still using chemicals, no matter how judiciously.”

While it’s not clear how many consumers know the difference between a label with a certification behind it and one without it, nearly everyone Civil Eats spoke to in or about the organic industry mentioned that at some point they expect that regenerative producers will eventually have to contend with the same kinds of consumer confusion and pushback that they themselves have experienced over the years.

While splashy headlines about “regenerative” can make organic seem like old news, “We’re 30 years ahead,” Batcha said. “All the other claims that have nothing behind them, nobody has any idea what they mean.”

Batcha is not alone. Many advocates feel that even if all the players rarely see eye to eye on what organic is or where it’s going, at least “the organic world has gone through establishing a clear standard and a process for inspection and certification,” said Merrigan (see more from her below).

Merrigan believes that’s a thread that has the potential to hold it all together. Plus, “Organic has always been a very divisive policy sub-sector to work in,” she added. “You have to have a steel stomach and quiet nerves to do it.”

The post What Is the Future of Organic? appeared first on Civil Eats.

https://civileats.com/2021/11/23/could-a-rapid-test-for-antibiotics-force-transparency-in-the-meat-supply-chain/ https://civileats.com/2021/11/23/could-a-rapid-test-for-antibiotics-force-transparency-in-the-meat-supply-chain/#comments Tue, 23 Nov 2021 09:00:16 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=44450 “So much of what is being sold as ‘antibiotic-free’ or ‘no antibiotics ever’ is just not that,” says Bill Niman, cattle rancher and founder of the Niman Ranch brand. As he sees it, that gap between what consumers expect and what’s happening behind most farmgates—where antibiotics, which happen to speed growth, are routinely used to […]

The post Could a Rapid Test For Antibiotics Bring Transparency to the Meat Supply Chain? appeared first on Civil Eats.

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Many major meat brands sell a range of products labeled antibiotic-free. And yet, sales of medically important antibiotics in the pork and beef industries have ticked up in the last two years.

“So much of what is being sold as ‘antibiotic-free’ or ‘no antibiotics ever’ is just not that,” says Bill Niman, cattle rancher and founder of the Niman Ranch brand. As he sees it, that gap between what consumers expect and what’s happening behind most farmgates—where antibiotics, which happen to speed growth, are routinely used to prevent animals from getting sick in stressful and crowded conditions—is a major cause for concern.

“We know this works, and we’re very optimistic that when we succeed and this is deployed, that change will occur.”

According to scientists, antibiotic resistance—the growing number of “superbugs” that are resistant to treatment—is “widely considered to be the next global pandemic.” And while a number of countries have successfully reduced dependence on them, the U.S. is behind the curve. For example, the U.S. cattle industry uses medically important antibiotics four to six times more intensively than four of the top livestock-producing countries in Europe, according to analysis by the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Now, Niman and FoodID, the company he co-founded, are hoping a simple test—and a resulting food label for products that pass it—will provide much-needed transparency and, as a result, force wide-scale change in the industry. Niman has been calling attention to how antibiotic use in meat production drives the public health threat for decades, and in an interview with Civil Eats, he presented FoodID as not just a company that will expose fraudulent claims and provide a marketing tool to better meat sellers, but also as a bold opportunity to transform the food system.

“We know this works, and we’re very optimistic that when we succeed and this is deployed, that change will occur,” he said.

The approach would be strikingly different from the existing efforts to curb the overuse of antibiotics in agriculture. In recent years, advocates have been pressuring fast food chains to make public sourcing commitments—just to see most of them fail to follow through on those commitments—and working to influence federal and state-level policies.

But while advocates and experts agree that any innovation that increases transparency around antibiotics’ use in farmed animals is a good thing, many are skeptical about whether the technology will move the needle on antibiotic use in a larger, more consequential way, especially since its current model relies on voluntary adoption and is likely to be utilized by companies already implementing more responsible antibiotic policies.

The Story Behind the Tech

Bill Niman is one of the biggest names in sustainable meat. His namesake pork and beef company, Niman Ranch, is now owned by Perdue Farms; he sold another meat company, BN Ranch, to Blue Apron in 2017, and he continues to raise beef cattle on pasture in Bolinas, California.

In addition to his five decades of experience ranching, Niman was a member of the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production, which investigated the issue of antibiotic resistance and in 2008, recommended a ban on non-therapeutic uses of antibiotics in agriculture.

Bill Niman on his Bolinas, California ranch. Photo by John Burgess.

In 2014, Niman met Dan Denney, a Stanford microbiologist and immunologist who had taken an interest in the many unverified claims made on food labels. “He was really astounded that there wasn’t, in this day and age, technology being applied to validating claims or data accumulated to support the guys who were doing the right thing,” Niman said. They joined forces to found FoodID and later brought on Kevin Lo, a tech executive who has worked for both Facebook and Google, as CEO. The company launched in 2020 and raised $12 million in a Series B investment round this past March.

While tests for antibiotic residue in meat already exist, FoodID’s version uses flow-through technology, the same technology used in at-home pregnancy tests, to make the process faster, cheaper, and more sensitive than ever before, Niman says. Using that tech, the company’s first application seeks to partner with companies to validate their “no antibiotics” claims, since the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) requires testing just .0025 percent of animals each year. With chicken, FoodID’s team tests multiple birds pulled from each chicken house; with cattle and pigs, they test carcasses at the slaughter facilities.

Just like in humans, antibiotics are metabolized and excreted after a certain amount of time, and while different drugs stay in different tissue types for various lengths of time, Lo explained by email that FoodID’s test is sensitive enough to detect whether the animal was ever administered antibiotics within its lifetime.

“We are validating whether the animal has been administered antibiotics and not whether there is residue in the meat,” Lo said. “If an antibiotic is detected, it means that drugs were present. It’s like human drug testing at the Olympics.”

Keeve Nachman, the director of the Food Production and Public Health Program at Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future, is an expert on industrial agriculture’s public health impacts and has worked on studies that tested feather meal and supermarket meat for antibiotic residues in the past. He said that depletion in tissues does matter, and that it would be impossible for him to evaluate whether FoodID’s test could do what the company says it does without seeing data from their verification processes. A spokesperson for the company told Civil Eats that “data from FoodID’s technology is under USDA review to inform label approvals,” and is therefore confidential.

“We’ve tested tens of thousands of animals and have proven the ability to test, and now it’s just a matter of it being deployed in the best possible ways,” Niman said.

The most obvious application of FoodID’s test is to hold sellers that say they are removing antibiotics from their supply chain accountable.

Currently, FoodID tests for seven drug families, chosen because they represent the most common drugs used in animal agriculture. Tetracyclines, for example, are used widely in both beef and pork production, and tylosin, used in cattle, is a macrolide. Niman said providing information on families of drugs tested rather than individual drugs kept the information simple for companies and consumers, but Steve Roach, senior analyst for Keep Antibiotics Working and the Safe and Healthy Food Program director at Food Animal Concerns Trust, said he thought a limitation of the report was that it didn’t give more detailed information on individual antibiotics.

On the flipside, Roach thought the fact that the panel also tested for beta-agonists—which are not antibiotics but are also given to cattle and other farmed animals in feed—would be helpful to raise awareness of the fact that those drugs are routinely administered purely for faster growth.

FoodID in the Future

In October, FoodID employees ran tests on liver, kidney, and muscle tissue from 13 chickens raised by Arkansas farmers in the supplier network for Cooks Venture, a relatively new company that works with farmers to raise slower-growing chickens outdoors.

Just like in the more than 700 previous tests they’d performed on the company’s birds since March 2020, they found no trace of antibiotics.

Soon, all of that information will be available to Cooks Venture’s customers through a scannable QR code on the packaging, backing up its stated commitment to use “no antibiotics ever.”

The most obvious application of FoodID’s test is to hold sellers that say they are removing antibiotics from their supply chain accountable. “As long as companies are making ‘raised without antibiotics’ commitments . . . it’s really good to have people making sure that they’re actually fulfilling those,” Roach said.

In chicken, several of the biggest poultry companies, including Perdue and Tyson, fall into that category. The latter came under fire at one point for injecting eggs with an antibiotic while making “raised without” claims.

In cattle especially, Niman sees FoodID’s technology as critical for catching cheaters, since most cattle moves from cow-calf operations to feedlots and then on to meat processing businesses, making the practices along the way difficult to trace.

But questions remain as to why a company would choose to pay to test their meat when they can make (or not make) claims without doing so. Niman and Matt Wadiak, the founder and CEO of Cooks Venture, are both banking on peer pressure, for starters. “The bottom line is the industry has to move to science to represent claims, and just simply saying something is no longer enough,” said Wadiak. “The whole world knows at this point that any affidavit-based systems can be abused.”

While the routine use of antibiotics in pork and beef production hasn’t fallen dramatically the way it has in chicken in response to consumer pressure, Wadiak says all kinds of claims—including natural, grass-fed, and antibiotic-free—are being made on every cut of meat at stores like Walmart. “It’s become mainstream,” he said. “That’s the indicator; they wouldn’t sell it if they didn’t think it was important to people.”

“Eventually this will be in the consumers’ hands, and industry will have to come to grips with that.”

Companies like Cooks Venture, which have been committed to raising animals without antibiotics from the start, are out in front, but it’s hard to imagine a company that is actively cheating signing up. At Hopkins, Nachman said FoodID seemed like a tool with lots of regulatory potential, but outside of that context, he wondered what the added value for consumers would be.

“What impact will a label like this have on consumer decision making, if the company already could make a claim that it never used antibiotics?” he said. “Now, there’s a verification by a company that’s working closely with the company selling the product; will it make consumers feel any more confident? Maybe some . . . but I wonder if the juice is worth the squeeze.”

But Niman sees potential in the tool beyond its elective use, especially if in the future FoodID makes its technology more widely available to consumer watchdogs, who could choose to test meat from a number of large companies as a way to pressure them to acknowledge, and ultimately change, their practices.

Niman points to the European Union, where a number of nations have undergone major efforts to significantly cut down on the use of antibiotics in livestock in recent years. “In the E.U., when they outlawed the use of antibiotics to promote growth . . . at first they had a lot of sick animals and then they realized they had to make husbandry changes—to provide more space, better ventilation, deep bedding instead of [having the animals] standing in their liquified manure . . . and all of those changes ended up being better for the animals, community, and the environment,” he says.

Niman also argues that while making those changes will require initial investments from companies and consumers, he’s optimistic that leveling the playing field, and removing the markup on antibiotic-free products, “can actually reduce the price as opposed to just appealing to an elitist customer base. If everyone has the same methodology they’re going to find ways to make it more efficient,” he says.

If the data from FOOD ID’s initial work passes muster, Niman is also looking toward future iterations of the technology that will have broader applications, and therefore, implications. “My vision is . . . a whole family of tests on a pegboard at the checkout counter at your local market and you can test for: Is this really GMO-free? Is it grass-fed beef? Is it farm-raised fish? And you can know quickly and easily when you get home or in your car,” he said. “Eventually this will be in the consumers’ hands, and industry will have to come to grips with that.”

Twilight Greenaway contributed reporting.

The post Could a Rapid Test For Antibiotics Bring Transparency to the Meat Supply Chain? appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2021/11/23/could-a-rapid-test-for-antibiotics-force-transparency-in-the-meat-supply-chain/feed/ 4 https://civileats.com/2021/11/11/cocktail-historian-shanna-farrell-on-why-the-spirits-industry-needs-a-grain-to-glass-revolution/ Thu, 11 Nov 2021 09:00:41 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=44196 Distillers are wholly disconnected from the farms that grow their ingredients—many even build their products from pre-made base spirits purchased from mass producers such as Midwest Grain Products of Indiana. Even iconic brands full of artificial ingredients like Campari and Aperol are mainstays behind the bar of restaurants that would never serve the equivalent on […]

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Farm to table has become a guiding principle in many corners of the food and wine worlds. But spirits—everything from whiskey to vodka to liqueurs—remain a monument to a broken food system, says Shanna Farrell, author of A Good Drink: In Pursuit of Sustainable Spirits, released in September.

Distillers are wholly disconnected from the farms that grow their ingredients—many even build their products from pre-made base spirits purchased from mass producers such as Midwest Grain Products of Indiana. Even iconic brands full of artificial ingredients like Campari and Aperol are mainstays behind the bar of restaurants that would never serve the equivalent on the plate.

The spirits industry is finally beginning to grapple with the concept of sustainability, says Farrell, a historian and interviewer at the University of California at Berkeley’s Oral History Center who specializes in cocktail and food culture and history. Efforts such as the Environmental Sustainability Working Group established in 2020 by the Distilled Spirits Council are bringing greater awareness to the ecological impact of spirits production and encouraging major players like Bacardi, Moët Hennessy, Rémy Cointreau, and Pernod Ricard to embrace innovations in energy and water use, packaging, and transportation.

Improving the sustainability of industry heavyweights with large, loyal followings, however, moves slowly. By comparison, nimble, small-scale craft distilleries have more flexibility to reduce their carbon footprint, improve the quality and taste of their spirits with family-farmed and heirloom ingredients, and rethink how their products reach consumers. Their efforts are gaining support from small spirits organizations such as the Tin Roof Drink Community and Tales of the Cocktail Foundation, which are working not just to build a greater sense of community among distilleries embracing sustainable practices but to also influence other spirits producers to do the same. The movement gradually gains momentum each year.

In her book, Farrell outlines some of the most innovative distilleries in operation, including South Carolina’s High Wire Distilling, which produces bourbon using locally grown heirloom corn, and Colorado’s Leopold Bros., where everything down to the on-site malting floor and outdoor landscaping was designed by its environmental engineer co-owner.

Civil Eats spoke with her about why distilleries are so disconnected from the farmers that produce their ingredients and how the spirits industry is slowly rolling toward a grain-to-glass spirits revolution.

Distilleries make spirits with agricultural products, but most aren’t using local or sustainably ingredients. Why?

I think there are a few reasons. There’s a disconnect between where we’re getting the ingredients for spirits, because often they are commodity crops [like corn and wheat] that we can’t see grown. There’s not really a direct relationship between distillers and farms. And because of the way spirits are regulated, distillers don’t legally have to list ingredients on their bottles. Food is regulated by the FDA (Food and Drug Administration), and spirits are regulated by the Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB). We’re not looking at a bottle of alcohol and generally thinking the same things as if we were looking at a box of pasta or sauce.

So even though spirits contain agricultural products and are consumed by drinkers, they are not considered food? Why, then, does the FDA regulate drinks like soda or juice but not spirits?

It goes back to before Prohibition to the Whiskey Rebellion [in the 1790s], which happened because there was a lot of whiskey being sold, but the government was upset it wasn’t getting the taxes. Even before Prohibition, alcohol was regulated [and taxed] by the federal government [through the TTB]. If alcohol is high enough proof, it can be sterile, so people aren’t as worried about getting sick the same way they might be about food being produced in a factory. Spirits are subject to the FDA’s Generally Recognized As Safe (GRAS) list, but they are not considered food, so there’s less of an interest in having them regulated by the FDA.

Do you think there’s a moral component to it?

Yes. The TTB regulates tobacco, alcohol, and firearms—things that have negative connotations. I think the moral component that came out of Prohibition is certainly part of it.

You note in your book that high-end bars and restaurants that would never put processed or artificial ingredients on a plate will pour mass-produced alcohol. Does this boil down to a lack of awareness about the ingredients or the absence of alternatives?

It’s a little bit of both. There are definitely some great alternatives on the market, but people don’t know because of the lack of ingredient lists on their bottles. You might not know that there’s red dye 40 in there. You might not know that there’s high fructose corn syrup. It falls to the bar operator to be aware of it and to provide alternatives, but these are just not conversations that are happening in the spirits industry. There’s a lot of money that comes from spirits companies—it’s a huge industry—so often there’s incentive for people to carry a product because they’re getting other perks from a company.

You write that almost all corn-based spirits come from the commodity crop yellow dent field corn. Why are spirits so dependent on industrialized farming?

Yellow dent field corn is really consistent, it’s really resilient, and it has a high enough sugar content to be able to make alcohol. With a commodity crop, you’ll get a steady supply year after year. When you’re using landrace or heirloom varietals of corn for your whiskey, it’s way less consistent, and you are at the mercy of your environment, the weather, [and] whatever’s happening that year.

At High Wire Distilling, [which uses heirloom Jimmy red corn], there have been a couple of years where they don’t really know what kind of crop they’re going to get because it has flooded or there’s been a massive hurricane. It’s hard to bet on something, especially when you’re financially dependent on it.

I was stunned to read that a number of distilleries don’t distill their own corn—they buy a mass-produced base from a larger distributor. Why?

A bunch of distilleries source their base spirit from a giant distillery like Midwest Grain Producers (MGP), and they just age it themselves. There are over 50 whiskey companies that source from there now. That’s a way to get a product to market really fast without having to distill something and then sit on it for two years; they can make money right away. Some new distilleries source from a place like MGP while they are aging their own distilled spirits. Or a lot of people do it if they don’t have the equipment.

Isn’t that just creating the same product with different labels on it?

I think so. That’s one of my big issues with the way that people talk about whiskey, which I think perpetuates the problem. It’s such a common practice where distilleries talk about the type of wood that’s in the barrel to age it or they talk about the weather while it’s being aged. Even the distilleries that distill their own stuff and are using yellow dent field corn. It’s the same corn that everyone else is using, so how do you differentiate? That’s why the dominant narrative has been more about aging and wood instead of the raw ingredients.

What is the difference between the distilleries that use industrialized ingredients and those that are “grain-to-glass” like St. George Spirits in California and Montanya Distillers in Colorado?

They know exactly where their base ingredients are coming from [and how they are grown]. It all comes back to the land. The questions that distillers should ask when sourcing ingredients are different for each category of spirit. What qualifies corn as sustainable isn’t the same as what makes an agave or sugarcane crop sustainable. That being said, a distiller should look for transparency from a farm. Do they practice organic farming? In some cases, it may take years for a farm to convert to organic from conventional. Is it possible to rotate their crops? Are there other crops grown on the farm? Do they irrigate?

If a farm isn’t willing to share that information, it’s hard for a distiller to make an informed choice. But if a distiller and a grower can build a trusting relationship and have open communication, they can work together to create a system that works for both the farm and the distillery. Grain-to-glass also means not putting additives and things like that in, and if you do, disclosing that so people know. Transparency is important.

How does the cost of operating a grain-to-glass and/or sustainable distillery compare to more traditional distilleries of the same size?

Though I didn’t have explicit conversations about cost, it’s reflected in their retail price. It may cost more to source heirloom ingredients that were grown in an eco-conscious way, so the price accounts for this. My feeling is that it’s similar to slow food—high-quality ingredients are more expensive than commodity crops. There are ways to cut costs and be environmentally friendly like using solar power, sourcing local ingredients, or working directly with a farm, but it’s going to be different for each distillery.

What are some other ways that distilleries are decreasing their environmental impact?

Leopold Bros. [in Denver] is a fascinating example. I have no hesitation about saying that it is the most environmentally advanced distillery in the country, if not the world. It’s a small family distillery run by two brothers: Todd, who is the distiller, and Scott, who is an environmental engineer. Scott designed the distillery, and every single component is in service of efficiency. They’re trying to be as efficient with their water use as possible, down to the type of native grass and plants they’ve planted all around the distillery. They use natural disinfectants on their wood fermentation tanks and solar power.

They grow and malt their own barley as well. They use the malt for their whiskey and vodka, and they use that vodka as the base for their gin and liqueurs, so they’re also trying to create less waste that way. They practice wild yeast fermentation. They have the windows open with fans that pull the pollen and wild yeast from the flora outside the distillery over the fermentation tanks. Everything goes back to a sense of place and it being in Colorado.

Distilleries aren’t required to be transparent about their ingredients and environmental practices. Is there a resource to help consumers determine which are grain-to-glass and which use commodity crops and artificial ingredients?

I don’t think so. There are things like carbon footprint generators for cocktails, but there’s really no list. You can find ingredients lists [online] but you have to work for it. It’s hard to make an informed choice. But I feel hopeful. More and more people are thinking about and doing these things. As people experience climate change on a daily basis, these issues are only becoming more important and there’s less resistance.

The first step is to make a mental switch to think about the environmental side of spirits, and then have a conversation. Go to a liquor store and say, “Hey, do you have any products that are made with locally sourced New York state grain?” That’s the place where the consumer can ask questions. I would also expect to pay more per bottle for a spirit that is made in an eco-friendly way than something that is mass produced, like we do with food. Being willing to adjust your habits a little bit goes a long way.

 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The post Cocktail Historian Shanna Farrell on Why the Spirits Industry Needs a ‘Grain to Glass’ Revolution appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2021/11/04/what-the-meat-industry-can-learn-from-the-downfall-of-belcampo/ https://civileats.com/2021/11/04/what-the-meat-industry-can-learn-from-the-downfall-of-belcampo/#comments Thu, 04 Nov 2021 08:00:00 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=44214 Then, last summer, the company was accused by former and current employees of selling meat brought in from elsewhere and sold as their own. Employees alleged that beef from Tasmania and Mary’s chicken were unloaded into the case and labeled as Belcampo meat; other former employees reported similar scenarios in different shops. After a short […]

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Belcampo did it all. The nine-year old company raised livestock on pasture on its 27,000 acre farm in northern California, slaughtered animals in its own processing facility, and sold the meat in its own high-end butcher shops and restaurants in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, and for a time, New York City. Belcampo also shipped meat around the country to customers willing to pay the hefty per-pound price (a 2.5 pound package of ribeyes sold online for $119.99 or almost $48 a pound, before shipping)—all in the name of good land and animal stewardship.

Then, last summer, the company was accused by former and current employees of selling meat brought in from elsewhere and sold as their own. Employees alleged that beef from Tasmania and Mary’s chicken were unloaded into the case and labeled as Belcampo meat; other former employees reported similar scenarios in different shops. After a short internal investigation, the company admitted that a small amount of meat had in fact been sold this way at their stores. Belcampo’s vertical integration from farm to fork, marketed as the key to total transparency, was in fact opaque.

Then, in mid-October, the company abruptly announced the closure of their e-commerce, restaurants, and retail shops. It’s not clear how the meat-labeling scandal impacted the company’s bottom line or whether the business was already in trouble. But as someone who raises grass finished beef and recently wrote a book about the challenges of making a profit farming, it strikes me that the demise of Belcampo offers an important moment for reflection on the industry at large.

Doug Stonebreaker, the founder and former CEO of Prather Ranch Meat Company (PRMC), another 30,000-acre operation in Northern California, has spent a lot of time thinking about what it will take to get more consumers eating beef from animals raised on pasture, at a time when the vast majority are not.

On a recent phone call, Stonebreaker was sanguine about the lessons Belcampo has to teach the rest of us in the industry. “Instead of saying, ‘That model can’t work,’” he said, “we should look at what mistakes might have been made and keep forging ahead.”

Pasture Raised Animals are Truly Slow Food

The Belcampo model tried to overcome one of the most basic laws of raising animals entirely on grass: it is a slow and unpredictable business. Although almost all beef cattle are raised on grass for the first six to nine months, most are then taken to feedlots, where they eat grain—predominantly corn and soy—that fattens them up in 16-18 months.

In a pasture-based system, however, you cannot finish cattle quickly (it takes 24 to 30 months), and there is no way to raise livestock in mass quantities. Plus, on pasture, each animal needs far more space than they do when they are standing around in a feedlot, and even with the 27,000 acres Belcampo had, there are only so many animals one could raise and herds one could manage. And, depending on the rain (which falls sparingly in California), the health of your soil, and the variety of plants you have in your pasture, the speed at which the animals grow is largely up to Mother Nature.

Which all speaks to the unpredictability of getting food from field to plate. Although you might not know it by looking at the meat case at your local grocery store, everything has a season, and unless a ranch freezes and stores its cuts (which also has high costs and challenges), it is impossible to have every cut of every animal available for consumers at every moment. Chickens can’t be pastured in cold winter months, and California’s increasingly dry summers mean that cattle there don’t reach their target weight in June, July, August, or September (unless farms irrigate, using precious groundwater to grow grass).

Consumers are fickle, too, wanting steaks in the summer for BBQs and roasts for winter stews, making it a logistical challenge for ranches trying to sell fresh meat and make the most of every whole animal.

Can a Single Farm Service Multiple Stores and Restaurants?

Yet even with these limitations, Belcampo attempted to service not one, but five (and at times more) restaurants with static menus that served traditional foods like sirloin steaks and chicken breasts.

“I just don’t see any way that I could manage my inventory in a way that would make that work,” Will Harris of White Oak Pastures recently told me on the phone. Harris’ farm, which is about one-tenth the size of Belcampo’s California operation at 3,200 acres, but raises roughly the same number of animals due to the higher annual rainfall and lush foliage in the South. White Oak also raises food for their restaurant in the small town of Bluffton, Georgia, and for an on-farm store. “But for us, those operations are in service of the farm, not the other way around,” Jenni Harris, Will’s daughter and White Oak Pastures’ marketing manager, added.

Think about it this way. Each 1,200-pound cow only has only about 16 pounds of tenderloin. That means that in order to serve 100 people an eight-ounce tenderloin steak, you would need to have four whole animals processed. But that would also yield an additional 1,896 pounds* of beef—meat that the ranch and restaurant must sell in order to stay afloat financially and live up to the moral obligation to utilize the whole animal to the best of their ability.

“You have to be processing what you’re raising, and marketing what you’re processing, otherwise you end up with a million dollars of ground beef in the freezer,” Will Harris explained.

“At our restaurant,” Jenni Harris added, “if we have too many beef cheeks—guess what’s for lunch at the restaurant?”

It is a massive inventory challenge to balance what a farm has in stock with what is being served at a restaurant, and to maintain the flexibility to adjust prices and menu items as necessary. Letting the farm dictate what will be for sale in the restaurant and finding ways to utilize unsold items in the kitchen can help an overall profitability.

Vertical Integration and Broken Promises

Belcampo tried to take two of the lowest-margin, highest-risk professions—farming and restaurant ownership—and make them profitable. The thinking was that by doing everything internally, it would remove the middlemen, processors, and distributors, thereby avoiding the mark up that comes with each hand-off up the food chain.

Today, farmers make 14 cents on every dollar spent at the grocery store—the brands, processors, and retailers pocket the rest. A well-run, vertically integrated business (the theory goes) keeps more of that money and makes low-margin businesses more profitable.

Notably, most of the huge agribusinesses that dominate the beef, chicken, and hog markets own very little in the way of land or animals. Instead, companies like Tyson—which, according to its website, produces 20 percent of the beef, pork, and chicken in the United States—contract with farms and feedlots, thereby avoiding the cash—and the risk—involved in owning land, buildings, and confinement facilities. And with a state-of-the-art, 2,499-hog “space” confinement barn costing upwards of $750,000, owning enough animals to slaughter 461,000 hogs a week (the amount Tyson can process) is prohibitively expensive.

It is impossible to know whether vertical integration did, in fact, mean that Belcampo came closer to making a profit than most farms do. In 2020, the median income for America’s two million farms was -$1,248—a more than $1,200 loss. But even with steaks at $47 a pound, farming is expensive business and Belcampo’s high monthly costs in real estate and labor may have detracted from their ability to make a net profit.

Yet the company also marketed their ownership of every part of the food chain as the reason customers could trust that they did everything right; the company’s motto was, “Meat you can trust, from start to finish.” Betraying that trust and getting caught misleading consumers almost certainly hurt the company, but it has also had a negative impact on all of us raising animals on pasture. Reverberations throughout the “pasture-raised” community were felt, even on farms that have worked for decades to build relationships with consumers.

“It is just one more layer of skepticism, and we don’t need that,” Will Harris told me.

White Oak Pastures works to combat “greenwashing” by inviting people to stay on the farm and visitors can peek into every part of their supply chain; you can walk into their freezers and watch slaughter if you so desire, the Harrises told me. But for smaller farms, like one I run with my husband, those extra steps aren’t possible. We’re hoping to increase our direct sales (particularly now, when consumers have more interest in buying locally), but there is no extra cash to build housing for customers to visit with our cows, and buying our own processing facility is cost-prohibitive. Add to that the fact that insurance for farm tours and pizza nights is virtually nonexistent in the state of Iowa. In other words, consumer word of mouth and trust in our practices is all we have.

Diversifying Ownership

There are also ethical considerations when it comes to the vertical integration. Having a single person or company owning all parts of the supply chain means the continued ownership and consolidation of land and property by the wealthy.

In Belcampo’s case, investment came from Todd Robinson, a retired financial executive who had been buying farmland in Northern California with the idea of raising grass-fed beef.

Currently, 98 percent of land in the U.S. is owned by white people, who also make up 96 percent of all landowners. And, as an increasing number of acres are farmed by larger operations, small and mid-sized independent farms and ranchers are producing less of the overall food in this country than ever before, and making less of the profit.

When one person owns everything, there is a missed opportunity to involve hundreds of thousands of farmers who might want to play a part in changing the food system and benefit financially from doing so.

Rather than investing in land, buildings, and restaurants, all the money invested into Belcampo (an estimated $50 million, although that number seems low for owning so much real estate) could have been used to help farmers already using regenerative practices to scale up, said Doug Stonebreaker. “If your goal is to change the system and build and support communities, with capital you can control the structure of the business instead of necessarily owning land. There are many farmers and ranchers who are totally committed that need capital, those ready to bleed to death trying to make it all work.”

Stonebreaker also sees opportunities for capital investments to help farmers transition row crop farming in the Midwest to grass-based, pasture models, thereby increasing the number of acres in regenerative agriculture. A central company could be used to process and sell the niche-market beef, increasing the prices farmers are paid for their cattle.

“You’d need a crazy balance of entrepreneurship and leadership, coupled with structure and discipline. There would need to be a lot of rules and there can’t be too much ego involved,” Stonebreaker added. “But you could pull it off.”

Larger companies like Belcampo may help to drive interest in and demand for pasture- raised livestock with sizable advertising budgets and frequent media mentions. But diversifying the ownership in addition to the diversity of plants and animals may have been what was missing. As Nobel Prize winner Elenor Ostrom found in her research about shared community resources, working together benefits not only the humans, but also the environment.

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]]> https://civileats.com/2021/11/04/what-the-meat-industry-can-learn-from-the-downfall-of-belcampo/feed/ 2 https://civileats.com/2021/10/14/better-chicken-commitment-fast-food-grocery-giants-promise-sell-better-chicken-is-it-enough-perdue-tyson-cage-free-labeling/ Thu, 14 Oct 2021 08:00:40 +0000 http://civileats.com/?p=43845 Animal welfare organization the Humane League announced that in August alone, four grocery chains—Sprouts Farmers Market, Kroger, Natural Grocers, and Giant Eagle—had signed on to the Better Chicken Commitment (BCC), a pledge to adopt a set of standards meant to improve the lives of the animals raised for meat sold in their stores. In the […]

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This summer, it seemed like things might be looking up for the more than 9 billion chickens that get fattened up quickly inside crowded barns before being processed into fried chicken sandwiches and crispy wings in the U.S. each year.

Animal welfare organization the Humane League announced that in August alone, four grocery chains—Sprouts Farmers Market, Kroger, Natural Grocers, and Giant Eagle—had signed on to the Better Chicken Commitment (BCC), a pledge to adopt a set of standards meant to improve the lives of the animals raised for meat sold in their stores.

In the same month, the animal advocacy group Compassion in World Farming (CIWF) formed a working group with seven large food sellers, including Shake Shack, Target, and Aramark, to help the businesses work toward adopting the same standards within the next few years. And the Global Animal Partnership (GAP) released the preliminary results of a study that is being used to create a new protocol for its certification (which is one component of the BCC) requiring slower-growing breeds with better welfare outcomes.

That development was particularly significant, because hybrid birds developed in the late 20th century have been bred to grow to double the market weight in half the amount of time compared to chickens raised in the 1930s. That fast growth, coupled with an emphasis on large breasts, can make the birds unhealthy and limit their mobility; animal advocates have long noted that shifting to different breeds would be the most foundational change for improving welfare in the industry.

While iterations of the BCC have existed for several years, this new momentum brings the usual questions: Do the standards it asks of companies represent meaningful change? Will fast food and grocery corporations honor their commitments—or will they kick the can down the road in the hope that public attention will shift before their commitments come due?

“Do I think it’s meaningful? Yes. Do I think it’s enough? Absolutely not,” said Delcianna Winders, director of the Animal Law program at Vermont Law School. “This is not anything that is going to actually ensure good welfare for these animals, but there is such an utter lack of legal requirements and such horrific treatment that this will bring the minimum floor up a little bit.”

The animal advocates who have been working to convince food service executives to sign on to the agreement see even small changes within the industrial system as a win, as they say those tweaks alleviate the suffering of so many animals. Others pushing for changes to chicken farming believe the focus should be on changing those systems entirely, with a recognition of animal welfare as one piece of a broader puzzle that also encompasses environmental justice concerns and climate impact.

What Is the Better Chicken Commitment?

Over the past 50 years, in addition to breeding chickens for lightning-fast growth and feed efficiency, the poultry industry has begun raising them in more concentrated ways on larger farms and sped up processing to produce as much chicken as possible at lower and lower prices. As a result, Americans now eat more chicken than any other meat (or fish). While per-capita red meat consumption has fallen compared to highs in the 1970s, the average American now eats 97 pounds of chicken per year, about two and a half times the rate in 1970.

Changes associated with the industrializing and scaling up of production have had significant negative impacts on the environment, surrounding communities, and the chickens themselves. In response, a group of animal welfare organizations with slightly differing goals began working together in 2014 to put pressure on food companies to improve the welfare of the chickens in their supply chains. According to Jeff Doyle, the U.S. head of food business at CIWF, the groups realized that their organizations were approaching corporations with a wide array of demands, and some were counterproductive.

“What we really wanted to do was try to align behind an agreed-upon set of criteria . . . so that when we go to companies, they’re not hearing 10 different things from 10 different groups,” explained Doyle. “We were trying to be proactive and to draw lines where we think there are some changes needed, but [in ways] that are still economically viable for these companies.”

In 2019, the groups finalized the BCC around five basic criteria. By 2024, the signing companies would have to require their chicken suppliers to prohibit cages and give birds slightly more space than the industry standard, provide “enrichments” for the birds including litter and lighting improvements, switch to a slaughter system called controlled atmosphere stunning (CAS), and conduct third-party auditing to show they were meeting all the requirements. By 2026, they would also have to switch to slower growing, more humane chicken breeds.

The BCC also offers a kind of shortcut version of the standards in which companies can choose GAP certification (at any level), which already meets, and in many cases exceeds, the requirements.

To date, about 200 companies have adopted versions of the commitment, including major fast-food chains such as Burger King and Popeyes. But unlike certifications operated by a single organization or a government agency, the BCC is not overseen by any one governing body. Different groups secure commitments from companies independently, and how those companies “commit” varies, making it difficult for a consumer to know what it really means when a grocer declares they’ve signed on.

For example, the four supermarkets that the Humane League announced came on board in August actually agreed to apply the standards only to specific brands to varying degrees and along different timelines. Sprouts said it would commit to enrichments by 2024, more space by 2025, and CAS by 2026, but it made no solid promise to adopt slower-growing breeds. Kroger also left breeds out of its commitment and promised only to have 50 percent of the chicken for its Simple Truth Natural and Simple Truth Organic brands compliant on the other factors by 2024.

What Does ‘Better Chicken’ Really Mean for Birds and Farmers?

“What we’re asking is to raise the baseline . . . and the criteria is based around what can make the most impact now,” said Vicky Bond, a veterinarian and animal welfare specialist at the Humane League. Bond said changing processing systems that are stressful for chickens and sometimes result in the animals being conscious at the time of slaughter is key. “[CAS] is overall a much better and more reliable system for more humane slaughter,” she said.

Bruce Stewart-Brown is the senior vice president of technical services and innovation at Perdue, one of the main suppliers for companies looking to adopt the BCC. He agreed that CAS is a more humane system for processing for multiple reasons but said it’s also the biggest barrier to a greater percentage of the company’s chicken supply meeting the standards.

“It’s expensive, and there is a limitation on the number of systems that can [be installed at processing plants] in any given year. There are maybe three different companies making CAS systems,” said Stewart-Brown. Currently, he added, only 10 percent of Perdue’s chicken supply comes from birds slaughtered using CAS.

The other component that would represent a significant change for industrial chicken producers is the gradual move away from fast-growing breeds. Fast growth and enlarged breasts in today’s commercial chickens are linked to decreased mobility, skeletal abnormalities, skin lesions, and higher mortality rates. But animal welfare advocates don’t necessarily agree among themselves as to what constitutes a “higher welfare” breed.

Farm Forward and associated farmer Frank Reese advocate for turning back the clock to before the industry began using hybrid breeding techniques altogether. They believe that standard bred and heritage chickens, which live active lives outdoors and reach a smaller market weight over about 16 weeks, compared to the commercial industry average of six to seven weeks, should be the baseline all breeds are compared to.

“We must eliminate hybrid genetics that cause animals to grow too big too quickly or lay too many eggs, in favor of animals bred in accordance with Dr. Bernard Rollin’s Principle of Conservation of Welfare: newer breeds should have at least the same level of welfare as previous breeds,” Farm Forward executive director Andrew deCoriolis wrote in a 2020 blog post. “Until industry takes these steps, Farm Forward calls upon people to divest from this corrupt industry by refusing to buy its products.”

But heritage chickens are expensive to produce and are raised on pasture in non-industrial systems, and the groups aligned with the BCC believe advocates should try to introduce improvements that the dominant system will be willing to adopt.

GAP’s five-tier certification system already includes requirements related to space and enrichments for chickens at every level, but in the past only required slower-growing breeds at top tiers, in pastured systems. Over the last five years, it has been working to update the standards to include slower-growing breeds across the board.

“It became very apparent that while there were bits and pieces of science out there, putting all of the bits together was going to be really difficult,” said Anne Malleau, GAP’s executive director.

To get clearer answers, the organization funded a study at the University of Guelph in Ontario in which researchers compared 16 different breeds with varying growth rates on outcomes including mobility, physiology, and mortality. GAP then assembled a multidisciplinary technical working group to develop a high-welfare breed protocol using the results of the study. “Our first list will be breeds from the study,” she explained, and then companies and producers that want their breeds approved for use in GAP-certified systems will be able to apply for their breed to be evaluated using the new protocol.

GAP-certified breeds will then be eligible for use by companies that have signed on to the Better Chicken Commitment, and the commitment gives them until 2026 to do it, since the industry is now set up for only fast-growing breeds and the process of creating enough stock of the higher welfare breeds will take time. At Perdue, animal scientists have been doing their own research on slower-growing breeds in an effort to prepare. Stewart-Brown said that they were working to answer several questions, such as whether the birds would do better with different feed and need more or less overall, how customers will react to differences in the meat, and how to fairly compensate growers who would have to switch from producing around five flocks a year to three and a half.

The economic concerns for farmers are significant—particularly in an industry that has long faced tight margins and restrictive contracts that benefit the companies at the expense of farmers. Raising fewer birds in the same barns would typically mean lower compensation, but Stewart-Brown said Perdue is paying growers more per pound for birds raised to meet the Better Chicken Commitment standards. (The company did not provide an exact number, but a spokesperson said that if Perdue places less chickens than “normal” with a farmer to allow for more space, “we figure out what the ‘loss’ to their regular income would be and pay extra; what we call ‘space pay.’”)

Perdue has been working to improve the animal welfare in its operations for about a decade, as a result of pressure from advocacy groups, Stewart-Brown said. Today, Perdue says 40 percent of its farms now meet the requirements for more space (6 pounds per square foot) and 26 percent include enrichments that are required by the standards.

Stewart-Brown noted that the company is paying for these upgrades, although in the past, poultry companies have typically foisted those costs onto contract farmers. For instance, over the past 10 years Perdue increased the number of barns with windows from 11 percent to 52 percent in conjunction with animal welfare groups’ input. While the company said it would pay for those changes, records provided to Civil Eats show some contract growers were required to pay the company back through significant reductions in their income over time. In response, Stewart-Brown said those contracts were being misinterpreted and that the company pays the cost upfront and then initiates a process of “turning over ownership” that includes extra pay to cover the installments farmers pay and only fully shifts the cost of the windows onto farmers if they choose to leave Perdue within three years of the installation.

Regardless of who pays for upgrades, when leading poultry companies point to incremental improvements like these as success stories, critics argue that programs like the BCC amount to little more than window dressing, since most chickens still spend their lives inside in an unnatural environment, contract farmers still struggle to stay afloat, and the other impacts of industrial chicken production on surrounding communities remain.

Enforcement, Policy, and the Bigger Picture

Groups like Farm Forward have accused animal welfare groups that call for small changes to industrial systems of “humanewashing,” and have been critical of GAP’s higher-welfare breed project. But while the BCC is narrow in scope, Chloe Waterman, senior program manager of Friends of the Earth’s Climate-Friendly Food program, said some of its components could have broader impacts. “Insofar as it also helps to contribute to reducing stocking densities, that’s where you start to see some of the environmental benefits as well, because part of what makes any confined animal production so harmful for the environment is … the concentration of waste,” she said.

As an incremental step, Waterman said she saw the commitment as meaningful, but in the context of larger food system transformation to address the urgency of climate change, much bigger changes to chicken are needed.

“We are still consuming an unsustainable amount of chicken, so we think the Better Chicken Commitment . . . needs to be paired with a ‘Less Chicken Commitment.’”

And the question arises as to the value of a corporate “commitments” more broadly. On one hand, food companies regularly vow to end practices like deforestation and antibiotic use in beef and then make little progress on actually doing so. However, in poultry, corporate commitments have contributed to a massive movement away from the use of medically important antibiotics. And while cage-free egg commitments have not been as universally successful, they have still led to a significant shift.

“We are seeing a huge rise in cage-free production now compared to when that advocacy started,” Waterman said. “I think what helped is the way in which these corporate commitments have worked in tandem with policy change. Part of the value of these corporate commitments is that it demonstrates to policymakers that this is achievable . . . that it’s not going to crash our food system and cause food businesses to go out of business.”

For Vermont Law School’s Winders, the real problem stems from the fact that the legal protections for animals that apply to other industries like research and pet breeding don’t extend to farms.

“[The Better Chicken Commitment] is an attempt to fill a legal void, and because the suffering is so immense, we should be doing everything we can to try to fill that void,” she said. “But it’s never going to be enough. There needs to be meaningful legal protections, because even with these corporate commitments, there are hurdles in terms of enforcement.”

If a company adopts the GAP version of the BCC, its suppliers will be subject to audits every 15 months. Otherwise, third-party auditing is technically required, but since the commitment is not run by one organization, there’s no central authority keeping track of all the audits.

In a 2020 report on BCC progress, Compassion in World Farming proposed a reporting framework in which organizations would ask companies to publicly disclose what percentage of their chicken meets the overall standard and each component of it, as well as whether they have been audited and by whom. But even that framework would be voluntary.

And as the requirements for higher-welfare breeds kick in over the next several years, it seems like a stretch to imagine the industry’s biggest players sacrificing enough income and efficiency to meet their commitments.

None the less, GAP’s Malleau is optimistic that—even with its piecemeal execution—the Better Chicken Commitment will eventually deliver on its promise, especially when it comes to better breeds. “There are already 200 companies in North America that have signed on and there are all of these global initiatives, with big food service companies coming together to figure out how to do it,” she said. “So, I’m confident we’ll figure it out.”

The post Fast Food and Grocery Giants Promise to Sell ‘Better’ Chicken—Is It Enough? appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2021/01/19/are-some-animal-welfare-labels-humanewashing/ https://civileats.com/2021/01/19/are-some-animal-welfare-labels-humanewashing/#comments Tue, 19 Jan 2021 09:00:05 +0000 http://civileats.com/?p=40093 Many of these labels look similar and use the same words and imagery—think cows on pasture or strong, healthy chickens pecking in the grass—but they’re not all the same. Some come from independent, third-party certifiers, and others are created by the meat and egg industries themselves. Now, a new report from the anti-factory farming group […]

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If you’ve bought meat or eggs in a grocery store recently, you’ve probably seen a wide range of labels promising improved treatment of farm animals.

Many of these labels look similar and use the same words and imagery—think cows on pasture or strong, healthy chickens pecking in the grass—but they’re not all the same. Some come from independent, third-party certifiers, and others are created by the meat and egg industries themselves.

Now, a new report from the anti-factory farming group Farm Forward seeks to outline the differences between independent and industry animal welfare labels and expose what it calls “humanewashing” among both types of groups.

Like the now widely recognized practice of “greenwashing,” Farm Forward says that companies use humanewashing to deceive consumers who care about animal rights, leading them to believe animals were raised according to their expectations of humane treatment even when they were not. And since some consumers have become savvy to unregulated labeling terms like “all natural” and “free-range,” organizations and industry are increasingly using certification schemes to formalize their standards.

At the heart of the report is Farm Forward’s criticism of the Global Animal Partnership (GAP), a program created by Whole Foods CEO and co-founder John Mackey in 2008 to establish standards and labeling for meat sold in his stores and beyond. It was intended to encourage farmers to steadily improve their practices over time and has grown into one of the most recognized and respected animal welfare labels since, with more than 400 million animals covered by the program and more than 1,200 certified products.

Now, after working in partnership with GAP for over a decade, Farm Forward is calling attention to the way GAP labels products that land at the bottom of their five-step system. Products at that low end of the scale can now don a generic label of “Animal Welfare Certified” which Farm Forward says gives those products a halo effect from the higher-welfare products—without making changes to their practices.

“Welfare certifications are designed, ostensibly, to help consumers identify animal products consistent with their ethical concerns,” reads the report. “But many are intentionally deceptive, and all are problematic. They generally function to confuse consumers, lock truly high-welfare animal farmers out of important markets, and thwart the kinds of reforms necessary to phase out industrialized farming.”

However, some animal welfare experts and advocates say that even the smallest improvements can alleviate animal suffering at a large scale and that calling out certifications making incremental progress detracts from important changes they are making. Others say that food certifications almost always operate as marketing tools, and the report’s findings merely reflect that reality.

“What we have concluded is that despite our best efforts . . . these certifications, like the industry label claims and unregulated claims before them, are now doing more to deceive and mislead consumers and are ultimately serving as a hindrance to progress on factory farming issues rather than a step in a better direction,” said Andrew deCoriolis, Farm Forward’s executive director.

Findings on Animal Welfare Certifications

The federal government does not regulate terms like “humane” or “free-range,” so as concerns about animal welfare on farms have grown over the last decade, multiple certification programs have emerged. Each has its own set of unique standards, and most require farmers to pay a fee to certify their operation and products.

The report analyzes several of the most popular labels. It calls out certifications produced explicitly by trade groups—including UEP Certified, created by United Egg Producers, and Farmers Assuring Responsible Management (FARM), created by the National Milk Producers Federation—identifying them as pure marketing tools that codify standard industry practices. It also details challenges with third-party certifications.

American Humane Certified, which works closely with large companies like Butterball and Eggland’s Best to make small tweaks within standard industry systems, has long been cited as among the weakest animal welfare standards by a range of groups, including the Animal Welfare Institute and Consumer Reports. Farm Forward says the certification “largely fails to improve conditions beyond industry conventions.”

One Health Certified is the subject of even more criticism. While its name suggests otherwise, the certification is not affiliated with the One Health Commission, a consortium that works on food system issues with an emphasis on connections between human, animal, and environmental health—although the commission’s executive director, Cheryl Stroud, told Civil Eats the program “shares a common goal” with the commission.

Instead, One Health Certified is administered by an institute based at Iowa State University. But Mountaire, the country’s sixth-largest poultry company and one that has been the target of animal rights groups investigations in the past, applied for the trademark and is currently the only company using the certification. In a 2020 webinar, Mountaire Director of Technical Marketing G. Donald Ritter was introduced as having worked on the certification. “The one thing you want a label to do is to reduce consumer concerns with buying your product,” he said, while explaining the marketing power of certification.

Brian Ronholm, the director of food policy at Consumer Reports, said he often points to One Health Certified as a good example of a certification that is meaningless. He describes it as “essentially a participation trophy for normal [factory-scale] operations.”

Across the spectrum of certifications, the report points to the fact that none completely eliminate several practices consumers may find inhumane—breeding fast-growing animals in a way that often impacts their health, immediately separating dairy calves from their mothers, and culling male chicks in the egg industry. (United Egg Producers pledged to eliminate the latter practice in U.S. egg production by 2020, but has so far failed to do so.)

Not even Animal Welfare Approved, run by the independent nonprofit A Greener World, addresses those issues. However, it does stand out in the report (and in many other evaluations of welfare labels) as having the most rigorous standards by far. Most significantly, it is the only certification in the report that prohibits raising animals in concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), where they are confined and in close proximity. DeCoriolis said that point is crucial, because consumers increasingly see CAFO production as anathema to animal welfare.

“Public sentiment is shifting strongly against industrial animal agriculture, and at that same moment, at this critical juncture where this shift in public perception is happening, the [other] certifications are now playing a role in retarding that progress on the kind of reforms that would be meaningful for farms,” said deCoriolis. “They’re telling the public, ‘We are humanely raised. We know that you care about these issues’ . . . and they’re further obfuscating the realities on their operations.”

Questioning Global Animal Partnership

At a Whole Foods in Baltimore on a busy weeknight in January, refrigerated packages of store-brand turkey and chicken bore stickers marked with GAP’s “Animal Welfare Certified” logo, suggesting to shoppers that the birds had been treated better than conventional farm animals.

But GAP certification spans a broad, five-step spectrum—ranging from a “base” level to a level at which animals spend their entire lives on a farm—and the generic labels did not indicate at which level the meat was certified. That means it’s possible the meat came from fast-growing birds confined in a CAFO—and given slightly more space than non-GAP-certified birds, but no outdoor access.

This loophole is a problem, says Farm Forward. And after years of participation on the GAP board, founder and CEO Aaron Gross publicly stepped down last fall “in protest” of the way the organization had changed.

“GAP is no longer a tool for change, but is increasingly a marketing scheme functioning to benefit massive corporations,” he wrote on the organization’s website at the time. The Farm Forward report followed at the end of December, and while many would expect its criticisms of many of the aforementioned certifications, its criticisms of GAP, long hailed as a stronger system for advancing animal welfare, are more surprising.

“Of course, change is always incremental, and if we thought that GAP’s commitment to continuous improvement was meaningful . . . it might be different,” deCoriolis said. He also referred to what the report calls the “halo effect” created even by more rigorous, tiered standards like Certified Humane and GAP and pointed to a recent class action lawsuit filed early this year against Diestel Turkey Ranch as an example.

Diestel raises slower-growing turkeys on pasture at its Sonora, California Ranch using regenerative practices. It was the first turkey producer to achieve GAP’s highest level of certification, 5+, meaning that animals live on pasture year-round with no physical alterations. But less than 1 percent of the turkeys the company sells come from that ranch and meet that level of certification.

“More than 99 percent of Diestel’s birds are not GAP 5-rated and some are not GAP rated at all,” the suit alleges, stating that the vast majority of the rest come from CAFOs that are not significantly different from the industry standard.

However, Diestel won a prior lawsuit brought by animal rights group DxE that accused the company of false advertising. The judge in that case found that the company provided significantly improved conditions for its birds at various GAP certification levels including the basic level.

“[Diestel’s] turkeys [are provided] a level of care and attention the vast majority of turkey producers never attain,” the judge stated. Turkey farmer and co-owner Heidi Diestel told Civil Eats that “birds that are not GAP Step 5 are clearly labeled with their corresponding GAP Step rating.”

GAP’s leadership also strongly defends its certification system as resulting in meaningful, ongoing change. “As farm animal welfare science advances and practical solutions develop, GAP standards continuously evolve and improve over time, becoming more comprehensive and including additional requirements,” Executive Director Anne Malleau told Civil Eats in an email.

She pointed to a new initiative, called the Better Chicken Project, that will affect 100 percent of GAP-certified broiler chickens and will address “the suffering of birds genetically selected for rapid growth in a way that has never been done before,” by using welfare-specific research to inform breeding.

She also disputed Farm Forward’s claim that producers tend to come in at lower levels of certification and stay there, pointing out that the number of pasture-raised Step 4 cattle has increased from 38 to 70 percent of the total cattle the group certifies since 2012. That growth is partially due the introduction of a program that allows farmers and ranchers to feed cattle grain while keeping them on pasture.

Finally, Malleau said that GAP created the generic label without a step number not to confuse consumers, but to support sellers who were concerned about the availability of raw materials and would be forced to update their packaging if a temporary shortage happened and they had to source meat from a supplier certified at a lower step.

“By its very design, our 5-Step program is inclusive of a wide variety of production systems and has positively impacted the lives of hundreds of millions of animals at all steps,” added Malleau.

Contested Value of Incremental Change

Not all animal rights groups see even the weakest welfare labels as promoting humanewashing. As some see it, lower standards allow more companies and farms to sign on, meaning more small improvements across the board.

Temple Grandin, a renowned animal scientist whose approach to welfare improvements fits into this realm, is on American Humane’s board. The point of its certification, she told the New York Times, is to “work with large-scale commercial producers so that they have at least some standards.”

In a written statement, a spokesperson for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), emphasized that many animal welfare certifications in the report do ban practices like caging and crating and provide third-party on-farm audits. The organization has its own food label guide and endorses three certifications: Animal Welfare Approved, Certified Humane, and GAP’s levels 2 and above.

“There is no perfect welfare certification, they each have room for improvement, and we are working to help strengthen their standards, but the certifications we recognize do afford meaningfully better lives for vulnerable animals and clarity for consumers, when the industry currently offers neither,” the statement read. “To criticize a small but growing group of farmers, businesses, and consumers whose efforts and investments are positively impacting hundreds of millions of animals, when billions are still suffering in truly hellish conditions, amounts to a trap named in Farm Forward’s report: letting perfect be the enemy of the good.”

DeCoriolis acknowledged that challenge, and the report explicitly gives some of the certifications credit for relieving the suffering of many animals. It questions, however, whether the improved practices should be dubbed “humane” and if they prevent bigger changes from being made.

“We think that the marginally better is being entrenched in ways that will hinder, in the long-term, the opportunity for an alternative market to be developed, for a meaningfully different, non-factory farmed movement to be built,” he said.

Certifications as Marketing Tools

While some consumers may feel duped, Amanda Hitt, the director of the Government Accountability Project’s Food Integrity Campaign, has never expected animal welfare labels to cause wholesale changes to modern agriculture.

“Anyone who’s watched the organic movement or the environmental movement knows that this is exactly how it works,” said Hitt. “You should be aware that the industry’s motivation is not to protect animals but to profit. Labeling is advertising. Certification is advertising.”

For the same reason, GAP was always going to be a marketing tool for Whole Foods, she added. “GAP was an attempt to work with industry,” she said. “Once industry signed on, that’s a sure sign that they’re going to profit.”

That’s not to say that corporations are filled with evildoers, that some aren’t doing more than others to make real change, or that animals’ lives aren’t improved along the way, Hitt emphasized. In fact, she says, producers and executives are doing what their employers require of them when they make as few expensive changes as possible to sell more products—they’re watching their bottom line. Hitt believes that certifications do start conversations and get the issue in front of the public in a new way, which can contribute to larger, long-term course corrections within the food system.

So what should a shopper concerned with animal welfare do in front of the meat case?

“As a rule, consumers should view these types of label claims with skepticism, and they should closely scrutinize them,” Consumer Reports’ Ronholm said. “Most are trying to convey a value that doesn’t really exist while charging you a premium price.”

Rating systems like Consumer Reports’ Food Label Guide and the Farm Forward report can help consumers evaluate each certification on its own based on all of the available information. But in the end, careful consideration at the grocery store may not be the best tool to improve farm animals’ lives.

“Part of this is a broader grappling of the American public with [the idea] that we can consume our way to the kind of country or world we want to live in. Personally, I don’t think that’s true,” deCoriolis said. “Consumer actions are critically important . . . but ultimately, changing industrial animal agriculture is a choice we have to make as a public, at a level of governance and regulation.”

The post Are Some Animal Welfare Labels ‘Humanewashing’? appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2021/01/19/are-some-animal-welfare-labels-humanewashing/feed/ 1 https://civileats.com/2020/09/04/excerpt-marion-nestle-imagines-an-enlightened-approach-to-national-food-policy/ https://civileats.com/2020/09/04/excerpt-marion-nestle-imagines-an-enlightened-approach-to-national-food-policy/#comments Fri, 04 Sep 2020 11:00:06 +0000 http://civileats.com/?p=37970 Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt of Marion Nestle’s new book, Let’s Ask Marion: What You Need to Know about the Politics of Food, Nutrition and Health, out this week. In each of the book’s chapters, the New York University professor of nutrition, food studies, and public health (and Civil Eats’ advisory board member) answers […]

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]]> Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt of Marion Nestle’s new book, Let’s Ask Marion: What You Need to Know about the Politics of Food, Nutrition and Health, out this week. In each of the book’s chapters, the New York University professor of nutrition, food studies, and public health (and Civil Eats’ advisory board member) answers a different food policy question posed by environmental advocate Kerry Trueman. (Longtime Civil Eats readers will remember our own version of these conversations starting in 2010.) With the presidential election upon us, we share Nestle’s response about the need for a national food policy agency.

Kerry Trueman: We demand a lot from our government agencies. We want them to be there for us when disaster strikes or disease breaks out. We want policies that protect us from danger and help us lead healthy lives.

But what happens when an agency has multiple agendas that conflict? Like, for example, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), whose mission is to help farmers turn a profit, while also promoting healthy eating habits. We end up with an agency whose agricultural policies actively encourage diseases that cost millions of lives and billions of dollars annually, even as its nutrition policies try to tackle those same largely preventable illnesses.

Academics, “good food” advocates, and health care experts have proposed that we break this vicious cycle by creating a national food policy agency that would adopt a more enlightened approach. Can you imagine such an agency?

Marion Nestle: Easily. I’m often asked what I would do if I were the boss of America’s food system. High on my action list would be reorganizing federal food and nutrition policies to get them all focused on preventing hunger, promoting health, and protecting the environment. In the United States, we have plenty of policies dealing with these goals, but responsibility for them is fragmented among multiple agencies, each with its own political leadership, constituency, and policy agenda. Each competes with the others for mandates and funding. And each attracts its own dedicated horde of stakeholder lobbyists.

A list is all you need to understand why current policies seem at cross purposes. I can think of 11 distinct categories of policies for agriculture, food, and nutrition. The USDA is in charge of most of them, but not all, and some of its functions overlap with those of other agencies. I realize that a table oversimplifies this situation, but I think it’s the easiest way to get a quick overview. See if you agree.

The explanation for a system this complicated is history—and politics, of course. The policies developed piecemeal, mostly during the twentieth century, in response to specific problems as they arose. Regulatory authority was assigned to whichever agency seemed most appropriate at the time. For some policy areas, oversight is split among several agencies—the antithesis of a systems approach.

U.S. Policy Areas Dealing with Agriculture, Food, and Nutrition

POLICY AREA	MANDATE	OVERSIGHT AGENCY (OR AGENCIES)
Agricultural support	Payments to producers based on congressional farm bill legislation	USDA
Alcoholic beverages	Regulation of production, imports, labels, advertising	TTB
Environmental impact of food production and consumption	Standards for protecting quality of soil, water, and air; farmland conservation	USDA, EPA
Food and nutrition monitoring	Food quantity and quality, dietary intake, and effects of diets on health	USDA, CDC
Food and nutrition research	Studies of agriculture, food, nutrition, and health	NIH, USDA, FDA, CDC
Food assistance	Nutritional support for low-income adults and children through programs such as SNAP, WIC, and school meals	USDA
Food labor	Regulation of working conditions for farm, slaughterhouse, and restaurant employees	U.S. Department of Labor (wages, working conditions, child labor, migrant and seasonal workers); USDA (surveys, statistics); OSHA (worker safety and health)
Food product regulation	Package contents, labels, health claims, advertising	USDA (meat and poultry); FDA (all other foods, supplements); FTC (advertising)
Nutrition education	Dietary Guidelines for Americans; MyPlate food guide	USDA and HHS (guidelines); USDA (MyPlate)
Food safety	Procedures, inspections, enforcement	USDA (meat and poultry); FDA (all other foods)
Food trade	Quality and safety standards for agricultural crop, food product, ingredient, and supplement imports and exports	USDA, FDA, and 20 other federal agencies

Abbreviations: CDC, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; EPA, Environmental Protection Agency; FDA, Food and Drug Administration; FTC, Federal Trade Commission; NIH, National Institutes of Health; HHS, Department of Health and Human Services; OSHA, Occupational Safety and Health Administration; SNAP, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program; TTB, Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau; USDA, U.S. Department of Agriculture; WIC, Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children.

 

What a mess. The USDA, historically and by law a dedicated supporter of corporate industrial food production—Big Agriculture, Big Meat, Big Dairy—is also responsible for dietary guidelines and food guides that sometimes advise the public to eat less of what these enterprises produce.

How to clean up this mess? I like to tell the story of my disheartening experience teaching a course on the farm bill, the enormous and enormously complicated legislation that governs agricultural supports and food assistance in the United States. I didn’t know much about the bill when I decided to teach this course but could think of no better way to learn about it (hubris!). The high point came on the first day of class. I asked students to consider what a rational food policy might look like. They had no trouble coming up with desirable goals: make sure everyone has enough to eat at an affordable price; ensure a decent living for farmers; provide an adequate and safe livelihood for farm, restaurant, and slaughterhouse workers; protect farmers against the hazards of weather, pests, volatile markets, and climate change; produce a surplus for international trade and aid; and, most critically, promote health and protect the environment. On this last point, they thought the farm bill should encourage regional, seasonal, organic, and sustainable food production; promote conservation of soil, land, and forests; protect water and air quality, natural resources, and wildlife; and stipulate that farm animals be raised humanely.

OK, it’s a long list, but policies addressing such matters already exist. They just need to be refocused on health and environmental goals, and agencies need to work together to achieve them. The difficulty of making this happen, alas, is again best illustrated by the Government Accountability Office’s 40-year campaign for a single food safety agency.

In 2015, food journalists Mark Bittman and Michael Pollan, along with food policy leaders Ricardo Salvador and Olivier De Schutter, called for an overall national food policy that would directly link food production and consumption to public health and environmental protection. Given political realities, they did not recommend creation of a single agency to oversee the entire food system, but they came close. They suggested reconfiguring the USDA to become the U.S. Department of Food, Health, and Wellbeing, and appointing a National Food Policy Advisor to coordinate food policies across all government departments.

In my book Safe Food, I included the wildly complex organizational chart of the then–newly formed Department of Homeland Security, an entity cobbled together from about four dozen federal agencies. A single food agency would be much less complicated, but evidently less politically feasible. As for a National Food Policy Advisor? I want that job!

Running down the table, I’d make sure agricultural policies promote health and protect the environment. I’d make alcohol labels consistent with food labels, and stop booze companies from aiming their marketing at low-income and minority groups. I’d insist that environmental policies do what they are supposed to do, that federal agencies diligently track how we produce and consume food and the effects of both on our health, and that research agencies sponsor studies of how our food system can best be configured to promote regenerative (sustainable, replenishing, carbon-sequestering) agricultural practices, as well as human and animal health. I’d insist that food assistance policies make adequate, healthy diets accessible for all participants.

I would correct decades of exploitation of farm and restaurant workers who still suffer the effects of racist 1930s legislation excluding them from minimal wage requirements and protections. I’d ensure that they are compensated fairly and have safe working conditions. For those who are undocumented, I would insist on legal protections and a route to legal status.

I’d get rid of misleading health claims and obfuscating labels on food products and do for food packages what Chile and some other Latin American countries have done: put warning labels on ultra-processed foods and ban cartoons from junk foods marketed to kids. I’d demand that food companies take safety seriously and do more to prevent foodborne illness. I would see to it that we import healthy, sustainably produced foods, and export high-quality products. Completing the list, I’d make sure that dietary guidelines and food guides promote vegetables and discourage ultra-processed products, and say so explicitly. Above all, I would consider agriculture, health, labor, and environmental policies as a unit, and never deal with them in isolation. That’s a food-systems approach in a nutshell.

Reasonable? I think so. Possible? I would dearly love to see all this as an agenda for action. Whether or not such policy goals are currently feasible, they are well worth setting. We need clear objectives for improving tomorrow’s food system as a means to guide—and inspire—today’s advocacy agenda.

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]]> https://civileats.com/2020/09/04/excerpt-marion-nestle-imagines-an-enlightened-approach-to-national-food-policy/feed/ 6 https://civileats.com/2020/08/17/usda-moves-forward-with-sweeping-plans-to-prevent-fraud-in-organics/ https://civileats.com/2020/08/17/usda-moves-forward-with-sweeping-plans-to-prevent-fraud-in-organics/#comments Mon, 17 Aug 2020 09:00:41 +0000 http://civileats.com/?p=37876 In 2017, The Washington Post reported on a shipment of 36 million pounds of soybeans that were shipped from Ukraine to Turkey to California and sold as organic, even though they had been fumigated with pesticides not approved under the USDA Organic standard and originally sold into the conventional market. And in 2019, an Iowa […]

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]]> In 2017, The Washington Post reported on a shipment of 36 million pounds of soybeans that were shipped from Ukraine to Turkey to California and sold as organic, even though they had been fumigated with pesticides not approved under the USDA Organic standard and originally sold into the conventional market. And in 2019, an Iowa grain broker was sentenced to 10 years in prison for selling more than $142 million in fraudulent organic animal feed to Midwest farmers between 2010 and 2017.

These were not isolated incidents. Over the last decade, groups like Organic Farmers Agency for Relationship Marketing (OFARM) and the Cornucopia Institute have tracked and analyzed massive shipments of grain from countries including Turkey, Ukraine, Romania, and Russia, with much of it routed through Turkey. They’ve found that the amount of certified organic acreage in the origin countries could not have produced the quantity of grain entering the U.S.

“Serious questions as to whether some countries, like Kazakhstan, even have organic production acreage are alarming, considering reports that imports from these regions have filled the U.S. organic supply chain,” John Bobbe, OFARM’s Executive Director, told the Cornucopia Institute in 2018.

And yet, regulation of this $50 billion global market is done by the USDA’s National Organic Program (NOP), which was staffed by only 37 people in 2019. Now, the NOP, which regulates the global industry, has released a proposed rule to combat organic fraud, and it could be the most consequential update to the organic standards to date.

“It’s the largest single piece of rulemaking since the organic regulations were implemented in 2002,” said Gwendolyn Wyard, vice president for regulatory and technical affairs at the Organic Trade Association (OTA). “I’ve been referring to it as a ‘beast’ because it covers so many topics and so many different areas. It’s really going to impact everyone in the supply chain.”

“It’s the largest single piece of rulemaking since the organic regulations were implemented in 2002.”

In its current form, the Strengthening Organic Enforcement Proposed Rule would require all certified organic food companies to have a plan in place to prevent fraud in their supply chains and would ramp up unannounced inspections of all organic operations. It would also make it easier to trace and track imported foods by requiring electronic certificates and mandating that more players involved in the transport and sale of organic foods—like brokers and traders—obtain certification.

The proposed rule is stems from an addition to the 2018 Farm Bill, and it was originally set to be released in September 2019. And while advocacy and industry groups celebrated the step forward, they also contend that the agency had failed to act on several other important issues, such as the Origin of Livestock rule, even when directed by Congress. And just a few days after publishing the proposed rule, the USDA also announced an unexpected reduction in payments made to help farmers manage the cost of transitioning to organic, angering pro-organic groups like the National Organic Coalition and the Organic Farmers Association.

The OTA’s Wyard said the group has been disappointed by the USDA’s management of the NOP under President Trump and that other near-term changes to the program are unlikely. “This is the only rulemaking I think we’re going to see out of this administration,” said Wyard.

Why Organic Fraud?

Organic food was once considered niche hippie fare and was mainly confined to produce and meats sold directly to consumers at local markets. Over the past few decades, it has become a multi-billion dollar market filled with premium packaged foods and processed snacks that can cost as much as twice the price of their conventional counterparts. Food industry giants including General Mills and Perdue have jumped into the game, as many consumers have been willing to pay that premium.

But the amount of certified organic farmland in the U.S.—especially for the corn and soy used to make processed foods and animal feed—has not kept pace with the demand for organic food, creating a wide gap between supply and demand that has primarily been filled by imports. That gap in supply and long, complicated foreign supply chains have created a situation ripe for fraud, which undercuts organic producers following the letter of the law.

“Part of the challenge has been that organic has experienced tremendous growth in the marketplace, and so [NOP] has to oversee what is now a worldwide system of organic production,” said Abby Youngblood, the executive director of the National Organic Coalition. “We’ve been working really hard to get the resources to USDA to do that more effectively. They have ramped up in terms of hiring a lot more auditors . . . and they have been making improvements in their ability to oversee the organic marketplace.”

“Organic has experienced tremendous growth in the marketplace, and so the USDA has to oversee what is now a worldwide system of organic production”

The proposed rule would take that expansion to the next level by closing several loopholes in the standard and adding new safeguards. For example, many people and companies involved in the supply chain that are not directly involved in growing or processing the food, like grain brokers and traders, have in the past been exempt from certification. The rule would significantly shrink that list.

“The allowance of uncertified handlers creates gaps in the organic supply chain, breaking chains of custody and complicating the verification of product origin,” the NOP wrote in the proposed rule. “Improved supply chain traceability is critical to the continuing success of the program and its ability to ensure the integrity of organic products.”

Wyard said that provision alone will be incredibly meaningful for the industry, and that requiring mandatory import certificates from all countries would be another major shift towards effective enforcement. All organic food companies would also be required to have a plan in place to monitor their supply chains to prevent fraud, a tactic the OTA has long supported. Through its Organic Fraud Prevention Solutions program, the organization provides training to help companies create those plans.

The Path Forward

The USDA published the proposed Strengthening Organic Enforcement Rule on August 5 and it’s open for public comment until October 5. After that, the agency will have to work through those comments before publishing a final rule that will then require an implementation period of about a year.

Wyard said some in the industry think that timeline may be ambitious given the scale of the changes, but for many it feels like a long slog.

“If you’re an organic grain producer, it feels as slow as molasses . . . when you’ve been competing with fraudulent products and your prices are being undermined,” Youngblood said.

Other proposed changes to the organic standards have gotten stuck in the mud along the way. The Organic Livestock and Poultry Practices (OLPP) Rules, which were championed across the industry as crucial to bringing animal welfare standards on organic farms up to a level consumers expect, were finalized in 2017 after the agency worked through five different versions. USDA then withdrew the rules altogether soon after the Trump administration took over, and a lawsuit the OTA filed against the agency is still tied up in court.

The Origin of Livestock rule, intended to close a loophole that allowed dairy operations to retain organic certification while adding conventionally raising calves to their herds, has suffered a similar fate. First proposed in 2015, it was never finalized. Congress then directed USDA to finalize the rule within 180 days in an appropriations bill signed into law in December 2019—to no avail.

Unlike many issues that have divided the organic community in recent years—such as certifying hydroponic farms—cracking down on fraud is a matter on which many in the industry appears to agree.

On July 1, a bipartisan group of lawmakers sent a letter to Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue notifying the agency that it had missed the deadline and urging the department “to immediately finalize the rule. In doing so, the lawmakers urged Purdue to “demonstrate meaningful support for the economic stabilization and recovery of family-owned organic dairy farms.”

There is also a long backlog of recommendations from the National Organic Standards Board—the advisory group made up of farmers, scientists, and other organic stakeholders charged with maintaining the science behind the label—that NOP has not yet acted on.

Still, industry experts are confident that a rule cracking down on cheating the system, especially one that mainly aims to curb foreign fraud that affects American consumers and farmers, will move forward, regardless of who is in office.

“Under this administration, from the top all the way down, this has been a high priority,” Wyard said. “As it turns out, our government doesn’t really like fraudulent products coming into the United States. And [because] so much of it is mandated by Congress, we really have that congressional support.” Organic fraud protections written into the farm bill, for example, had bi-partisan support.

Unlike many issues that have divided the organic community in recent years—such as certifying hydroponic farms—cracking down on fraud is a matter on which many in the industry appears to agree. “I think that we, as an organic community, have done a really good job of articulating the scale of the challenges, and we’ve been able to demonstrate that the lack of a level playing field for organic farmers is really undermining their viability,” said Youngblood. “It took a lot longer than we had hoped, but we are certainly encouraged by this.”

Still, advocates said it will take more than a USDA rule to end fraud in the industry, including concerted efforts within private companies. And given the long timeline until implementation, they’ll have to continue to police the issue until the new protections are firmly in place.

“In the meantime, we are continuing to advocate that USDA do as much as they can within their authority to stop the fraudulent activity,” Youngblood said.

The post USDA Moves Forward with Sweeping Plans to Prevent Fraud in Organics appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2020/08/17/usda-moves-forward-with-sweeping-plans-to-prevent-fraud-in-organics/feed/ 1 https://civileats.com/2019/10/18/restricting-plant-based-meat-labels-wont-save-the-meat-industry/ Fri, 18 Oct 2019 09:00:45 +0000 http://civileats.com/?p=33274 Substitutes for traditional meat products have captured the attention of investors, the media and consumers. Plant-based meat options are showing up in grocery stores and on the menus at fast food chains like Burger King and restaurants like TGI Fridays. These products are not necessarily targeted just at vegans or vegetarians, who comprise around 2 […]

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]]> Substitutes for traditional meat products have captured the attention of investors, the media and consumers. Plant-based meat options are showing up in grocery stores and on the menus at fast food chains like Burger King and restaurants like TGI Fridays.

These products are not necessarily targeted just at vegans or vegetarians, who comprise around 2 percent of the U.S. population over age 17. Meat, on the other hand, is a well-established market. In 2018 Americans consumed 57.2 pounds of beef, 92.4 pounds of chicken, and 50.9 pounds of pork per capita.

Nonetheless, the meat industry is defending its turf–including in the grocery store. Missouri passed a law in 2018 restricting use of the word “meat” to animal-based proteins, and now more than 20 other states are considering or have enacted similar legislation. Countersuits have been filed, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is assessing whether the federal government should clarify differences between traditional and nontraditional meat.

How important are these labeling debates? We are agricultural economists and have published a number of studies examining how consumers respond to changes at the grocery store. One key takeaway is that small labeling changes are unlikely to induce large changes in the way people purchase food. Indeed, we believe restrictions on what can be called meat could ultimately strengthen pushback against the meat industry.

Consumers Want Labels

Academic studies of other food technologies, such as genetically modified organisms, have found that consumers generally prefer a labeling policy to help guide their decisions. To explore how regulations specifying what can be labeled “meat” could influence consumer decisions, we conducted a survey with Cornell University economist Chris Wolf and graduate student Benjamin DeMuth of 1,502 food households across the United States. We wanted to find out how regulating use of the word “meat” could affect consumers’ understanding of ingredients and nutritional content, and their food choices.

Approximately half of our respondents were shown products with the type of labels that grocery stores use now, where nontraditional meat is labeled as “meat.” The other half viewed products with labels that described plant-based and cell-based products as “protein.” Our key question was whether forbidding food manufacturers from labeling plant-based and cell-based products as “meat” would make consumers more or less confused about these products’ ingredients and nutritional content.

Responses suggested that consumers don’t understand the nutrition of the foods they purchase, and are especially likely to overestimate the nutrition quality of plant-based alternatives. Respondents who were shown the current labeling scheme overestimated the amount of cholesterol, protein, sodium, and trans fats in both meat and nontraditional meat products, but underestimated their calorie contents.

When we asked people how many calories they thought various products contained, they estimated that the plant-based Beyond Meat option contained 51 percent fewer calories than it really does. For traditional meat options, they underestimated calorie contents by 24 to 34 percent. Many people were even confused about the likely ingredients in their products. Approximately 30 percent of respondents thought the plant-based Beyond Burger contained ground beef.

These findings might seem to argue for government intervention and more specific labeling. However, respondents who viewed nontraditional meat products with labels that did not use the word “meat” were just as confused about ingredients and nutritional content. In sum, whether a product carried the m-word or not, consumers knew little about what it contained or whether it was good for them.

No Clear Commercial Advantage

If laws restricting what can be called “meat” don’t reduce confusion, why are industry groups lobbying so fiercely for them? Some cynics argue that rather than protecting consumers, the industry aims to slow the growth of upstart competitors.

At the same time, key players in the traditional meat industry are investing in alternative meat products. Tyson Foods was an early investor in Beyond Meat and now plans to develop its own line of plant-based products. Kellogg, Kroger, Nestlé, Conagra Brands, and Hormel Foods have all made significant investments in developing their own plant-based meat substitutes.

Arguably, these companies could hurt their own new business lines if they successfully promote labeling restrictions that make consumers less willing to switch from animal-based proteins to plant-based substitutes. To test this possibility, we conducted an experiment in which we asked consumers to choose between packages of Beyond Meat, frozen beef patties, fresh beef patties, and a lab-grown alternative not yet available on the market.

Choice sets with all products labeled as meat (top), and alternative products labeled “protein” (bottom). (Image credit: Trey Malone)

These options were displayed multiple times at varying prices, which allowed us to assess how price differences affected consumers’ decisions.

We found that eliminating the word “meat” from nontraditional meat product labels did not affect the percentage of consumers who chose traditional meat products. The only noticeable difference was that when meat alternatives were labeled as such, more people opted out of purchasing any option. Our data suggest that at least in the short run, the meat industry has little to gain from advocating for labeling restrictions on these plant-based protein companies.

Helping Consumers Choose

What should be done? Although consumers know astonishingly little about the nutritional content of either traditional meat or nontraditional alternatives, our results suggest that forcing alternative meat companies to use labels that more clearly distinguish themselves from the traditional offering is unlikely to transform the way consumers make decisions.

Costs associated with labeling legislation are nontrivial, and restrictions on what can be labeled meat could ultimately have the reverse effect desired by the meat industry. Stiff industry pushback against mandatory GMO labeling generated such strong consumer backlash that the U.S. ultimately adopted mandatory national labeling.

One option would be requiring grocery stores to stock alternative meat products in separate areas from traditional meats. But even this less-restrictive approach could have unintended consequences. Grocery stores operate on razor-thin margins, and restricting revenues from slotting fees–which wholesalers pay to grocery chains for optimal placement on shelves–could critically affect stores in precarious locations, including rural and urban food deserts.

A less risky strategy would be supporting and subsidizing grassroots consumer education programs. Land grant universities are uniquely positioned for this role, and extension specialists throughout the country already conduct community-based food and nutrition education programs. Our research suggests that this kind of outreach could help consumers make better choices about meat of all kinds.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Top photo CC-licensed by Raysonho on Wikimedia Commons.

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