The post In Brazil, a Powerful Law Protects Biodiversity and Blocks Corporate Piracy appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>In the center of Rio de Janeiro sprawls a lush enclave of tropical flowers, vines, and palm trees, with howler monkeys screeching from the leafy canopies. Just blocks from the traffic-clogged bustle of Rio’s boulevards, the Jardim Botanico do Rio de Janeiro is a remaining 130-acre patch of the rainforest from which the city was carved three centuries ago. Locals and tourists alike go there to enjoy the bounty of Brazil’s legendary abundance of plant and animal life.
Inside the Jardim Botanico do Rio de Janeiro. (Photo credit: Jon Hicks, Getty Images)
But if you are in Brazil representing a company in search of new food, drugs, or cosmetics, the Jardim’s research center is of far greater significance than the meandering garden paths. Here, inside a former colonial villa, the Jardim maintains what amounts to an inventory of the nation’s plant life, more than 65,000 samples.
Each one is a potential treasure trove for companies seeking new plant-based products. And each is now subject to a Brazilian law governing genetic resources, the Law on Access to Genetic Heritage and Associated Traditional Knowledge—known as the genetic heritage law—which is finally being implemented after almost a decade of political and logistical hurdles.
While data on the nation’s plant life is inventoried at the Jardim in Rio, the most powerful tool for implementing this ambitious new law resides in a locked chamber 600 miles away in the nation’s capital of Brasilia. There, in the basement of the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change, sits an extensive database for registering access to and paying benefits for the nation’s abundant quantities of genetic resources.
Each plant sample is a potential treasure trove for companies seeking new plant-based products. And each is now subject to a Brazilian law governing genetic resources.
It’s called SisGen, shorthand for the National System for Genetic Resource Management and Associated Traditional Knowledge. Commercial enterprises must register with SisGen when they leave a region with a sample and when a “finished product,” in the words of the law, “is developed as a result of the access.” Scientists must also register their access and sampling of a plant if they intend to use it for research. In other words, all possible uses of the plant, including efforts to obtain patent protection for any product developed from it, must be registered.
Furthermore, the Brazilians add a requirement to block any return to the days of biopiracy: All those accessing the resources must have a Brazilian partner (many U.S. companies have Brazilian subsidiaries). For the Indigenous people who provided the know-how necessary to turn plants into commercial products, SisGen is a potentially key pathway to ensuring compensation.
Numerous U.S. companies, universities, and research centers are already making regular use of such ingredients. Among the companies that have recently registered the export of plant or seed samples are agrichemical giants like Bayer Crop Science (which bought Monsanto in 2018); the biotech firm Novozyme; smaller firms like ProFarm, a company that sells biologically based fungicides, insecticides, and seed treatments; and the U.S. subsidiaries of European companies like Givaudan, which develops plant-based snacks and meat alternatives.
Centers of Food Origin: Genetic Treasure Troves
Leaf by leaf, flower by flower, Brazil is a genetic powerhouse. The relative stability of the nation’s climate—for thousands of years it rarely veered more than 10 degrees in either direction—has made it ideal for the rapid evolution and adaptation of species. It is one of a handful of countries located along the equator that are home to as much as 90 percent of the planets’ biodiversity.
It’s fair to say that most of the foods we eat in North America began their journey to our tables in one of these centers of origin. Corn originated in Mexico; potatoes in the Peruvian Andes; chiles in the mountains of Jamaica; apples in the rugged valleys of Kyrgyzstan’s Tian Shan Mountains; wheat in Syria and Lebanon; coffee in Yemen; peanuts, cashews, and pineapple in Brazil.
So, when new diseases strike, new pests emerge, and climate stresses increase on North American farms, scientists tend to look to places that are far from American farmland to find genetic resources in centers of origin that were never domesticated. There, plants haven’t had their survival characteristics bred out of them in favor of qualities like super-charged yields and other features of industrial agriculture.
For many years, Europeans and Americans took whatever they found in these and other biodiverse places without asking, or paying, anyone. For instance, when Dr. Moises Santiago Bertoni, an Italian-Swiss botanist, learned in the late 19th century about the stevia plant with the help of the Guaraní people in Brazil and Paraguay, he never had to acknowledge where or how he found the samples he took with him back to Switzerland.
Nor, a century later, did Cargill, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola or any other company have to provide payments or other benefits to the Guaraní community when they released stevia-enhanced products now worth more than $700 million in annual sales.
Coca-Cola Life, a drink sweetened with cane sugar and stevia. (Photo CC-licensed by Mike Mozart)
Who, finally, gets the credit and gets paid for any products that may result from the use of these traditional plants? That is a raging question in Brazil and other biodiverse countries where people are tired of paying for imported foods or drugs that originated from plants in their own home territories.
A UN Law for Protecting Biodiversity
Brazil is now at the forefront of a group of nations who have demanded an end to this free-for-all. Beginning in 2018, the country joined forces with Indigenous groups around the world as well as Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, other mega-biodiverse countries, to demand that the U.N. recognize the sources of these genetic resources and find a way to provide benefits to the people whose traditional knowledge contributes to their use.
In December 2022, in Montreal, at the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity, their efforts bore fruit. The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, which emerged from that meeting, was seen as a major step toward reckoning with how we value the Earth’s resources and the people most responsible for conserving them.
Americans have largely sidestepped these debates over genetic resources, because the U.S. is the only country, along with the Vatican, that has not ratified the Convention on Biological Diversity. But the agreement will certainly impact the U.S., because it will play a role in shaping many of the foods, agricultural products, and drugs of the future, and many of the companies that develop and sell those products are global and have extensive markets in the United States.
The Montreal deal called for a global system to ensure that benefits are paid in return for providing access to living genetic resources and to the gene sequences within them that are increasingly providing the basis for new tastes, foods, and drugs. This is called, in U.N. shorthand, access and benefit sharing (ABS). Here, access means obtaining consent to access a nation or tribe’s genetic resources, and benefits means an equitable distribution of profits made from those resources. A U.N. working group of public officials and academics has been charged with devising the details for the system in time for the next Convention on Biological Diversity, to be held in Cali, Colombia, in October 2024.
After centuries of rampant biopiracy, Indigenous communities and their advocates hope that a sea change is at hand. And Brazil, with the most sophisticated system yet for ascertaining the value of genetic resources, is widely seen as a model for the world.
Political Drama and the Birth of Brazil’s Genetic Heritage Law
Brazil’s Law 13,123, the Law on Access to Genetic Heritage and Associated Traditional Knowledge, was born in May 2016, at a moment of great political drama. A new genetic heritage decree, formulated the previous May, was in its final negotiations. At the same time, left-leaning President Dilma Rousseff was being impeached after a group of conservative lawmakers accused her of corruption in an effort to oust her from office.
“Dilma was watching her impeachment on TV at the same time we were negotiating,” recalled Henry Novion, the former head of Brazil’s Department of Genetic Heritage, who co-authored the law. Later that day, he, two other government officials, and Rousseff’s legal adviser rushed to her office in the presidential palace to get her signature on the decree, which was the final step necessary to implement the nation’s new law governing its genetic heritage.
That eleventh-hour act, one of her final as president, would set into motion the unprecedented system that Brazil devised to track where its genetic resources are located and who was accessing them. It was also the first step toward the allocation of benefits for the insights that Indigenous and local people have long provided to outsiders about the characteristics of plants in their territories, what’s known as “traditional knowledge.”
The law calls for compensation if such knowledge, according to Novion, “adds significant value to the products’ functional characteristics . . . or its market appeal.” The new law replaced an earlier genetic resources law, passed in 2001, that put most of the responsibility for compliance on companies, had little enforcement muscle, and was widely seen, by Indigenous communities as well as the business community, as unwieldy and ineffective. Law 13,123, Novion said, was intended to correct those errors and give the regulations over genetic resources some teeth.
When Jair Bolsonaro was elected as president two years later, progress on implementing the new law—and many other environmental laws—was frozen. Novion stayed on at the department until 2020. He then spent two years working as an independent consultant for foreign governments—including Japan, Angola, and Mozambique—on their own rules governing genetic resources. Then, in February 2023, Novion got his old job back after Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva, who had served as president before Rousseff, returned to the presidency.
Also in 2023, Lula reappointed Marina Silva, the one-time Green Party presidential candidate and environmental leader, as his Minister of Environment and Climate Change. The new team set out to slowly but steadily shift Brazil away from its heavy reliance on selling commodities—many of them grown in deforested areas—to what Lula has called a “bio-economy,” which creates value out of Brazil’s bounty of genetic resources. At last, the 2016 law began to be implemented across the country.
The document itself is an extremely complicated 22-page piece of legislation. It requires that any company or research institution accessing the country’s resources must engage with a Brazilian partner, and must register their accessions with SisGen. More than 16,000 plant accessions have been registered so far this year, says Novion. When a commercial product is developed from those resources, 1 percent of the annual retail sales must be either provided to the local community or deposited into the National Benefit Sharing Fund. (In some instances, companies may opt to provide services that amount to less than that figure).
The funds are to be dispersed to support local and Indigenous communities’ biodiversity conservation efforts. Thus far in 2024, 9 million reales—roughly $1.6 million U.S.—have been collected for the fund, according to Maira Smith, a biologist with the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change team, which is implementing the new law.
The program offers recognition and monetary compensation for conservation to three distinct Brazilian populations: Indigenous people living on the land long before the arrival of the Portuguese and other colonial powers; traditional small and subsistence-scale farmers who have lived off the land for long enough to develop their own knowledge of local genetic resources; and the Quilombolas, the Afro-Brazilian communities descendant from enslaved people who have been living in the tropical forests for generations.
The SisGen database represents the most substantive effort yet to identify the provenance of the country’s genetic resources, a key first step toward recognizing their ties to traditional knowledge. The global nature of farming and the mobility of seeds—which easily traverse national frontiers by means of wind, water, trucks or shipping containers transporting crops—means that the provenance trail is not always clear, however.
According to Novion, many crops grown in Brazil, like corn, soybeans, coffee, and sugarcane, did not originate there, and thus would not be subject to the genetic heritage law. But the many other plants that are clearly endemic to Brazil—açai, stevia, guarana are among the better-known examples—do qualify, and so companies that utilize them for any new products are subject to the registration requirements.
Many global food and agribusiness companies with large Brazilian subsidiaries are subject to these rules, including Corteva, Bayer, Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Nestlé, and Cargill.
And it gets even more complicated, explained Novion: “If a plant emanating from an exotic, non-Brazilian source finds its way to Brazil and develops independent of human intervention into another related variety, then it, too, is a Brazilian genetic resource.”
Smith explained that the law includes some sharp enforcement tools that will be used with any foreign company or institution. “If there is an American company that does not comply with our legislation,” she said from her office in Brasilia, “we can reach them through their subsidiary industry in Brazil.”
Many global food and agribusiness companies with large Brazilian subsidiaries are subject to these rules, including Corteva, an agrichemical and seed conglomerate which until recently was a subsidiary of DowDuPont; Monsanto and its corporate owner, Bayer; and the food processing and commodity companies Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Nestlé, and Cargill.
With potentially tens of millions of dollars’ worth of new plant-based products at stake, however, a number of major food and agribusiness companies launched a sustained campaign to weaken the measure as it made its way through the Brazilian Congress. Among the major lobbying forces were the Agricultural Parliamentary Front and the Pensar Agro Institute, which receive support from major international companies like Bayer, Syngenta, Cargill, and Nestlé, according to the Brazilian NGO De Olho Nos Ruralistas.
They succeeded in writing loopholes into the law big enough to steer an atmospheric river through.
Agribusiness Loopholes in the Genetic Heritage Law
Two major concessions to the agribusiness coalition exempted them from key provisions of the new law, according to Gustavo Soldati, a botany professor at the Federal University of Juiz de Fora, who has followed the law closely and worked with Indigenous communities to strengthen its enforcement.
Those making foods based on Brazilian plants must register with SisGen, but are exempted from seeking consent from communities or paying benefits. For example, if you’re looking to make a new facial lotion containing açai, you have to get consent from the local population and pay benefits; but if you’re making a new snack food with açai, no consent or compensation is required.
“We call this a juridical fiction,” says Naiara Bittenfeld, a lawyer for Terra de Cereitos, an organization that advocates for the land rights of Indigenous and local farm communities. As she sees it, the loophole lets many companies off the hook. “Traditional communities can always identify the [people] that produce knowledge. All knowledge has an origin.” She cites stevia as an example. “If Coca-Cola uses stevia in [products], then Coca-Cola needs to pay something. And they don’t need to ask the Guaraní for their consent to use it, though we know the knowledge about stevia comes from the Guaraní.”
Additionally, those seeking access to Brazil’s unique bounty of native seeds—defined in the legislation as “reproductive organisms”—have to pay into the benefits fund, but are exempt from having to obtain consent from local communities. The law states that, for seeds, there are “no recognizable sources” of traditional knowledge.
“Traditional communities can always identify the [people] that produce knowledge. All knowledge has an origin.”
Soldati asserts that such provisions “violate one of the most important rights of Indigenous people, the right to be consulted about every subject that involves their lives.”
Maira Smith explains the government’s view: Because many forest communities have practiced agroforestry for centuries, traditional knowledge is shared by many people; knowledge and seed have essentially evolved together. “The traditional knowledge is contained inside the seed,” she says. That makes it difficult to identify any one community as the primary source of traditional knowledge. In such instances, payments are made into the National Benefits Fund, which makes grants to communities that protect their genetic resources.
For the past year, Soldati, supported by the U.N.’s Green Environment Fund, has been traveling to many of the biodiversity-rich communities that are far from the corridors of power in Brasilia to explain their potential rights under the law, and lobby for an expansion of protections. “We want to plant the roots of knowledge deep inside the soil,” he said.
In January 2024, Soldati and a coalition representing hundreds of Indigenous communities met with Minister Silva to discuss their concerns. Among their top demands, according to Soldati: Stronger enforcement of “prior informed consent” rules, and greater transparency to ensure benefits are paid. The current system requires navigating the complex SisGen database, and some of the information—like how much each company pays—is confidential.
The coalition also demanded government guarantees of access to their traditional tribal territories (many communities have been ousted from traditional lands by mining, ranching, and agribusiness interests), and government support for an Indigenous-run pharmacopeia of native plants that explains their history and uses. Those last two things are connected: Compiling such a guide would require revitalizing an effort, begun during Lula’s previous presidency, to clearly demarcate tribal lands.
Natural Resources as Property versus Relationships
Like the Brazilian initiative, the U.N.-led effort underway to create a global access and benefit-sharing system ahead of the October 2024 Convention on Biological Diversity requires navigating between two very different views of “genetic resources.” It can be murky territory, according to Preston Hardison, a longtime adviser to the Tulalip tribe in Washington state and a negotiator at the 2022 CBD in Montreal. The dominant view of such resources is steeped in U.S. and European principles of intellectual property, which considers them as singular organisms whose origins can be clearly delineated according to Western concepts of land and ownership.
By contrast, an Indigenous view, says Hardison, sees such “resources as part of their relationships with kin, with knowledge of their ancestors, and relationships with other animal beings.”
A stevia plant. (Photo credit: Leila Melhado, Getty Images)
Daniele Manzella, a policy officer for the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), says the current ABS negotiations involve synthesizing multiple perspectives: impulses to conservation, open scientific exchanges, Western science, traditional knowledge, and the rapidly expanding technologies for reproducing characteristics obtained from plant DNA. “It’s different souls,” he said, “competing with each other.”
The SisGen computer, containing all that information about Brazilian plants and their possibilities, is whirring away in the middle of these contradictions, translating the evolutionary relationship between humans and plants into Western concepts of intellectual property and mechanisms of financial recognition. “We are working with different knowledge systems,” says Smith, at the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change. “We’re trying to encourage the flow of knowledge between the two systems.”
The Genetic Sequencing Twist
As the next U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity, to be held in Colombia, draws near, Colombian President Gustavo Petro says signing an ABS deal is one of his top three priorities for the conference. “Access and benefit sharing lies at the core of the Biodiversity Plan. This is a crucial issue in the negotiations,” reads a press release on the conference website. The Brazilians, who were key to passing the agreement in Montreal, are actively engaged in the negotiations, passing along their experiences with their country’s genetic heritage law.
At the heart of these negotiations is an attempt to also address the new frontier for genetic resources: the digital information contained within each plant. Now that the genomes of hundreds of thousands of plants have been mapped, and the data entered into global gene banks, food and pharma scientists are able to identify gene sequences that contain desired characteristics—the “sweet” sequence in a stevia leaf, for example, or the sequence in a seed that may convey resistance to drought. In other words, they may no longer need the physical specimen to get what they’re looking for. Once identified, that sequence delivering a specific characteristic can be synthesized with a technology known as Digital Sequence Information, or DSI.
At the heart of these negotiations is an attempt to also address the new frontier for genetic resources: the digital information contained within each plant.
The practice, now pursued by many food and seed companies, poses a profound challenge. DSI offers the real possibility of disconnecting an organism from its origins. Manzella says that the quandary inherent in the U.N.’s asset and benefit-sharing work lies in trying to place the high-speed, highly technical science of genetic sequencing alongside traditional knowledge based on millennia of experience and life on, and from, the land. Never before have negotiators tried to find a common ground between the two.
At a meeting of the U.N. working group assigned to hammer out a benefit-sharing plan in advance of the November meeting, the challenges presented by DSI were central to the conversation. Such questions included whether such a system should indeed be global, or give individual countries leeway to devise their own ABS systems, such as the one that now exists in Brazil. Other contentious issues on the table: How do you identify the source pool of a set of chromosomes, and who do you pay? What to do if no specific community source for the material—either physical or chromosomal—can be identified, or the trail leads to multiple locations?
Proposals being considered include a subscription service to seed banks or gene banks, with the subscription fees going toward indigenous-led conservation of threatened genetic resources. Then the question: Who pays? What restrictions are placed on taking such resources and placing them behind an intellectual property paywall? How negotiators deal with such questions on a global scale will determine the shape of genetic resource use for decades to come.
A global agreement has the potential to begin reversing centuries of unhindered extraction by funneling millions of dollars toward long-ignored communities. It could also flounder under the pressures of companies, scientists, and nations that perceive the recognition of traditional knowledge, and even minimal profit sharing, as a threat.
Meanwhile, in the realm of actual plants, almost a decade after Brazil passed its groundbreaking genetic heritage law, the country is preparing to unlock the first round of grants from the National Access and Benefit Sharing Fund. The fund will be offering an initial amount of 1,250,000 reales, roughly U.S. $235,000, for which any of the more than 300 officially identified Indigenous and local communities may apply.
The first round of awards will be in November, according to Smith. Twenty-four communities determined to be “guardians of biodiversity” will each be awarded grants of 50,000 reales (U.S. $8,940) based on their work preserving their genetic resources. It will mark one of the first times that funds generated through the sharing of traditional knowledge will be sent back, by the government, to those who shared it.
An earlier edition of this article misstated the 2024 amount gathered for Brazil’s local and Indigenous biodiversity conservation efforts. That figure has been updated.
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]]>The post Op-ed: I’m a Restaurant Worker, Not a Robot appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>In 2021, I worked in a restaurant that promoted itself as the future of dining. Diners would sit down and immediately download an app to browse the menu, place their order, and pay with a credit card, all on their phones. As a server my job was not only to prepare drinks and run food, but to assist customers in navigating the technology, troubleshooting when it didn’t work, and explaining, repeatedly, why exactly our restaurant did things that way—and I didn’t exactly have a good answer. Things could sour quickly, and the customers often left frustrated and hungry. Some days I went home feeling like a punching bag, and an unwitting symbol of a broader cultural shift.
Like much of the world, new and ever-changing technology is a fact of life for restaurant workers. From the COVID-19 lockdown and the wave of resulting closures to the recession and labor shortages, the restaurant industry has been on a rollercoaster ride over the last several years. As restaurant owners search for solutions, many are turning to automation and other technology designed to replace humans as a silver bullet. But what does it mean for workers?
“Paper menus and hand-written orders were never the problem with the industry—it’s the working conditions, wage theft, and lack of benefits.”
Disrupters and the Silicon Valley Effect
As startups have “disrupted” the restaurant industry, they’ve replaced menus and hand-written orders with kitchen display systems (KDS), ordering tablets, and QR codes. Tablets on tables have also proliferated in chain restaurants like Olive Garden and Applebee’s, offering customers games to amuse children, and the ability to order desserts and appetizers. It’s yet another indication that Silicon Valley’s executives see restaurants as places to consume, not to connect.
While some customers thrill at the idea of a robot bringing their food to their table, or the efficiency of an ordering kiosk, what fosters loyal customers is the quality of the food and drink and the human relationships they build. Mom-and-pop restaurants are thriving after the pandemic, “the personal connections [the customer] has made with the staff and other diners keep him coming back,” according to one reporter.
When met with online menus and QR code, customers who are uncomfortable navigating technology often find themselves alienated from the dining experience, too embarrassed to ask for help. For customers who don’t have a smartphone, it sends an unambiguous message about who belongs in the restaurants of the future. For servers, baristas, and other food industry employees, it can already feel like we’re competing with customers’ phones for their basic respect.
And while digital payment systems increase tipping rates, it can be impossible to know how much of your tip will make it into the server’s hands, unlike with old-fashioned cash. My coworkers tell horror stories about tip theft by owners who take as much as 20 percent for themselves, or tip-out structures where chefs or managers take significant cuts.
And when customers don’t tip, servers can end up paying out of pocket to pad a manager’s paychecks. The switch to automation has put more money in the owners’ wallets and less in the hands of the low-level workers who earn a tipped minimum wage as low as $2.13 an hour in some states.
Indeed, paper menus and hand-written orders were never the problem with the industry—it’s the working conditions, wage theft, and lack of benefits. And these are all problems that tech cannot fix.
“Relying on technology in a way that removes agency from the humans in the equation is hell on workers.”
“Restaurants don’t provide the minimum wage or job protections. There’s no paid leave, there’s no sick leave. There’s no health insurance. Rather than addressing the real problem, the restaurants are now looking for new ways of getting around labor issues,” said Anthony Advincula, director of communications for Restaurant Opportunity Center (ROC) United, an organization that fights for the rights of restaurant workers across the U.S.
Thriving restaurants are not those with the latest technology—they’re ones that invest in their employees. Restaurants like Bell’s in Los Alamos, California, offer paid time off, a living wage, and health care to their workers—and that investment in their workers has helped them succeed where many have failed.
Handing Over Our Agency to Machines
Tech has a place in restaurants—point of sales, online reservations, and waitlist websites make running a restaurant easier. But relying on technology in a way that removes agency from the humans in the equation is hell on workers. It also often bypasses one of the central joys of dining out: human connection.
App-based service, robotic servers, and other forms of automation also often require employees to be digital interpreters. Restaurant work comes with enough stress already: drunk people, balancing plates, and keeping up with requests for more napkins, more ketchup, another round. Adding the stress of shepherding a customer through brand new technology is a weight we shouldn’t have to bear.
And while business owners will tell you that technology saves workers time and energy, they’re reaping the most benefit.
“The rise of technology in the restaurant industry is mainly for the owners,” said Advincula, who points to the fact that while the “Great Resignation” has affected all industries, hospitality was hit the hardest.
“The restaurant industry has lost 5 million jobs,” Advincula said. “Chains like McDonald’s or Applebee’s are avoiding their responsibility to provide job protections to workers.”
Servers, dishwashers, line cooks, bartenders, and chefs already work long hours on unpredictable schedules. Women make up more than half the workforce and people of color and women are more likely to be in low paid positions in the industry, while white men hold the more prestigious and high-earning positions, and workers of color make up more than half of back-of-house employees. One-third of undocumented workers in the U.S. work in food service, and they often work in invisible, but essential, positions.
As technology is promoted as a salve for all kinds of problems, many food industry workers are fighting for basic rights and dignity.
“Multiple baristas described how mobile ordering oriented them toward speed and volume rather than cultivating relationships with customers.”
Starbucks is a good example. During the pandemic, mobile ordering at the national coffee chain skyrocketed, making up a quarter of all orders. Baristas I spoke to told me that mobile ordering prioritizes speed, and mobile orders are more likely to have a large number of special requests. As any barista or line cook will tell you, these modifications slow down workers as they prepare drinks and meals.
The increase in mobile ordering has led to burnout amongst baristas, who are increasingly voting to join unions, along with other workers across the hospitality and food service sector. Over the last couple years, workers at businesses from distilleries to doughnut shops to coffee chains to fast food restaurants have successfully won unionization votes.
Multiple baristas I spoke with described how mobile ordering oriented them toward speed and volume rather than cultivating relationships with customers. At its best, coffee shops offer a “third place” that fosters community and gives people a place to belong. Mobile ordering has turned many cafés into coffee vending machines.
“Management really emphasized how important Starbucks being a third place was, being that space where you connect with your friends, that space between home and work where you can gather,” said Jo, a former Starbucks barista who asked to go by their first name only. They worked for Starbucks in Vancouver, B.C. between 2018 and 2019, as mobile ordering was rolled out in stores.
Since the introduction of mobile ordering, however, Jo said customers tend to grab their coffee and leave without interacting with staff—unless there’s a problem. Customers also tend to get frustrated by delays, as they assume mobile ordering will be faster and more efficient, and they take it out on burned-out, overwhelmed baristas.
“Those points of connection get lost in mobile ordering. So, it’s just like, ‘Here’s your order, bye,’” Jo said. “The experience is so frustrating for both baristas and customers; I don’t know what purpose it serves anymore outside of increasing profits.”
Post-COVID Landscape
As we emerge from the early days of the pandemic, customers returning to restaurants are especially likely to be seeking human interaction. When it comes to complex problem solving, human beings are much more adept than bots at dealing with customer complaints, questions, and problems that come with serving the public. While a kiosk can tell you what menu items are gluten-free or vegan, it won’t be able to tell you its favorite dessert or recommend a great spot for live music. And for workers, moments of connection make a difficult job a little easier.
As a server, I’ve seen customers struggle to communicate, awkward and nervous as they admit this is their first time in a restaurant since before the pandemic began. Technology can widen this gap and alienate customers further. And for workers, our labor is often rendered invisible, and therefore not worth compensating. When customers order via app, for example, it can seem like servers aren’t working as hard for the customers. Customers are already mostly unaware of the amount of physical and mental labor involved in making a restaurant run efficiently–and technology obscures that further.
As Advincula points out, invisibilizing this labor also makes it harder for workers to connect and it makes labor law violations less visible. This is particularly true for gig economy workers who deliver food for GrubHub, UberEats, and other apps. These workers spend their whole days and nights working on their own, which makes them some of the most atomized, as they battle health and safety concerns and take home less than minimum wage.
“Restaurant workers deserve safer work environments. They deserve time for healing and rest.”
In the case of Instacart, wages are determined by an algorithm, putting workers at the whim of technology more than ever. And while delivery people in some states have been organizing for more rights and better pay, many are still struggling to make ends meet.
“It’s increasingly difficult for workers to organize and build power,” Advincula said.
And yet while the rise of technology to replace workers in restaurants can feel like a losing battle, there is a growing movement to improve these worker’s lives.
“Restaurant workers deserve safer work environments. They deserve time for healing and rest,” said Advincula. He and ROC United are advocating for a restaurant worker’s bill of rights that places humans over technology. Other organizations are advocating to abolish tipped minimum wage.
Meanwhile, the Restaurant Organizing Project supports food service workers in organizing their restaurants, connecting them to resources and other workers. Campaigns like these offer more for workers than a tablet, a QR code, or a robot ever will.
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]]>The post As Investors Bet on ‘Milk Without Cows,’ Questions About Transparency Loom appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>When Ryan Pandya and Perumal Gandhi stopped eating dairy around a decade ago, they found themselves at a loss to try to replace the creamy consistency associated with the milk and cheese they had grown up eating. In the ensuing years, the pair founded a startup called Muufri—which has since been renamed Perfect Day—dedicated to creating “dairy without the cows.”
“They would open their fridge and it was stacked with all of these plant-based options that were fine, right?” Nikki Briggs, Perfect Day’s vice president of corporate communications, told the local publication Berkeleyside last year. “But it just wasn’t the same thing as stretchy cheese on pizza, or silky yogurt, or creamy ice cream.”
The answer, Pandya and Ghandi decided, was to replicate the protein found in whey using precision fermentation to make products that are strikingly similar to “the real thing.”
And, by many accounts, that plan seems to be going well for the company. Perfect Day provides its whey protein to existing food company “partners”—such as Graeter’s ice cream and General Mills, which uses it in its animal-free Bold Cultr cream cheese. The company also has its own consumer packaged goods (CPG) arm, called The Urgent Company, which has so far unveiled both an ice cream brand (Brave Robot) and a cream cheese brand (Modern Kitchen). Over the course of the last two years, Perfect Day has accumulated $750 million in funding. In November, it revealed a potential partnership with Starbucks and then, in December, The Urgent Company acquired the ice cream brand Coolhaus.
Although Perfect Day—which received its first $2 million investment in 2014—has been a kind of pioneer in the space, it’s now one of a handful of companies making lab-produced milk. Competitors like Imaginedairy and RealDeal Milk all appear to be using a similar fermentation process. According to a 2020 report from the trade group the Good Food Institute, three quarters of precision fermentation companies are working on dairy. That may be because meat produced through cellular agriculture may ultimately be too costly to make it worth doing at scale. Or it may be that lots of consumers dream of a way around the pitfalls of dairy, but can’t break the habit.
Either way, “there is a real revolution going on here,” Jim Mellon, a biotech investor and the author of Moo’s Law: An investor’s Guide to the New Agrarian Revolution, said about the trend when speaking to New Scientist last August.
And yet while these “animal-free” dairy brands are promising lower-carbon, kinder products through technology, they may also be benefiting from the fact that most consumers know little to nothing about the science it relies on. And a number of the scientists and food system advocates Civil Eats spoke to worry that a loophole at the U.S. Food and Drug and Administration (FDA) has allowed the company to declare its own products safe, despite being an ultra-processed food made with a novel set of proteins that have never before been on the market. There are also big questions about whether Perfect Day and its peers are simply providing a very expensive distraction from other more—to use their own word—urgent systemic solutions.
Or, as Anna Lappé, sustainable food advocate and author of Diet for a Hot Planet (and a Civil Eats advisory board member), put it in a recent interview about the phenomenon: “I don’t think the conversation about alternative meat and dairy should take the place of the important conversation about how dominant the meat and dairy industry is, how it needs to be regulated better. We’re not going to take on that corporate power by choosing a different [product] in the marketplace.”
Perfect Day’s Promises
Although Perfect Day was founded by dedicated vegans, and promises consumers a “kinder world” on its website, the company’s marketing doesn’t share facts or spend time talking in detail about factory animal farming. Instead, it’s positioning itself in a more neutral way that might appeal to omnivores as well as vegans.
“We hear from vegans all the time who love our products, but our target consumer is really any food lover who wants to reduce their environmental footprint,” said Tim Geistlinger, Perfect Day’s chief scientific officer.
Indeed the company says its supply chain results in as much as 97 percent fewer greenhouse gas emissions than traditional milk. According to Briggs, if just 5 percent of the dairy industry replaced the whey in their products with Perfect Day’s, it would save 12.3 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions or the “equivalent to the carbon emitted from every single car registered in the city of Los Angeles.”
Perfect Day also provides its own detailed life cycle analysis (LCA) of the powdered whey protein on its website, where it claims to use less “blue water” and use 60 percent less nonrenewable energy than traditional milk production. When the company released the 2021 LCA— which was created for Perfect Day by WSP, a global engineering and infrastructure company and reviewed by a panel of experts—Leonardo DiCaprio applauded the company’s “forward-looking vision.”
However, Alastair Iles, associate professor of Sustainability Transitions at the University of California, Berkeley, is skeptical of the company’s claims, in part because they’re so dramatic.
“Biotech fermentation manufacturing can use up a lot of water and lead to significant wastewater pollution,” says Iles. “The centrifuge and drying parts will also use a lot of energy. This is why I would be a bit wary of a life cycle assessment that makes the big claims that the company does.” Case in point, while the LCA claims the emissions are reduced by anywhere from 85 to 97 percent, the company has chosen to use the largest number in its materials. And while the analysis is “based on projected production at a co-manufacturing site in the U.S.,” Geistlinger told Civil Eats that the company produces “our protein at a number of large food manufacturing sites globally.”
“We work with our co-manufacturers to ensure consistency regardless of where our protein is being produced, so our LCA is an accurate reflection of our protein production process,” he added. “That being said, we do plan to conduct additional analyses to even more deeply understand how aspects like geography may impact how we are creating a kinder, greener tomorrow and how we maximize that impact.”
Transparency and GRAS
On a weekday in December, the Perfect Day offices, located in an industrial neighborhood in West Berkeley, are nearly empty. After giving a reporter a short tour of the laboratory and test kitchen, Geistlinger offers up a tasting of the surprisingly creamy Modern Kitchen cream cheese on crackers.
“We want to be very transparent,” he said. “We want people to understand what we do and how it’s very much building on what the food industry has been doing for over 40 years, but we’re taking the next step.”
Geistlinger also stressed the fact that Perfect Day is using the same percentage of protein that you’d find in traditional dairy. “We want it to be the same as what the animal is offering. Most vegan products are very low on protein—they’re mostly starches and gums—but we’re matching [dairy] on protein, because we don’t want customers to feel like they’re cheated on that,” he said.
That protein ferments in giant vats similar to the way beer does, but the process differs greatly from what most consumers think of when they hear the word “fermentation.” That’s because it involves genetically modifying a type of fungi similar to yeast (with genetic code from an online database) in a solution with sugar so that it excretes something called Beta-lactoglobulin. Then it’s spun in a centrifuge and dehydrated before combined with water and fats like coconut oil to create a “milk.”
Iles describes Beta-lactoglobulin as “a key part [but not the only part—perhaps 65 percent] of cow whey. It’s the milk skin that forms on top of a drink when heated.” But Iles and others we spoke to have some questions about the fact that the ingredient is allowed to be sold in food due to the FDA’s Generally Recognized as Safe or GRAS regulations, and it harkens back to debate about another ingredient in a meat alternative—the heme Impossible Foods makes using genetically engineered yeast.
“GRAS is now a way for food companies to quickly secure regulatory approvals of new food ingredients, as companies have more scope to make their own determinations and to provide the information they want to provide to the FDA. Plenty of food additives have been given GRAS status without real scrutiny; some may be quite safe for people to eat, but others might not be,” says Iles.
Perfect Day sent FDA a GRAS notice—essentially explaining why they believe their new form of whey protein is safe. Then in March of 2020, they were informed that the agency “had no questions,” meaning it wouldn’t contest the use of the ingredients.
“We’re giving a microorganism the instructions on how to make a protein it wouldn’t normally make,” said Geistlinger.
But not everyone sees it that way. “Their basic argument is that because fungus-made whey is chemically identical to animal-made whey, it should therefore be approved. This also seems to be the FDA’s reasoning, but it’s based on the company’s argument,” says Iles.
“They’re assuming that because the amino acid is the same, nothing else has changed,” said Michael Hansen, a senior scientist at Consumer Reports. “Could this product that they’re producing have a different impact on gut microflora, for example, compared to a whey protein from a cow? The answer is, we don’t know. At the DNA level, it’s different.”
For this reason, Hansen says, “It would seem appropriate that these products be treated like new food additives.” And yet, at the same time, he believes the fact that Perfect Day is submitting GRAS notices at all is worth noting. Because the GRAS process is voluntary, “there could be companies out there putting these kinds of products into their foods without letting anybody know.”
That’s why Hansen and others in the public health and food safety fields have concerns about the GRAS that extend far beyond Perfect Day. The Center for Food Safety and the Environmental Defense Fund sued the FDA over the GRAS rule in 2017, and a federal judge dismissed the lawsuit last October. Lawmakers have also introduced bills in Congress that would require the agency to study and reassess the chemicals used in foods.
The company acknowledges that allergies are a concern for those who might mistake the product for dairy-free. It has worked with the Food Allergy Research & Resource Program at the University of Nebraska and includes an allergen warning on the front of packaging, in addition to the mandated back of package warning.
“We do not plan to do human testing because our whey protein is bioidentical to traditional whey protein which has been a staple of diets for centuries,” Geistlinger said. “Additionally, precision fermentation has been used safely for over five decades to create the majority of food enzymes, like rennet used for cheese manufacturing globally, and other common food staples.”
Michele Simon, a public health attorney and the former executive director of the Plant Based Foods Association, compares the way companies like Perfect Day use terms like “precision fermentation” to earlier attempts seed and pesticide companies made to obfuscate the fact that they were using new, unknown technology to breed GMO seeds.
“In the Monsanto era, the biotech industry did a great job in getting the federal government to not require companies that use genetic engineering to label their products accordingly,” says Simon, “That’s been the history of the FDA for decades.” Last June, she penned a LinkedIn article examining Perfect Day’s “rush to market” with the Brave Robot ice cream and pointed to their use of the term “vegan friendly” despite the fact that it is made with whey. In it, she called out the brand’s narrative: “This messaging, attempting to justify a new form of biotechnology by comparing it to age-old food-making techniques should sound familiar,” Simon writes. “It’s from the Monsanto playbook.”
Replacing Factory Farming?
The market for plant-based alternatives is growing as more than 52 percent of Americans say they are eating more of these foods. But it’s not exactly clear whether new high-tech alternatives will actually lead to a reduction in overall consumption of factory farmed meat and dairy. In fact, overall U.S. meat consumption appears to have gone up slightly between 2020 and 2021. Overall dairy consumption has also increased more or less consistently since 2002.
“These companies will tell you they’re on a mission to displace dairy, but they can’t explain how putting out GMO protein products is displacing anything in the food system,” said Simon, who is an outspoken vegan. “Is Starbucks going to stop serving dairy now? The only way to save the nation from the damages of dairy production is to get a company to stop serving the harmful dairy.”
And not everyone wants to see all dairy displaced. For instance, Iles says that while the current model of industrial animal agriculture isn’t sustainable, that doesn’t mean it couldn’t move in that direction.
“Dairy has become very intensive, dependent on energy-consuming technologies, building much more massive cow herds than before, and using feed sourced from soybeans. At the same time, animals are central to sustainable agriculture. Not only can they contribute important inputs to a farm, they support a functioning farm ecosystem and help support a diversified farming system. So reducing—not eliminating—dairy milk would be a good idea.” He also points to the plight of farmers in places like Wisconsin, which lost 10 percent of its dairy farms in 2019 alone. “We need more support for those farmers to survive and to practice sustainable agriculture,” adds Iles.
“It’s important to not fall into a binary—that we have to choose between horrific factory farming or problematic GMOs,” says Dana Perls, the food and technology program manager at Friends of the Earth. “There are very sustainably grown, organic, plant-based proteins. There are also very well managed, pasture-based production systems that have been providing a very critical alternative to factory meat and dairy,” she added.
And while Perfect Day doesn’t make big health claims, it isn’t clear that most consumers see meat alternatives as the heavily processed products they are.
“In recent years, ultra-processed foods have emerged as a major concern for public health experts,” said Iles. “Even if the [dairy products] are not in the same category as, say, packaged meals, it still amounts to a model of food production that is in the same line as the industrial foods we’ve been eating for decades,” he said.
Looking to a Perfect Future
While Perfect Day has made itself at home in the dairy aisle, it’s also hoping to work with food manufacturers to include its whey in products typically found in a wide range of other parts of the store.
“We’ve already seen what our protein can do in replacing the equivalent of three eggs in cake mix and giving performance nutrition to athletes in protein powder, and our food team has created prototypes of everything from salad dressings to whiskey sour mixes to confectionary treats and beyond,” said Geistlinger. “We’re just getting started with whey.”
Many alt-protein brands have been acquired by large meat and dairy corporations in recent years —and Anna Lappé says that trend raises big questions about the potential for systems change.
“These products become a profit-generating portion of a portfolio for a company that can use that profit and invest it back into its highly environmentally destructive industrial meat and dairy production and expand those throughout the world as they continue to do,” says Lappé.
But that’s not Perfect Day’s plan.
“Our business model exists to help make other brands, big and small, kinder and greener,” Senior Corporate Communications Manager Anne Gerow told Civil Eats. “We aim to make our supply chain more resilient through partnerships with companies who want to use our protein or technology as part of their sustainability commitments, and [we] are not looking to be acquired by them.”
Nonetheless, Iles says he’s curious about whether the company plans to patent its manufacturing process. “A lot of the new technologies are more about creating valuable IP than anything else, if you look deeper,” he added.
And in the end, most of the critics we spoke to saw Perfect Day as representative of a much larger pattern: A reliance on new products and technology as silver bullets at a time when much larger change is needed.
For starters, that means relying less on dairy and meat as the basis of the American diet—regardless of how it’s made. “If Americans just ate—even if it was still terrible, factory-farmed meat and dairy—the amount of protein that was aligned with what our bodies can use and what science says is best for our health, there would be a dramatic reduction in the demand for meat in this country,” said Lappé.
It also means holding the companies that make our food to account rather than crossing our fingers that the next company will make better choices in a minimally regulated industry.
“We don’t need to hold out hope around being able to scale up a new technology,” said Lappé. “What we really need is the political will to take the kind of regulatory action needed and put pressure on corporations to clean up their supply chains.”
Tilde Herrera contributed reporting.
The post As Investors Bet on ‘Milk Without Cows,’ Questions About Transparency Loom appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>The post ‘Right to Repair’ Advocates Petition the FTC to Investigate John Deere appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>In a press release from the agency, FTC Chair Lina M. Khan commented, “The FTC’s action today seeks to ensure that farmers across America are free to repair their own equipment or use repair shops of their choice—lowering costs, preventing ruinous delays, and promoting fair competition for independent repair shops.”
January 10, 2023 update: John Deere this week announced that it had signed a memorandum of understanding with the American Farm Bureau Federation to allow independent mechanics access to tools and software documentation to repair their equipment. In exchange, the Farm Bureau agreed to not advocate for any state or federal right-to-repair legislation—a caveat that has advocacy groups like PIRG calling for continued efforts to pass right-to-repair laws.
Update: On March 21, John Deere announced that it has made additional software available for farmers. However, farmers we spoke to said it costs around $4,000 and still doesn’t include a lot of what they would need to troubleshoot repairs.
Many U.S. farmers say they are locked into an increasingly costly, dependent relationship with John Deere, the $100 billion company that manufacturers about more than half the farm equipment in the U.S.
“To put that in perspective, that’s half of America’s farmers under the thumb and control of John Deere,” said Joe Maxwell, the co-founder of Farm Action and former Lieutenant Governor of Missouri, at a recent press conference. Yet farmers’ relationship with the corporation extends long after buying a tractor or combine—for the lifespan of their equipment when it inevitably needs repair.
Along with the equipment itself, John Deere controls the market for repairing that equipment, and in recent years it has actively prevented farmers and many independent dealers from diagnosing malfunctions or making many repairs. As we have previously reported, farmers and advocates have been increasingly calling for the “right to repair” their equipment as part of a larger movement that spans industries. They’ve often singled out John Deere’s restrictive practices.
Today, farmers and advocacy groups took their resistance a step further, filing a 40-page complaint with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), asking federal regulators to take enforcement action and investigate John Deere for engaging in “unfair methods of competition and unfair and deceptive trade practices.” The National Farmers Union, along with local farmer unions in some of the largest agricultural states—Missouri, Nebraska, Montana, Wisconsin, and Iowa—are petitioners, alongside Farm Action and repair advocacy nonprofits.
“Hundreds of thousands of farmers cross our proverbial fingers that nothing breaks because we can’t fix it, and we know it’ll take the dealership days or even weeks to get us running again.”
“After the investigation, there are a number of steps FTC can take but the biggest one would be to issue an order requiring them to do essentially what state and federal ‘right to repair’ legislation would require them to do: Make freely available the necessary diagnostic codes and software to diagnose problems, fix issues, and pair replacement parts,” Jamie Crooks, the lead petition author and an attorney with Fairmark Partners, told Civil Eats.
The complaint is the first to be filed against John Deere in response to the FTC’s call last July for complaints about this issue—as part of the commission’s broader pledge to ramp up enforcement of restrictive repair practices. This came shortly after the Biden Administration’s sweeping executive order aimed at breaking up monopolies, including within agriculture, and ordering the FTC to initiate a rulemaking process to improve access to repair across manufacturing industries. (The FTC has yet to publicly initiate this process.)
“There are hundreds of thousands of farmers growing our food and every time we get into this equipment, we literally cross our proverbial fingers that nothing breaks because we can’t fix it, and we know it’ll take the dealership days or even weeks to get us running again,” said Jared Wilson, a Missouri farmer at the press conference. Wilson described how it took him 28 days to have his John Deere fertilizer spreader fixed, while begging the dealer to repair it.
If the petition is successful, it could potentially make a big difference for the many farmers, like Wilson, who say that John Deere’s restrictive policies cost them both money and time during harvest season, undercutting farm businesses across the country. “Over the past five years, I have collectively lost months of time during those important parts of the years. I have no doubt that has cost my farm hundreds of thousands of dollars,” said Wilson.
Along with farmers, the restrictive repairs also put dealers in a position of being dependent on John Deere, while driving out independent dealers as John Deere expands its ownership of dealers. Case in point: Walter Schweitzer, the president of the Montana Farmers Union, recalled how he once could easily get his equipment fixed at one of the three family-owned dealers within an hour from his ranch. Now, there’s only one option in town and the next closest is nearly four hours away.
“The people that are managing and owning these dealerships are my friends. It’s not their fault. The equipment manufacturer is holding them hostage, too,” said Schweitzer, at the press conference.
John Deere’s dealership concentration is documented in a February report by U.S. PIRG, one of the petitioning organizations, which found that, “82 percent of Deere’s 1,357 agricultural equipment dealerships are a part of a large chain with seven or more locations,” which “further erodes farmers’ repair choices.”
If the FTC decides to investigate John Deere, then it would have the power to subpoena the company, accessing internal documents to understand the basis of its practices and licensing agreements that accompany its various high-tech machines. John Deere has maintained that the agreements are for the safety of farmers and environmental concerns. In a company statement last July 2021 it said, “When customers buy from John Deere, they own the equipment and can choose to personally maintain or repair the product.” It also maintained that less than 2 percent of all repairs require software updates, which means the majority of repairs farmers need to make, can be made themselves.”
Advocates say that the restrictive practices simply add to John Deere’s bottom line. “For the past several years, Deere’s margins on repairs have been three to six times more profitable than its margins on equipment,” said Crooks. “So, this is really a profit-driven decision. And we allege unfair method of competition under long standing very well-established Supreme Court and FTC precedent.”
Unlike the proposed legislation related to the broader “right to repair” movement, this order would only apply to John Deere.
In 2021, John Deere’s net profit margins reached a peak of 13 percent—as the upfront costs of farming continue to climb, requiring significantly steeper investments in both equipment and farmland.
The petition points to a Supreme Court case which determined that Kodak Cameras violated the Sherman Act, the nation’s oldest antitrust law, by making equipment that only Kodak could repair. “Our case is even a little bit stronger than Kodak because the company faced significant competition. It did not have a significant market power in the market for the copiers themselves,” said Crooks, in an interview.
Unlike the proposed rulemaking process and legislation on the table related to the broader “right to repair,” which would extend to a range of electronics makers, this order would only apply to John Deere. But the petitioners include many of the leading advocates and farmers in the broader movement, which has gained ground in recent years. They are also pushing for state and federal legislation, recently introduced by Senator Jon Tester (D-Montana). And they are supportive of a string of recent class-action lawsuits against John Deere for monopolizing repair services.
“There’s a realistic chance for this [petition] to lead to some timely relief for farmers,” said Kevin O’Reilly, director of the Right to Repair Campaign at U.S. PIRG.
Advocates and farmers intend to continue pushing across many avenues. “Every minute counts when it comes to raising your crop or bringing up livestock,” said O’Reilly. “We need to continue to push on all fronts until a solution is reached.”
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]]>The post Dust Is a Growing Problem. What Role Does Farmland Play? appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>As hurricane force, record-breaking winds blew through eastern Colorado in mid-December, the skies took on an eerie sepia glow. Visibility dropped to almost zero as a massive dust storm roiled through the Great Plains states, impacting 100 million people. Two weeks later, high winds and severe drought led to the devastating Marshall wildfire in urban northern Colorado.
Dust storms aren’t unusual in these areas, but they typically occur in the spring and at a smaller scale. And yet, as a two-decade drought persists in the West, scientists are concerned that they could become even more prevalent. This is, after all, Dust Bowl terrain. “It was never easy land to begin with; climate change is just going to make it more difficult,” says Becky Bolinger, a Colorado state climatologist who shared a warning on Twitter about the possibility of a dust event the day before the storm.
As the percentage of dust in the air increases, so do hospital visits for respiratory complications, as well as dust-borne diseases such as Valley Fever and meningococcal meningitis.
Dust is a growing concern for a number of reasons. As the climate-fueled drought across the western half of the country continues and irrigation sources likely become limited on farms—resulting, potentially in the increasing the amount of bare, fallowed land—researchers are working hard to identify dust hot spots and how they are linked to agriculture.
As the percentage of dust in the air increases, so do hospital visits for respiratory complications, as well as dust-borne diseases such as Valley Fever and meningococcal meningitis. Traffic accidents are also a growing concern across the western U.S., where dust affects road visibility. In the last two decades, car crash victims and insurance companies have shown an interest in holding farmers accountable for poor practices that created dust sources—but their liability is hard to prove.
Importantly, many of today’s dust events are region-wide phenomena. All fall, throughout eastern Colorado, “it’s really been bone dry,” says Bolinger. “I’m not sure there was much that agricultural communities could have done to mitigate the amount of dust that was up in the air.”
At the same time, tillage has increased in the region in recent years as farmers work to combat a growing number of herbicide-resistant weeds, explains Eugene Kelly, a soil scientist at Colorado State University.
During the unprecedented December storm, satellite imagery captured dozens of sites in the southeastern corner of Colorado and the Oklahoma panhandle where the dust was first lofted into the air, a region known among dust researchers as an active source area. Eastern Colorado soils are 70 percent windblown loess, but cultivation, grazing, construction, and roads—anything that destabilizes the soil—can generate dust, says Kelly. “These episodic events are really damaging because they can move an awful lot of material,” he adds.
Still, scientists are working to understand “the chaotic cascade of dynamics that causes a dust storm to initiate a particular point in space and a particular point in time,” says Thomas Gill, a dust researcher at University of Texas at El Paso. Nevertheless, his research points to agriculture as an important source to watch.
Continued advances in modeling capabilities—and soon data from satellites to be launched in 2022 and 2023—not only promise to make pinpointing dust sources more routine, but also to enhance dust forecasting.
Gill co-authored a 2020 study using data from satellite imagery to characterize sources of dust in the Southern Great Plains. It showed that the Great Plains contained seven times more dust points than the Chihuahuan desert (over 1,200 compared to 187). Cultivated fields comprised 43 percent of them, while shrublands and grasslands combined contained 40 percent.
As the public’s interest in air quality grows, as evidenced by Purple Air’s network of over 10,000 air quality monitoring devices, researchers are eager to identify the dustiest sources to inform policymakers. And they will soon have new tools available. Continued advances in modeling capabilities—and soon data from satellites to be launched in 2022 and 2023—not only promise to make pinpointing dust sources more routine, but also to enhance dust forecasting. What that will mean for agriculture is harder to predict.
Monitoring Dust
Without a dedicated dust monitoring network, researchers have long relied on the two nationwide air quality sensor networks and happenstance satellite imagery.
One network was designed to monitor the particles that contribute to haze near national parks in order to maintain clear views. The other network, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Chemical Speciation Network sensors, are located predominantly in urban areas to implement the National Ambient Air Quality Standards.
“These were never designed to monitor dust,” says Jenny Hand, an air quality researcher at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. Notably, a small percentage of the ground-based sensors from both networks are located in or near agricultural areas.
Still, the data these networks generate has shed light on modern dust dynamics. Two sizes of dust are typically monitored—PM2.5 and PM10, shorthand for particle micrometer diameters. In recent years, regulatory effort has focused largely on the smaller PM2.5 particles, which can penetrate deeper into the lungs than PM10. While interest has shifted to the health concerns of PM2.5, PM10 is still a problem. Exposure can aggravate heart disease and asthma and damage lung tissue. Recent research shows that long-term exposure to PM10 can also increase the severity and mortality of COVID-19. For example, a recent study found the relative risk of hospitalization for a range of conditions significantly increased after a dust storm in El Paso.
In fact, the nationwide decline in PM 2.5, as a result of the regulation of combustion, is an often-overlooked success story. But particulate matter is an ongoing concern, for example, in several parts of farm country.
While we don’t have the ability to identify the exact sources of the dust, agriculture is likely the cause given the seasonality of the dust, which is often heavy during harvest time.
Hand co-authored a 2019 analysis of dust particles sized between 2.5 and 10 micrometers, called “coarse mass”, between 2000-2016. The study revealed that California’s Central Valley, along with southwest Arizona and parts of the central U.S.—all agricultural areas—are coarse mass hotspots. And while we don’t have the ability to identify the exact sources of the dust, agriculture is likely the cause given the seasonality of the dust, which is often heavy during harvest time, explains Hand.
Last year, Hand and colleagues used satellite imagery to detect a 5 percent increase in airborne dust every year in the Great Plains between 2000 and 2018. Not only has cropland coverage increased by 5–10 percent in the same region, but increases in dust have been found to coincide with the harvest and planting of dominant crops—notably, soybeans in Iowa and corn in the southern Great Plains.
“Marginal lands are the ones being developed [as farmland],” says study co-author Andy Lambert, currently a physical meteorologist at the Naval Research Laboratory. All the best farmland has long been in production and prices have been high for corn and soy crops in recent years offer a greater financial incentive than the programs such as Conservation Reserve Program, which pays farmers to leave the land undeveloped. As a result, adds Lambert, “Grassland is being developed at much higher rate than it used to be.”
Improving Technology
Scientists have been able to detect dust storms with satellites for over 55 years—but only if the satellites had the right sensors and were in the right place at the right time. For example, one of the most commonly used satellites for recording dust only takes one image at mid-day over the entire U.S. Yet dust storms often kick up in the late afternoon. When it comes to satellite imagery, there has long been trade-offs between the frequency of images, spatial reliability, and even the accessibility of the data, explains Gill.
But that is swiftly changing. NASA is upping its air quality monitoring considerably over the next year. The Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (dubbed EMIT), scheduled for launch to the International Space Station in May, will produce maps of the minerals transported from dust-producing regions. In December 2022, NASA is scheduled to launch a new satellite called TEMPO, which promises to further enhance not only the search for specific dust sources, but also other agricultural air pollutants, including nitrogen dioxide, ozone, and formaldehyde. TEMPO will make hourly observations and produce a new dust source map for North America, which will help scientists track dust plumes backwards to their sources.
Whether improved technology will alter land use policy or prompt more regulatory enforcement of dust-prone agricultural areas is yet to be seen.
And earlier this year, Gill and colleagues demonstrated how “CubeSats,” a constellation of over 200 nano-satellites orbiting close to Earth, can capture plume development in the Chihuahuan Desert. The images showed numerous distinct point sources, essentially 8 percent of the focus area was eroding.
Will More Science Bring More Regulation?
Whether all this improved technology will alter land use policy or prompt more regulatory enforcement of dust-prone agricultural areas is yet to be seen. For starters, little has been done in farm country to enforce the current air quality standards.
For example, California’s San Joaquin Valley is home to a great deal of the state’s farmland and is one of the primary areas that has experienced increased air quality standard exceedances since 2017. According to data obtained on the California Air Resources Board website, PM10 values in the district have steadily gotten worse over the last few years.
In 2020, 18 of the 21 PM-10 monitors in the San Joaquin Valley Air Basin exceeded the 24-hour maximum standard at least once, and often several times throughout the fall months that correspond to harvest—a typically dry period when the soil is disturbed. One site had air that exceeded the safety limit for a total of 36 days in mid-August through early November. On one day in September 2020, the PM10 reading topped 480—over three times the EPA standard.
The monitors gauging PM 2.5 in the air in the valley showed similar numbers. In 2020, 37 out of 45 PM 2.5 monitors exceeded the standards. In 2021, it was 28 out of 31.
“The San Joaquin Air Pollution District has a very hands-off approach in how it chooses to regulate agricultural sources,” says Brent Newell, senior attorney focused on food and farming at Public Justice, a national legal advocacy organization that works on civil rights and environmental justice. “When it does, the regulations are milquetoast.” For example, to comply with the rule, Regulation VIII, adopted in 1993, which governed directly emitted PM10 particles from agricultural operations and roads, farmers were only required to check boxes on a menu of actions that were basically what they were already doing, such as water or oil down roads or reduce the speed limit, says Newell.
Soil degradation is becoming a chronic problem, says Kelly. He argues that the amount of dust in the atmosphere offers a way to take the pulse of ecosystems.
Paul Cort, an attorney with Earthjustice who unsuccessfully challenged the agricultural dust control measures in the San Joaquin Valley in 2009, agrees. “To the extent any regulation has occurred, it’s been done in a way that is super flexible to the point of being almost toothless,” he says. If it’s dust, he says, the odds are good that it’s coming from agriculture.
“No one is arguing it comes from construction or road dust or from some other source,” says Cort. What’s more, there’s little public concern about PM10, which is often seen as simply airborne soil, and part and parcel of farming communities. “There’s some public perception that that’s not the pollution we need to be worried about. [That] it’s just dirt,” he says.
But soil degradation is becoming a chronic problem, says Kelly. He argues that the amount of dust in the atmosphere offers a way to take the pulse of ecosystems. “What’s happening now is we’re getting much larger events, not only in terms of the wind speeds, but over much larger geographic areas,” he says. And, he adds, it will take decades for the soils to recover from the ongoing drought.
Kelly suggests that a large-scale, multi-agency effort—one that combines satellite imagery, climate models, historical data, and new sensors is needed to identify the most vulnerable landscapes—and potentially stop farming them, at least for the time being. “We need to get to the point where we can identify these areas and say we cannot put these lands into production because they are too risky,” he says.
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]]>The post Op-ed: We Don’t Need a ‘Moonshot’ for Faux Burgers—We Need To Hold ‘Big Meat’ Accountable. appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>In a recent New York Times opinion piece, Ezra Klein proposed a moonshot investment in “Meatless Meat.” Klein makes a cogent, fact-filled case for the government to spend a few billion dollars on public research to increase the commercial viability of plant-based and cellular (i.e., lab-created) meats.
Klein’s objective is straightforward: reduce the climate footprint of meat and dairy, reduce the suffering of animals confined in feed lots and barns, and prevent the next pandemic. He proposes use public funding to accelerate research and development—much like Tesla’s boost to e-cars or the Department of Defense’s boost to the internet—as the best way to move production and demand of alternative meats quickly and effectively.
The stakes are high. And Klein is not wrong. Cheap meat is a problem. The much-loved (recently mythologized) hamburger is brought to us by an extractive industry whose recent record profits come on the backs of disadvantaged workers, animal cruelty, mountains of manure, and a whole lot of public subsidies. But even the quickest, most superficial look at today’s U.S. food system shows the solution to the mess is not public subsidies for petri-dish proteins that will inevitably be produced (or at least funded) by a handful of large, vertically integrated food and feed companies.
Klein’s analysis forgets the first instinct of any investigator: cui bono, or, who stands to benefit? It’s not as if consumers ask for animal suffering, or excess greenhouse gas emissions. Sure, we like burgers—but we like fish and chips, too, and falafels and dumplings and pakora. The great thing about being an omnivorous species is that there is not much we won’t eat. Involve sugar or a deep fat fryer and we’ll eat far too much of it, sadly.
The problem with cheap meat is not that it should cost the consumer more (though it probably should). It is that what looks cheap to the consumer is in fact costing the public all the way down the production line. From unchecked pollution to uninsured workers, cheap meat makes a lot of money for a very few, while costing the earth—quite literally—for all of us.
The challenge is not how to save the hamburger by making an animal-free, lower-emission proxy, nor is it about generating enough chemical compounds to make soy and fungi taste like blood at an affordable price.
The problem is unchecked market power, enjoyed by a small handful of corporations. They often own all parts of the food chain—from the grain silos to the feedlots to the final brand that shoppers see on grocery store shelves. And they make a lot of money by selling unhealthy food, extracting profits from farmers whose livelihoods are squeezed in poorly regulated and noncompetitive markets, using a vulnerable workforce whose rights they violate. Market power is turned into political capital as these corporations use campaign donations to capture state and federal legislators, who have spent decades commissioning reports that document these harm and bemoaning the hollowing out of rural America in public speeches, all the while eliminating the funding for inspectors, enlarging legal loopholes, and handing out public money in support of those few highly profitable firms.
The part of the food system that really needs a moonshot is the human cost. The pandemic brought that cost home sharply: Meat companies such as Tyson, JBS, Cargill, and Smithfield openly put their workforce at risk, with nearly 59,000 meatpacking workers testing positive for COVID-19 to date. They did not provide PPE. At first, companies refused to test, and when they did, they refused to share the numbers. They denied workers paid sick leave and are now denying them disability.
To top it off, the Trump administration used the Defense Production Act to reopen closed or slowed-down meatpacking plant and offered to support meatpackers in any litigation brought by workers related to workplace exposures to the virus. Pandemic conditions aside, workers earn too little to live with dignity, and their earnings are so precarious that a day off work is not an option. Meat plants employ people from dozens of countries in the world—many of them new immigrants—and treat them as dispensable.
Factory farms run on cheap feed, lax environmental regulations, and disposable labor. We do not need rocket science to change that. We just need to enforce the existing labor, environmental, and anti-trust laws. We can stop emissions before they happen. We know how to protect animal welfare. We know how to protect public health, too—the burger is not so bad, nutritionally, just hold the cheese, the extra patty and the sugar-laden sauces that turn the average fast food burger into a high-calorie, low-nutrition meal.
The answer is not a moonshot. Instead we need a government and a public that stand up for workers and demands corporations and their investors obey the laws, pay their share of taxes, and pay their fines when their companies are found guilty of price-fixing, food safety violations, or grossly negligent pollution of the communities where they operate.
What else?
- Enforce basic labor rights, legislate a living wage, enforce the right to collective bargaining, and protect the right to affordable and adequate health care. For all.
- Fight structural racism in the food system. Keep the money going out to farmers excluded from the last 150 years of public funding. End the abuses encouraged by the U.S. immigration system, the loopholes for farm work that permit human rights violations, and the environmental injustice that pushes pollution onto communities of color and Indigenous peoples’ land.
- Use and fund the Packers and Stockyards Act. Provide enough inspectors, make their job worthwhile and fine the operators who break the law. Ensure climate emissions are counted when issuing permits to factory farms. Do that math right—lesson one of climate change science is that cumulative effects matter.
- Enforce anti-trust laws. Hundreds of thousands of independent hog and poultry producers have been bankrupted in the last 20 years; many now work on contract for global meat companies. Decades of legal challenges to the poultry sector have left the corporations untouched.
- Control overproduction. U.S. land is exhausted, farmgate prices don’t cover the cost of production and high (and highly concentrated) profits accrue to grain traders and meat packers.
- Make polluters pays. Fine the operations with practices that lead to excessive nitrogen fertilizer run-off that kills our waterways, and demand protection for biological diversity in farm systems. Insist factory farm permits factor in their climate costs, especially their monstrous sources of methane. Now, that owners of concentrated animal feeding operations (or CAFOs) want public money to turn their hogshit into factory farm gas, or so called “biogas.” The real solution is stopping the waste at the source by enforcing real manure regulation.
- Invest in local and regional food systems. Alternatives to cheap meat exist—animal agriculture that is regenerative, supports farmers, and is kind to the animal, soil and water—but they provide only a small share of the market. Now is the time to shorten and diversify supply chains and use public contracts and institutional buying to leverage new revenue streams for producers that build in high standards. IATP’s experience with farm to school and childcare programs shows how well this can work to support an integrated food policy involving education, environment, health and agriculture departments in productive conversation and innovate policies. Create the space to diversify, experiment and reintroduce regional specialty foods.
- Reward regenerative and agroecological practices. The U.S. has useful and effective conservation programs, including the Conservation Stewardship Program and Conservation Reserve Program. They are heavily oversubscribed and underfunded. Fund and improve them.
A sustainable, adaptive, and resilient food system is so much more than a low-emitting carbon sink. Animal agriculture must be regulated on a life-cycle basis, from the millions of acres of corn and soy the animals eat to the piles of manure that the industry now wants to convert and pipe like natural gas, in exchange for yet more public money. Nip too-cheap meat in the bud by making sure that at every step companies are held responsible for their own pollution, workers are paid, and animals are treated right.
Rather than asking for a moonshot, let’s shift power away from the small handful of megacorporations that control our food system. Let’s spend public money protecting the health of the whole ecosystem, people included. That way we’ll all win.
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]]>The post Automated Harvest is Coming. What Will it Mean for Farmworkers and Rural Communities? appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>At the same time, a crew of about two dozen farmworkers is also harvesting strawberries just a few hundred feet away, on an adjacent farm. As an energetic song blasts from a parked vehicle, the men and women stoop to pick berries straight into plastic clamshells that they tile, side-by-side, into cardboard trays. Once their trays are full, the workers take them back to one of several sorting tables spread out along the access road (to allow for social distancing). It’s clear by the speed at which they’re walking—and in some cases even running—to drop off each box that these men and women are getting paid by the piece.
I’ve trudged through the muddy, irrigated fields to watch both forms of harvest with Kyle Cobb, advanced.farm’s youthful, clean-cut CEO. The company was the first to mechanically harvest strawberries for commercial sales last year, and had raised just under $10 million by June 2020, including a $7.5 million Series A round in 2019. After building a robot that cleaned solar panels, Cobb and his team dove into agriculture, where they hope to put an end to the notoriously grueling, repetitive work of harvesting strawberries.
If things go as planned, and advanced.farm is able to scale up over the next several years, Cobb says, “You’d see the same crew, but instead of it being this big, you’d see about half the size . . . and they wouldn’t be doing the traditional picking like this. They’d be doing a combination of sorting and packing in a very comfortable ergonomic set up.”
Today, instead of the fleet of three or four harvesters that are typically picking berries, the TX is in the field prototyping, gathering data to be used by the company’s team of engineers at their office three hours north, in Davis. Prototyping is slow, exacting work, and the machine is accompanied by field operations manager Jorge Cava, who carries a tablet and watches patiently as the harvester moves along the rows, learning thousands of iterations of berry, stem, and leaf. “We should get several hundred more hours testing on it,” said Cobb, before it goes back into the field.
Compared to the hustle taking place on the next farm over, it’s a pretty low-key scene—boring even, to the untrained eye. And yet, Cobb, Cava, and others working to automate the harvest have been in the midst of their own hustle over the last few years. Now, the pandemic has ratcheted up the pressure.
For farmers considering investing in the automation, Cobb tells me in the field, he sees the pandemic as one of several factors that will breaks the camel’s back. “It’s the rising cost [of labor], it’s the already-dwindling supply, the aging of the workforce, the hard work. Add in a health pandemic that further limits the supply and complicates your daily logistics, and automated harvest starts to sound really nice,” he said. Hazardous conditions caused by this year’s wildfires may also be a factor, although they haven’t stopped many crews from harvesting this fall.
It’s not just growers who may soon embrace the technology. In California, most of the counties with the highest rates of infections are in the Central Valley, the state’s most productive agricultural region, and home to hundreds of thousands of farmworkers. And as farmworker communities around the country battle a growing number of coronavirus outbreaks, illnesses, and deaths, the discussion of automation across the food production spectrum has grown in the public arena as well. If the people doing the work on farms are getting sick, the logic goes, why not just replace them with machines?
The transition for the companies isn’t going to be fast or easy: Cobb estimates that it will likely take five to 10 years before it’s really complete.
“We’re working as hard as we can,” he said, as he details the many challenges companies like his face in the process to get the machines out in the field, working as fast as human pickers. For a good part of the summer, for instance, the strawberry plant’s leaves grow so large that they essentially block the harvester’s vision from above. And strawberry breeders have so many other priorities, that it could be a while before they start breeding plants that make it easier for the harvesters to do their job.
Of course if advanced.farm—or one of the other companies in its lane—succeeds, the shift won’t be easy for farmworkers either, nor for farm-centric communities such as Salinas, Watsonville, and Oxnard.
The strawberry industry employs about 55,000 people in on-farm jobs on an estimated 38,000 acres in California—making it one of the state’s more labor-intensive crops. And if automation successfully cuts that number in half it could mean the loss of over 27,000 jobs in that slice of the produce sector alone.
Illustration by Justin Limoges.
A Ripe Moment for Automation on Farms
For Sébastien Boyer, the shift toward increased automation in farming is an inevitable one. Boyer is the CEO of Farmwise, a company that launched its first autonomous weeding robots in early 2019, and has grown quickly in the year and a half since then.
FarmWise went from having a small handful of weeding machines in 2019 to 20 of them in 2020. It also scaled out from a startup in a garage in San Francisco to a 700,000-square-foot shop and headquarters in Salinas. And Boyer says he has seen an increase in interest from farms in California and Arizona.
“We see a kind of short-term positive shock in the attractiveness of what we do. But we are also seeing increased discussion around automation,” Boyer told me in his thick French accent. “By and large, what I think is going to happen during the crisis is a faster push for things that makes the overall supply chain less reliant on the uncertainty of manual work being done in the fields.”
Advanced.farm’s Cobb echoed this sentiment. “There are always early adopters, and they have been ahead of this trend for all kinds of reasons,” he said. “But now that second wave of people, the mass adoption . . . I think they’re moving faster. They’ve changed their mindset faster than you otherwise would have expected.”
Emily Reisman is an assistant professor in the Department of Environment and Sustainability at the University of Buffalo and a recent transplant from the University of California, Santa Cruz. As part of a larger effort to document and study the agtech industry with a group of other researchers, including U.C. Santa Cruz’s Julie Guthman, she has been attending agtech events—which have moved on online but not slowed down—since before the pandemic began.
“I think it’s unlikely that COVID will dramatically accelerate the development timelines of these companies, especially for mechanical devices,” said Reisman. “But this moment might allow certain technologies to gain legitimacy and potentially additional financial backing, institutional support, or broader public acceptance.”
Reisman is also concerned that COVID is being used as a way to depoliticize technology that displaces workers. She has spent the last few years studying the almond industry, where automation already allows for near-instant harvest thanks to mechanical tree shakers that can remove an entire tree full of nuts in around a minute. On those farms, the number of people needed per acre is minuscule.
“I found that the crop’s high level of automation is part of what makes it so attractive to financiers looking at land as an investment. Low labor means low risk,” she said. “So, I think automation is attractive not only to farmers or technology companies, but also people who are interested in land as a financial asset.”
Rather than selling their equipment, both Farmwise and advanced.farm contract with farmers to pay for the machines’ services—which allows the companies to send fleets of weeders and harvesters around the area.
“I found that [almonds’] high level of automation is part of what makes it so attractive to financiers looking at land as an investment. Low labor means low risk.”
And with new overtime laws for farmworkers going into effect in 2022, Cobb says the investment in automation is “more of a hedge for future cost inflation rather than a significant cost reduction.”
Indeed, automated harvesting will potentially do away with the limitations of the workday. It’s not typically safe to employ people to work on farms at night—but machines like the TX harvester don’t care about light or temperature, nor do they have circadian rhythms; they can conceivably run for 24 hours if needed.
“It’s filling the gap in two ways. One is just by supplying machines that can pick instead of humans, and two, improving quality of work for the humans who are left so that more people are attracted to the line of work than are today,” said Cobb, who envisions a transformed industry unburdened by the kinds of repetitive, body-ruining work that is so common in today’s fields.
Better Jobs—and Fewer Jobs?
When I spoke with Farmwise’s Boyer in April, right after the coronavirus hit, he told me his company was in a rare position to be hiring several people as they ramped up their customer base. “We’re paying significantly more than the average wage that fieldworkers make today. And that’s because we’re going to make every one of those workers drastically more productive than if we were asking them to do this work manually,” he said.
Jaime Eltit, Farmwise’s commercial operations manager, says the new, better-paying jobs created by companies like his are an important response to the farm world’s “shrinking and deteriorating labor force.”
“Probably the youngest people that you see out there right now are around my age,” said Eltit, who is in his 30s. “But the generation below them, those kids aren’t going out into the fields. This kind of work is hard; it’s not really desirable. And so there are going to be less people, but [a small number of] more skilled people doing the job of others.” And companies like Farmwise are “replacing the jobs at the bottom,” such as thinning lettuce, weeding, and harvesting, he adds.
In fact, nearly everyone I spoke to in the agtech industry preferred to focus on the “better jobs” aspect of the coming shift. When I asked Cobb about the fact that the future he and others envision could involve fewer jobs, he cautioned me to be careful about that phrase.
“Right now, one of the ways [farms] bring people to bridge the gap is through H-2A visas and immigration,” he said. “My hunch is that that’s always going to be a necessary part of the equation. But I think that we’re going to see less need for that type of solution. But I don’t think [automation] is going to take a bunch of domestic jobs.”
At Andrew and Williamson Fresh Produce, a large, multi-farm grower-shipper operation that works with advanced.farm, district manager Matt Conroy shares this sentiment. He points to automation as a way to fill what he says is a “10–20 percent gap in the workforce,” but adds that “our goal is never going to be to get rid of people.”
“At the end of the day, certain jobs may fall to automation. The goal is not to have that happen. But there’s always an uncomfortable reality in there.”
A few years back, Andrew and Williamson developed the brand Good Farms in partnership with Costco and the Equitable Food Initiative, a public-private partnership aimed at improving the lives of farmworkers. At its eight Good Farms locations, the company says it includes all its workers in planning meetings, employs them year-round, and provides benefits, among other things. And in an industry known for anonymous disregard at best, and wage theft and sexual harassment at worst, these efforts stand out.
And yet Conroy admits that, “at the end of the day, certain jobs may fall to automation. The goal is not to have that happen. But there’s always an uncomfortable reality in there. It’s like the photo booth people—that job went away when everybody went digital.”
Advanced.farm is the fourth robotics company Conroy has tried working with, and he likes that Cobb and his team are interested in grower feedback, rather than approaching automation purely as a technical problem. And he hopes some of Good Farms’ workers will be able to train to run the automated harvesters, a previously unheard of opportunity in a field that generally offers no opportunity to advance. “It’s about providing more skills to this person now and helping them be marketable in the future, so they can go outside of the scope of just picking from aisle to aisle,” Conroy told me.
Of course, while learning to operate the machine on the farm is one thing, really getting trained in the intricacies of the machinery would require that a worker and their family could relocate to Davis for several months—and he said finding that person could be difficult.
There has also been an effort to provide a pathway for the children of farmworkers to work in the agtech sector. In 2018, produce giant Taylor Farms invested in two centers, including one in Salinas, where existing workers can learn programming, engineering, and machine operation. And the Western Growers Center for Innovation and Technology—a Salinas agtech incubator—has a partnership with nearby Hartnell community college, where the children of farmworkers have been recruited since 2014 to train for computer science degrees. The idea is to provide a path toward a career in tech without having to leave their families behind.
That promise was one of the things that appealed to Eduardo*, a young man who went through the Hartnell program a few years back. After moving with his four siblings at age 10 from Oaxaca to the U.S. to join his parents, Eduardo (whose name has been changed to protect his identity) spent several years working the fields alongside his family—“cleaning lettuce, cutting onions, stuff like that.” He was good at math and got into the fast-tracked computer science program at Hartnell, but finding a job near his family hasn’t proved possible yet.
His first year out of school, Eduardo took an internship for a large ride-share company, learning it was in San Francisco just a few days before it started. Then, the internship turned into a full-time job, and he chose to stay on to learn what he could. He hoped to find work in agtech, but he wasn’t optimistic.
“A lot of my friends are jobless,” said Eduardo. “They’re still looking for a job a year or two after graduating.
When we spoke last fall, he was eating nearly all his meals in the company cafeteria, living in a surprisingly affordable room with other young tech workers an hour outside of the city, and sending money home to his family—a lifestyle entirely different from most of the other tech workers in San Francisco.
“It’s something that I can connect back to my parents,” he added about the prospect of working in agtech. “My dad doesn’t trust getting into a random person’s car. But if I build something for ag, he would trust it.”
Community Impact
Armando Elenes, a farmworker organizer and secretary treasurer of the United Farmworkers (UFW) is skeptical. “They’ve been talking about bringing robots into the field for over a decade,” he said. “I’ll believe it when I see it.” This year, protecting workers from the impacts of the pandemic—and expanding the union’s base, in part so that they have better access to healthcare—are much more pressing issues, said Elenes.
But Maria Cardenas disagrees. The executive director of Santa Cruz Community Ventures, and the founder of Undocufund Monterey Bay, was also neck-deep in her work to support undocumented farmworkers impacted by the pandemic when we spoke. She sees the move toward automation as inevitable, and potentially destructive. “Oh, it’s coming,” she told me. “I mean if you look at the millions that are being invested in things like identifying the right strawberry, those millions are not going to go to waste. It’s coming!”
In Salinas, as in other agricultural regions of California, Cardenas points to the fact that a whole generation of people have been working seasonal, high-skilled, low-wage jobs in the fields for two to three decades without benefits or any increases in pay. Most domestic farmworkers haven’t had access to much education in the last decade, and in recent years the existing population has been joined by a large number of migrants from Indigenous communities who speak neither Spanish nor English.
“Where do they go when these jobs are taken away? There are some young people, but a lot of them are getting close to retirement age, and they have no savings,” said Cardenas. “The employers in ag haven’t really invested in the workforce, and instead treat them as a piece of machinery in the fields.”
In that sense, it’s not surprising that a system that seeks to constantly replace its machinery with a more efficient model would be doing so with human workers as well. But Cardenas adds that most of the farmworkers she and her staff engage with are too mired in the work it takes to survive right now to track the progress of automation—let alone mount a response.
“[In Salinas,] they’re in households earning less than $50,000 a year living in a community that takes $94,000 to be okay. So, in many ways, their ability to work is subsidized by community programs and rental assistance,” she said. “And also by informal networks. The family takes care of the kids. You rotate. Or somebody is working in lettuce so they bring lettuce home and somebody is working berries and they bring berries home.”
Cardenas sees the value of a response from a union or a community organization, but she hasn’t seen one yet. And while the industry points to the opportunity for better jobs, she’s skeptical about the math, especially because a more efficient harvest won’t likely mean more money for the growers who pay the workers.
“All that does is lower your price per pound, with berries in particular. I don’t think a worker who is now running a machine is going to earn so much more . . . to make up for the lost household wages when three people are let go,” she said.
And yet, like many in the industry, Cardenas believes it’s likely that the pandemic will speed up the adoption of automation technology in the fields.
COVID has already made life difficult for farmworkers in many ways. “You have a political environment that makes it unsafe for workers to feel like they can get tested or get support. You have overcrowded conditions that makes it hard to isolate,” she said. “And poverty wages, which means that they can’t afford to not work—or access health care. All of that combined is a tsunami, quite frankly. And all of that combined in households that are already living in fear.”
Add the demand for produce outside the U.S. and consumer concerns about the stability of the food supply, and the drive to produce will likely take priority over other changes, she says.
“Even if the workers are sick, growers will still tend to want to produce. So, I don’t see the time allotted to change the industry,” Cardenas said. “But it will impact the agriculture communities where these workers are living. And the real strain will be felt by cities, which are facing tremendous deficits, and social safety net programs and nonprofits, which are also facing tremendous deficits.”
Getting Out in Front
Samir Doshi, a Race and Technology Fellow at Stanford University, is also concerned about the potential impacts of automation on Latinx immigrant communities in California and he’s engineering a plan to get out ahead of what could be an enormous wave of change.
Doshi did his doctoral research on developing regenerative economies for coal mining communities in Appalachia, and sees potential parallels with agriculture. When faced with questions around safety of miners, the companies turned to automation rather than creating safer jobs, says Doshi.
When faced with questions around safety of miners, mining companies turned to automation rather than creating safer jobs.
“It did make mining much more efficient; it saved a number of costs. And you had mining happening at all times of the day. It basically extracted the value of that industry completely for the owners and operators. You saw a huge drop in employment, and for a lot of mining communities, whether it’s in Appalachia, New Mexico, or other areas, there was no alternative economic pathway for a lot of those communities,” said Doshi. “They didn’t get other jobs within the industry, which is what is being promised in agtech. And they did not move up the career ladder.”
Instead, the mining companies, which tended to be based outside the communities where the mining takes place, have all moved their own higher-level employees in to run the machines.
Doshi is concerned about this pattern being replicated within agriculture, where immigrant communities play a larger role. “The consequences aren’t just people being put out of jobs. It’s people being pushed out of their homes, their country, their communities,” he said. “It is definitely possible to have dramatically cascading effects on communities and regions for what automation does.”
He has been tracking the rise of agtech outside the U.S., where it’s being funded by many of the same large foundations that have brought genetic engineering to the developed world. Doshi believes that, globally, investment in agtech is “going to be as pervasive as biotechnology,” using a similar narrative of food security and efficiency.
Doshi has spent time studying healthcare, education, and other industries that have been radically changed by technology, and hopes to bring a range of stakeholders—from industry representative to academic institutions, foundations, investors, and grassroots community organizers—into a single conversation about how to take workers and communities into account while adopting tech solutions in agriculture. The ultimate goal is a set of principles, or a code of conduct that can help guide the industry.
Doshi is looking toward other efforts like UNICEF’s innovation principles and the Digital Impact Alliance, which has created principles for digital development that helped shape investment in the space.
“I’m not trying to be predictive. We’re trying to be considerate and strategic about how to take care of our communities, how to take care of our food systems, and how do we look at sustainability and value across both of those domains over time,” said Doshi, who has also worked as a Senior Scientist at USAID, and for the San Mateo Food System Alliance and California Alliance for Family Farms (CAFF) in recent years. The goal, he says, isn’t to stop technology in its tracks, but to widen the conversation to include workers and smaller farmers who don’t benefit from the same kinds of tech.
“There are many technologies that can genuinely benefit small-scale, medium-scale family farms,” he said. “And if we can even the playing field in terms of the utility and efficacy and equity within these technologies and distribute the value that’s provided so that it’s not just large-scale investment into large scale applications that then [only] benefits industrial farming and agriculture.”
While the pandemic has slowed down Doshi’s process, he hopes to convene digital conversations about what it would take to develop a code of ethics in agtech—and get buy-in from investors and governments, using mechanisms like the Digital Impact Alliance, the World Economic Forum and other convening agencies and coalitions.
Farmworkers pick strawberries in 2019. (USDA photo by Lance Cheung)
A Monocrop of Movement
It’s hard to talk about replacing workers with automation without looking squarely at the very real physical cost of farm labor.
Flavio Carnejo, a family physician who works with strawberry and raspberry pickers in central California’s Pajaro Valley, described it well in a TEDxFruitvale presentation in 2011, in which he lists the types of pain, swelling, and spasms that occur in the worker’s wrists, shoulders, and backs, as well as longer-term effects, like compression in the sciatic nerve, degenerative joint disease, and arthritis, that farmworkers endure years before most other people do.
“Strawberries are picked stooped over, and our bodies are just not designed to do that for so long. You don’t have to be a physical therapist to realize there’s going to be a tremendous amount of damage that’s going to happen to the physical body,” he said. “You touch the back of some farmworkers and they feel like they have rods running up their backs—even years later.”
But it’s not clear that replacing people on the land is the best—or only—way to avoid these problems. And it’s hard not to compare the environmental challenges that come up in agricultural monocrops with the monocrop of movement we see in today’s produce fields. While science points to a diversity of crops as fundamentally better for the environment—it means fewer pests, healthier soil, and cleaner water, for instance—it’s also clear that a diversity of tasks and movement has benefits the human body and brain.
“There’s a lack of acknowledgment that the repetitiveness of the motion, which causes physical injuries and then allows for robotic interventions, is really symptomatic of the plantation structure of current agricultural practices,” said Emily Reisman. “Everyone acknowledges that this model is problematic ecologically and socially. And yet somehow we have no choice but to use the plantation to overcome it.”
If the industry weren’t trying to replicate what has been done in factories and other industrial settings on farms, she adds, they may find themselves asking, “what would it take to make economically viable agricultural work that fosters more diversity, or is more intellectually and creatively fulfilling? What would it take to make farm work a pursuit that enriches every life it touches?”
“We know that so many people are desperate for some kind of physical connection to the Earth—not only for their own health, but their psychological well-being, and a sense of place and purpose,” she adds.
Meanwhile, Eduardo, the son of farmworkers, is holding out hope that he’ll get to help make Salinas a place where he and his peers in tech can pursue their own sense of purpose. And if automation becomes the norm on Central Valley farms, it won’t be all that different than the changes that drove his parents to the U.S. in the first place.
“Immigrants—we don’t do one thing,” he said. “Farm labor is obviously a huge thing we do. But there are a lot of immigrants that work in restaurants and lot of different parts of the world. And we might just have to adapt.”
*His name has been changed to protect his identity.
Top image: The TX Harvesters from advanced.farm. Photo courtesy of the company.
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]]>The post Inside the Race for Lab-Grown Meat appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Journalist Chase Purdy is the rare person who can say he’s tried chicken, foie gras, and a meatball—among other foods—all grown in a lab. Originating from animal cells in petri dishes and not from slaughter, this meat is colloquially known as “motherless,” cell-cultured, or cell-based.
Since 2013, cellular agriculture has seen the launch of at least 10 food tech startups, and more than $100 million in investments from billionaires and venture capitalists. In his new book, Billion Dollar Burger: Inside Big Tech’s Race for the Future of Food, Purdy writes about cell-based meat’s origins, taste, and benefits, while documenting how one startup—San Francisco-based JUST—has vowed to make lab-grown meat the next food fad.
According to Purdy, getting cell-based meat into restaurants and supermarkets is a tricky undertaking. For one, scientists have to get the taste and texture just right (it’s apparently much leaner than meat from animals). And though the consistency of ground meat is relatively easy for technologists to replicate, other cuts, such as steaks and filets, require complex methods to get muscle cells to grow as they would in animals.
Cost is also a factor, but not as much as it once was. In 2013, cell-cultured meat was priced at $1.2 million per pound. “Now it’s hovering around $50 per pound, a precipitous drop as the technologists behind it have pushed the science to new heights,” writes Purdy. But that’s still too expensive to make it the next Impossible Burger, the plant-based protein available for $12 per pound at grocery stores around the country.
As technological advances bring production costs down, however, cell-based meat has been touted as an innovation that could annually save the lives of millions of animals and reverse the effects of climate change, since factory farms are significant sources of greenhouse gas emissions. (Writing for Quartz, however, Purdy reported that it’s unclear how much good cell-cultured meat will actually do for the environment.)
Despite its would-be benefits, not everyone is a champion of lab-grown meat, particularly its competitors in the conventional meat industry. American food-tech companies also face regulatory hurdles about oversight. Last year, the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) announced that it will oversee the cells harvested for cultured foods and that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) will supervise development into the meat as well as the product labeling. Once that happens, the fact remains that many consumers will have no clue what cell-cultured meat is—and others might flat-out refuse to try it.
Civil Eats spoke with Purdy about lab grown meat’s perceived “ick” factor, its potential impact, and the startups angling to be the first to make it accessible to the public.
Let’s start with COVID-19 and how outbreaks at meat processing facilities have reportedly generated more consumer interest in plant-based meat. Do you think this might also make the public more interested in trying lab grown meat?
My general thought is that the people behind cell-cultured meat still have a lot of work to do to actually get the idea into the public imagination. It’s starting to get to that level, especially as these technologies and this food gets closer to the point of being ready for market. It is ready for market in simple terms and simple types of meat, but the regulatory hurdle is what everyone’s currently waiting to get over. But anytime you talk about alternative meats, whether plant-based or cell-cultured, they get connected to animal welfare issues and climate change. And COVID-19 and its impact on the meat system in particular adds an extra sense of urgency that a lot of alternative meat companies can use to make their case to the public.
There are something like 35,000 meatpacking plant workers who have been exposed at this point. That’s a shocking number and a major labor problem. And, sure, I think that is an extra bow in the quiver for the cultured meat companies.
Can you discuss where the USDA and FDA are now with regard to cell-cultured meat?
The USDA and the FDA have working groups going over this. They could be working more closely with each other but, all in all, they’re making progress. The cultured meat companies are basically having to compile and deliver all the important data that the agencies need to comb through to build a regulatory framework. They’re looking at their own production process, like you would at any food plant, and identifying the risks and talking about how they will address them.
Only about five cell-cultured meat companies around the world at this point have pilot production facilities or have announced that they’ve begun construction on a production facility. Among that group is BlueNalu, which makes fish; JUST, which is sort of the center of the book; and Memphis Meats.
Why did you end up making JUST CEO Josh Tetrick the focus of Billion Dollar Burger?
In the book, I make it pretty clear that all of these companies have different strengths and weaknesses. And not all of the food they’re making is equal. I have tried some of JUST’s cell-cultured meat, and some of it impressed me and some of it was . . . fine. But Josh was the center because he’s a known quantity. One of his company’s strengths is that he already knows how to sell food. He has relationships and supply chains already laid out, both in Asia and here in North America, and that’s going to help him out a lot.
Why did you name the book Billion Dollar Burger?
The title is hyperbolic, but what I wanted to convey is whether you are squeamish about cell-cultured meat or totally in love with the idea, there are enough billionaire investors and other people who are motivated to make it a reality, so people need to be thoughtful about it and to come at it with a critical lens. The book title was to emphasize to people the amount of interest behind this, including from Bill Gates, Richard Branson, and Li Ka-shing in Hong Kong. The working title of the book was The End of Meat, but that didn’t work because what I’m describing is a new kind of meat, not the end of it.
Tell me about your experience eating lab-grown meat. What was it like?
I’ve tried the meat a bunch of times. The first thing I was ever served was foie gras, which I wasn’t raised eating, so it was kind of hard to impress me with that. It tasted really rich and had a meat-ish flavor to it that I could imagine foie gras tasting like. Then, I was served duck chorizo tacos, fried chicken, a chicken salad, a meatball, a chicken nugget, and all of those were really good.
There’s a scene in the book [where I’m] trying a Memphis Meats chicken tender—taste is obviously something that people are really interested in, but one of the things that I’m interested in is the texture and how it looks on the inside. You can imagine cutting into chicken breasts, and you notice it’s pretty stringy and fibrous. It’s actually really hard to get cells to grow that way in a controlled setting overseen by humans. But Memphis Meats actually accomplished that. They gave me this chicken tender, I pulled it apart, and when I saw that they’d [made it look like real chicken], it made it so real.
What are your thoughts on the public’s willingness to consume cell-cultured meat? Michigan State University’s 2018 Food Literacy and Engagement Poll found that 48 percent of respondents aren’t willing to try it.
There’s obviously always going to be a subset of eaters who are like, “Gross—never trying it; not interested.” And there will always be a subset of people who are a little too enthusiastic about these kinds of food-tech creations. And there’s a middle ground, where people are curious and/or skeptical. Those people are the ones companies want to appeal to, the people who are willing to roll up to a restaurant, stop in the grocery store, select this product and try it.
That’s the shot that this little industry has. Most people that I encounter have been very interested in at least trying cultured meat. The New York Times wrote a review of the book and the reviewer focused on the “ick” factor, and everyone in the comments was basically like, “You need to get over it.”
There’s no doubt in my mind that all cultured meat companies are going to have to do a better job communicating to the public exactly how much better for the environment their process is. Most of the data shows that animal agriculture accounts for about 14 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. Think about the energy it takes to harvest crops, transport the grain to the animals, and raise the animals for slaughter. It’s not hard to imagine how that system could pretty easily be improved upon by a process that doesn’t involve an animal.
What are you hoping readers get out of this book?
I hope this book introduces people to a concept that they’re going to be confronted with in the near future. And I want people who are interested in learning more to be able to pick up the book, read it, and get a sense of the brands and motivations behind it and to better understand the political willpower that has fought against and supported it. I want people to, more than anything, just be thoughtful about it.
With climate change being as significant as it is, it would be disappointing to come across a tool that could be really promising, and to just sort of dismiss it out of hand. And I think that, hopefully, this book will give people a language to be able to talk about it, understand it, and to really dig deep and think about how they feel about it.
When I started this book, my main concern was that this meat is so far from nature, and my thoughts changed during the course of my reporting. It forced me to think more deeply about my own relationship with food and my preconceived notions about my own proximity to the natural world, and I hope it spurs others to dig deeper, too.
Edited for brevity and clarity.
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]]>The post Can UV Light Help Restaurants Stay in Business? appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Lloyd and her immunocompromised husband began researching other options to add an extra layer of sanitization to the bakeries, in addition to taking employee temperatures upon arrival, requiring face masks and gloves, and cleaning throughout the day. They decided on newly-developed technology by Florida-based company Healthe, which emits continuous, low doses of ultraviolet radiation, called far-UVC, or wavelengths around 220 nanometers.
Soon, their West Village and Upper West Side locations will have UV-emitting ceiling lights and air conditioning units as well as a step-through “Cleanse Portal” that customers walk through to sanitize themselves in far-UVC light upon entry. High doses of UVA or UVB (280-400 nm) can harm human skin or eyes, but far-UVC is a sweet spot—able to kill viruses and bacteria without the threat of causing blindness or skin cancer in humans.
At a fraction of the cost of the deep clean, Lloyd says the far-UVC installations will give customers and staff an extra layer of confidence. “This won’t take the place of proper cleanliness, wearing a mask or gloves,” says Lloyd. “It’s just another level of safety. The way I look at it, if there’s no harm, it can only do good.”
Lloyd isn’t alone in investing in UV technology. A number of food businesses around the country are incorporating it in their sanitization practices. From the Bay Area’s BambooAsia to Cameo Pizza in Sandusky, Ohio, eateries are advertising the use of UVC light treatments to keep patrons and staff safe. And James Marsden, former White House advisor who sits on Chipotle’s Food Safety Advisory Council, recommended its use.
Although President Trump was lambasted for suggesting UV light could be used internally to treat COVID-19 patients, the technology is appealing to restaurants in 43 states that have moved to re-open dine-in service around the country and keep dining rooms safe. But kitchens—which are often small, cramped, and poorly ventilated—pose an equally important set of challenges for restaurant staff.
UV lamps have been used to disinfect hospitals and the New York City subway and have proven helpful, so it is reasonable to assume they would also help in a restaurant environment, says David Welch, a researcher at the Center for Radiological Research at Columbia University in New York City. Their efficacy, however, hasn’t yet been thoroughly tested on COVID-19. And Welch and other experts say that while some of the many UV devices swiftly making their way onto the market have potential benefits, they may pose more harm than good if they’re not used correctly.
“We’re still learning more about how COVID-19 is spread, whether it be through surfaces or airborne routes, so it’s really tough to predict the specific effectiveness, but UV is an important tool that can be part of the overall protection plan,” says Welch.
An Extra Level of Cleanliness?
Before reopening Ciena Agaves, a chain of Arizona-based Mexican restaurants, manager Bob Shulken sent a 5-foot-tall robot on wheels in to the restaurant alone to emit UV light in 20-minute bursts in different parts of the building. In addition, an antimicrobial coating called Omni Shield, which is supposed to last between 60 and 90 days, was sprayed onto surfaces.
Like Lloyd, Shulken was looking for an extra level of cleanliness. “It’s about making sure your facility for serving people is completely safe,” he says.
While these aren’t bad practices, there are a few things to consider. “The problem with UV light is that it only travels in a straight line,” says Charles Gerba, a microbiologist at the University of Arizona. “So it won’t get under a table top, for example,” he says. Uneven surfaces also may not be uniformly sanitized.
There have been lots of studies to confirm the addition of high-powered UV rays in hospital settings, says Gerba. For example, it has been shown to effectively reduce microbes by up to 99 percent on hospital keyboards and it has reduced the presence four major drug-resistant superbugs by 30 percent. But, says Gerba, there has been no verification of how effective they are in restaurant settings. The same is true for antiviral coatings, he adds.
“I’m not saying it’s not potentially useful, but it hasn’t been verified in restaurants,” he says. He worries some restaurant owners could be overconfident in UV light’s ability to reduce the risk of COVID-19.
Welch says the overwhelming majority of UVC lamps available right now can cause eye and skin damage, so they should not be used when there is a danger of being exposed. “There are a number of falsely advertised products available right now, especially for products claiming to be far-UVC lighting,” he notes. “If the wrong lamp is installed or if UV lights are installed incorrectly there are potential health risks—not to mention they may not be effective.”
Warriner agrees. “Depending on the system, anything less than a 12-watt output is going to have limited effect,” says Warriner. “If the lamps are uncovered [exposing humans to the light] then you know for sure it is not legitimate,” he says.
When it comes to restaurants, making sure the air is free of COVID-19 may be of special concern. A CDC epidemiological study from a restaurant in Guangzhou, China, found that air currents moved by an air conditioning vent in a crowded restaurant helped spread the virus. The study showed that sitting in the direction air was flowing posed a significant risk, resulting in as many as eight diners contracting the coronavirus.
Gerba has no concerns with the use of UV light to sanitize air moving through heating, venting, and cooling (HVAC) systems. Warriner suggests that UV used with a high efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filter is an even better system. In an HVAC system, the microbes could pass over the lamp too quickly to be inactivated, but a filter system, such as HEPA, enables the microbes to be trapped and then inactivated, says Warriner.
Using UV Light Beyond Restaurants
Beyond restaurants, other food service businesses are exploring UV light for sanitation. The Summerhill Market in Toronto, Canada, recently tested the XGerminator, a new tunnel-like device to sanitize groceries in the checkout line. Using high-dose 254 UVC to kill any microbes before shoppers take them home, their tests revealed that lower doses would be sufficient. The XGerminator is being developed in partnership with Prescientx, an Ontario, Canada-based company that produces UV devices for the healthcare industry.
The eventual device, which they expect to be available first in Canada in about three months, will have multiple levels of safety to ensure that at no time the checker or bagger be exposed to UVC, says Keith McGlone, a vice president at Prescientx.
McGlone shares safety concerns about the bevy of products coming on the unregulated UV market at the moment, including a personal handheld device. “There’s a lot of strange stuff being thrown out there—like UV wands,” he says. He advises consumers interested in such products to deal with companies who have been in the UV business for a while and are members of the International UV Association.
“We’re still learning more about how COVID-19 is spread . . . so it’s really tough to predict the specific effectiveness,” says Welch. “But UV is an important tool that can be part of the overall protection plan.”
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]]>The post Open Source Technology Could Be a Boon to Farmers appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Their collective solution? Pre-programmed, customizable spreadsheets that guide them through seed purchases and planting and harvesting schedules. The spreadsheets are free, hacked together, and open source, in a sense. But, Chang told Civil Eats, “it seemed pretty complicated to me, even though I’m an IT person.”
Chang, who started farming eight years ago and works full-time in information technology off-farm, searched for a different solution for his 14-acre organic vegetable and cut flower farm in northeastern Connecticut, finding software aimed at CSAs, which he doesn’t run, or marketing and sales, which he didn’t need. Then he discovered farmOS, a free, open source record-keeping software built on the web platform Drupal.
At a time when a dense field of ag-tech startups—1,600 of them, by one estimate—are vying for market share and a number of venture capital firms now specialize in agriculture technology, finding alternatives is no small task. In 2018, tech startups along the entire agriculture and food supply chain securing nearly $17 billion in funding, with farm management and sensing startups alone attracting $945 million, according to AgFunder. The total investment haul was the highest amount ever—and 43 percent higher than the year before.
This abundance of tech can solve any problem a farmer may have, but the upfront costs and ongoing subscription fees can bring expenses through the roof.
[newsmatch_box]Want to use satellite technology and other data to make decisions on irrigation and fertilizer application? Try Cropio, which costs 40 cents to $2 per acre per year. Seeking a business management solution to measure revenue and analyze field-by-field profits? Harvest Profit’s software runs $1,500 per year. (A consulting package that includes personalized calls twice per month goes for $10,000.)
Need a full-service solution that manages everything from worker punchcards to spraying events to RFID harvest tracking? Croptracker offers a per-service pricing plan that starts as low as $5 per user per month, but can easily run to hundreds of dollars per month for more comprehensive packages. Major names such as Granular, Conservis, Agworld, and others offer only custom quotes.
In the case of farmOS, on the other hand, Chang says, “Nobody is mining it or monetizing it in any way. It’s yours. You can export it in whatever way you want.” And it is infinitely customizable, if you’re tech savvy. “Since it’s open source, you can change the code, if you want to do your own customizations.”
FarmOS isn’t the only option for those seeking open-source alternatives, but it reflects the recent iteration of the open source farming movement, which emerged 15 years ago with a website on which farmers shared designs for hand tools and tractor implements. The scrappy movement has since evolved into an online community seeking to make the most advanced digital technologies of precision farming available to everyone, and not just Big Ag.
If it succeeds, the future of farming could be much more democratic. But it has a lot of catching up to do.
An Open Source Operating System
The open source software movement coalesced in the late 1990s, with programmers sharing software source code rather than sealing it off from users and forbidding its replication. The movement is known most famously, perhaps, for the Linux operating system, which was created by a disparate group of users connected only by the internet—a direct contrast to the sealed-in software worlds of tech titans like Microsoft and Apple.
Those using open source software in agriculture are up against similarly powerful companies. Farmers who scrap their cherished binders and spreadsheets full of records in favor of off-the-shelf farm management software often run the risk of losing control of their data to tech companies—or losing their data entirely.
Don Blair, a consultant who works with farmers setting up their own open source-based systems, knows farmers who have gone through just that. “They’ve experienced more than once that they’ve collected these records for years and the company goes out of business and there’s no way for them to get that data in a meaningful way,” Blair told Civil Eats.
To be sure, it takes longer for tech hobbyists and hacker farmers to collaborate on the development and maintenance of an open source program than it takes for a venture capital-backed team of a dozen developers working around the clock to spit out a shiny new app. Mike Stenta, who first created farmOS in 2014, concedes that much.
Farmier satellite view.
But, in exchange, farmers can remain independent.
“They are running the software themselves. They’re not dependent on another company, because companies come and go,” said Stenta, who apprenticed on organic vegetable farms in Washington state and Maine after college then started a CSA farm in Connecticut with a friend.
FarmOS users can host their data on an on-farm server, or pay for a hosting service from companies, such as Stenta’s own, Farmier. The company hosts a couple hundred farmers’ farmOS sites; an unknown number more host their own versions.
Anyone can contribute code to open source technologies like farmOS, and it’s that kind of knowledge sharing and community spirit that may help give small farmers a better chance of survival in the face of farm consolidation and climate change.
“The core technology is communication and collaboration,” said Dorn Cox, the research director at Wolfe’s Neck Center for Agriculture & the Environment, a leader in the open source farming movement. “The rest of it changes, but the ability to have those conversations and collaborations is most important.”
Developers are building additional farmOS modules—which will become open source—to help farmers organize additional activities such as animal movement through paddocks. Enterprising farmers can even hack together their own “smart farm” by connecting low-cost soil moisture sensors, greenhouse humidity monitors and other hardware to $35 Raspberry Pi computer kits that can feed the data into farmOS.
Stenta sees the potential for a rich marketplace of software products to provide additional features on top of the central farmOS databased—everything from data visualization to processing, recommendations. An application programming interface (API) enables other software to communicate with farmOS.
[pico_box]“If anything, farmOS allows for more competition and more innovation because the companies producing these solutions don’t have a monopoly on the farmer’s data itself,” Stenta said. “They have to work for their permission in order to keep access to the data. They have to prove they’re valuable. That’s different than if the farmer puts all their data in one platform. It’s going to be difficult for them to get out of that even if the company stops innovating.”
A Fully Connected Farm
Farmers adopting open source technology are now partnering with scientists who extend that collaborative ethos to their research projects.
OpenTEAM, a project Wolfe’s Neck Center announced this summer, will help make the vast array of open source technologies more usable for farmers by gathering that tech into an ecosystem. Farmers will collect data on farm activities, soil chemistry and other variables—then scientists will analyze it to find solutions for soil health and climate change mitigation. The project will push research out of the carefully controlled conditions of research sites and onto real farming landscapes. And farmOS will play an integral role in organizing that data.
OpenTEAM members, from left: Britt Lundgren of Stonyfield Organic, Dave Herring from Wolfe’s Neck Center, and Jeff Herrick, Research Soil Scientist, USDA. (Photo courtesy of Wolfe’s Neck)
“We can’t just keep doing research trials and [field testing] and then try to apply that across the landscape. We need to be doing research in place and that means working with farmers,” said Dorn Cox, who is also a coordinator of OpenTEAM.
Cox has blazed his own technology trail since he first started expanding his parents’ organic New Hampshire homestead in 2003. In 2004, he helped launch Farm Hack, a website on which farmers could share designs for physical tools, such as a drip tape winder, poultry plucker, and no-till seed drill. But as farming itself grew more digitized, Cox’s focus shifted to open source digital tools. He rigged up environmental sensors and devices on his farm, connecting them over a wireless network.
By 2018, a group of tech-oriented farmers had coalesced within Farm Hack. That year, around 50 of them, including Cox, got together at the Omega Institute in upstate New York for the first Gathering for Open Ag Technology, where they shared ideas and discussed the future of open source farming.
“We have really terrific research tools in isolation, and that includes everything from field measurements to modeling and remote sensing,” Cox said. “We have a lot of work to do to put it into a form that’s useful.”
The Ability to Compete
The open source technologies will help small farmers compete against the large operations that are currently showered with an abundance of technology options. At conferences and expos, such as the National Farm Machinery Show in Kentucky, the Farm Progress Show in Iowa and Illinois, and the World Ag Expo in Tulare, California, farmers can eye advanced machines with wonder, and then drain their wallets to bring the equipment home.
“Going to the [ag-tech] events, you’re definitely wowed by the technology that’s available. There are drones and self-driving tractors and software systems that integrate massive amounts of data,” Evan Wiig of the Farmers Guild and Community Alliance with Family Farmers (CAFF) told Civil Eats. “But the vast majority of tools that are being promoted at these events is geared towards bigger farms.”
CAFF is organizing the first-ever Small Farm Tech Expo in December to offer an alternative. The technology and tools at the event will be diverse: optimized hoes, complex software systems that track soil carbon content in fields, remote-controlled irrigation systems, complicated transplanting tractor implements, and sales software.
“We are moving into a very different age of technology in terms of online systems and online sales and the way consumers, both individual consumers and business distributors, are expected to do business,” Wiig said. “The days of keeping all your seeds in a shoebox under your bed and dealing in cash aren’t going to fly any more.”
Ryan Power, who grows 15 acres of certified organic vegetables and licensed cannabis in Sonoma County north of San Francisco, started farming with hand tools and horses a decade ago, but quickly upgraded to tractors, finger weeders, and power mulchers. Small farmers, he says, don’t need open source schematics to build their own hand tools, even though he has used a root washer based off a design from Farm Hack. Rather, small farmers need to use basic digital services to streamline management and track finances, such as Google forms and Slack to organize management and communicate with workers, and Quickbooks to manage accounting.
The innovation that would help Power the most would allow him to distribute his produce at a micro-regional level. Power has struggled to sell his vegetables to local grocery stores and restaurants in Sonoma County, where half a million people live, and he believes that halting the decline in small farms’ economic viability demands that technology seamlessly integrate those farms with distribution centers using trucks that never drive empty.
“The issue isn’t what creative ways I’ve made a special tool on my own,” Power said. “The issue is aggregation and distribution of the food I produce and how quickly I get food to the customer and how quickly that money gets into my bank account?”
Even though farmOS doesn’t yet have the ability to connect Power with his buyers, it could. Since farmOS is an open source project, anyone can contribute and write additional abilities into the platform. Stenta, the farmOS creator, said that an ecommerce module could be built into the platform using Drupal Commerce, or farmOS data could be pushed to third party ecommerce platforms.
Collaboration may be a slow process, but Stenta believes it often has more staying power.
“It’s kind of like the tortoise and the hare. The slow and steady tends to build a more stable product that outlasts the flash-in-the-pan products,” Stenta said. “I was raised into this ethos that code is sort of like a snowball and it helps to all work on it together. Why would you create one little thing when you can all make one big thing?”
Top photo: Clockwise from left: Some tools for open-source farming, including a double-rolling dibbler, a tilther, and a zipper. (Photos courtesy of Johnny’s Selected Seeds)
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]]>The post What AI Down on the Farm Could Mean for Rural America appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Carroll is spearheading an effort to build an agricultural Tomorrowland on 40 acres of black dirt just outside of Horace, North Dakota. The director of operations at Emerging Prairie, a non-profit dedicated to fostering entrepreneurship in North Dakota, he’s overseeing Grand Farm, an initiative launched at the end of April that is in the running—competing with indoor operations like Iron Ox—to create the world’s first fully autonomous farm by 2025.
Farm may be a misnomer, however, because while Grand Farm will include some fields growing crops like corn, soy, and wheat, even those will most likely be for field testing more than actual production. Described as a “a laboratory for entrepreneurs and ag tech companies,” the effort will include a business accelerator, robotics lab, makerspace, and code school called Emerging Digital Academy.
Autonomous farming—marked by equipment fueled by artificial intelligence, using machine learning to gather and compute data to determine and optimize when, where, and how much to plant, fertilize, and the like—has been evolving for years. It has already yielded advancements in precision agriculture and smart equipment such as driverless tractors. Now, projects like Grand Farm promise to take it further.
An annotated rendering of Grand Farm, including autonomous drone monitoring, a learning center, and autonomous tractors. (Click image for a larger version)
Grand Farm hopes to advance autonomous ag tech as an approach to addressing several issues facing North American farmers and rural communities today: a skills gap, a lack of venture capital across rural America, and a farm labor shortage pervasive across the U.S. and Canada.
Grand Farm’s primary goal is to provide technology that will take human labor out of the equation, but it’s not an all-or-nothing proposition for Carroll. “I look at it this way: if we get to a fully autonomous farm, that would be great. But to me, the challenges are addressing those pain points… those are more important measurements to see if we’re successful or not,” he says.
The project will develop and test ag-focused innovations, ultimately marrying them with investment opportunities to shepherd them into the wider market. For now, production will center on row crops, but Carroll says the initiative has already gotten interest from mushroom growers and vertical farmers. Grand Farm, which received an investment of 1.5 million from Microsoft earlier this month, also has a bigger goal: to ensure that when the future of agriculture arrives, North Dakota—and the Corn Belt more generally—will have a place at the table.
[newsmatch_box]Like other, similar efforts, Grand Farm also raises important questions about the role of ag tech, and artificial intelligence in particular, at a time when farming has become dominated by large producers and even larger agribusiness interests. Artificial intelligence-based (AI) ag tech also brings with it sociocultural issues that have profound implications for farmers in rural America and the communities they sustain.
Fertile Ground for Innovation
For an experiment that pairs one of America’s oldest industries with one of its newest, North Dakota is fertile ground. Ninety percent of North Dakota’s land is devoted to agriculture; the state is a top producer of row crops including sunflowers, lentils, and soybeans, and 40 percent of North Dakota’s farms weigh in at 1,000 acres or more in size.
Grand Farm isn’t the state’s first foray into farm-tech innovation. The now-international, multi-billion-dollar farm equipment company Bobcat was founded in North Dakota in 1947. More recently, Fargo-based Myriad Mobile launched the app Bushel that digitally handles everything from scale tickets to cash bids for modern grain farmers.
Although Grand Farm’s founders face an uphill battle when it comes to finding investors (more than three-quarters of venture capital went to companies in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and Boston in 2015) the founders hope that an infusion of capital and high-tech jobs could revitalize an area that has been struggling to keep young people from moving away.
AI farming promises a myriad of benefits, such as using precision ag to reduce farming’s carbon footprint through a highly efficient use of resources—everything from fertilizer and pesticides to water and seeds. Autonomous tractors and other machines that use sensors, algorithms, and image-recognition software all have the potential to make farming more efficient by killing weeds, harvesting crops, and spotting crop diseases before they spread.
“I think one of the big benefits from a global perspective is that we’re going to be able to use these technologies to produce more food with less inputs on smaller amounts of land,” says Evan Frasier, director of the Arrell Food Institute and research chair in Global Food Security at Canada’s University of Guelph.
“There is a great interest and desire in technology and where it may go,” says Mark Watne, president of the North Dakota Farmers Union.
A recent effort by Google supports Watne’s claim. The company helped convene a group of stakeholders in late 2018 to explore how technology such as AI and machine learning could accelerate the creation of a more sustainable, scalable, and equitable food system. “We see big opportunities for big data to help small and mid-scale farmers,” reads a report summarizing the group’s findings.
[pico_box]But Watne wonders whether or not the efficiencies and decreased labor costs that AI agtech aims to bring are enough to justify the price of the equipment. “The questions of how fast, what we can afford, and does it actually bring efficiencies, are always the challenge,” he says. The farmer hopes that Grand Farm’s research element will help weigh the costs and benefits for producers so they won’t have to take on all the economic risks themselves.
However, there are serious issues facing AI farming that warrant Watne’s cautious stance, from data ownership to national security threats, all existing in a fast-moving tech sphere that far outpaces the ability of lawmakers and regulations to keep up.
Betting the Farm on Big Data
Chances are, the cost concerns that Watne raises are going to be a downstream issue in the data-centered revolution that agriculture is undergoing through initiatives like Grand Farm—a revolution that could make ownership as we know it a thing of the past.
“In the digital agricultural revolution, what we’re talking about is data,” Frasier says. “And in this regard, there’s actually nothing different about farming than any other sector of the economy that’s moving into a data-driven system.”
Consider the last time you upgraded your smartphone. Maybe you walked into a store, forked over some cash, and walked out with a phone you own. But when you powered up the new device and accepted the long list of conditions wrapped up in the phone’s end-user license agreement (EULA), you were consenting to license the software that the phone requires to operate. Through that consent, the company retains the rights to, and control over, the essential components of the phone. What you actually own is merely a chunk of parts that’s largely useless without the software designed to run it.
Many companies in the ag tech sphere are making similar moves to ensure that ownership of the software that powers smart farm equipment stays in the hands of the company, rather than the farmer, through similar EULAs.
And, as we’ve seen in the evolution of Facebook, the information the company harvests from its 2.1 billion users can easily be deployed for nefarious purposes.
“If I’m a farmer and I’ve got AI systems, what’s happening to my data—who does it belong to and what’s it being used for?” asks David Rose, an associate professor in Agricultural Innovation and Extension at the School of Agriculture, Policy and Development at University of Reading in southern England. “Is it being used to maximize benefits on the farm for me or is it being used by a company that wants to sell me more stuff?”
As smart farm equipment churns across a farm, scooping up data on everything from rainfall and water stress to microclimate information and chlorophyll levels along the way, that data can then be used by the company to market products to farmers in the form of AI-fueled recommendations like applying more fertilizer, which said company just happens to manufacture, Rose explains. “If you aggregate data across certain types of farms, you can build up a detailed picture of how that farm works, what products they need, and know that farmer better than they know themselves.”
Precision Agriculture technology with GPS allows farmers to plant corn at night. (Photo by the University of Kentucky College of Agriculture)
Data ownership gets particularly murky when data sets are created by a company, corrected by farmers in the field, and perhaps partly owned by the government—should states get involved in the Big Data game. “There’s a huge quagmire,” Frasier explains, one in which farmers aren’t free or able to use the data they generate across different equipment manufacturers and their respective clouds. This results in more ownership and control for companies, and the evaporation of notions of ownership as farmers have known it.
Little has changed in terms of software ownership since the days of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, designed to protect movies and music from pirating in the Napster era. “In little bits and pieces, that protection was extended to software that runs devices. Lo and behold, 20 or 30 years later, software is actually on everything. Suddenly this really narrowly tailored legal language… can be applied to tractors on a farm,” says Paul Roberts, the founder of securepairs.org, a group of security professionals advocating for the right to repair. The shift has effectively been turning farmers into tenants rather than owners. And as ownership becomes hazy, so does accountability.
“If a computer [makes a farming decision], what can farmers do if it’s wrong?” Rose asks. “Where does accountability lie? If company says, ‘Apply X amount of nitrogen because it will maximize yields,’ but then a weather event happens that can’t be anticipated that changes the nitrogen necessary and the crop doesn’t turnout how you expected. Whose fault is that and what happens? Does the company pick up the bill?”
The Price of Progress
Beyond farms themselves, the tech-fueled farming revolution is poised to have staggering ripple effects on the rural communities that surround and rely on them as smaller, local farms struggle to keep up. The North Carolina hog industry offers a look at the ongoing relationship between agriculture and technology says Wyatt Fraas, assistant farm and community director at the Center for Rural Affairs.
As technology evolved to allow for the confinement of larger numbers of hogs, the investment required to participate became largely an option only for big farms with the necessary capital. Because one large shipment of pigs is easier to work with than several smaller loads from multiple farms, the market shifted in favor of large farms. “The processors only wanted to work with the larger operations—gave them preferential prices and eventually [processors] became owners of the animals and created the contract systems that we have now where they control all aspects of production,” Fraas says.
As the larger hog farms prospered and offered lower prices, most smaller, local operations were squeezed out of the market. Between 1992 and 2009, there has since been a 70 percent decrease in hog farms across the country, while the number of animals produced has remained roughly the same. This shift has also led to a system in which hog farmers have largely morphed from businesspeople in charge of their operations to little more than landowners who supply companies with a place to mature their pigs.
[pico_box]When technological advancements that come in the form of proprietary software on every conceivable farm device are combined with weak antitrust enforcement and oversight, particularly regarding tech acquisitions, it can lead to consolidation. It’s a quick slide from there into monopolies that “can do what any monopoly does, which is increase costs and decrease service and availability—so you pay more for crappier service,” Roberts notes.
Most American commodity farmers already understand this; they’ve already lived through the advent of consolidation in the seed industry.
“You can grow seed from your own bins as long as you’re not doing something with the genetic trait that’s protected,” Watne says. “But all the new technology out there is being held pretty much in three companies, and we’re paying more for our seed than we ever have.”
As technological advancements that push the farming-as-a-service model proliferate across the farming industry as a whole, “the larger [farms] are more and more going to be leasing equipment rather than owning it,” Fraas says, eliminating the need for local businesses that traditionally serve local farms while enabling the transfer of ownership, and the power that comes with it, to companies rather than people.
Larger farms have less economic activity in the community, fewer farm laborers and owners, and “some less numeric qualities such as less feelings about ownership in the community or interest in participation in the community,” Fraas says of research on industrial farming in rural communities. The opposite was found to be true in communities still buoyed by small- and medium-sized farms.
“What that does is in your local community you end up with fewer farmers and ranchers, and you have fewer people coming to town to do business,” Watne explains. “As those farms grow, they tend to buy further away which, again, hurts that local business. Then, you see these small towns starting to dry up,” unable to sustain local businesses, access to healthcare, grocers, and more.
“It’s serious, and it begs the question if that is what we really want to happen,” Frass says. That ag tech and efforts like Grand Farm will play a central role in this determination is undeniable.
‘Is That the World We Want to Live In?’
“Grand Farm sounds absolutely fantastic,” Rose says, but in the next breath he cautions that it’s important to ask the deeper questions that can stem from this kind of innovation. “It’s the Wild West, when you don’t have legal or ethical guidelines to govern [technological advancement].”
Both Roberts and Rose have taken the issues surrounding software and data ownership and more that recent technology has raised as an opportunity to interrogate the kind of world we want to live in and to start advocating for that vision of the future now.
The right to repair movement that Roberts is involved in—which, at its core, challenges the notions of eternal corporate ownership that software has created—is sweeping across industries, agriculture included. Their effort to fight back against unfair terms that limit farmer’s ability to repair, and thus effectively interact with their equipment, is a noble one, but their path isn’t easy, as manufacturers out-lobby equipment owners 28-1. While corporations have resources—to the tune of billions of dollars spent each year—to pour into lobbying Congress and other federal agencies on their behalf, local farmers simply don’t often have the same ability to get their voices heard.
What the right to repair movement has already accomplished, though, is a glimpse into the regulations that may be required if AI and ag tech are going to be as beneficial to users as they are to the companies that make them. “We need new laws to really make clear that owners own things. Even if they’ve got software on them,” Roberts says. “Anything that the company would use to repair it, the owner should have that, too.”
“I often hate top-down [rules], but when you’re dealing with some of these big players, it’s really only governments that have teeth to do something about it,” Rose adds. Any change, according to Rose, results in winners and losers. For him, this doesn’t mean we should curtail advancements like Grand Farm. But it does mean that extra thought should be given to those on the losing end and put plans in place to support them along the way.
“The future of farming with tech might make more food, but is it all worth it? And is that the world we want to live in?” he asks.
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]]>Right now, it typically takes four days, on average, to send data files and receive the high-resolution drone images on a thumb drive via FedEx. “That is not good enough,” Blair laments. Ideally, he could get the data in real-time as he flies the drone.
“Farmers are essentially plant doctors,” says Blair, pictured above. “We have to understand what’s happening to those plants.” On a four-wheeler, he says, can see only about 5 percent of a 60-acre field—roughly 10 feet in any direction down individual rows—compared to 100 percent via drones. “With imagery I make better management decisions”—those that keep his crops producing enough and help him reduce inputs like fertilizers and pesticides, says Blair. “I just want the information in a timely fashion.”
A quadcopter drone flies over a garbanzo field. (Photo courtesy of Robert Blair)
He’s not alone in his frustration. Nationally, only 65 percent of rural residents have access to broadband technology. That may soon change, however. In April, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced a $20.4 billion rural broadband fund to increase rural access over the next 10 years. At the same time, several presidential candidates are promoting big-dollar proposals to expand rural broadband, notably Senator Elizabeth Warren’s $85 billion plan.
In April, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) published “A Case For Rural Broadband,” a report detailing the potential return on the broadband investment. The USDA estimates that deployment of broadband—when combined with next-generation precision agriculture technology—would generate at least $64.5 billion in annual economic benefits. According to the report, row crops such as corn and soy will gain 4 percent in gross economic benefits, while livestock and specialty crops (i.e., fruits, nuts, and vegetables) would gain 7 percent and 19 percent, respectively.
It’s an eye-popping increase—and one that presumes broadband is the only hurdle farmers must overcome to adopt more sustainable technologies and practices. Broadband will undoubtedly help transform rural farming communities—by providing economic development opportunities, such as online sales, and encouraging young people to stay. When it comes to the sustainability of small farmers in particular, high-speed internet access offers them a fighting chance to find new markets and stay competitive, but it may also set the stage for a new wave of consolidations.
Precision Agriculture is a Driving Force
Precision agriculture is a catch-all term for a range of data-intensive tools—including yield monitoring and mapping, soil nutrient mapping, guidance systems to apply nutrients or pesticides, and variable rate fertilizer application technologies. The goal of these technologies is to deliver plant needs as exactly as possible on a farmer’s field, saving input costs and maximizing yield.
A command station set up with an early drone at Three Canyon Farms. (Photo courtesy of Robert Blair)
To that end, Robert Blair has proven that by using data he can save significant amounts of fertilizer. Over the last few years, he’s identified four zones with different nutrient needs. By varying the fertilizer application rates accordingly, he has saved up to $20 per acre and decreased nitrogen runoff without compromising his yields. Blair’s operation is more sustainable—economically and environmentally. He thinks increased connectivity could only improve his real-time decision making.
But, Blair notes, broadband is just one of many obstacles to more widespread adoption of precision agriculture tools. He thinks government incentives and increased local expertise to help farmers use these new tools will be needed. “We need the experts on the ground to help growers do their job, so we don’t have to become IT or GIS [geospatial analysis] experts,” he says.
The experts on the ground agree. “If we offer broadband overnight, that doesn’t mean everybody would adopt everything in precision agriculture,” says Bradley Lubben, an agricultural economist at University of Nebraska in Lincoln.
While broadband is critical, it’s not sufficient, Lubben adds. The hurdles that may stymie adoption of precision agriculture tools include the cost of the technology, the tech-savviness of the farmer, and how close they are to retirement.
Despite relative affordability, many farmers still don’t use computers. A just-released 2019 USDA report found that 73 percent of farms have access to desktop or laptop computer, and 75 percent have access to the internet. Lubben published a 2016 study that found two predictors of the number of technologies adopted by farmers: cell phone use and a high number of row crop acres in the operation. Essentially, the wealthier, more tech-savvy farmers are the early adopters.
Regardless of high-speed internet availability, “a lot of the big guys already have [high-tech tools],” says Trish Kelly, managing director of Valley Vision, a Central California nonprofit research organization. They can afford big tractors with satellites or are able to put their own cell tower in. “It’s the smaller farmers that get left behind,” she says. And with those dynamics at play, it’s possible that increased adoption of these tools could lead to further consolidation, says Sarah Rotz, a social scientist who studies land and food politics at York University in Toronto.
Does Broadband Help Small Farmers?
While big farmers are better positioned with resources necessary to adopt precision agriculture tools, broadband gives small farmers a fighting chance to stay competitive. “We’ll not just see increased efficiency in the farm field, but also increased e-commerce and agritourism,” says Calvin Sandeen, broadband project coordinator for the Sonoma County Economic Development Board.
For many small farmers, internet connectivity can make or break their marketing. Maine-based cattle farmer Dan Kaplan sells high quality grass-fed beef direct to consumers. While the lack of rural broadband is not the only reason many small farms are struggling, Kaplan says, it is critical to developing online sales. “Without broadband, we would be stymied,” he adds.
Small farmer Johnathan Hladik, also the policy director for the Center for Rural Affairs in Nebraska, agrees. He sells his Berkshire pork and broiler chickens directly to customers who live in nearby cities, and the internet is a crucial tool in making that happen. “I can’t survive solely on the customers in this local area,” he says.
Johnathan Hladik’s family working on the farm. (Photo courtesy of Johnathan Hladik)
But Hladik notes that reliable, affordable broadband has another important role in rural communities—to keep them from further depopulating. Nebraska’s population is shrinking in rural places. “We tend to produce, grow, and export young people,” says Lubben. In fact, rural communities all over the country are finding it difficult to hold onto the next generation. Sandeen has worked with members of the small town of Timber Cove, California, who say it feels like their rural community is dying as young people continue to move out. For them, “getting reliable, fast internet service is the light at the end of the tunnel,” he says.
Hladik confirms connectivity is crucial, especially for young farm families—in part because so many of them have to work off the farm to make ends meet. “The days when one family can survive on just farming alone are, if not totally over, close to it,” says Hladik, who feels fortunate to have good internet access.
In Nebraska’s rural areas, only 58 percent have broadband capable of least 25 megabytes per second (Mb/sec) download and 3 Mb/sec upload speeds. (For comparison, one 2018 study found average speeds in the U.S. were 96 Mb/sec download and almost 33 Mb/sec upload.) “Broadband opens up other job options—for example, via telecommuting—to make it financially viable for young people to return to rural communities and raise kids here,” he says.
As aging farmers leave the profession amidst narrowing profit margins, rising labor costs, and shifting trading partners, it’s fair to suggest the next generation of farmers won’t exist without broadband. “To exist as a business in 2019 without the internet is hard to fathom, really,” says Evan Wiig, director of membership and communications for the Community Alliance with Family Farmers and the Farmers Guild.
When Rotz looks at the impacts of technology, she asks “who’s winning and who tends to lose?” Since big farms are better positioned to take advantage of high-tech tools, the trend toward a small number of larger and larger farms producing more and more of the food we eat is likely to continue, says Rotz. She adds that precarious and vulnerable populations are more likely to lose. “We really don’t see these tech investments helping to support for instance on-farm safety or health, or support for unionization of migrant farm workers,” she says.
While Wiig agrees that specific technologies have the potential to lead to more consolidations, he says he’s more concerned with the “political environment that encourages and turns a blind eye to monopolization in the food industry.” Greater connectivity, he argues, gives farmers a collective voice. “Anonymous farmers have no power. The more disconnected and voiceless a farmer is, the less say they have in getting a fair price.”
To that end, increased broadband availability offers opportunities for greater communication and education across vast rural areas. For example, Wiig increasingly hosts webinar series for small acreage farmers, on topics such as disaster preparedness. He also plans to post online videos of new tools and equipment at the Small Farm Tech Expo he is spearheading in December in Forestville, California.
“I struggle to come down hard on the extent to which broadband will have an impact and on whom, because it depends on the farmer you speak to,” says Rotz. What is worrisome, she adds, is that these technologies can be adopted by farmers in ways that very much enlist them into a cycle of data production that can best serve tech and equipment companies.
Who Has Access to the Data?
Whether increased access to broadband would help independent farmers manage, analyze, and interpret high-tech data—and turn the aggregate of observations into farmer-specific fertilizer rate applications or seed choices—by themselves is another question, says Lubben. “An awful lot of yield data that generates pretty maps doesn’t translate to changed production practices, because they don’t know how to take next steps,” he adds. Perhaps not surprisingly, the number of consultants and large companies who are in the business of helping producers make those decisions is growing. And that leads to yet another reason why farmers don’t adopt technologies—concerns about data ownership and access.
Climate Corp, a unit of Bayer AG (formerly Monsanto), is just one of several data analysis providers that collect farmers’ yield, rainfall, fertilizer use, rotations, and other bits of information while building models aimed at maximizing yield. Another firm, Indigo Agriculture, aims to do nothing short of disrupt agriculture by harnessing Big Data to help farmers mass customize, rather than mass produce, crops. The move, according to a recent New Food Economy article, suggests that “the commodity system’s days are numbered.”
Even though data sharing is necessary to aggregate vast amounts of information in order to best guide an individual farmer’s management options, it’s not always clear how and where the data will be stored—and whether it will remain confidential. While attention has focused primarily on “who owns the data,” says Lubben, “the real question may be who has access to or control of the data.” Some farmers worry the data will be used to sell the company’s products or manipulate the market. And then there are concerns that the government could use the data—particularly if regulators wanted to monitor practices for environmental outcomes.
As efforts to increase rural broadband availability get underway, however, Rotz calls into question whether the public policy landscape is set up to support farmers—and especially small farmers, during this kind of massive shift. “We’re expecting people to transition when we haven’t created any economic or political conditions to make that transition, when this is their livelihood,” says Rotz. “We know farmers are in more debt than they ever have been. In order to obtain capital, they need to grow bigger. That’s the treadmill they’ve been on for 60 to 70 years now. I don’t think technology will free us from that,” she says.
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]]>The post Synthetic Biology Is Changing What We Eat. Here’s What You Need to Know. appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>What consumers may not realize, however, is that many of these new foods are made using synthetic biology, an emerging science that applies principles of genetic engineering to create life forms from scratch.
Originally used to produce medicines, biofuels, and super bacteria designed to eat oil spills, synthetic biology is increasingly being applied to the production of food and fiber—from vegan burgers to “spider silk,” feed for farmed fish, synthetic flavors, and animal-free egg whites. A California accelerator, IndieBio, is helping to churn out many of these new businesses. Synthetic biology applications span from simple gene editing combined with fermentation processes, to cellular meats that culture food products from animal cells in the lab, to gene drive applications intended to change an organism’s genetics in the environment, such as a mosquito’s ability to spread malaria. For purposes of this discussion, we focus on products and processes that rely on gene editing combined with fermentation.
Synthetic biologists identify the gene sequences that give food or fiber certain qualities, like the gooiness of cheese or the tensile strength of silk. Often, it’s a protein produced by plant or animal cells that imparts the desired quality. Once identified, the gene sequence for that protein is created chemically in a lab and inserted into yeast or bacteria cells. Then, much like brewing beer, a fermentation process turns the microbes into tiny factories that mass produce the desired protein—which is then used as a food ingredient or spun into fiber. The Impossible Burger, for example, contains an engineered heme, a protein originally derived from soy plant roots, that gives the burger its pseudo-meat flavor, color, and texture.
Most of the companies using synthetic biology are still in the startup phase and may fail to gain traction, just as the earlier applications of synthetic biology for biofuels failed to reach scale. But there are billions of dollars in funding behind these products, and plenty of desire for them to succeed. And while many synbio products promise to use fewer natural resources, similar to cellular “meat,” a general lack of public information and transparency from many companies about their processes and what their supply chains will entail when brought to scale leaves unanswered questions about the safety and ultimate environmental, economic, and social sustainability of these products.
In the interest of trying to track down answers to some of these questions, Civil Eats asked six companies using synthetic biology, as well as two industry associations—including Bolt Threads, Impossible Foods, Gingko Bioworks, and IndieBio—for comment; although many declined to comment, the answers we received—plus the many questions that remain unanswered—suggest how much we still need to know about the potential impacts of this food of the future.
How it Works: Fish Food as an Example—and a Source of Concern
Each synthetic biology process is unique, but take the example of bacteria-based fish feed produced by KnipBio, the first company of its kind to receive U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) approval as GRAS (“generally recognized as safe”). KnipBio uses a microbe commonly found on leaves that naturally produce carotenoids, anti-oxidants that can be vital for fish health.
Through simple edits to the bacteria’s genetic makeup, KnipBio CEO Larry Feinberg says he can “turn up or turn down the valves to make things of interest,” like variations on the carotenoids. Next, he ferments the microorganisms in a tank, feeding them methanol—an alcohol derived from methane gas—or corn waste by-products to stimulate them to reproduce and make the carotenoids. The fermented bacteria are then pasteurized and dried, which Feinberg says kills them, and formulated into a flour that is milled into fish feed. It has taken KnipBio five years to refine this process.
Critics say that synthetic biology’s dangers lie in the potential release of gene-edited organisms into the wild, human health impacts, and disruption to agricultural communities, should engineered food or fiber displace natural products.
Rebecca Burgess, the founder of Fibershed, which last fall produced a report with ETC Group on the hazards of clothing made from genetically modified or synbio-derived materials, questions the efficacy of methods to keep gene-edited material from getting into the environment. “The concern is that they’re using base life forms that grow rapidly and transfer genes rapidly and they’re not considering the future of genetic pollution.”
Feinberg responded to this concern by saying that ensuring microbes are dead before release outside the lab is “microbiology 101,” like milk pasteurization. Nevertheless, “there should be, and will be, safety redundancy built into containment at an industrial biotech operation,” he adds. Furthermore, Feinberg says that research shows that modified bacteria tend to revert back to their “wild type” when they’re no longer housed in the optimized conditions created in the lab.
Piers Millet, vice president of safety and security at iGEM, a non-profit organization that runs a global synthetic biology competition, agrees. “One of synthetic biology’s biggest challenges is getting the new traits to stick past a few generations [which typically last days or weeks]. In almost every case, the alterations you’re making make those organisms less suitable for natural environments.”
That challenge leaves Michael Tlusty, associate professor of sustainability and food solutions at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, “guardedly optimistic” that synthetic biology will have beneficial applications, like the creation of alternative fish feeds to reduce the pressure on forage fish. Tlusty also notes, “we’ve been editing bacteria for a long time, medically, such as for insulin.”
Health Impacts?
Bacterial engineering processes for medicine have been established for 40 years. We’ve also been editing bacteria to create the vegetable rennet in cheeses since 1990. In fact, 90 percent of U.S. cheese today is produced with what’s known as fermentation-produced chymosin, or FPC, a vegetable rennet.
There are no reports of health or environmental impacts from FPC to date, but neither does it appear that anyone has researched the question.
The main health concern with synthetic biology products is that they add new proteins to foods, and those new proteins may be allergenic or otherwise unsafe to eat, says Dana Perls, senior food and agriculture campaigner with Friends of the Earth. “We need to understand the short- and long-term impacts before these ingredients and products enter the market or the environment,” she says of products genetically engineered to replace animal products, and stresses the need for stronger regulations for all genetic engineering.
Most consumers wouldn’t know that the cheese they buy is produced using gene modification, because it isn’t labeled as GMO. The FDA ruled that because FPC was identical to the chymosin found in animal rennet, it didn’t require labeling.
GMO labeling laws in the U.S. don’t apply to products made using synthetic biology, which makes it tough for consumers to make informed choices. Most recently, the FDA announced that labeling isn’t required for ingredients made from GMO crops if no modified genetic material is detectable.
Cell-based meat, which is grown in a lab by multiplying entire stem cells taken from animal muscle, will be regulated by both the FDA and the U.S. Deparment of Agriculture (USDA), though it’s not yet clear what that means in practice.
Synthetic biology is advancing so meteorically, regulatory schemes are hard pressed to keep up, Millet says, adding that, besides national laws, the industry follows World Health Organization biosafety guidance and other international regulations. But that guidance is updated every five years, so there can be a lag before the newest technology will be considered.
“The new wave of genetic engineering is slipping through very large loopholes,” says Perls. “People who are trying to purchase food or clothing that reflects their values are in the dark.”
Social Disruption Ahead?
As a disruptive technology, advocates fear that synthetic biology may also pose harm to the livelihoods of farmers, particularly in the developing world.
Oakland Institute’s Executive Director Anuradha Mittal is especially concerned that the rise of synthetic biology for products such as vanilla, coconut oil, and silk poses a threat to the livelihoods of smallholder and indigenous farmers if those engineered products replace their natural counterparts. Many of these farmers, like the Filipino coconut growers facing super typhoons year after year, are on the front lines of climate change, and Mittal notes that synbio alternatives could increase their vulnerability at a time when they need solid markets to help them adapt to climate change.
“These artificial solutions that are manufactured in petri dishes threaten smallholder farmers,” she told Civil Eats. “The devastation of women’s livelihoods in particular in India would be huge from these fancy silks.”
Fibershed’s Burgess worries that artisanal farmers and agroecologists could lose their sovereign rights if the synthetic biology world takes over fiber production and patents its processes.
Burgess’ concerns of farmer’s livelihoods being displaced are not unfounded, according to Todd Kuiken, senior research scholar at the Genetic Engineering & Society Center at North Carolina State University. “There are winners and losers. All of that needs to be evaluated and put on the table so people can make informed decisions,” says Kuiken, who previously led the Wilson Center’s Synthetic Biology Project. Companies need to conduct full life cycle assessments of their products, including both environmental and socio-economic impacts, he says. He knows of few companies that have done this, however.
Finally, Feedstocks
Fermentation requires carbohydrates—think barley or wheat for beer brewing—and that raises a key sustainability concern: What feedstocks will be used, and how much?
U.S. synbio companies are largely using sugar from GMO corn, because of its abundant supply, according to Bolt Threads, a leading manufacturer of Spider Silk, on its website, adding, “It is widely believed that large-scale fermentation will be possible with non-food crops … in the future.”
Some companies like KnipBio, however, are choosing to work from day one with more sustainable feedstocks, like agricultural waste or methane gas. “Feedstocks that don’t compete with humans—that has to be part of the consideration. We have to make things more efficient,” says Feinberg.
FOE’s Perls worries that synbio companies could simply perpetuate “unsustainable, pesticide-intensive, industrial agriculture,” by requiring massive amounts of GMO corn or sugar cane.
“If we now have to scale monoculture 2,4-D corn to feed these fermentation tanks,” notes Fibershed’s Burgess, “what does that mean for the [U.S.] Midwest or the Cerrado in Brazil?”
Until recently, life cycle assessments that could answer the feedstock question were hard to come by. Recently, Impossible Burger became the first to release an environmental life cycle analysis of its burger. Peer-reviewed and produced by independent auditor Quantis, the assessment found that the Impossible Burger requires 87 percent less water, 96 percent less land, and produces 89 percent fewer greenhouse gas emissions than an equivalent beef burger.
The heme protein that’s synthetically produced is but one ingredient of the burger, which is made from plant-based proteins, fats, oils, and binders. Spider silks or other products that are principally made from proteins produced by synthetic biology will likely have a different footprint that may or may not be as environmentally beneficial.
And while Impossible Burger has taken initiative on environmental transparency, its life cycle analysis didn’t consider potential socio-economic impacts. That’s important, says Kuiken, because “say Impossible Burger takes over the world: You’d reduce the number of animal products; you need to understand all of [the] socio-economic interaction[s]” of a reduction in demand for products from farmers and ranchers and the resulting impacts on their livelihoods.
Need for Dialogue
For those raising these questions, the lack of information and transparency on the part of most synbio companies fuels mistrust and prevents broader dialogue about the best solutions for the future of food, much like the lack of transparency on the part of cellular ag startups.
Garrett Broad’s 2017 essay in Civil Eats, “Why We Should Make Room for Debate about High-Tech Meat,” speaks to the dilemma. “I find myself with mixed feelings about the whole enterprise,” Broad wrote. “On one hand, I’m skeptical that these technological fixes will automatically lead us to some sort of agricultural utopia. But I’m also concerned that many who identify with the food movement might be missing out on the chance to shape the future of food because they’re turning their backs on food science altogether.”
iGEM’s Millet acknowledges there is some consumer distrust. “My feeling is that a lot of the leftover concerns about genetic modification has to do with the nature of power relationships, about very powerful companies controlling technology,” he says. “But that doesn’t mean we can’t have a different type of relationship.”
Dialogue with impacted communities is key, he says. Furthermore, Millet believes that synthetic biology can be used “to create a much fairer world, where people have more access to the tools they need to solve the problems challenging them, as opposed to mega-corporations selling the solution to them.” He cites an iGEM project in Sumbawa, Indonesia, where a poor community used synthetic biology to develop a genetic test to stop the pirating of its famous honey, a key revenue source for the island.
That vision of a fairer future is shared by others, like Oakland’s Counter Culture Labs, a “community supported microbiology maker space,” but not necessarily by the synbio companies remaining tight-lipped about their enterprises.
As in any industry, there are a range of players, with some more focused on sustainability than others. Whether synthetic biology can meet its promise by helping address some of agriculture’s biggest impacts and feeding the world—without causing harm—remains to be seen and will likely be project-dependent.
In the meantime, “people want real food, they want transparency, and nobody wants to be an experiment,” says Perls.
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]]>That future seemed one step closer to reality last year when San Francisco-based indoor farming startup Plenty, which grows a variety of salad and leafy greens hydroponically (without soil) and uses artificial lighting in facilities in three locations, announced that it had raised a whopping $200 million in funding from the SoftBank Vision Fund, whose investors include Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
Flush with cash, Plenty quickly opened a 100,000-square-foot indoor farm outside Seattle that promised to produce 4.5 million pounds of greens annually—and testing some varieties not yet grown for the masses at scale, such as strawberries and tomatoes, at its research and development farm in Wyoming. To Plenty’s leadership and many observers, the cash influx signaled the economic promise of growing food indoors without sunlight and with less soil and water than field farming.
Photo courtesy of Plenty.
“My reaction [to the $200 million round] was both that of validation, excitement,” said Matt Barnard, Plenty’s co-founder and CEO, over a manner of farming he says yields 350 times the produce per acre on one percent of the water used by dirt farming. “Now we must move with speed and efficiency if we’re to accomplish our mission of bringing people worldwide an experience that’s healthier for them and the planet.”
Not everyone is in agreement.
“My first thought was, ‘we could build a lot of greenhouses for $200 million,’” recalls Neil Mattson, a professor of plant science at Cornell and one of the country’s leading academic voices on indoor agriculture, who’s found that high-tech greenhouses that harness sunlight are more cost- and carbon-friendly than vertical farms that use artificial light.
Most vertical farmers are only hoping to claim a percentage of the conventional produce market, not replace it. To these founders and their investors, the market for lettuce and greens, especially—grown primarily in California and Arizona and shipped worldwide—is ripe for disruption. E. coli outbreaks like the one that hit Arizona-grown romaine lettuce earlier this year, killing a handful of people and sickening hundreds, only further their case.
But behind futurists’ fervent predictions about indoor agriculture, claims about product quality, and sexy technology lies a reality known by industry insiders but too often missing from media coverage: The future success of this nascent industry is still very much an open question.
The astronomical capital costs associated with starting a large hydroponic farm (compared to field and greenhouse farming), its reliance on investor capital and yet-to-be-developed technology, and challenges around energy efficiency and environmental impact make vertical farming anything but a sure bet. And even if vertical farms do scale, there’s no clear sense of whether brand-loyal consumers, en masse, will make the switch from field-grown produce to foods grown indoors.
Tricky Economics
Walking into any supermarket will reveal a small mountain of salad greens, carrying a price tag of between $9 and $12 per pound. They may be locally grown or organic, which will add $0.50 or $1 to the price tag. Meanwhile, a 4.5-ounce carton of Massachusetts-based FreshBox Farms’ spring mix—grown in the company’s hydroponic farm in Massachusetts—costs $3.99 for a 4-ounce box, or $15.96 per pound. Or kale: the conventional variety will run you $1.33 per pound at Walmart; organic kale costs around $4.99 per pound at Whole Foods; and vertically farmed kale grown at Newark, New Jersey-based AeroFarms will cost you a whopping $14.18 per pound.
That dramatic price gap is due to the millions of dollars currently needed to build one large indoor vertical farm—and that price is not going to drop until the industry scales up. Agritecture Consulting, whose clients include current and prospective indoor farms, estimates that a 30,000-square-foot vertical farm growing leafy greens and herbs in the tri-state area around New York City requires nearly $4 million in startup capital—not including labor.
They should know: In 2016, Agritecture built farm.one in Manhattan’s TriBeCa neighborhood, which supplies hydroponic greens and edible flowers to a number of the city’s top restaurants. Chefs have been quick to catch onto the value of consistent, year-round, locally grown produce.
A farm.one indoor farming operation. (Photo courtesy of farm.one.)
In 2016, AeroFarms, now considered an industry leader, spent $30 million on its flagship aeroponic farm in Newark. The majority of these costs lie in the equipment needed to grow greens without soil or sunlight—heating and cooling systems, ventilation, shading, environmental controls, and lights.
All of these costs add up to a hefty electricity bill: According to models compiled for Civil Eats by Agritecture, a 30,000-square-foot vertical farm in metro New York City should budget upwards of $216,000 annually for lighting and power, and another $120,000 on HVAC systems; costs will vary region to region depending on what each state charges for electricity.
Energy and equipment costs are, by far, the largest drivers of expenses that can bring the price of operating a vertical farm close to $27 per square foot. By contrast, Agritecture’s models show that the cost to run a 100,000-square-foot smart greenhouse is roughly a third as expensive, thanks to the use of natural sunlight and more advanced automation.
Vertical farms’ energy usage carries a significant carbon footprint. While vertical farm companies promise more-sustainable produce by growing it closer to consumers and using renewable energy to power their operations, the industry still has a long row to hoe.
Industry leaders acknowledge the energy challenges in the short term, yet tout continually improving lighting technology that has brought down costs. But Mattson, whose Cornell team studies the way plants respond to different lighting, predicts a plateau coming for improvements to LED technology.
LEDs lighting an indoor farming operation. (Photo courtesy of Agritecture.)
“The best LEDs are 40 percent more energy efficient than in 2014,” Mattson says. “There continue to be improvements; however, those improvements will start to slow down over time. There’s only a finite amount of light you can generate at a given wavelength, and in 2022, I’m not expecting new lights to be 40 percent more efficient than the current lights now.”
FreshBox Farms began shipping greens from its 40,000-square-foot hydroponic facility in Millis, Massachusetts, in 2015. The warehouse farm, located 30 miles outside of Boston, runs on a combination of renewable energy and non-renewables, and CFO Dave Vosburg admits his company is “not doing any better” than field-grown greens when it comes to carbon usage.
When it eventually expands outside of Massachusetts, Vosberg says that by introducing a cogeneration system—technology that recycles otherwise wasted heat into new energy—FreshBox Farms will eventually keep costs and carbon emissions down in expensive markets like Connecticut, where commercial users pay an average of more than 14 cents per kilowatt-hour. But Vosburg says the company’s priority is to use contextually appropriate renewable energy sources to power the farms, such as wind energy in the Midwest, hydro in the Northwest, and solar in the Southwest.
“Yes, it sounds crazy to take the sun and turn it into electricity and turn that electricity back into light. It sounds ridiculous, but that’s what we’ll be doing,” Vosburg says. “It’ll be really efficient and clean and create a better product, and it won’t have the same carbon impact that we’re having today.”
And energy isn’t even a vertical farm’s top ongoing expense. The companies Civil Eats spoke to say labor is actually their largest budget item. Vertical farms typically pay workers higher, more metropolitan pay rates than both dirt farms—many of which rely heavily on migrant labor—and the more automated smart greenhouses. The fast-food chain Wendy’s announced in June that it plans to source vine-ripened tomatoes exclusively from greenhouse farms by early 2019.
Moreover, no matter how automated the indoor growing system is, vertical farmers are discovering the constant need for a human eye—or several—on the process. In fact, some estimate that if indoor agriculture continues to grow at the pace it has in recent years, vertical farms will have to hire 100,000 workers over the next decade.
That continued growth is not a given, however. Because of the high cost to launch, operate, and scale up a vertical farming operation, the industry is highly leveraged, with each new farm requiring tens of millions of dollars in investor capital before it can grow a single plant. Between 2016 and 2017, investments in vertical farming skyrocketed 653 percent, from $36 million to $271 million. The lion’s share of that investment went to Plenty, but Newark-based AeroFarms has raised $80 million in recent years and New Jersey’s Bowery Farming added another $27 million.
Just last week, Manhattan-based BrightFarms announced it had raised $55 million. Shoppers can now find produce grown indoors by more than 23 large vertical farms in more than 20 supermarket chains in nearly every major metropolitan area in the country, according to Agritecture.
While industry leaders say scaling offers the best hope for profitability in this business, many vertical farms have encountered problems when they began planning to add additional production facilities. Before Atlanta-based PodPonics closed its doors in 2016, executives from the five-year-old hydroponic farm startup met with executives from supermarket chain Kroger.
Kroger indicated that it was ready to purchase 25 million pounds of produce from PodPonics annually if it would build the facilities to support that kind of production, founder Matt Liotta told a crowd at the 2017 Aglanta Conference. According to Liotta, who said PodPonics had lowered the cost to produce a pound of lettuce to $1.36, Whole Foods and Fresh Market also expressed interest in bringing PodPonics greens into their stores nationally.
“This was our wildest dream,” Liotta said. “Then we realized how much capital that was going to require, how many people we were going to have to hire. Every retailer told us the same thing: ‘We will buy it if you will build it.’ We realized we were incapable of building everything that they wanted.”
Unproven Demand for Food Grown Indoors
In early 2016, researchers from the University of Illinois-Urbana set out to determine whether consumers would spring for produce grown indoors. They asked a panel of 117 participants a series of questions about their perceptions of and willingness to pay for lettuce grown in fields, greenhouses, and in vertical farms. While vertical farming ranked fairly high in terms of produce quality and safety, the tech-heavy production method was rated less “natural” than both field farming and greenhouse and ranked last in participants’ willingness to purchase it.
Photo courtesy of Plenty
For the vertical agriculture industry to eat into the profits of field-grown products—a roughly $140 billion industry—Agritecture Consulting founder and managing director Henry Gordon-Smith says it will first need to prove consumers are demanding produce grown indoors. He points out that because of a lack of demand, many vertical farming operations are not yet at full production year-round—despite touting the 12-month growing season as a main benefit of the industry.
His sense is that indoor farms that have achieved the sales to produce continually—such as Gotham Greens has with its New York City greenhouses, for example—have a customer base that’s responding to strong “local” branding rather than the technology behind the food. That may include vertical farms selling their produce using the USDA Certified Organic label, which the National Organic Board reaffirmed in January, much to the dismay of many organic dirt farmers.
Gotham Greens’ greenhouse (photo courtesy of Reana Kovalcik)
“I think the automation and economics are all improving,” Gordon-Smith says, adding that the question of “whether consumers are going to pay more or whether the products coming out of vertical farms are going to align with their values” is still an open question.
But while many of the East Coast vertical farms built their business models around replacing greens being shipped cross-country from California and Arizona, Matt Barnard of Plenty hopes to add to the global population consuming fresh produce. A 2015 report found that where USDA guidelines suggest each of us in the U.S. should eat up to three cups of vegetables daily, current U.S. production is only providing enough for 1.7 cups per person. Barnard extends that supply gap to the rest of the world, especially the Middle East and Asia, where a lack of water and high pollution have hampered agriculture.
Plenty CEO Matt Barnard. (Photo courtesy of Plenty.)
“We believe the industry will be five times larger when there is supply to meet the demand,” Barnard says. “With the field unable to deliver consistent supply, new forms of agricultural capacity like Plenty must be added to the global food system.”
But as vertical farming companies like Plenty go city by city attempting to dominate local markets, it may be that small farmers get hurt the most. Barnard drew the ire of Washington State dirt farmers last year when he told GeekWire that Plenty expanded to Seattle, in part, because it was the West Coast’s “best example of a large community of people who really don’t have much access to any fresh fruits and vegetables grown locally.”
Not so, according to Sofia Gidlund, Farm Programs Manager at Tilth Alliance, which advocates for and supports local agriculture systems in Greater Seattle.
“We work with many hardworking local farmers who supply Seattle with high-quality, delicious, and nutritious food while caring deeply for our land. These farmers use sustainable farming practices, nurse the soil, create beautiful open green space and provide wildlife habitat,” says Gidlund, who adds that she does not speak for all area farmers on the issue of vertical farming. “Many consumers in Seattle choose to support local farmers, both urban or rural, because of this deep connection to the land. Providing that support is a point of pride for many Seattleites.”
Actual Data Is Coming
Peer-reviewed research into the business of vertical farming has been sparse, partly because the industry is so new. That’s set to change, however, when Mattson and a team of researchers at Cornell University finish a comprehensive study into the viability of this approach.
A three-year, $2.4 million research grant, which is funded by the National Science Foundation and kicked off in January, will compare the vertical farming industry to field agriculture in a slew of categories, including energy, carbon, and water footprints, profitability, workforce development, and scalability. The study will include one of the first nutritional analyses of food grown indoors, as well as comparing the price-per-pound to deliver strawberries, lettuce, and tomatoes grown vertically and outdoors to five U.S. metropolitan areas: New York City, Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles, and Atlanta.
A 2016 study conducted by a few of Mattson’s colleagues at Cornell found that the energy consumption and carbon footprint associated with a vertical farm (the study calls it a “plant factory”) is significantly higher than that of a greenhouse. Vertical farming leaders counter that they use significantly less water than field farms, are more space-efficient, and do not produce emissions from trucking produce across the country. Mattson says these factors were not considered in Cornell’s previous research but will be included in the current grant.
“[Vertical farming] is not a fad,” says Mattson, who wants to use data to help the industry become more sustainable over time. “I’m not sure to what degree it’s going to scale up, but this is happening. So we need to understand the economic and environmental implications—both the good and the bad.”
Update: This article was updated to reflect the fact that Plenty is testing its strawberry and tomato crops in Wyoming, not at its facility in Washington state.
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]]>The post PastureMap Brings a High-Tech Approach to Sustainable Grazing appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>But beef producers face criticism for their product’s impact on the environment—from land degradation to high greenhouse gas emissions caused by manure storage, feed production, and even the way cattle digest food. Through her startup PastureMap, entrepreneur Christine Su hopes to improve those practices while helping ranchers increase their bottom line.
PastureMap helps ranchers raise climate-friendly beef. The software platform helps them manage their grazing land and strategically graze their herds in a sustainable way. “If you let your cattle run all over the place and continuously graze, they’ll overgraze,” Su says. But strategic grazing can prevent soil erosion, improve soil nutrients, and even reverse emissions by sinking carbon into the soil, she says. This is called regenerative agriculture. “It raises food in a way that heals the land rather than further extracting from and eroding it,” she says.
Using PastureMap on their phones, ranchers manage grazing history and planning, keep track of herd information like weights and health issues, document grass and soil health, and keep their whole ranching team informed. The information is stored in one place and is easy to analyze, for short-term decisions like where to graze the herd that day, to long-term decisions like planning out future pastures or placing water tanks and fencing.
Sample image from TomKat Ranch. PastureMap pulls together satellite maps, farm records, rainfall, and aerial imaging from providers like TerrAvion. (Courtesy of Pasturemap)
Su started PastureMap in 2014, and co-founder George Lee joined in 2016. Today it employs 11 people and is used by over 9,000 farmers and ranchers in 40 countries. Financial investors and social impact funders have pumped $3.2 million into the company.
The Startup Path
Su’s interest in the food chain evolved from her own food allergies, which developed when she was an undergraduate at Stanford University. She sought out farmers markets to find locally raised produce and dairy products that wouldn’t give her hives. There, she began meeting local farmers, and her interest in food production was piqued.
Christine Su. (Photo courtesy of Pasturemap)
After she graduated, Su worked at consulting firm McKinsey & Co., where she worked with large food brands. Later, she worked at private equity giant KKR & Co. as an operations executive. She built supply chain improvement processes and operations software in portfolio companies that were earning $500 million to $2 billion in revenue. She realized that she wanted to use her skills to help farmers improve farm productivity and profits.
In the Fields
Su started her MBA at Stanford Graduate School of Business in 2012 and spent her summer breaks working on farms. At an internship on a 60-cow dairy farm in Hokkaido, Japan, she milked cows, shoveled manure, baled hay, and helped birth calves. In her spare moments, she conducted a study measuring how fast the farmhands could milk, and drew a diagram of where to place the milking tools to speed up those times. “I couldn’t help myself,” she says of her passion for improving on-farm processes.
Her in-the-field learning did not end there. She spent a summer working at organics giant Earthbound Farm in California’s Salinas Valley, known as the “Salad Bowl of the World” for its prolific lettuce production. At Mountain Hazelnuts in Bhutan, she learned the challenges of subsistence farming, and built an operations data tracking system for 150 field agents in the Himalayas to monitor tree health using mobile phones. And at the New Zealand Merino Co., she spent a summer interviewing high country merino wool shepherds about their grazing practices and measuring pasture quality data with field scientists.
“I kept noticing as I worked on more and more farms that these farmers keep all their records on paper,” Su says. “I would go into barns and see a chart on the walls. They run their whole lives on paper.” The record-keeping, she says, was cumbersome and often ignored, and the data wasn’t digitized in a way that could help the farmers derive the full value of their records.
“Here is something I can do,” she recalls thinking. “I can’t bale hay as well. I can’t pull a calf as well. I can’t doctor an animal as well as a farmer. But I do know metrics. I do know how to make the core value drivers of their operation run better.”
Lydia Carpenter of Luna Field Farm in Manitoba is a next generation farmer selling regenerative meat to conscious consumers. Photo courtesy of Pasturemap.
She talked to 3,000 farmers and ranchers in person, and designed her own additional MS degree on sustainable grazing systems in the Stanford School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences to teach herself more about grassland management. During this time, she put into practice Steve Blank’s well-known lean startup method—find a problem, develop a minimally viable solution, and immediately get customer feedback—to mock up some wireframes on the image of a phone. She printed out fliers and went to Columbia, Missouri, to a grazing conference and showed her prototype to ranchers.
The MBA graduate stood out among the ranchers.
“A kindly older gentleman with a big belt asked me, ‘Ma’am, are you lost?’” she says. “Whenever I go to ranching conferences, I stick out.”
But her biggest challenge was learning the nuances of agriculture: the various types of farmers and their varied needs. “There are a million farmers in the United States, and they’re incredibly diverse,” she says. Some are tech curious, some just want to save time. Some might never use a tablet computer, but are interested in handing down a sustainable operation to the next generation.
Infographic courtesy of Pasturemap
Their knowledge has helped her continue to iterate her product. Since those wireframes, the company has overhauled the platform three times based on conversations with customers, refocusing from graphs and charts to displaying more visual interfaces, such as offline maps that ranchers can carry with them into the field.
Finding investors also took a precise focus. While more investors are becoming interested in agriculture, she specifically looks for those who understand agriculture and food systems on a deeper level. “Whenever I meet an investor who has some agriculture and soil health expertise, I’m much more interested in talking to them. Otherwise we spend a lot of time doing education.”
What’s trendy in Silicon Valley often has little relevance to the Salinas Valley, she says. “VCs are often very interested in the tech part of agtech. I would encourage VCs in agtech to get more interested in ag.”
Going Vertical
As it grows, PastureMap is focusing more on helping ranchers make money off their regenerative practices. “We are working with ranching cooperatives and beef brands now to help them monetize some of the data, not just for them getting more efficient on their own land base, but also being able to communicate that to the customer,” Su says.
For consumers, it could mean a label on the beef, indicating that because of how the animal was raised, it is more climate and environmentally friendly than the competitor on the shelf. It could also be digital. PastureMap is building an online map for consumers to find regenerative, climate-friendly ranchers—and for those ranchers to find each other.
“What we’re learning is you can optimize everything on land, but if we don’t help individual ranchers make more money marketing that beef, then they’re up against some pretty big industry barriers on commodity pricing,” Su says. “The regenerative beef sector is still small compared to commodity beef, but it’s the brightest light in beef right now and growing 25 to 30 percent every year. We are empowering these ranchers to find each other and build the future of the industry together.”
This piece was originally published by Stanford Graduate School of Business on Insights by Stanford Business.
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]]>The post Farm Runoff in U.S. Waters Has Hit Crisis Levels. Are Farmers Ready to Change? appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>The conventional farmer grows cover crops, tills less often than most of his neighbors, applies fertilizer to his fields 4-6 inches underground, and has planted several pollinator patches on his acreage—all in an effort to improve his soil and cut down on the amount of nitrogen and phosphorous that runs off his land in the winter.
When the Ohio Farm Bureau first asked him to talk about these practices as part of a multimedia website designed to educate farmers on how to protect their watersheds, he initially declined. “We’ve tried to stay under the radar, and just do our thing in our corner of the world,” he says, acknowledging that other farmers in his area will often talk at the local coffee shop whenever someone tries something new. “I’m not a coffee shop guy,” he added.
“It was out of my comfort zone to give up our information.” However, after long talks with his son, Shane, they decided it was time to share what they do. Kellogg fears that if farmers in this region don’t make progress to improve water quality soon, they’ll face government regulations.
In a video on the demo farm website, Kellogg explains: “We need to be proactive in showing our community and neighbors that we’re serious about taking care of the world around us.” The website provides 360-degree aerial tours of three farms in the Blanchard River watershed and gives users an intimate view of their fields. Kellogg and his son have given talks to around 1,400 people and another 1,000 visitors have stopped by the farm.
“If I didn’t have Shane pushing me on the technology end, I don’t know whether I’d be doing some of these things,” he says. “I know we’ve opened some peoples’ eyes.”
Across farm country, local and state governments, federal regulatory agencies, and farm groups are searching for lasting strategies to keep farm nutrients out waterways. But despite a robust combination of incentives or “carrots,” such as subsidies and cost-sharing programs, and increasingly, regulation, the problem remains dire.
The Size of the Problem
Kellogg is all too aware that many more eyes need to be opened to realize the Ohio Phosphorous Task Force’s goal of reducing excess phosphorous flowing off farms by 40 percent—the amount needed to reduce or eliminate algal blooms in Lake Erie. The Blanchard River is one of the waterways delivering farm runoff to the lake, where it fuels toxic algal blooms.
As they do throughout the Corn Belt, Ohio row crop farmers—notably of corn and soy—typically apply fertilizer on their fields in fall. When winter precipitation arrives, the system of tile drainage pipes used on 46 percent of farm fields provides a perfect pathway for fertilizer runoff to enter waterways. In fact, Lake Erie’s 2014 algae bloom left more than 400,000 residents of Toledo, Ohio without drinking water for three days.
Nitrogen pollution, in the form of dead zones, algal blooms, and contaminated drinking water, has gotten to be such a dire problem globally that the five-year, $60 million International Nitrogen Management System—a research effort patterned after the International Panel on Climate Change—was launched in 2016 to tackle the issue. In the U.S. alone, billions so far have been spent to encourage farmers to voluntarily adopt practices to improve water quality in the Chesapeake Bay and the Gulf of Mexico—yet neither region has seen significant change.
Algal blooms in Lake Erie on August 14, 2017. Credit: Aerial Associates Photography, Inc./Zachary Haslick
State and federal level governments have introduced a variety of cost-share incentive policies and other “carrots” to convince farmers to adopt conservation approaches, but few have successfully yielded the kinds of voluntary adoption necessary to make a lasting dent in the pollution. The 2008 U.S. Hypoxia Action plan, a national strategy to reduce the Gulf of Mexico’s annual dead zone to 5,000 square kilometers, had an ambitious goal of reducing nitrogen and phosphorous amounts by 45 percent by 2015, a deadline extended to 2035 amid dismal progress. The 2017 dead zone was the largest ever, at 15,032 square kilometers.
When carrots don’t work, governments are increasingly turning to the “stick” of regulation. Minnesota’s governor just proposed the state’s first-ever regulation on farmers’ fertilizer use to protect drinking water. After 12 years spent relying on voluntary efforts in the Chesapeake Bay region, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finally resorted, in 2010, to imposing a total maximum daily load (TMDL), of nitrogen and phosphorous from six of the Bay’s surrounding states. In Pennsylvania, compliance has been “painful,” says Jim Shortle, director of the Center for Nutrient Pollution Solutions at Pennsylvania State University. The state has the most farmers (in excess of 30,000) of the six and, “it got the worst grade on agricultural oversight on the EPA 2016 report card,” he says.
The threat of regulation—a concern raised in a recent farmer survey—has been a powerful motivator for some farmers to start changing their practices, says Kellogg.
Farm pollution is a problem in just about every state (here’s a national map of communities whose drinking water has been threatened from the Environmental Working Group). But most state agencies struggle to reach the majority of farmers, who are working within a system that prioritizes crop yield. As Bill Kellogg notes, reluctantly, there are two kinds of farmers: those who practice conservation with the future in mind and those farmers who are only in the here and now for profit.
Self-starters like Kellogg are perhaps the best sign of hope. “We’re beginning to see farmers say they want to be leaders, rather than be forced into actions by regulations,” says Shortle. And that’s welcome news. “The most effective pressure will come from fellow farmers,” he says. Rebecca Power, director of the North Central Regional Water Network at the University of Wisconsin, agrees. She says she has seen “a fundamental cultural change” begin to take effect among farmers.
Still, change is slow considering the formidable obstacles in the path. Chiefly, ongoing research on conservation practices can sometimes yield conflicting findings about what will work in particular regions, sowing enough uncertainty that landowners avoid taking action. To that end, there is a scramble to get enough technical skill in place to help farmers identify and adopt the best options for their circumstances.
But it’s unclear whether increased social pressure and technical skills will be enough to reach the magnitude of change many agree is necessary. “As long as we rely on voluntary action, it is going to be an uphill battle,” says Shortle. “The low-hanging fruit is all picked,” says Shortle. “[Progress] is going to cost money.”
Roger Wolf, director of environment programs and services for the Iowa Soybean Association, admits that the federal government has largely failed in its attempts to get states to address water quality issues caused by nutrient pollution. A big part of the challenge at this moment is coming to grips with the scope and scale of the management solutions necessary to move the needle, he says.
Mixed Messages
Of all the conservation practices being championed, farmers have perhaps most readily focused on precision fertilizer management, a strategy that combines soil tests and GPS to generate highly calibrated soil maps to help identify which farm fields require more or less nitrogen. Yet studies used to develop the Iowa Nutrient Reduction Strategy show this solution decreases nutrient pollution by about 10 percent, so clearly other strategies will also be necessary to reach that 40 percent reduction target.
Nitrogen stabilizers, which farmers apply directly to the soil alongside the fertilizer, are also being developed and sold as a cheap, easy solution. But once they wear off and soil bacteria bounce back, nitrogen will continue to run off, says Sarah Carlson, strategic initiatives director at Practical Farmers of Iowa. The competing, mixed messages frustrate Carlson, who argues that the key is “having a living root [in the soil] all the time to keep nutrients from leaking out of the system.” Banishing bare soil is the basis for the group’s new T-shirt slogan—“Don’t Farm Naked, Plant Cover Crops.”
Carlson argues that the data show cover crops, grown between and often alongside cash crops, are the most cost-effective conservation practice. Plants like cereal rye or winter wheat are best at soaking up nutrients, leading to as much as a 30-40 percent reduction in nitrogen loss, on a large scale.
Field day participants share soil health and pollution-reduction strategies on Nathan Anderson’s farm.
Growing cover crops also builds valuable soil health, providing other potential economic benefits such as reduced pest pressures and improved water retention. Edge-of-field practices such as wetlands, buffer zones, and bioreactors, which filter nitrogen out of runoff using wood chips, have also been pointed to as solutions. But they may not offer a direct benefit and be pretty costly to install, says Matt Helmers, an agricultural engineer at Iowa State University.
Programs to help offset the cost of cover crops have also flourished in the region. Seven years ago, Iowa only had roughly 10,000 acres of cost-shared cover crops, says Sean McMahon, executive director of the Iowa Agriculture Water Alliance. In 2017, he says, the state boasted 760,000 acres of cover crops, about half of which were funded by cost-share programs. And yet that number represents about 3.3 percent of the total farm acreage in the state. “In order to meet the goals of the nutrient reduction strategy, we probably need between 12 and 17 million acres of cover crops—between 50-70 percent,” says McMahon.
Weather extremes are making cover crops more appealing, while simultaneously harder to execute. They offer some farmers a way to reduce soil erosion during downpours and floods, but heavy rainfall can also make it difficult to realize their benefits. Put the crop in too late and it may not germinate; plow it under too early and it won’t be there to help keep soil on the ground
One thing is certain—farmers don’t like uncertainty.
While some say cover crops will save the world, they come with complex nutrient management dynamics to untangle, says Robyn Wilson, a behavioral decision scientist at Ohio State University. U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) agricultural engineer Kevin King has shown that cover crops, such as rye, can significantly reduce nitrogen losses in subsurface tile drainage, but had no effect on phosphorous. Yet not all cover crops act the same. Recent studies have shown that cover crops that die naturally in winter—such as some radishes—could even increase dissolved phosphorous concentrations in surface runoff.
Wilson’s research suggests there are additional, legitimate reasons farmers aren’t adopting some conservation practices more effectively. For example, subsurface fertilizer placement would help maintain the benefits of reduced tillage and reduce nutrient runoff, but it costs twice as much to apply and the equipment can be expensive and hard to find. A heavy-handed regulatory approach may help achieve faster progress, says Wilson, “but unless we fix some of these problems, we’ll get pushback.”
It’s also easy for uncertainty to translate into apathy. To adopt a new practice, farmers need to believe it will be effective, says Wilson. “Motivated farmers are looking for solutions and we [researchers] haven’t convinced them we know what those are,” he adds.
Getting information to farmers remains a hurdle. “There are not enough boots on the ground to deliver conservation information,” says McMahon. While National Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) staff and extension agents do a good deal of that work, their numbers are often very limited, and farmers have come to rely on private-sector crop advisors for support as well. Wolf argues that arming fertilizer reps with a better understanding of conservation practices could play an important role, however, since state and federal agencies are chronically budget-constrained.
“The ag retailers are the dominant way farmers get information,” says Carlson, adding, “and they overwhelmingly are not giving the right recommendations for growers of cover crops.” Carlson has been arming growers with information to share with fertilizer representatives in a bid to change the system from the bottom up.
Online Resources Help Fill in the Gaps
It’s a problem increasingly being tackled online as well. A growing group of no-till and cover crop practitioners share images and videos on YouTube and Twitter. And Practical Farmers of Iowa has a series of YouTube videos, called Rotationally Raised, which describe how to successfully grow diverse crop rotations.
Blanchard Demo Farms Project lead Aaron Heilers says the goal of web-based outreach is to offer data and personal experiences to farmers who may not attend traditional Field Day events that are miles away from their own farms. “Farmers want to see the data, [and know] that these things are working,” he says.
One of three demonstration farms that users can “tour” on the Blanchard Farms Demonstration site.
Many early adopters often find their own ways to minimize risks when trying something new. Nathan Anderson, an Iowa farmer who grows corn, soybeans, and small grains in addition to beef cattle, uses cover crops on nearly every acre. The cattle made it easier, he says, to get through the learning curve with cover crops because the cost spent on cover crop seed could be rationalized as feed for the animals. “We reduced our risk by having cattle that could eat our mistakes,” he says.
There’s a cultural dimension as well. For example, Anderson’s first season of cover crop-grazing cattle was a source of curiosity among neighboring farmers. “Knowing that people are talking about what you are doing can be intimidating,” says Anderson, although it didn’t hamper his experimentation. As Anderson and others worked out the kinks, neighbors who may have once been dismissive of the added management time and risk associated with conservation practices are increasingly interested. “Farmers that I never thought would be asking me for cover crop advice are asking those questions,” he adds.
Building New Strategies from Data
To realize results on the ground, a number of conservation professionals are turning to data-visualization tools to identify places where shifting practices could have the most impact and help farmers weigh the potential impact of those practices. To that end, a number of state agencies are developing tools to capitalize on the fact that most farmers need to “see it to believe it.”
In Pennsylvania, the Chesapeake Conservancy uses a high-resolution digital mapping tool to prioritize areas where restoring nitrogen-filtering buffers along waterways offer the greatest “bang for the buck,” says Carly Dean, the nonprofit’s project manager. Working together with property owners, they explore ways to improve both habitat and income opportunities. “It’s definitely a new chapter in the conservation story,” she adds.
Farmer Nate Anderson shares his cover-cropping and grazing strategies with field day visitors.
In areas pursuing a watershed-level strategy, such as Iowa, wetlands can be put in key hot spots to reduce nitrate inputs to downstream waters—and visualization tools will help set goals for their placement on a broader scale, says Iowa State’s Helmers. Wetlands can serve as a holding tank, slowly filtering incoming nutrient-rich surface water.
“It’s not the same old information, simply repackaged,” says Ohio State’s Wilson of data visualization. It can be powerful to run scenarios or role play to find the most effective strategies for landowners—something, she imagines, will have more of an impact.
Wolf says government agencies, farmers, conservation organizations, as well as industry, are all working hard to innovate. Last fall, the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship tried a novel approach: farmers who plant cover crops receive a $5 per acre discount on their crop insurance over the next three years.
Nate Anderson jumped at the chance to enroll in the program. “A number of [cover] cropping systems may only yield a $50 return,” he says, “a $5 per acre discount just added 10 percent to a bottom line.”
Companies Push for Progress
While farmers like Anderson explore marketing options that help him get a premium price for his practices, companies—increasingly motivated to ensure sustainable supply chains—are also getting behind a number of nascent ventures to reduce nitrogen pollution.
The Midwest Row Crop Cooperative is a coalition of top companies and conservation groups—from Cargill to the Nature Conservancy—testing projects to improve and accelerate conservation practices in Illinois, Iowa, and Nebraska. The goal is to incentivize farmers to withstand the cost, risk, and learning curves that currently keep them from changing their practices.
Food giant Unilever is involved with two cost-share programs overseen by Carlson at Practical Farmers of Iowa. The first focuses on Hellmann’s mayonnaise soybean oil supply chain. It aims to get 850 soy growers to adopt cover crops—in an area where they’re rarely grown—over the next five years by offsetting costs and arming farmers with a detailed plan and a network of their peers from whom they can learn.
Last month, Carlson launched a similar program with Cargill and Pepsi to encourage 150 corn suppliers to adopt cover crops. She says the approach—which lowers farmer costs from $25 to $15 per acre on average—is gaining momentum throughout the region. “We provide the recipe for how to make it easy to get farmers to sign up,” says Carlson, who says one of the key ingredients is the requirement that farmers go to field-day events and talk to experienced cover crop farmers.
The days of soft-selling farmers on conservation practices may be over. There is some concern that funding to support voluntary adoption efforts may dry up. Wilson just received EPA funding to determine how cost-effective the billions spent in the Great Lakes have been. And Trump’s budget dramatically cut several conservation programs, Anderson points out. He believes that cost-share programs have a role to play in farmer education and transition—but he also thinks they should require greater accountability and not go on indefinitely.
While it’s not yet clear the role regulations may play, it is clear that policymakers are running out of patience. “We need better outcomes for the dollars we spend,” says Penn State’s Shortle. “While regulation can be very effective, agriculture is expensive and difficult to regulate.” It’s imperative that we find approaches that are collaborative, cost-effective, and pay for performance, he adds.
Kellogg thinks that farmers will be perceived to be making a difference. Whether or not it will happen fast enough is another question entirely.
This story is part of a year-long series about the underreported agriculture stories in our rural communities.
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]]>The post Will Robot-Led Restaurants Be a Gift or a Curse to Food Workers? appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>But what sets Spyce apart from the Dig Inn two doors down or the two Sweetgreens within a stone’s throw is who—or, rather, what—cooks the food. The star culinarian at Spyce is a nine-foot long, 14-foot wide robotic kitchen—so, not really an employee at all.
The machine wirelessly collects multiple orders from a bank of self-service menu kiosks, displays the names of the guests whose orders are being prepared, pipes the various ingredients from refrigerated hoppers into a spinning wok to be cooked and tossed, and dumps the hot meal into a compostable bowl waiting on the counter below. Only then does a human handle any part of your meal, adding fresh ingredients and handing over the order, a process designed to take as few as three minutes.
But, despite the small number of humans involved, Spyce’s co-owners appear to be taking the human touch quite seriously.
“At the end of the day, a restaurant is all about hospitality and, obviously, how good the food is,” says Spyce’s COO Kale Rogers, who built an early prototype of the robotic kitchen with his three current business partners in the basement of their fraternity house at MIT. “We see the automation as a tool to allow us to serve incredible quality to more people. A necessary component is the human touch—the presentation, the personalization, the handing it to you with a smile.”
One of Spyce’s robot-prepared dishes.
Spyce’s robotic system, plus a number of other recent advances in restaurant automation, may raise questions about the culinary future we want. They’re questions easily recognized in nearly every sector, from driverless cars in the automotive industry to self-checkout in grocery stores. Will replacing cooks with robots or cashiers with computers be good for the nation’s often-undervalued food workers? Or will it just make them obsolete?
Restaurant industry leaders have blamed fair pay movements like Fight for $15 for the rise of restaurant automation, with the assumption that more robots equals fewer human workers. But some workforce advocates note that automation may actually end up being beneficial to restaurant workers.
A Short History of Robotic Restaurants
In developing Spyce, Rogers and his co-founders had a lot to learn from less-successful experiments in automation over the last several years.
For one, they brought on renowned chef Daniel Boulud, who drew from his Michelin-rated restaurants for design and flow. Along with executive chef Sam Benson, Boulud helped develop Spyce’s menu. Boulud and Benson also convinced the co-founders, who may have been leaning more robot-centric, to place two French-inspired garde mangers at the front counter to garnish the bowls. Two more employees roam the front-of-house, welcoming guests and helping troubleshoot any snags with the kiosk ordering system. A handful of additional human workers prepare ingredients at an off-site commissary kitchen.
From left: Co-founder Luke Schlueter, co-founder Michael Farid, co-founder Kale Rogers, executive chef Sam Benson, co-founder Brady Knight, chef Daniel Boulud.
Kale Rogers, co-founder and chief operating officer, wouldn’t say what Spyce is paying its workers—though Boston’s minimum wage is $11 an hour, so assume employees make at least that much—but he acknowledged that customer service is key to creating an environment to which the lunch crowd wants to return week after week.
“It’s staff whose job is to enhance your experience in the store,” he says.
Technology and automation have been seeping into the restaurant industry for years now, dating back even to the automats of the early 20th century. But not all companies wear their automation on their sleeve like Spyce does.
Visit San Francisco-based eatsa—where customers order on kiosks and pick up their machine-made bento bowl or chile con quinoa from a space-age cubby—and you may avoid interacting with a single employee. And at Café X, a coffee bar also in San Francisco, your barista is a robot that pulls orders from a touch-screen monitor and pours espresso drinks, drip coffee, and cups of nitro cold brew. There’s also Flippy, the food-safe robot arm that has made national headlines for its ability to grill, monitor, and place burger patties on buns at CaliBurger’s Pasadena location.
Many other, more mainstream eateries are experimenting with automation and technology, such as digital menus and payment pads at the table, as a way to lower rising labor costs, says Patrick Maguire, a restaurant consultant in Boston and author of the blog Server Not Servant. Maguire says the idea of automation may make sense from an economic and efficiency standpoint, but it can end up harming the guest experience because machines and humans are not equal in their intangible service skills.
“It’s true that robots can’t call out sick or bitch about their schedules, but they also can’t ‘think on their feet’ or provide the same hospitality that humans can,” Maguire says. “And often, one of the best aspects of dining out is interacting with a great server, bartender, or staff member.”
And yet, some have predicted we’re moving closer to the widespread replacement of human restaurant workers with robots, computers, and other forms of technology. These predictions sometimes come in the form of threats from restaurant lobbyists to advocates of higher wages for food workers, such as the Fight For $15.
Robots and the Restaurant Workforce of the Future
Saru Jayaraman, cofounder of the worker advocacy group Restaurant Opportunities Centers United and one of the engines behind the Fight For $15, says she has yet to see robots replace humans in the restaurant industry. In fact, Jayaraman noted that data suggest automation could lead to increased restaurant employment in the future.
One need only look, she says, to California: ground zero for both the booming restaurant industry and for automation in restaurants. For starters, even as automation becomes more commonplace in California, restaurant employment there has exploded, increasing 45 percent from 2001 to 2016.
Many headline-grabbing robots and systems, like Flippy, were born in the Golden State, and fast-food chains have used California as proving grounds for technologies like self-service kiosks and tablets, mobile ordering and payment, customizable menus, and table service. A September 2017 ROC memo points out that on the whole, automation of some tasks has led to changes in the kinds of positions restaurants need, but not in the number of staff.
The memo notes that Starbucks has seen mobile ordering and payments boost its sales, allowing it to increase the number of baristas without needing to hire more cashiers; Panera is adding staff to handle greater order volume through its self-serve kiosks. And while servers at restaurant chains like Chili’s, which has added tablet-based ordering at its tables, can handle tables quicker and more accurately during the heavy dinner rush, their presence is still key to the dining experience.
“We see two futures in our industry: One future [leads to] higher wages, better benefits, and professionalizing an industry that has been undervalued for too long,” says Jayaraman. “The other future is what we call the ‘low road,’ and involves digitization and extremely low wages. Which future is tech supporting with automation?”
The real question may be whether consumers will buy wholesale into a more automated, less human-run restaurant industry. Eatsa, the quick-service restaurant where meals were placed into cubbies for customer pickup, closed all but two of its retail locations after sales flagged and shifted its business model to licensing its technology. Jayaraman points to chains that have scaled back automated systems following customer complaints that they were too impersonal. Another full-service chain she heard of rolled out automation on its prep line, only to find that it needed to hire more human employees to monitor and repair the automation.
“Our industry doesn’t lend itself well to workers being replaced by robots,” she says.
Time will tell whether Spyce will be able to find a happy medium in an industry built on hospitality and the human touch. Their model is yet unproven in one of the city’s busiest business districts, but Spyce COO Rogers says he’s confident in what they’ve built, and he and his team will “understand right away if the customer really values what we bring.”
Photos courtesy of Spyce.
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]]>The post With Vertical Farms, Food Banks are Growing their Own Produce to Fight Hunger appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Until spring, almost all of the fresh fruits and vegetables distributed through the Community Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma are imported from warmer climes like Mexico and California. Those donations are few and far between, often leaving the food bank distributing non-perishable items such as canned tomatoes, peanut butter, and pasta instead of fresh foods. To address this gap, the food bank started to grow its own greens, ensuring a stable supply of fresh, locally-grown produce for its clients.
“Our priority is getting healthy foods to the people that need them, but getting donated produce has been a big challenge for us—and having fresh produce is even tougher in the winter months,” said John McCarthy, the food bank’s director of community incentives.
Inside the Community Food Bank of Oklahoma’s vertical farm. (Photo courtesy Growtainers)
In 2016, the food bank installed a vertical farm—an indoor, temperature-controlled environment where food is grown in stacked towers under LED lights. The two 40-foot by 8-foot shipping containers that make up the operation were upfitted into indoor hydroponic farms by Growtainers, one of several manufacturers of vertical farm systems. The containers are designed to produce up to 1,800 heads of lettuce and other leafy greens every 45 days—regardless of the time of year.
“We harvest greens in the morning, and they’re available in the afternoon, producing a really nice product we can count on,” McCarthy said.
Farming is generally not commonplace among food banks. Feeding America, a nonprofit, nationwide network of food banks, reports that only 29 of its 200 members operate farms and distribute that produce to food insecure and low-income clients. And this is mostly because land is expensive to acquire or lease; growing food is time- and labor-intensive and requires specialized knowledge; and many food banks choose instead to focus their efforts on the logistics of getting food to people in need.
But vertical farms—with manufacturers’ promises of producing large amounts of food in a small footprint through high-tech, plug-and-play growing operations—could bring about a shift in food banks’ willingness to grow their own food. Unlike greenhouses, which can lack light and temperature control, thereby limiting the growing season, vertical farms might offer food banks the ability to grow food year-round.
With the National Organic Standards Board recently making the controversial recommendation that hydroponic and aeroponic systems be eligible to earn organic certification, vertical farms are poised to reach new levels of popularity. And though there is no data on the number of food banks operating vertical farms, several appear to be experimenting with the high-tech approach.
Cultivating the Right Approach for the Climate
One of the biggest arguments against food banks getting into the vertical-farming business is simply that these systems are pricey. The Community Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma paid $140,000 for its two Growtainers, securing a grant from the Morningcrest Healthcare Foundation to purchase the vertical farms. It costs an additional $680 per month for electricity to power them.
For nonprofits, cost can be a barrier and, in some locations, indoor farms are an unnecessary expense. The learning curve can also be steep and most food banks rely on volunteer labor to handle maintenance and harvesting, often with training from the manufacturers of the vertical systems.
The climate was the main reason the Surrey Food Bank, the second-largest food bank in British Columbia, installed a vertical farm from Living Garden Foods at one of its four locations earlier this year. The wall-mounted towers grow produce in eight rows; fresh lettuce and kale are harvested every six weeks, allowing the food bank to provide fresh greens for up to 80 families at its Cloverdale location.
“A lot of food banks have outdoor community gardens, but this is a new thing, and we think it’s working well,” said Feezah Jaffer, the food bank’s executive director.
The Surrey Food Bank’s vertical farm system. (Photo © Pixel Perfect Photography)
Still, some food banks growing food in warmer climates are continuing to grow outside. San Antonio Food Bank, for example. operates a 75-acre farm and an urban orchard with 170 fruit trees, distributing produce to clients in 16 counties across Texas. The conventional farming plots grow everything from onions and potatoes to watermelons and cantaloupe, helping the food bank achieve its mission to provide fresh, healthy foods to those in need.
Because of the success of the farms, Patrick Brennan, manager of facilities and agricultural initiatives at the San Antonio Food Bank, has no immediate plans to add vertical farming to the agricultural operations.
“In more extreme climates, growing indoors is a more attractive option,” Brennan explained. “We do get temperature fluctuations and occasional freezes, so vertical farming might be in our future, but for now we have the ability in Central Texas to decrease costs by growing produce traditionally.”
Working Through the Growing Pains
For food banks where the climate isn’t as friendly to outdoor farming, vertical farms may hold promise. Given their positive experience with vertical farming, Surrey Food Bank in B.C. is hoping to install similar systems at the bank’s three other sites as well. While farmers donate apples, pears, cherries, and other locally grown fruits and vegetables to the food bank, those donations often fall short of demand, requiring the food bank to allocate part of its budget to purchase fresh produce. All together, produce comprises 45 percent of the food the bank distributes.
Before expanding the farming effort, however, Jaffer wants to address some of the challenges facing the current operation.
First harvest in the Community Food Bank of Oklahoma’s Growtainers. (Photo courtesy Growtainers)
Less than six months into production, volunteers at the Surrey Food Bank are still figuring out how to maximize the farm’s output. Some of the greens failed to grow, and others went to seed too fast. Additionally, varieties like Swiss chard grew well, but clients were unfamiliar with the greens or disliked their flavor. As volunteers gained experience with the vertical towers, production problems became less common and surveying families about what kinds of greens they prefer helped the food bank tweak its crop mix so no greens went uneaten.
The Community Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma also adjusted its approach based on feedback from clients and experience with the vertical growing system. In addition to experimenting with growing tomatoes in one of its Growtainers, the food bank reduced output of non-nutrient-dense greens such as butter lettuce, romaine, and mesclun in favor of growing more kale and spinach—and teaching clients on how to prepare it by offering recipes—to maximize the nutritional value, and reduce waste.
Jaffer at the Surrey Food Bank believes asking clients about their preferences helps provide a sense of ownership in the harvest and increases their willingness to add fresh greens to their food baskets.
“There have been growing pains, but the more we learn these lessons, the bigger of a success it becomes,” she said. “We think food banks need to evolve to meet the needs of our clients, and embracing vertical farming technology is one way we can do that.”
Top photo: The Community Food Bank of Oklahoma’s Growtainers. Photo courtesy of Growtainers.
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]]>The post A Soil App Aims to Get Kids Deep into Dirt appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Oliver’s on-air quizzes were purely anecdotal, of course, and surveys attempting to quantify American children’s food literacy are scant. But a British study released in June found significant food confusion among children in that country, and it’s unlikely that children in the U.S. know any more considering the fact that 7 percent of Americans actually believe that chocolate milk comes from brown cows.
Most kids today are at least a generation removed from the farm. Whereas 100 years ago, around one third of Americans farmed, only 2 percent of the American population still works in agriculture, with 72 percent of surveyed adults now admitting they know “nothing or very little” about farming. Our diet, too, reflects this agricultural disconnect, with almost 60 percent of Americans’ daily calories coming from ultra-processed foods sold in supermarkets and restaurants.
One group working to address this growing literacy gap is the Center for Ecoliteracy. The Berkeley-based organization has been working with schools for the last two decades to teach sustainability and help kids get familiar with the basics of where their food comes from and how it gets to their table.
In collaboration with the Whole Kids Foundation, the organization has just released a new, free tablet app called Starting with Soil, designed to use colorful, interactive experiences to teach kids about our food system’s most fundamental building block, including how soil is formed, the roles animals and people play in keeping it healthy and fertile, and the basics of seeds, pollinators, and organic farming practices.
Civil Eats spoke recently with Zenobia Barlow, the organization’s co-founder and executive director, about the genesis of the Starting with Soil app and what the organization hopes it will accomplish:
What inspired you to create Starting With Soil? And why did you choose to focus on soil?
We asked ourselves, “What is the thing we would most like young learners to experience and understand?” We chose soil because it contains most of the life on earth, and is literally the foundation for everything we eat, and everything that supports our lives and the lives of the beings around us. Our hope is that the app instills in children enthusiasm and curiosity about the world around them, and a profound sense of understanding about their role as part of this larger, vibrant world. It provides a real opportunity for families to learn and garden together, too.
But is “soil” too esoteric a topic for kids who might not be able to name even common fruits and vegetables?
We realize that children may come to the app with very little food literacy, so we designed Starting with Soil to be highly interactive. For example, young learners are able to plant a seed, take a microscope underground to see who lives there, and journey through the last 500 years to watch an inch of topsoil form. Time-lapse photography, animation, and stunning visuals tie it all together. In other words, we made it colorful, dynamic, and fun. That’s one way to get kids—even those with little prior knowledge—to dig in.
How was the app funded and developed?
The app came about through conversations with the Whole Kids Foundation [founded by Whole Foods Market in 2011] over an extended period, and then United Natural Foods, which distributes natural and organic foods, helped fund it through a grant to the Whole Kids Foundation. We kicked off the effort in 2105—a nice coincidence, as that was the United Nations International Year of Soils—and spent two years developing and refining the content.
Did you design the app with a particular age group in mind?
The app was created at a third-grade reading level because it’s a time when many science teachers create lessons to help students understand the relationship between soil, plants, and humans. But much of the content is appropriate for older children, too. We also think parents will find that it helps them to initiate conversations with their kids about how fruits and vegetables grow. So, really, we’re striving to reach learners between the ages of six and 12.
How are you planning to get the app into the hands of as many kids as possible?
We’re working hard to make parents, garden educators, and other outdoor educators aware of the app, which is free. Since school gardens are becoming increasingly common, the hope is that the experiential learning students do in the garden augments classroom science instruction. And Starting with Soil compliments both.
Why did you choose the tablet as your teaching platform? And is there any concern that you won’t reach underprivileged kids?
We felt the tablet offered something we wanted to leverage: the ability to show movement and sound, and convey the wonder of living diversity in ecosystems. We’ve also seen a trend in schools away from PCs to tablets, including iPads and Androids. They are cheaper than laptops and can be shared more easily. Also, because they don’t have a “lid,” it’s harder to hide things from the teacher. And they are more portable, which make them usable in outdoor and garden settings.
If families or schools are inspired by the app to start a garden for the first time, does the Center offer any resources?
In collaboration with Annie’s Foods, we offer Creating Gardens of Goodness, a downloadable booklet that offers advice for designing, creating, and maintaining five types of educational gardens. We also offer Getting Started: A Guide for Creating School Gardens as Outdoor Classrooms. Parents who are learning to garden will enjoy the sections on nurturing a child’s curiosity and understanding nature’s cycles.
What’s next for the Center in terms of new teaching tools for kids?
We’re currently working on an interactive guide for grades 6-12 called Understanding Food and Climate Change, which uses food as a lens to explore how climate change affects our food system and how our food system affects climate change, and presents promising strategies.
Ultimately, what do you hope young users will take away from Starting with Soil?
We always envisioned this as working beautifully as a companion learning tool in school and home gardens. Learn some principles on the tablet, see what microorganisms and pollinators look like and how they function and interact. Then go outside, get your hands dirty, and viscerally connect that learning to growing real food.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
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]]>The post Technology Could Make or Break the Food Workforce of the Future appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>As automation, peer-to-peer transactions, and online delivery services re-shape food-system business models, the relationship between employers and workers has also begun to shift—and not always in ways that benefit workers. While many companies—and some workers—benefit from the “gig economy,” this revolution in how people work has outpaced efforts to maintain safe working conditions, fair labor practices, and job security.
The ongoing, rapid expansion of the tech economy may only intensify the challenges facing the food system workforce. But despite the speed, size, and scope of these, there are a number of real-world solutions on the horizon that can make food work fair for all.
Workers are Getting the Short End of the Stick
Some of the most popular software apps, including Uber (transportation), Airbnb (hospitality), and TaskRabbit (general labor), bring workers providing goods and services together with customers and depend on a sharing, or peer, economy business model. Food-delivery companies working in this sector—like UberEats, Grubhub, DoorDash, and Seamless—have attracted millions of customers, thousands of contractors, and billions of dollars in investment over the last 10 years. But the changes these companies have brought to the industry, and particularly to those tasked with preparing or delivering the food, offer a glimpse at potential troubles ahead.
The gig economy is less likely to provide workers with salaries, benefits, or a consistent schedule. And it also often frees employers from any obligation to provide year-round income for their employees, and leaves workers’ livelihood in the hands of the customer.
In 2016, for example, the grocery delivery service Instacart removed the tipping feature from its app and replaced it with a flat “service fee”—a change that meant lower overall income for many contractors. In the face of pushback from independent contractors, Instacart relented and replaced the original tip feature—but buried the new feature so deep within the app’s user interface that workers began distributing flyers to customers to explain how to tip.
In another example, in April 2017, employees at the California-based restaurant delivery service DoorDash successfully sued the company for illegally classifying its delivery staff as independent contractors. The court found that the contractor designation used by the company didn’t suitably capture the role its delivery workers play. By classifying workers as independent contractors, DoorDash circumvented laws that cover federally mandated overtime and minimum wage rates, which in some instances led to lower pay for more work.
As part of the $5 million settlement, DoorDash has agreed to make changes to how the contractors are classified and treated, while still retaining the right to use the contractor designation. As part of the settlement, delivery staff are still classified the same with a few more benefits and protections.
Sometimes, the risks to workers extend beyond unfair pay to a lack of workplace safety, as in the case of meal-kit maker Blue Apron. Since its founding in 2012, Blue Apron has proven wildly popular across the United States—but the demands of producing high-quality meal packages at a profit has led to some safety concerns for Blue Apron’s staff.
A 2016 inspection of the company’s California food packaging facility turned up five worker safety violations. One of those violations—a failure to offer emergency showers near the forklift battery charging station—could have potentially resulted in “death or serious physical harm,” according to the state inspector.
Moreover, during the approximately three-year period after its Richmond, California warehouse opened, Blue Apron received nine violations and proposed penalties totaling $11,695 for unsafe conditions, and four arrests for violence, or threats of it, on the premises. Unfortunately, conditions at Blue Apron’s facilities resonate all too well with the challenges food workers face when working with tech companies.
These sorts of workplace issues are mirrored in other parts of the tech sector as well. A recent article detailing dangerous workplace conditions at Tesla’s car manufacturing plant in Fremont, California, found that ambulances have been called to the plant more than 100 times since 2014 due to workers experiencing fainting spells, dizziness, seizures, abnormal breathing, and chest pains. A Tesla factory worker was quoted saying, “everything feels like the future but us,” a sentiment that reflects the experience of so many of the workers doing manual labor and service tasks for tech companies.
Arbitrary and unfair practices like these have led some workers to demand fairer practices. In 2016, delivery staff for UberEats and the restaurant delivery service Foodora in Italy and the U.K. took to the streets to protest both their treatment and working conditions as contractors. Fair wages—an issue across the industry—were a particular point of contention in these two actions.
Effect of Automation on Food Industry Jobs
Large-scale automation efforts are already underway across the country as McDonald’s and Wendy’s plan to install self-serve kiosks at more than 5,000 locations around the country. While McDonald’s has said that it has no current plans to fully replace workers, Wendy’s has made no such pledge. And it’s hard to imagine that the lure of higher profits won’t eventually become a factor for both companies as they determine how much to expand the use of automated systems.
So far, the fast food industry has said very little about what all these changes mean for front line workers. Similarly, labor groups have continued to focus their energy on “Fight for $15,” while largely setting aside concerns about automation. Both sides are likely considering the best way forward—but the pace of technology may force the issue sooner rather than later.
Amazon’s recent purchase of Whole Foods Market is likely to make automation a more pressing issue on the grocery retail front as well. The new store model called Amazon Go has billed itself as the first grocery store completely without cashiers, and Amazon is already experimenting with new ways to remove workers from the equation. It’s also hard to imagine that Amazon won’t use Whole Foods as a laboratory for testing out similar ways to reduce labor costs.
Five Recommendations to Protect Workers
Based on the impact technology has already had on food workers, forward-thinking governments and corporations should get ahead of the curve to offset the harmful impacts that technology could have on the people behind our food.
1. Corporate Profit-Sharing
One ongoing complaint from workers in the gig economy is the way that platform companies change pay and performance expectations to maximize the companies’ profits—and which often minimize workers’ income. A food-delivery service, for instance, will use multiple pay incentives (such as surge pricing in combination with guaranteed hourly rates, something that Uber has implemented among some of its drivers) to encourage workers to be available during times of heavy demand. This move flies in the face of the promise of flexible work hours if workers want to make anything close to a reasonable wage.
Similarly, platform companies have been accused of arbitrarily changing performance expectations for workers, and using those shifting definitions as a way to deactivate a user’s account. In the case of Instacart, the company used this tactic to retaliate against its shopper-contractors who were protesting changes to their pay structure and to discourage other shoppers from joining the effort.
Shifting to a profit-sharing model between these companies and the workers they depend on would provide contractors with more income, more incentive to offer high-quality performance, encourage building relationships with customers and platform companies alike, and offer a way to address these types of predatory practices.
2. Shorter Work Weeks
If companies are adequately taxed on the productivity gains made possible by automation, there may be significant opportunities to reduce the number of hours employees give over to work each week. A portion of the additional revenue that comes with lower labor costs and greater work efficiencies could also be used to benefit current workers by maintaining, and in some cases increasing, their income over time.
3. Protect Workers with Policy
The question of who benefits from developments in technology is ultimately a political one. Restoring basic worker protections; enforcing worker safety, wage regulation, and anti-trust laws; and leveling the political playing field to limit the influence of corporations and the wealthy won’t be easy, but it’s necessary. An example of this kind of policy action is New York City’s recent “Fair Workweek” legislation, which set rules to ensure predictable schedules and paychecks for retail and fast-food workers, including regulating the practice of “clopenings,” or scheduling workers on consecutive closing, then opening, shifts—a practice that has increased as companies adopt automated scheduling systems. In 2016, San Francisco enacted similar rules under the name “Retail Workers Bill of Rights.”
4. Conditional Cash Transfers (CCT)
These programs provide financial support to jobless workers under the condition that they participate in community activities, volunteerism, or engage in trainings for higher-skill, technical jobs where possible. This approach has been put to work in New York City and Memphis, where the Family Rewards 2.0 program has used a CCT model to provide incentives (“rewards”) to families for completing activities related to children’s education, family preventive healthcare, and adults’ work or training.
5. Universal Basic Income (UBI)
UBI programs provide unconditional monthly cash payments from the state budget to all of its citizens, helping buffer workers from the loss of jobs that might result from automation. The concept has garnered support from across the political spectrum and is seen as one of the most direct ways to address the unemployment crisis that could arise from high levels automation. UBI pilots have been implemented around the world, for instance tech startup-funder Y Combinator’s 2016 launch of a five-year UBI pilot in Oakland, California.
None of these options is perfect, and most come with downsides. But considering the major disruptions that technology has brought to the labor market already, it’s important to consider similarly disruptive solutions to help protect workers from the widespread disruption these changes will likely bring as they spread across the economy.
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