The post Farmworkers Heal Climate-Scarred Land With Native Seeds appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Irma Quiroz pulled her bandana over her face, lowered her hat, and flicked a switch. A towering seed-cleaning machine roared to life, sending a cloud of dust and residue into the air. Quiroz shoveled native grass seeds into the machine as her husband, Juan Gómez, held out a palm to inspect the stream of cleaned seeds, looking for any that were empty or underdeveloped, as they cascaded out of the machine into white sacks. They were now ready for restoration sites across California.
Quiroz and Gómez are seed-cleaning specialists and field workers at Hedgerow Farms, a native seed farm near the Central Valley town of Winters. Hedgerow’s collectors gather seeds from native plants in the wild, and field workers grow them out at the 300-acre farm to produce more seeds. This spring, neat rows of mugwort, purple needlegrass, and California poppies sprouted in the midst of neighboring almond orchards, tomatoes, and alfalfa.
Government agencies, tribes, and other land managers use the seeds to revegetate fire-ravaged areas, transform abandoned farmland, reestablish wetlands, and repair other damaged or altered lands, creating environments that support local ecosystems and biodiversity.
“We’re doing something for the planet,” Quiroz said in Spanish.
Recreational areas have benefited too: Hedgerow Farms’ silverbush lupine grows in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, and its native grasses can be found in the Yolo Bypass Wildlife Area outside Sacramento. The farm also supplies native seeds to seed packet retailers, helping sow drought-resistant plants and establish pollinator habitat in urban environments.
Some projects, such as the ongoing restoration of the Klamath River Basin in Oregon and California, involve billions of seeds—from various suppliers, including Hedgerow—spread across thousands of acres. “Native vegetation is the foundation of a healthy ecosystem,” the Yurok Tribe said in a social media post showing wildflowers blooming this spring in the scar of a former reservoir. After four dams were removed from the Klamath River, the tribe began revegetating the riverbanks last year, planting species such as milkweed—a key food source for monarch butterflies—that once flourished in the watershed.
A crew at Hedgerow Farms hoes a Lupinus bicolor field in Winters, California. (Photo credit: Joshua Scoggin/Hedgerow Farms).
Native Seeds to the Rescue
Research has shown that native plants play a powerful role in slowing climate change and restoring ecosystems. They create wildlife habitat, sequester carbon, limit dust and erosion by stabilizing soil, and deter future wildfires by preventing highly flammable invasive grasses from taking root.
“Having native seed ready and getting native plants back in the ground after these big fire events is critical,” said Justin Valliere, assistant professor of cooperative extension at the University of California, Davis, who studies native plant restoration.
Spanish clover, miniature lupine, and white yarrow are already growing at sites devastated this year by the Palisades and Eaton fires in Los Angeles. The seeds were supplied by Rancho De Las Flores, a native seed farm in Los Alamos, near Santa Barbara, which is owned by the same company as Hedgerow Farms. Las Flores and Hedgerow Farms coordinate production, each specializing in plants native to their regions.
“Having native seed ready and getting native plants back in the ground after these big fire events is critical.”
Hedgerow Farms has grown seeds for restoration projects on all fronts of the climate crisis. This spring, the farm’s collections experts left their homes before dawn to scout for irises and cinquefoils in the hilly pasture that runs along Gleason Beach, north of Bodega Bay on the Sonoma Coast, for a project restoring the first site in California where a highway was moved inland due to sea level rise.
Meanwhile, the farm has ramped up seed production for tarweed, phacelia, and saltbush, plants native to the San Joaquin Valley. As groundwater depletion threatens to dry up half a million acres of agriculture in the nation’s top-producing region, farmers and land managers have begun begun using native seeds to transition dairies and other farmland to desert scrub habitat.
“If fields are just abandoned, they can turn into sources of dust or weeds,” which can harm nearby farms and communities, Valliere said. The region, home to many of California’s farmworkers, already suffers from the worst air quality in the country.
A Shortage of Seeds
As the climate crisis accelerates the need for ecological restoration, native seeds are in high demand. In 2020, for example, California Governor Gavin Newsom announced a plan to conserve 30 percent of the state’s lands by 2030 to mitigate climate change and protect biodiversity by preserving nature. The plan includes land stewardship, which requires native seeds for measures such as rehabilitating wetlands to enhance wildlife habitat, and calls for accelerating restoration projects.
But only a handful of California farms—Hedgerow, its partner farm Las Flores, and a few others—grow native seed, and there isn’t enough inventory or production to support the state’s conservation goals, according to a 2023 report by the California Native Plant Society. The native seed shortage is “one of the main bottlenecks” delaying restoration work, Valliere said. “It’s a nationwide—even a global—problem,” he added.
During the past few years, catalyzed by the California Native Plant Society’s report, government agencies, land managers, and native seed producers formed working groups to improve coordination, discussing which native plant species might soon be in demand. “We’re trying to really listen and keep our finger on the pulse of where restoration is going,” said Julia Michaels, restoration ecologist and designer at Hedgerow Farms, adding that the company has scaled up its production in recent years.
Stewards of the Seeds
Hedgerow Farms is the longest operating native seed farm in California, and together with Las Flores, it is the largest. The farm’s biggest contracts, multi-year agreements that include seed collection and growing, are worth millions of dollars. For some species, Hedgerow Farms is the only supplier that can provide the quantity of seed—often delivered by the truckload—needed to reestablish huge swaths of native vegetation. All told, Hedgerow has enabled the restoration of hundreds of thousands of acres of California landscapes.
Michaels said the farm’s team of roughly a dozen farmworkers has been critical to that legacy. Their expertise in this unique field, she said, makes them some of the most important and irreplaceable people working to restore California’s ecosystems.
Founded in the 1980s by John Anderson, a local veterinary professor turned native plant guru, Hedgerow Farms has always hired farmworkers laboring in the surrounding fields and orchards for seasonal jobs. Some stayed on, developing expertise in the collection, growing, or processing of native seed.
“They’re the ones who hold all the knowledge,” Michaels said of long-serving employees who helped keep the farm running after Anderson’s death in 2020.
Not many people have applied farming techniques to native grasses and wildflowers, so Hedgerow Farms developed its own best practices, maximizing seed yields for 400 species through years of trial and error.
Like others at Hedgerow Farms, Alejandro García, one of the farm’s collections experts, grew up in an agricultural environment in Mexico, working with his family in corn fields in Michoacán. In California, García found work in orchards and vineyards, pruning and tending vines in Napa Valley before learning wildland seed collecting from some of the industry’s early leaders.
For the past two decades, García has scoured the state for native seeds. With permission from private landowners such as farmers and ranchers, or a permit to collect seeds on public land, he treks through marshes, grasslands, forests, and deserts.
“I learned to look at the flowers and see the differences,” García said in Spanish. He added that he can identify hundreds of species and subspecies, as well as their varying behavior, localized traits, and genetic diversity. He knows which seeds must be collected ripe and which can be gathered green and left to ripen off the plant.
With lupine, a native wildflower especially good at fixing nitrogen and restoring soil health after wildfires, “you can tell it’s ready when you see the veins” in the flower petals, García said.
Around 2010, he began teaching the intricacies of native seed collecting to Manolo Sánchez, who had been working in peach orchards near Yuba City. Both were hired as collections experts by Hedgerow Farms in 2017.
“They’re some of the best botanists in the state,” said Michaels, who has a doctorate in ecology and serves as vice president of scientific and public affairs at NativeSeed Group, which owns Hedgerow Farms and Las Flores. “What they do is really, really impressive.”
Hedgerow has enabled the restoration of hundreds of thousands of acres of California landscapes. The farm’s team of roughly a dozen farmworkers has been critical to that legacy.
Back at the farm, field workers grow out the wild seeds, turning handfuls into hundreds of pounds. Not many people have applied farming techniques to native grasses and wildflowers, so Hedgerow Farms has developed its own best practices, maximizing seed yields for 400 species through years of trial and error, said farm manager Jeff Quiter. When the crops are ready, a combine harvester moves through the fields, chopping up row upon row of wildflowers and separating out the seeds.
The seeds then go to the cleaning shed. Gómez, the seed-cleaning specialist, began working at Hedgerow Farms more than three decades ago after leaving Mexico to join his mother transplanting tomatoes near Winters. He modified equipment designed for corn and barley to clean grass and wildflower seeds, dialing the machine’s air flow up for one species, down for another. The process improves the seeds’ chances of germination, Gómez said in Spanish, and ultimately, the success of restoration projects. “You have to take it very seriously,” he added.
Quiroz, the farm’s other seed-cleaning specialist, initially preferred the exotic flowers she grew for garden centers while working at a nearby plant nursery. In comparison, she thought native plants “were ugly,” she said. But at Hedgerow Farms, where she has worked since 2021, Quiroz was soon preaching their virtues during farm tours, which are open to the public once a year. Unlike the flowers she had grown for sale at Lowe’s and Home Depot, which were bred to reproduce aesthetic qualities, native plants “are more resilient,” she said, having adapted to survive in their natural environment.
When Quiroz passes a cluster of lupine or poppies, and her children point out “her” flowers, she takes pride in her work—and the little ways she has changed the world around her. “If one can play a small part in a larger effort,” she said, “I think that’s beautiful.”
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]]>The post A National Soil-Judging Contest Prepares College Students to Steward the Land appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>On an early spring morning in central Wisconsin, the hills were still and serene under a frosty grey sky. Then the fight songs began. More than 200 students from 27 colleges and universities across the U.S. had converged in Portage County for an unlikely competition. Their arena was not a court, a field, or a pool, but a pit dug five feet into the sandy red earth. Shouts of “Go Terps!” and “Hail Purdue!” erupted as the competitors fired themselves up to walk into the underbelly of the world.
Each year at the National Collegiate Soil Judging Contest, students gather to classify soils based on their color, texture, and structure. The team whose analyses most closely match those of professional soil scientists return to campus with a gleaming 3-foot trophy, the coveted Stanley Cup of soils.
There is more than school pride at stake, however. This competition teaches the next generation of soil scientists how to manage the soils used to grow our food and support our agricultural infrastructure. Their work helps farmers produce more nutritious crops, combat erosion, and capture and store carbon underground. As the Trump administration’s budget cuts put the field of soil science on shaky ground, students here remain committed to treating soil as the life-giving—and downright competition-worthy—resource that it is.
Students receive instructions ahead of soil-judging. The national competition has taken place every year since 1961, including one virtual contest during the COVID-19 pandemic. (Photo: Emma Loewe)
Prepping for the Contest
The first National Collegiate Soil Judging Contest was held in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1961 to give students more hands-on experience analyzing soils. It has occurred every year since, although in 2020, during the pandemic, it was virtual. Leading up to the contest, students learn about soil in the classrooms of their respective schools and practice analyzing it in pits around their campuses. Each fall, schools compete at regional competitions that roughly correspond to USDA Soil Survey Regions. The top schools from each region advance to the national competition in the spring, hosted by a different college each year. Teams and their coaches arrive at nationals a week early to familiarize themselves with that area’s unique soil.
“You can imagine how different the soil is in the middle of Utah than it might be in Maine or Florida,” John Galbraith, the longtime coach of Virginia Tech, 2024’s winning team, said in the lead-up to this year’s competition.
Teams can range in size from three students to more than 20. They compete both individually and as a group to most accurately describe the origin and characteristics of five “competition pits” over two days. These pits expose the top five to six “horizons,” or layers, of soil, telling a story of the land.
This year’s contest was held April 27 through May 2 this year. Hosting an outdoor event in spring in Wisconsin is always a gamble, since winter’s chill and precipitation tend to stick around well into April, and on Day One of the contest, Mother Nature dealt a losing hand.
It was 45 degrees and dumping rain as the students and their coaches gathered in the parking lot of a local nature reserve near this year’s host school, the University of Wisconsin Stevens Point (UWSP). From there, they were guided to the competition site, which had been kept a strict secret all week.
Once they arrived at the site, a wooded lakefront property called Lions Camp, students were forbidden from looking up anything about its soils online. “If your cell phone comes out, you will be disqualified,” Bryant Scharenbroch, an associate soil science professor at UWSP and the lead organizer of this year’s competition, bellowed over a loudspeaker. “No warnings!”
The poncho-clad students sloshed nervously towards the soil pits. Over the course of the morning, they would each spend an hour individually “judging” three pits. Judging requires filling in a scorecard with the color, texture, structure, and water retention abilities of each soil horizon, and using this to estimate the soil’s classification, how it formed, and how it can be best managed or utilized.
Students use a color book to determine the exact shade of each soil layer; a triangle to classify soil, based on its mix of clay, silt, and sand; a soil knife to get a feel for the texture of each horizon; and finally, a muffin tin to transport soil samples in and out of the pit. Their hands, though, are their most important tools. Throughout the day, students need to manually squeeze, squash, and smash the soil to get a sense of its composition, down to its exact percentage of clay versus sand.
At 10 a.m., the first timer went off, and the competitors descended into the soaked earth.
The national contest aims to give students hands-on experience evaluating soil. An affinity for soil is apparent in student apparel and tools as they compete. (Photos: Emma Loewe)
Digging Into Wisconsin’s Glacial Soils
The soil horizons in Portage County, Wisconsin, reveal a glacial history. The Laurentide ice sheet advanced and retreated over this region until roughly 11,000 years ago, depositing gravel, sand, and other sediment across the landscape along the way. The resulting soils are sandy and dotted with rocks and tend to have relatively low water retention, making them good candidates for irrigation systems.
Portage County’s glacial soils support an agricultural industry that produces $372 million worth of food (mostly vegetables like potatoes, sweet corn, and peas annually as of the 2022 census. The 951 farms in the county provide 74 percent of the state’s crop sales.
While more than 50 farms in Portage County top 1,000 acres, the typical farm size here is smaller—roughly 287 acres, or two-thirds the national average.
“We have a lot of very small-scale farming, an active farmers’ market, and a lot of local growers,” Scharenbroch said. “It’s something that’s really cool and unique about our area.”
To show students the range of farming styles in the region and how they impacted the soil, Scharenbroch took them to visit a handful of local producers during their practice week. There, students saw how farming practices like machine tilling caused soil layers to be tighter and less permeable, making it harder for water to penetrate. This left soil on the surface vulnerable to blowing away during winds and storms.
Farms that used techniques like compost application and cover cropping had deeper, darker-brown top layers that were better at absorbing moisture and less at risk of erosion. “One of the biggest things is to keep the soil covered,” said Joel Gebhard, a soil scientist for the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) who helped plan the contest. “If soil is bare, it’s going to get removed somehow.”
At Lions Camp, soggy students wrapped up their analyses of each pit. “Pit monitors”—mostly employees or alums of UWSP—collected their scorecards and walked them inside to a cafeteria where the coaches had gathered for grading. First, they needed to align on the correct answers for each scorecard. In a room full of soil science academics, this was more contentious than you might imagine. Every coach had their own opinion, and matters that may have seemed trivial (say, whether students need to place a dash through empty boxes, or leave them blank) were grounds for impassioned debate.
There was good reason for the pedantics. Because soil varies from state to state, region to region, and even mile to mile, and because there are over 20,000 ways to describe soils in the U.S., having an agreed-upon lexicon was essential. Once the coaches came to an consensus and reviewed (and re-reviewed) each student’s scorecards, the first day’s competition was complete. After hours in the dirt, students dumped their supplies into plastic buckets (some decorated with slogans, like “Loam is Home” and “Loess Lover”), piled into vans and headed back to their hotels to dry off and rest up for the second and final competition day.
Central Wisconsin provided ample soil types for judging as students competed. (Photos: Emma Loewe)
The Role of the Soil Scientist
The analysis these students perform provides practice for future careers in the soil sciences. “People who soil judge have such a big leg-up on anyone else entering soil jobs,” said Nathan Stremcha, a former UWSP soil judger who is now a soil scientist at the NRCS. “The skills directly transfer.”
The NRCS, an agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), is one of the largest employers of soil scientists in the country, though soil scientists also work in the private sector for companies focused on bioremediation, construction, and agricultural research. Originally established in 1935 as the Soil Conservation Service, the agency was created to manage erosion and steward conservation during the Dust Bowl. Today, the NRCS manages the national Web Soil Survey, an essential database for farming, community planning, and beyond. “The database gets a hit at least every second,” Stremcha said.
Many students hope to go into a job at NRCS once they graduate—but now are unsure what will be available, given the recent federal funding cuts. Until recently, the agency was on a hiring spree. Many older employees were retiring, and it needed new soil scientists to help execute its climate-smart agriculture programs, which received $19.5 billion in funding over five years as part of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).
“Farmers trust us, but with that comes an obligation to make sure that you have well-trained employees who are going to be out there on the farms making the best scientific recommendations to make sure we get this conservation on the ground,” NRCS Chief Terry Cosby told the 2023 Trust In Food Symposium after unlocking the IRA funds, noting that the agency was struggling to find candidates qualified to advise farmers on soil conservation.
“They’re sending us even more jobs than we have students,” Scharenbroch said on a call back in October of 2024.
“People who soil judge have such a big leg-up on anyone else entering soil jobs. The skills directly transfer.”
The promise of the field changed, however, once the Trump administration took office this year. Since January, NRCS has reduced its staff by at least 2,400 employees, while a blanket freeze on hiring remains in place across the government. The USDA has erased information on federal loans and technical assistance for climate-smart agriculture from its website (although, after a lawsuit on behalf of farmers, it now plans to restore it) and cancelled many grants that had been made through the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities program. In response to the USDA’s 2026 budget request, Congress is proposing $45 million in cuts to NRCS conservation operations. These moves have left farmers in limbo and federal soil science hiring at a standstill.
Coaches worry about what these cuts will mean for their students and the future of soil science at large. “My fear with having potentially fewer soil scientists around is that we’re going to have more environmental disasters and agricultural disasters that we’re not prepared to respond to appropriately,” said Jaclyn Fiola, an assistant professor of soil and environmental science at Delaware Valley University and coach of the school’s soil judging team, on a call with Civil Eats.
The job market may be fluctuating, but the next generation’s commitment to soils remains steadfast.
“Where people live, where agricultural and economic power is, how people form culture . . . It’s all based on the soil,” Sky Reinhart, a junior at the University of Idaho, said during competition weekend. “Once you learn to see the soil . . . It makes all the difference for everything.”
The Significance of Soil Surveys
Conducting a soil survey is often the first step in assigning value to a piece of land and designating its most effective and efficient use. Different types of soils are suitable for different crops, so these surveys can be instrumental for agricultural planning. Soil scientists can also work with farmers or ranchers to help them better manage soil health to reduce erosion, maximize water infiltration, and improve nutrient cycling, increasing yield.
Beyond the farm, the surveys provide information on which soils can best support infrastructure like septic systems and roads. Sometimes, they can even inform where to bury animals affected by disease outbreaks, like during the recent avian flu. Increasingly, they have important climate implications as well.
“A lot of our carbon sequestration models are based on numbers that were collected by soil surveyors,” Fiola said. “That’s a really important reason that we need these maps to be accurate.”
The climate applications of soil attract many of today’s students to the field. “Almost 50 percent of the students I interact with are coming into soil science because they want to make an impact on climate-change issues,” Scharenbroch said.
As a result, some regional and national contests now ask students to describe soil indicators like salinization from sea level rise, identify functioning wetlands, or calculate a soil’s carbon-storage potential.
Digging Deep, Despite an Uncertain Future
On Day Two of the contest, the unpredictable weather continued. Rain fell in fits and spurts over Scharenbroch’s home, which is near a glacial moraine and littered with unique deposits. (Rumor has it the Web Soil Survey played a role in his house hunting.) “These soils are really interesting,” Gebhard said, motioning to the two massive pits excavated in the front yard. “They’re messy because they’re right on this edge where glaciers went back and forth.”
During group judging day, each school analyzes pits together, aligning on a scorecard as a team. A few teams are assigned to a pit at a time, and they alternate between spending 10 minutes underground and 10 minutes above it.
Once the timer began at Scharenbroch’s, each team split off to stake their claim to a spot on the pit’s perimeter, setting up a tight circle to keep discussions out of earshot of the competition.
“Once you learn to see the soil . . . It makes all the difference for everything.”
“You texture, I color?,” Sean Cary, a sophomore at the University of Rhode Island, confirmed with his two teammates (the smallest team of the competition—fitting, they joked, as the smallest state). By splitting up tasks, the team could spend more time on each analysis and double-check each other’s work at the end. Rhode Island’s time in the pit was spent scanning the horizons closely, as if searching for a rare library book. Outside of it, they quietly deliberated on the soil’s properties and perhaps more importantly, its practical uses.
“Having the knowledge of what soils can do and how we can fix them and use them in the correct way is one of the main reasons I’m doing this,” said Cary, who is majoring in agriculture and food systems. “It’s not something that should be taken lightly, because the future of soil can affect the future of society.”
The pit monitors gave a two-minute warning to the final set of teams. Then, the contest students had spent months preparing for was over. Cary and his teammates dumped out their muffin tins, turned in their scorecards, and swished their hands in a water cup like used paintbrushes. When asked if they were happy that soil judging was over for the year, they said they’d miss it.
The winning team, from the University of Idaho, from left: Hannah Poland, Daniel Middelhoven, Tegan Macy, Sky Reinhardt, Coach Paul Tietz, Logan Mann, Jacob Flick, Coach MaryBeth Gavin. (Photo: Emma Loewe)
Crowning a Winner
All that was left was the awards ceremony. This would take place under a park pavilion in Steven’s Point later that afternoon, leaving students ample opportunity to get nervous about the results. Some distracted themselves by tossing a Frisbee around the pavilion’s perimeter; others sang old sea shanties as they waited. The trophy that every school was after sat up front: the Bidwell-Reisig, a two-handed behemoth nearly as old as the competition itself, named after its designers—a Kansas State soil professor and one of his students. Engraved with the winners of the past, the trophy’s 2025 spot lay blank in waiting.
At long last, Scharenbroch asked the group to gather round. Many students remained standing at the pavilion’s edge, too antsy to sit down.
First came the individual results: “In first place, with 852 points,” Scharenbroch announced to a rapt audience, “JosiLee Scott!”
The pindrop-quiet pavilion exploded in cheers. The West Virginia University senior walked stoically to accept her prize—a plaque and, naturally, some local cheese curds. She quickly ushered her coach up for a big bear hug and a photo as a well-earned smile spread across her face.
The grand prize, which went to the school with the highest combined group and individual scores, went to The University of Idaho—the Vandal’s first win in over 35 years of competing. Six Idaho students and their two coaches looked at each other in disbelief as they ambled up to accept the trophy. Some shed tears as they hoisted it high, the applause of their fellow soil enthusiasts filling the misty air.
The University of Delaware and The University of Maryland rounded out the top three schools, bringing the 2025 contest to a close. Some students were already planning for the next one. For others, this was the last competition of their scholastic careers. And what came next was as uncertain as the weather of a Wisconsin spring.
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]]>The post Conservation Work on Farms and Ranches Could Take a Hit as USDA Cuts Staff appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>In the spring of 2024, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) officially offered Gretchen Troutman, 49, a job as a natural resource specialist. Elated, she packed up her life in Pennsylvania and moved close to 2,000 miles to a small town in Mora County, New Mexico, where she imagined she’d finally do the kind of work she had long hoped to do up until it was time to retire.
For close to a year, her job at the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS)—the agency division that helps farmers sustain land and ecosystems—was everything she thought it would be. Across vast expanses of arid sage and piñon-juniper rangeland, Troutman worked alongside ranchers, advising them on efficient irrigation for cattle, fencing methods for improved grazing, and federal grants to offset the costs.
“Land is being lost at very quick rates for many different reasons, and so the fact that we were trying to help these people make improvements to their land, but it also improved their lives, that was my interest in [the position],” she said. “I was actually feeling like I was helping people and helping the land as well.”
On Valentine’s Day, NRCS fired her.
While her notice cited poor performance, Troutman said she had only received positive feedback from superiors. Her experience was not unique: USDA and other federal agencies sent the same notice to thousands of “probationary” employees, who had either recently started or were recently promoted. On March 31, after a court found the action unlawful and ordered the Trump administration to reinstate the employees, Troutman got her job back.
Back at her desk, though, Troutman began to feel immense pressure to take an offer called a “deferred resignation package,” or DRP. With agency leadership warning of more mass “reductions in force” layoffs, Troutman worried that she would be fired a second time, and be stuck in a small town with few job opportunities and no access to unemployment benefits.
“It was just this constant barrage of, ‘You might get fired. You might keep your job. You might get fired. We don’t know,’” she said. “It wears you down.”
So, she and the only other specialist in her NRCS office both took the offer.
In an interview in late May, Troutman sounded pained as she explained her decision. “I didn’t want to leave my team shorthanded, [and] I also didn’t want to leave the farmers and ranchers,” she added, expressing a sense of guilt. “For future [conservation] applications, it’s going to be so much harder to do, because there’s just not the staff to go out and do a site visit. There’s nobody there to do the work.”
‘Acute’ Capacity Problems
Across the NRCS, reductions in staff could jeopardize the agency’s work to protect land, water, and wildlife across vast swaths of U.S. range and farmland. According to a USDA document provided to members of Congress and reviewed by Civil Eats, of approximately 2,400 NRCS employees who accepted resignation offers between January and April, only about 30 were based in Washington, D.C. The rest were working with farmers in local offices across the country. New Mexico lost 43 NRCS employees. Texas, Kansas, and Wisconsin—major beef and dairy producers—all lost 100 or more people.
Meanwhile, the Department of Government Efficiency has proposed shutting down more than a dozen NRCS offices nationwide, along with additional county USDA offices where NRCS staff work. In their 2026 budget requests, President Donald Trump and the USDA have also proposed eliminating an entire source of funding for farmer technical assistance from NRCS, which would result in a $784 million cut, although appropriators in Congress have reduced that in their spending bill, proposing a smaller $45 million cut instead.
“It was just this constant barrage of, ‘You might get fired. You might keep your job. You might get fired. We don’t know.’ ”
“On the ground in districts like mine, local FSA [Farm Service Agency], NRCS, and Forest Service staff are being let go,” said House Agriculture Committee ranking member Angie Craig (D-Minnesota) at a June hearing where lawmakers questioned Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins. “Waitlists are getting longer, and fewer USDA staff are available to help family farmers navigate the agency’s incredibly popular and impactful programs.”
Rollins, who was asked about staff cuts several times, said that overall USDA staffing had expanded significantly under President Joe Biden—by more than 20,000 employees—and that reductions would save taxpayers money. “No one has been fired,” she said, despite the record of probationary employees being let go. Pressed on the issue, she said: “We are adequately staffed to meet our mission.”
But many farmers and others who have worked closely with NRCS for years dispute that assertion.
From 2023 to 2024, Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI) assessed how well NRCS was serving the farmers who are typically excluded from USDA services. One of their main findings, said Aaron Johnson, a policy director at RAFI, was that NRCS can’t serve small, diversified farms without increased staffing in local offices. And that was before the reductions.
“In the states we work in, that staff capacity problem is pretty acute,” Johnson said. “That was the lens we came into the year with: This is already a problem. Then the staff hiring freeze, rolling layoffs, etc., happened, and everything has just been made much worse. We hear this from Congressmen who are hearing from constituents, and we hear this from most farmers we talk to.”
In response to questions from Civil Eats, a USDA spokesperson said, in an email, that Rollins is “working to reorient the Department to be more effective and efficient at serving the American people by prioritizing farmers, ranchers, and producers. She will not compromise the critical work of the Department and will continue to put farmers first.”
Farmers Lose Advisers—and Trust in USDA
NRCS oversees a suite of conservation programs authorized in the farm bill, including the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP), and the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP). Those programs have long had bipartisan support and are so popular among farmers, there is never enough funding to meet demand. That’s because they allow farmers to do simple things to improve a farm’s long-term resilience, like build a hoop house or a manure management system—projects that might otherwise be out of reach financially. All the programs operate as a cost-share, so farmers pay a portion of a project and are then reimbursed for the NRCS portion.
But while the individual programs themselves get a lot of attention, Johnson said, the farm bill gives NRCS a toolbox containing them. “Whether and how that toolbox gets used is all up to that [local staff],” he explained. “They don’t just write you a check. “They have engineers and hydrology experts to help you manage your land and your farming systems in a way that conserves resources.”
Ariel Greenwood runs cattle on 120,000 leased acres in Mora County, New Mexico, where she’s used both EQIP and CSP over the years to reduce erosion, improve the health of wetlands, and retrofit fencing so that wildlife could move through the ranch without harm.
Across the NRCS, reductions in staff could jeopardize the agency’s work to protect land, water, and wildlife across vast swaths of U.S. range and farmland.
When Greenwood was putting together her last application, Troutman came out to the ranch and spent the day with her. She made practical suggestions and helped Greenwood navigate the process. “It’s just a special kind of person who works in that job,” Greenwood said. “Someone who has a passion for conservation and also has a brain for the really technical paperwork side of things, there’s not a lot of people like that. So when they’re good at it [and you’re] firing them, there’s no efficiency there.”
Since Troutman’s been gone, Greenwood said the staff at her district conservation office seem to be hustling to keep up, and little things have fallen through the cracks, like a form she had to resend after Troutman’s departure. But they have been able to keep services running for her so far. “That is completely to the credit to the individuals who work there,” she said.
In a very different climate, near Maine’s rocky coast, Seth Kroeck has been farming 187 certified organic acres of vegetables, small grains, hay, and wild blueberries for more than 20 years. In that time, his Crystal Springs Farm has used conservation funding for multiple projects, including improved irrigation and the planting of cover crops. Currently, he has one contract to put in pollinator-friendly plants around the edges of his fields and another to spread wood chips on his blueberry fields, to protect them from the hotter temperatures Maine is experiencing due to climate change.
Since January, many of the employees Kroeck had engaged with at his local NRCS office are no longer there. “There were two employees that were in that office that I’ve been working with directly on programs, and they’re gone,” he said. “There were two engineers that were helping us on different irrigation contracts, and they’re gone. It’s kind of a mess.” The USDA record shows 32 NRCS employees in Maine accepted the DRP offer.
Like Greenwood, Kroeck said his NRCS county director has held everything together based on her work ethic. “She’s the only employee there, where there used to be six,” he said. “She is answering the phone, she is opening the letters, she is doing all the contracts.”
The loss of the NRCS engineers could particularly hurt farmers, he said, because many depend on them to answer technical questions about project implementation.
“If the work isn’t done exactly to spec for the contract, we don’t get paid,” Kroeck said. “It really means that sometimes there’s no one with the expertise on a particular practice to reach out to, so our agent has had to reach out to other parts of the state or other states to get advice on the specifics of our projects.”
Kroeck’s trust in USDA’s support for farmers has been particularly shaken because his wood chip project was also caught in the funding freeze. By the time USDA unfroze the funding, the supply of wood chips in his area had been diminished, and he could only purchase enough to cover 4 acres instead of the planned 12.5. Now, because of the particulars of blueberry plant growth, he’ll have to wait two years to cover the remaining acres while the plants struggle amid rising temperatures.
Bracing for Future Impacts
Staffing challenges at NRCS offices have not been uniform from office to office or state to state.
At Sunset Springs Ranch, in Nacogdoches, Texas, for example, Marty French said no one in his local NRCS office took the resignation offer. As a result, he’s seen no delays on inspections or his cost-share payments for his active EQIP contract. “The only issue is they cannot hire yet for their open engineer position,” he said, due to a hiring freeze.
On the other hand, wider impacts do exist for farmers relying on conservation programs, because NRCS contracts out some of the technical assistance.
“Waitlists are getting longer, and fewer USDA staff are available to help family farmers navigate the agency’s incredibly popular and impactful programs.”
The environmental organization Point Blue Conservation Science, for example, has long provided wildlife biologists for California NRCS offices to work with farmers on wildlife protections. However, the organization had to pull those biologists when the Trump administration froze grant funding earlier this year, and the situation is still in flux, Bonnie Eyestone, Point Blue’s working lands conservation director, told Civil Eats in an email. “We understand the value and importance of the role biologists play in the field offices in assisting farmers and ranchers to carry out their conservation plans,” she wrote, “and hope to continue providing that service if our agreement is allowed to move forward.”
Farmers also said they’re worried about NRCS offices not having enough staff to help them complete the complicated paperwork involved in applying for a conservation program grant. “Most people who’ve started farms do not have a background in grant writing, and it’s such a specific language,” said Jake Mendell, who grows vegetables at Footprint Farm in Starksboro, Vermont, with his wife, Taylor Mendell. Taylor happened to have some previous experience in grant writing, he said, which helped them apply for EQIP grants to build hoop houses, infrastructure that allows them to extend their growing season and ultimately survive as a small farm. Even with that advantage, Jake said, the process was still a little daunting for him.
“We know how to grow things and maybe talk to customers, but farmers are asked to do a lot,” he said. “You have to be a small-engines mechanic and a marketer and also a biologist, and to add grantwriter onto that, it’s another thing. So to have people whose job it is to help our food system improve and help people get the financial assistance they need is such a benefit.”
In the emailed response to Civil Eats, the USDA spokesperson said that USDA remains “committed to working with producers to ensure they have the support and tools needed to address natural resource concerns and achieve their conservation goals.”
Back in New Mexico, Greenwood said that as discussions about cutting conservation spending and staff focus on how taxpayer dollars should be used, she wishes more people understood not just how NRCS conservation programs help farmers, but also the value they provide to the American public.
On her ranch just east of the Sangre de Cristo mountains, she’s used the funding to help restore land that was degraded long before her cattle arrived. Here, where every drop of water matters, she’s taken bare, hard dirt and created diverse pasture with spongy soil beneath. That soil captures water when the rain falls, allowing it to percolate through the bedrock and into the springs that the nearby communities rely on for drinking water.
She did that work with the help of NRCS and, more specifically, with the help of Gretchen Troutman. “These programs do a pretty darn good job for farmers to make improvements on ag operations that really affect the health of the land and in turn affect everybody else,” she said.
The post Conservation Work on Farms and Ranches Could Take a Hit as USDA Cuts Staff appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>The post Could This Arizona Ranch Be a Model for Southwest Farmers? appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>One mid-morning in May, the temperature at Oatman Flats Ranch, in southern Arizona’s Sonoran Desert, had already soared into the 90s. By 4 p.m., the thermometer peaked at 105 degrees—a withering spring heat, but still mild compared to the blistering summer months ahead.
“I joke that this farm is a little better than Death Valley, but I’m not really joking,” said Yadi Wang, the farm director, as he drove his pickup through this 665-acre ranch about a two-hour drive from Phoenix.
“If we’re going to hold on to farmland, we need a significant change in how we farm and what we farm.”
For Wang, every day at the ranch is different. During the winter, he spends his days preparing fields of heritage wheat, planting seeds, and laying pipes from irrigation ditches to the row crops edging the now-dry Gila River. Early summer is the busiest, with the farm team spending up to 10 straight days harvesting the desert-hardy wheat, barley, and other grains.
“These cash crops translate into the tangible,” Wang said. Yet much of his time is devoted to a longer-term, less noticeable project: restoring degraded land, often through practices that originated with the Indigenous peoples of this region.
Oatman Flats Ranch is attempting to create a sustainable, scalable model for regenerative farming in the Southwest, demonstrating what can and perhaps should be grown in an increasingly hot, dry, and water-limited region. In 2021, Oatman Flats Ranch became the region’s first-ever Regenerative Organic Certified farm, with practices build soil health and biodiversity, help sequester carbon, and reduce water consumption. Now it’s been designated as a Regenerative Organic Learning Center by the Regenerative Organic Alliance (ROC), welcoming other farmers interested in observing and talking about the practices there.
‘We Need a Significant Change in How We Farm’
Those time-tested practices will become increasingly important as Arizona farmers grapple with the worst water crisis in the state’s history.
“If we’re going to hold on to farmland, we need a significant change in how we farm and what we farm,” said Dax Hansen, the ranch’s owner.
A combine harvests blue durum wheat on the south side of Oatman Flats Ranch in the summer. (Photo courtesy of Oatman Farms)
But it won’t be easy. Oatman Flats Ranch has undergone a dramatic transformation that required significant investments in training, research, equipment, and techniques, all of which took years to deliver a return. Although processes have been refined and problems worked out along the way, with insights that Hansen freely shares with other farmers, many practices are out of reach for the average farmer.
“It’s an experimental farm,” Wang said. “I have a lot of respect for [Hansen], willing to get all these cash assets to pour into this, to lose money. Not many people can or are willing to do that.”
Hansen, a successful financial technology lawyer who grew up in Mesa, Arizona, purchased the property from his aunt and uncle in late 2018. Oatman Flats Ranch has been in the family for four generations. His grandfather Ray Jud Hansen ran cattle in the 1950s before becoming one of Arizona’s first conventional cotton farmers.
The land was severely degraded when Hansen bought it, with compacted, salty, eroded fields caused by decades of conventional farming practices and 10 years of neglect. The soil was more than 55 percent clay. “It was pretty bleak,” Hansen said. “[The land] had basically been sterilized, with almost nothing growing on it.”
Hansen wanted to demonstrate the potential for regenerative farming in the arid Southwest, so he and his team redesigned the farm. They began by restoring the dilapidated infrastructure, repairing wells and pump equipment, excavating irrigation ditches, and purchasing the necessary farm equipment. They cleared hundreds of invasive trees, leveled the fields, fertilized them with manure, and planted cover crops to improve soil and water quality. In addition, Hansen commissioned an ethnobotany and archaeology study of the property to understand what crops had historically been planted at Oatman Flats Ranch.
Meanwhile, the neighboring farmers no longer grow food for people; their crops provide feed and fuel. Oatman Flats Ranch is surrounded by millions of acres of alfalfa for livestock and corn for ethanol, watered by one of the world’s fastest-draining aquifers.
Dax Hansen purchased the farm in 2018 with his wife, Leslie Hansen to create a model of regenerative farming in an increasingly hot and water-scarce Southwest. (Photo credit: Adam Riding)
“Climate change and a persistent megadrought are reducing the flow of rivers in the West, yet we have been unable to sufficiently reduce our dependence on these rivers to keep demands balanced with supplies,” said Brian Richter, president of Sustainable Waters, an organization focused on water scarcity issues. “The result is increasing depletion of rivers, lakes, and aquifers.”
The constraints led Hansen and his wife to explore water-conserving crops. His team planted drought-tolerant, and nutrient-dense White Sonora wheat and mesquite trees.
“We embraced the abundance of heirloom and native crops in the Sonoran Desert,” Hansen said. “We are looking at the land and asking it what we should grow, rather than asking the land to grow what we want.”
Hansen hired farm attendant Juan Carlos Gutierrez and Wang, who shared his vision of healing the land and were knowledgeable about water, soil, and biodiversity. Wang has a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering and a Ph.D. in agriculture and life sciences. Gutierrez does a bit of everything at the farm, including planting and harvesting, maintaining farm equipment, managing cover crops, rotating animals, and milling wheat and mesquite into flour.
In five years, Oatman Flats Ranch’s regenerative practices saved over a billion gallons of water, doubled the amount of organic matter in the soil, and steadily transformed the once-beleaguered ecosystem, according to its May 2024 Regenerative Impact Report. The water savings are measured by tracking the flow rate of each well on the ranch to calculate the amount of water used per round of irrigation. The acre-feet of water used at Oatman Flats Ranch are then compared to the estimated acre-feet used in conventional wheat production. (One acre-foot is enough water to flood a football field 1 foot deep, or more than 325,000 gallons.)
“When we grow regenerative, we can use 2 or 3 acre-feet of water,” Hansen said. “Alfalfa and cotton will take like 9 or 10 acre-feet.”
To measure soil organic matter, Wang takes samples from the surface of the fields and sends them to the Motzz laboratory in Arizona and the Regen Ag Lab in Nebraska for analysis. Soil organic matter is the key indicator of soil health, influencing nutrient and water availability, biological diversity, and other factors critical in growing healthy crops. In some fields, soil organic matter has grown from 0.8 percent to 2.4 percent, according to the lab results. Yadi said 0.8 percent is about normal for the region, while 2.4 percent is very high, an outlier. “People think it’s impossible,” he said.
Regeneration Rooted in Indigenous Practices
Southern Arizona’s rich agricultural history stretches back more than 5,000 years. By 600 CE, the Hohokam people were constructing North America’s largest and most elaborate irrigation systems along the Salt and Gila Rivers. The descendants of the Hohokam—the Pima and Tohono O’odham—continued to farm the land up to and after the arrival of the Spanish, who began to colonize southern Arizona in the 1600s. They continue to farm in Arizona today.
At the Tohono O’odham Indian Reservation, about two hours southeast of Oatman Flats, the San Xavier Co-op Farm uses historic land management practices and grows traditional crops that reflect their respect for the land, plants, animals, elders, and the sacredness of water.
San Xavier Farm Manager Duran Andrews and his team plant cover crops, rotate fields, and collect rainwater. “[Regenerative agriculture] is nothing new to us,” Andrews said. “We have been doing this for decades. Harmony between nature and people has been our approach all the time.” Rotating fields and cultivating multiple mutually beneficial species in the same fields improves water and soil quality and biodiversity in this harsh landscape.
“You’ve seen what the land looks like in five years; imagine it in 10. If we can do it here, we can do it anywhere.”
The co-op grows a variety of native crops that were developed in the region and cultivated for centuries or, in some cases, millennia, such as grains and beans, which they sell online. “We irrigate them till they sprout, then cut them off till the monsoon shows up,” Andrews said. “We try to keep crops in that hardy state through all the years and decades they have been here. We try not to get away from how things were done in the past.” They also grow White Sonora wheat, introduced to Arizona by Spanish Jesuit missionaries in the 1600s. “It was a gift from Father Kino that we have taken as our own,” Andrews said. “The [San Xavier] community was one of the first to grow this wheat.”
Following the Mexican-American War in the mid-1800s, the United States claimed parts of modern-day Arizona, New Mexico, California, Nevada, and Utah. The Anglo ranchers who moved into the area dug canals to irrigate agricultural fields, transforming the landscape. An 1852 watercolor by surveyor Jon Russell Bartlett depicts a verdant valley with cottonwoods and mesquite trees lining a flowing Gila River as it passes through Oatman Flats Ranch.
That landscape is unrecognizable today. The lower Gila has gone bone dry after years of upstream diversions, dams, water overuse, and climate change. In 2019, the Gila River earned the title of Most Endangered River by the nonprofit advocacy group American Rivers.
Standing on the sandy Gila riverbed, which divides the north and south farms of Oatman Flats Ranch, Wang pointed to the nearby invasive salt cedars. Healing the land involves rebuilding the water, nutrient, and carbon cycles from the ground up, “at the micro level,” he said. “On the macro level, it’s broken.”
The ranch team has poured resources into rebuilding soil health by planting hedgerows and 30-plus species of cover crops, at a cost of approximately $100,000. The hedgerows, mostly native trees, were planted along the edges of the fields to reduce erosion and provide habitat for beneficial species, including pollinators such as bees and hummingbirds.
The cover crops—millet, chickpeas, sunflowers, sorghum, sudan grass, broadleaves, and native grasses among them—are planted immediately after harvesting wheat, to provide “soil armor,” help conserve water, fix nitrogen in the soil, suppress weeds, attract beneficial insects, and sequester carbon. The once-barren land now supports life for more than 120 species of flora and fauna.
Farm manager Yadi Wang with a handful of mesquite pods picked from a tree near the farmhouse. The mesquite pods are dried and ground into a gluten-free, nutrient-dense flour. (Photo credit: Samuel Gilbert)
“When you take life away, it just doesn’t come back unless you provide the resources,” said Wang.
The varying heights of the cover crops make multi-storied microclimates, with vapor condensing near the cooler soil surface, creating dew. “I can make dew in the hottest part of July, when the ambient temperature is over 90 degrees by 9 a.m.,” Wang said.
Instead of tilling the cover crops into the fields at the end of their cycle and disturbing soil structure, the team uses a roller-crimper—a ridged cylindrical drum attached to a tractor—to cut stalks and lay the crops down “like a carpet” to protect topsoil, Hansen said. Switching to roller crimping saves money, too, since it costs one-third less than tilling.
The roots remain in the soil, reducing soil erosion and creating an extensive microbial network that cycles nutrients, builds soil organic matter, and increases water infiltration “like a sponge,” Wang said. All of this protects soil from high temperatures, too.
The fields slope ever so gradually to allow irrigation water to move down the rows. In the early years, water would race down the hard-packed dirt, spilling into the Gila drainage. Now, Wang has the opposite problem: When he irrigates, it takes days for water to spread three-quarters down the length of the field. In response, the ranch plans to switch to sprinklers to save water, expand cultivable land, and mimic natural rainfall. The sprinklers are expensive and cost about $1 million, most of that already paid by a water irrigation efficiency grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. This move away from flood irrigation is gaining traction in the parched Southwest.
In 2022, Oatman Flats Ranch introduced sheep, natural lawnmowers that prune back cover crops and weeds while fertilizing the soil. They are rotationally grazed from field to field to give plants in each area a chance to recuperate and strengthen their root systems.
Now, six years after regeneration efforts began, 90 animal species have returned to the area around the farm, including mountain lions, owls, and tiny blue dragonflies—”a sign of water,” Wang said—who weave in and out of rows of White Sonora wheat.
Native Crops Adapted for the Arid Southwest
Although Wang and his team are introducing new crops, including native and heirloom melons, their signature crops are mesquite and White Sonora wheat.
Mesquite trees are superbly adapted desert plants. At the ranch, they’re planted in dense groves near the farmhouse. Their taproots can burrow 200 feet deep, and they can shed their small, waxy leaves—designed to conserve moisture—in extreme drought.
Sonora wheat, barley, and other desert-hardy crops stretch along the now-dry Lower Gila River valley at Oatman Flats Ranch. (Photo credit: AJ Ledford)
Their green-bean-like pods were a staple food for Indigenous people in this region, rich in fiber, protein, and calcium. When dried and ground into flour, they have a mildly smoky, nutty, molasses-like flavor. Wang’s wife adds the flour to her coffee, making a frothy, slightly sweet, nutrient-packed latte.
White Sonora wheat is a key part of Hansen’s vision for a regenerative grain economy. The wheat is sown in November or December and harvested in late spring or early summer.
Standing in a field of pale golden wheat stalks, Wang threshed the grain from the chaff by rubbing his palms together as if warming his hands on a cold day. The berries resemble tiny deer hooves, with a groove in each golden-colored grain.
“This is as clean as you can get,” Wang said. “No synthetic fertilizer. No chemicals. Drying on the stalk.” The ranch’s cold-stone milling process preserves the grain’s vitamins and minerals, and retains its naturally sweet, mild flavor.
Oatman Flats Ranch sells Regenerative Organic Certified (ROC) products such as stone-milled flour and mesquite flour, as well as bread, pancake, and waffle mixes, under the Oatman Farms brand. The flours and mixes are now used by numerous restaurants, including Arizona Wilderness Brewing Company.
“We are looking to partner with and help sustain farms like Oatman,” said Jonathan Buford, CEO and brewmaster at Arizona Wilderness, which sources sustainable ingredients from more than 50 local producers. “We need to look at a different currency than just capital. We must consider that Earth must profit, too, for the future of our planet.”
Seeding More Regenerative Farms
Hansen is sharing what he has learned. Oatman Flats is one of the country’s five Regenerative Organic Learning Centers, which other farmers can visit to observe regenerative solutions that they can potentially put to use on their own farms.
To better understand how the regenerative movement is evolving, Hansen routinely talks to other farmers, and he’s clear about what must happen for it to really take hold. “It is absolutely true that farmers don’t have the resources to do this on their own,” Hansen said. “Farmers need help from consumers, restaurants, and governments to pull off this regenerative effort. I believe we can make regenerative agriculture viable by explaining the plight of the land and the farmers and nature and boldly proclaiming the solution of regenerative agriculture.”
Six years after regeneration efforts began, 90 animal species have returned to the area around the farm, including mountain lions, owls, and tiny blue dragonflies.
The transition to a Regenerative Organic Certified (ROC) model can require a large investment, as it has for Hansen. And it takes three to five years to reap the benefits of regenerative practices, according to Elizabeth Whitlow, founder and senior advisor of the Regenerative Organic Alliance (ROA), which oversees the ROC framework and guidelines.
For most farmers, this is not an option. Margins are thin, and financial constraints often inhibit farmers from exploring regenerative practices. “The only option is to do the cheapest thing you can to survive,” Wang said. “[There is] no room to consider what they could do differently.”
The paybacks of regenerative organic farming can be significant, however. They include reduced costs of inputs such as fertilizers, pesticides, and water, as well as increased profits from high-value products. “I do see brands stepping in and up to provide long-term contracts with farmers while they transition into this new, unknown territory,” Whitlow said. “The premiums and long-term stability offered through this kind of contract agreement help the farmers.”
Besides Hansen’s own funds, Oatman Flats Ranch has also been supported by payments from the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service for on-farm conservation programs, such as tree planting and conservation cover. As the Trump administration cuts climate-related programs, Hansen said Oatman Flats would be affected by “the elimination of Arizona statewide programs supporting local food systems.”
Hansen nonetheless believes that in time, a financially viable model for regenerative organic farming is possible, particularly as demand for ROC products grows. A 2022-2023 impact report from the ROA showed that ROC product sales grew 22 percent on average between 2022 and 2023, reaching nearly $40 million. But profitability, he said, will take “quite a while.”
With the growth of regenerative agriculture, Hansen sees the potential to preserve his family’s farm and a way of life he holds dear, especially as the climate changes.
“You’ve seen what the land looks like in five years; imagine it in 10,” Hansen said. “If we can do it here, we can do it anywhere.”
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]]>The post Op-ed: Why Most No-Till Agriculture Is Not Actually Regenerative appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>I sat down to write this piece after a five-inch April snowstorm gave our newly planted wheat fields their first drink of the season. Wheat is one of five crops we raise on our farm just outside Belgrade, Montana, that work in rotation to help build our soils, minimize weeds, and produce high yields—all without using expensive and toxic synthetic fertilizers, herbicides, and insecticides.
We also grow flax, yellow peas, alfalfa, and durum; you might have seen our peas and durum in Annie’s mac & cheese. Our flax is grown for seed and also ends up in bulk bins at grocery stores, our durum is made into pasta, and our alfalfa keeps organic dairy cows producing delicious milk, butter, and cream.
“As the term ‘regenerative’ has gained ground, many have lost sight of the fact that organic is the oven-ready set of standards to define regenerative ag.”
When I started my first-generation farm in 2004, I dove head first into regenerative practices, partly out of interest in the fascinating agronomy, but mostly out of necessity. If I was going to make a career in farming, producing high yields without expensive inputs would be my only way towards profitability.
As regenerative agriculture has gained steam in recent years, I’ve been thinking about its potential and how important it is that we direct the energy behind it towards real solutions. Since there’s no set definition of the term, I’ve seen “regenerative” increasingly being used to describe practices most farmers can agree don’t regenerate much soil.
The idea of “no-till” has become nearly synonymous with “regenerative” agriculture, the farming practice of reducing tillage and plowing. A new report from Friends of the Earth sheds some light on why this is concerning. It shows that, while no-till can be done without harmful chemicals, most no-till systems are so dependent on herbicides to manage weeds—since a key reason farmers till their soil is to get rid of weeds—that a full one-third of the U.S.’s total annual pesticide use can be attributed to no- and minimum-till corn and soy production alone. (The term “pesticide” includes herbicides, insecticides, and fungicides.)
A tractor sprays pesticides on a farm. (Photo credit: sircco, Getty Images)
This impacts a lot of land. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) data shows that 107 million acres—about 60 percent of both corn and soy—are under no- or minimum-till management. The report’s analysis of USDA data shows that 93 percent of those acres use herbicides linked to health and environmental risks, like Roundup.
This means the majority of no-till farming in this country is focused on herbicides, not regeneration. These chemicals devastate soil life—the microbes and bugs that farmers need to regenerate soil and to build resilience to droughts and floods. And they threaten our health, with scientists linking them to cancer, birth defects, infertility, and more.
No-till corn also uses a massive amount of synthetic fertilizers that can harm soil life and our health—about 7.6 billion pounds each year.
On top of that, the report shows conventional no-till farming is not scientifically linked to increasing carbon in the soil, despite most investment in no-till as “regenerative” being based on the faulty assumption that it is.
If conventional no-till is not regenerative, then what is? The key question is not “to till or not to till.” A narrow focus on single practices like tillage is misleading. Truly regenerative agriculture works with the farming system as a whole. Research shows that careful tillage in holistic farming systems can achieve better soil outcomes than chemical-intensive no-till systems.
Reducing tillage has its benefits and should be a target in all farming systems. Tillage tools available today are vastly improved over those available to farmers in the 1980s. Reducing tillage also saves time, steel, and fuel, helping improve farmers’ bottom line. Less tillage means less soil erosion and greater soil water-holding capacity. But as a farmer for more than two decades, I can say that in order to truly address soil health, supporting organic farming is a better path than a sole focus on no-till.
“It’s not farmers’ fault that chemical-intensive agriculture predominates in the U.S.—that’s what our public policies and markets support.”
When I purchased my first cows at age 12 as an offshoot of a 4H project, I quickly realized that I needed to find a market that adds value. As I built my operation and found markets, the demand for certified organic crops and beef offered a consistent premium I couldn’t ignore.
Later, as I expanded from 10 acres to over 1,000, I was able to grow my operation not only because of premium markets, but also because I didn’t have to navigate the expense of high fertilizer and herbicide bills—these synthetic inputs are prohibited in organic production. Not only do I have a healthy business, I have a healthier community, because my neighbors, my employees, and I have avoided exposure to many known toxic chemicals.
Some people have the misconception that organic can’t be regenerative because organic farmers use tillage to manage weeds and soil fertility. As the term “regenerative” has gained ground, many have lost sight of the fact that organic is the oven-ready set of standards to define regenerative ag. The organic standard includes pillars of soil health and provides an enforcement mechanism to ensure regenerative practices are actually implemented on the farm.
Decades of research shows that organic farming is one of the most comprehensive and time-tested ways to build healthy soils and protect the natural resources we need to grow food for ourselves and future generations, from helping pollinators thrive to preserving clean water. And unlike “regenerative,” the definition of organic is enforced through a rigorous legal standard.
This is a critical moment for agriculture here in Montana for my farm, and across the country. The fact that so many farmers have adopted no-till practices is indisputable evidence they’re interested in protecting their soil. It’s not farmers’ fault that chemical-intensive agriculture predominates in the U.S.—that’s what our public policies and markets support.
If we’re serious about regeneration and making America healthy, companies and policymakers need to help farmers thrive by investing in reduction of harmful, expensive inputs in conventional farming systems while expanding organic agriculture in our country.
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]]>The post The Future of California’s Climate-Smart Farming Programs appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>In 2019, as California’s historic drought hit its peak, the well on Lilian Thaoxaochay’s 20-acre family farm, GT Florists and Herbs in Fresno County, looked close to drying up. With rows of Armenian cucumbers, budding dahlias, and blooming jujube trees at risk, the only fix, it seemed, was to dig the well deeper—at a cost of $20,000. “It almost tanked us,” Thaoxaochay recalls of the crisis that threatened her family’s livelihood.
Then came a reprieve: the State Water Efficiency and Enhancement Program (SWEEP), a state initiative to help farms adapt to California’s increasingly erratic climate. Using the $58,000 grant, the Thaoxaochays switched their farm from full-flood irrigation to a drip system fed through trenched water lines and monitored by moisture sensors.
As part of the upgrade, they also installed a flow meter to help comply with California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), which requires farms to track groundwater use. The changes slashed not just water use, but also the energy costs of running the pump, leaving the farm far better equipped for the next drought—which arrived just three years later.
While California farmers aren’t immune to the fallout, the Golden State offers a level of support not found in much of the country.
The farm also secured a $23,000 grant through the state’s Healthy Soils Program (HSP), an initiative that helps growers integrate composting, cover cropping, and reduced tillage—practices that enhance soil health and increase its capacity to retain water and sequester carbon. In addition to boosting field productivity, the changes helped cut the farm’s reliance on synthetic fertilizers.
“It was the lifeline we needed,” says Thaoxaochay of the two programs. “We’ve been completely resilient since,” she adds, unlike many small farms that have been forced to seek emergency state relief due to erratic weather conditions.
In recent months, U.S. farmers have watched climate-related support wobble under political pressure. The Trump administration froze more than $1 billion in USDA funding for programs aimed at climate resilience and social equity, then reissued several with political strings including scrubbing references to climate change and DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion).
A federal judge has since ordered reinstatement of the funds, but the episode has only deepened the fragility of national climate policy, casting a long shadow over efforts to help farmers brace for a future of worsening droughts, floods, and wildfires.
While California farmers aren’t immune to the fallout, the Golden State offers a level of support not found in much of the country. In addition to SWEEP and HSP, the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) oversees a suite of several climate-smart agricultural programs that cut emissions and build on-farm resilience.
These include the Alternative Manure Management Program, which funds systems that dry manure into compost rather than flushing it into methane-emitting lagoons; the Biologically Integrated Farming Systems Program, to promote low-input, plant-based farming methods; and the Sustainable Agricultural Lands Conservation Program (SALCP), to fund conservation easements that permanently protect farmland, preserving them as carbon sinks. (See “California’s Climate-Smart Farming Programs,” below, for details.)
Lilian Thaoxaochay said a recent drought “almost tanked” her family’s farm. A California initiative, funded by the state’s Cap-and-Trade program, helped them switch to a drip system. (Photo courtesy of GT Florists & Herbs)
All these initiatives are funded through California’s Cap-and-Trade Program, which channels billions of dollars towards reducing greenhouse gas emissions and spurring economic growth.
Enacted in 2006 and implemented in 2013, Cap-and-Trade requires major polluters like oil refineries and manufacturing facilities to buy “allowances” at quarterly auctions to offset their carbon output. The proceeds flow into the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF), which pays for the state’s climate-smart agricultural programs—along with more than 80 other climate initiatives across transportation, housing, and energy. Together, these investments support California’s goal of achieving net-zero emissions by 2045, positioning California as a national model for integrated, climate-resilient policy.
Eleven Northeastern states also cap power-sector emissions through the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. Yet California Cap-and-Trade is the only program that directly accounts for emissions from agriculture, the leading global source of atmospheric methane and responsible for 8 percent of California’s carbon emissions.
Despite these significant emissions, the climate-smart agricultural programs designed to reduce them receive just 5 percent of Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF) allocations. That imbalance, says Brian Shobe, policy director at the California Climate & Agriculture Network (CalCAN), overlooks agriculture’s outsized potential to sequester carbon and build climate resistance: Healthy fields, pastures, and orchards enhance biodiversity, improve water retention, and help buffer farms against extreme weather.
With federal funding cuts hitting California’s farmers—and Trump’s recent executive order seeking to nullify state cap-and-trade systems—advocates are pushing for more than just a renewal of Cap-and-Trade’s existing allocations. As the program moves toward reauthorization in 2030, a coalition of agricultural and environmental groups, including CalCAN, has started urging lawmakers to lock in 15 percent of GGRF revenues for agricultural climate programs.
And, in mid April, Governor Gavin Newsom, Senate President pro Tempore Mike McGuire, and Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas pledged to extend the program, framing it as a chance to “demonstrate real climate leadership” on the national stage.
Stable funding, says Shobe, would let more farms and ranches adopt long-term climate solutions instead of scrambling for inconsistent, one-off grants tied to fluctuating auction revenues. It would also fortify the state’s broader climate strategy, he adds, and help stabilize the food system against climate-driven shocks that drive up grocery prices.
But agriculture isn’t the only sector competing for those funds. With no automatic appropriations for most climate programs, about 40 percent of Cap-and-Trade revenue is up for grabs each year, prompting fierce competition among advocates for housing, transit, energy, and agriculture.
“There’s an annual food fight over limited climate dollars,” says Zack Deutsch-Gross, policy director at Transform, a nonprofit focused on sustainable, equitable transit and land use. “It pits climate advocates against one another as they seek [stable] appropriations for their programs.”
CalCAN and its allies argue that carving out 15 percent for agricultural programs is essential to safeguarding California’s food supply in the face of relentless cycle of droughts, floods, wildfire, and heatwaves.
“This is a once-in-a-decade opportunity to secure a more stable, climate-resilient food system,” Shobe says. Given the competition for funding as Cap-and-Trade’s reauthorization deadline nears, and the added pressure of federal pullback, he and his colleagues are wasting no time in laying the groundwork for legislative support.
Climate Strain and Sticker Shock
Since its launch, the Cap-and-Trade Program has helped drive down California’s greenhouse gas emissions, with year-on-year reductions across the board. The market-based approach has spurred innovation in clean technologies and generated more than $25 billion in climate investments while boosting the state economy. Those funds support programs in agriculture, renewable energy, wildfire prevention, and air quality improvements, and amplify their reach. Though the program is authorized through 2030, reauthorization will require a two-thirds majority and substantial legislative maneuvering, which has already begun.
Last month, Assemblymember Jacqui Irwin, chair of the Joint Legislative Committee on Climate Change Policies, introduced a bill to extend Cap-and-Trade beyond its expiration date. While Irwin did not respond to Civil Eats’ requests for comment on the bill or its implications for agricultural funding, the move signals growing legislative recognition of the program’s role in backing climate initiatives, including those that support farmers.
Gianina Thaoxaochay harvests sigua, a luffa gourd, at GT Florists & Herbs. (Photo courtesy of GT Florists & Herbs)
Agricultural programs, meanwhile, remain among the state’s most cost-effective climate investments, says Shobe, measured by the cost per ton of greenhouse gas reductions. That includes initiatives focused on water efficiency and soil health, along with the CDFA’s Cap-and-Trade-funded climate-smart programs.
Despite their impact, most of these programs face inconsistent, boom-and-bust funding. SALCP is the only one with continuous appropriation, receiving 2 percent of GGRF revenues through the broader Affordable Housing and Sustainable Communities Program. Yet even with that modest share, it accounts for 15 percent of all GGRF emissions reductions.
“These programs offer cost-effective, scalable solutions—especially for small- and mid-sized farms—to help them adapt to worsening climate extremes,” says Shobe. Yet their reach remains limited due to volatile funding. Without sustained investment, many farmers face steep barriers to adopting climate-smart practices at the scale needed in a sector already operating on razor-thin margins.
And it’s not just farms feeling the squeeze, Shobe says—consumers are, too. As human-induced climate change continues to disrupt food production, raise grocery prices, and worsen inflation, the economic strain will intensify, he adds, without greater investment in farm resilience.
“Families feel climate change at the checkout line,” Shobe says. “If we don’t invest now in protecting our food system, we’re going to see real cost impacts.”
Manure, Methane Digesters, and the Funding Divide
As a fifth-generation dairy farmer, Paul Danbom, owner of Brindeiro & Danbom Dairy Farms in Stanislaus County, has had to adapt to erratic weather and an ever-shifting economic landscape. His operation includes 900 milking cows, a small beef herd, and 500 acres of corn and almonds spread across the vast, sunbaked expanse of California’s Central Valley. Yet even with diversification, soaring fertilizer costs have whittled away his slim margins.
In 2022, Danbom received a $565,000 Alternative Manure Management Program (AMMP) grant, which funded roughly three-quarters of a system that captures manure before it’s flushed into methane-emitting lagoons, then dries it into nutrient-rich compost. According to a CalCAN report, AMMP projects have cut methane emissions by the equivalent of removing nearly 150,000 cars off the road annually.
“This is a once-in-a-decade opportunity to secure a more stable, climate-resilient food system.”
“We’re now producing about 80 percent of our fertilizer needs on-farm,” Danbom says. The compost improves soil structure, reduces pesticide use, and, once aerated, serves as soft cow bedding. “It’s totally increased my [waste] management efficiency,” he says, “and helped my bottom line.”
Despite those gains, anaerobic digesters—larger-scale systems that capture methane from manure lagoons and convert it into biogas for fuel—dominate manure management funding. Through a combination of GGRF and other programs, California has committed nearly $677 million to these dairy digesters while the Biden administration made parallel investments through projects such as the USDA Rural Energy for America Program.
Collectively, manure management projects have slashed methane emissions from California’s dairy sector by 22 percent, according to research. Yet digesters continue to receive the bulk of public funding, with supporters maintaining that they deliver the biggest methane cuts in the livestock sector and are key to hitting state climate goals. Critics, though, counter that this focus overwhelmingly favors large-scale operations, effectively incentivizing the growth of mega-dairies and potentially boosting emissions.
“We need all of the programs working together,” says Michael Boccadoro, executive director of Agricultural Energy Consumers Association. “Farmers of all sizes need solutions that work for them.” His coalition is pushing for a $75 million annual allocation for small- and large-scale manure management approaches, alongside increased funding for farming infrastructure and processing upgrades. Nevertheless, he maintains that dairy digesters provide the best return on investment, noting that they can capture up to 90 percent of methane emissions from livestock waste.
Still, digesters only make financial sense at a certain scale, making dry manure management a better fit for smaller dairies—if they can access funding. AMMP, along with healthy soil and water efficiency programs, are often the most accessible options for small-scale farms facing financial and logistical barriers. But they’re oversubscribed, Danbom says—he applied three times before securing his grant. Without consistent support, he warns, the climate-smart solutions “consumers increasingly demand” may be out of reach for the farms best positioned to implement them.
Competition for Cap-and-Trade Funds
Meanwhile, other sectors are also calling for more reliable Cap-and-Trade support. Transportation, housing, and energy advocates are urging lawmakers to close structural gaps in the program. Deutsch-Grosse of Transform points to two key loopholes: free pollution allowances—permits granted to industries such as oil and manufacturing to encourage them to stay in-state—and carbon offsets, which let companies meet emissions targets by funding reductions elsewhere rather than cutting their own. These mechanisms “facilitate continued pollution in frontline communities,” he says, and reforming them could boost GGRF revenue while advancing environmental justice.
As the outlook for national climate policy darkens, that push has gained urgency, says Adina Levin of Seamless Bay Area, a transit equity and land use advocate. Her group, along with Transform, is part of a coalition pushing the state to direct Cap-and-Trade dollars towards affordable housing and public transit—investments that reduce emissions, improve air quality, and benefit frontline communities rather than subsidize high-polluting sectors such as industrial agriculture.
With transportation as California’s largest source of greenhouse gases—and a major contributor to particulate pollution—Levin sees transit and transit-oriented housing as essential infrastructure. And like climate-smart agriculture, these programs deliver broad, lasting returns, she says, by expanding low-cost housing, boosting transit ridership, and easing public health risks linked to air pollution.
“Without consistent funding, we’re left crossing our fingers that these programs will still be around after each funding cycle—rather than building on their success.”
“Since federal funding is likely to be unreliable in the near term, it’s essential for California to stand up for equity and climate action,” Levin says. Keeping up that momentum matters: California’s climate initiatives have become a national model, from inspiring Healthy Soils programs in eight states including New Mexico and Montana, to shaping affordable housing and transit policy in the Pacific Northwest.
And ultimately, sustaining this leadership hinges on stable funding.
Strengthening the Food System Against Climate Change
On the dry, chaparral-covered hills of California’s Central Coast, shepherd Jack Anderson runs Cuyama Lamb, grazing 1,200 sheep for wildfire prevention as well as for food and wool. His flock also cycles through vineyards and ranches supported by Healthy Soils grants. Here they graze cover crops and control brush while enriching the soil, sequestering carbon, and helping to control erosion.
Despite the layered benefits, Anderson often sees regenerative practices “stymied by the inconsistency in funding.” Having witnessed eager landowners walk away from projects when support fell through, he adds that “it really slows the adoption of something that not only meets our climate goals, but stabilizes our food system in the face of climate change.”
Thaoxaochay, of GT Florists and Herbs, agrees. As a University of California Cooperative Extension agent who works closely with small-scale farmers, she’s seen firsthand how transformative these programs can be. And she notes that once farmers adopt these techniques, they tend to stick: Research shows that 75 percent of grant recipients continue the practices well after funding ends.
“The long-term impacts . . . are greater than we could ever imagine,” Thaoxaochay says. “But without consistent funding, we’re left crossing our fingers that these programs will still be around after each funding cycle—rather than building on their success.”
Through California’s Cap-and-Trade-funded Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, the California Department of Food and Agriculture supports a suite of climate-smart agriculture programs that promote sustainable agricultural practices and land conservation:
- Alternative Manure Management Program (AMMP) provides grants to dairy and livestock operations for capturing manure before it’s flushed into methane-emitting lagoons, and for then drying it into nutrient-rich compost.
- Dairy Digester Research and Development Program (DDRDP) funds the installation of anaerobic digesters that capture methane from manure pits and convert it into renewable energy.
- Healthy Soils Program (HSP) offers incentives for on-farm practices that enhance soil health, boost carbon sequestration, and improve water retention through cover cropping, compost application, and reduced tillage.
- State Water Efficiency and Enhancement Program (SWEEP) provides financial assistance to implement efficient irrigation systems and related equipment—such as drip lines, soil moisture sensors, and pump upgrades—to reduce on-farm water use and cut greenhouse gas emissions from energy-intensive pumping.
- Biologically Integrated Farming Systems Program (BIFS) funds on-farm demonstration projects that show how to reduce chemical pesticide use through ecological practices such as beneficial insects, crop rotation, and soil health management. These on-the-ground trials—often in partnership with university extension programs and farmer-led research groups—are paired outreach and education to help other growers adopt similar approaches.
- Proactive Integrated Pest Management (IPM) Solutions Program funds projects that develop and implement pest management strategies to prevent the spread of invasive pests, reducing reliance on pesticides and associated greenhouse gas emissions.
- Pollinator Habitat Program (PHP) provides grants to establish and maintain pollinator habitat on agricultural lands, supporting biodiversity and ecosystem health.
- Sustainable Agricultural Lands Conservation Program (SALCP) funds the protection of critical agricultural lands through conservation easements that permanently protect farmland from development, preserving carbon sinks, supporting biodiversity, and helping to curb urban sprawl.
This article was updated to include the correct spelling of Zack Deutsch-Gross’ last name.
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]]>The post California Decides What ‘Regenerative Agriculture’ Means. Sort of. appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>California urgently needs to improve its soil. Better soil produces healthier food, but it also holds more water—a boon for a wildfire state with depleted groundwater. Better soil also holds more carbon, making it an effective tool to combat the climate crisis. One way to improve soil is through regenerative agriculture, an array of sustainable farming practices that, as of January, are gathered under an official definition in the state of California.
The question is, will the new definition do any good?
Broadly speaking, regenerative agriculture improves soil health and carbon sequestration through diverse crop rotations, animal grazing, limited tillage, and reduced (or eliminated) external inputs like fertilizer and pesticides. But it also has wider benefits, including farmer wellbeing, community engagement, and ethical animal husbandry. The problem is that it’s notoriously hard to define. No federal or scientific definition exists, leaving the term open to interpretation—and greenwashing.
The definition’s supporters say it provides an entry point toward better practices for thousands of farmers.
Two years ago, in an effort to guide California’s farming policy and programs, the state launched a public process to define regenerative agriculture.
The process included seven public listening sessions—two of them for California Native American tribes—and three work group meetings. Hundreds of people from across the U.S. food system joined the sessions, adding impassioned comments that ranged from “Regenerative MUST be coupled with organic to have any value whatsoever” (Annie Brown, Rodale Institute) to “We’re trying to make a difference in agriculture and we need to be open minded: Instead of asking everyone to switch religions immediately, at least get them into regenerative ag, and we’ll get ‘em into organic after a while” (a farmer at California’s Alexandre Family Farm). For some, farmworker health was essential to the definition; for others, it was irrelevant.
On Jan. 7, the state’s advisory board for food and agriculture unanimously approved the work group’s definition and forwarded it to Karen Ross, secretary of the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA), who is expected to accept it. Critics say the new definition will do little to promote significant regenerative practices and will potentially confuse the public, but the definition’s supporters say it provides an entry point toward better practices for thousands of farmers.
A Definition as a Continuum
The approved document runs to a single page and begins with the following:
“‘Regenerative agriculture,’ as defined for use by State of California policies and programs, is an integrated approach to farming and ranching rooted in principles of soil health, biodiversity and ecosystem resiliency leading to improved targeted outcomes. Regenerative agriculture is not an endpoint, but a continuous implementation of practices that over time minimize inputs and environmental impacts[,] and further enhances the ecosystem while maintaining or improving productivity, economic contributions and community benefits. ‘Regenerative agriculture’ is an ongoing continuum of sustainability for California’s farmers and ranchers, informed by current science as well as the traditions and innovations from the original Indigenous stewards of the land.”
Don Cameron, president of the state’s advisory board, lauded the definition’s flexibility and discretion while making clear that this effort was not about establishing certification or a framework for companies to make label claims.
Critics say the new definition will do little to promote significant regenerative practices and will potentially confuse the public.
“That bridge will be crossed if [companies] move forward with a certification process,” he said. “I look at this for different state agencies to have guidelines so they can put programs out there that are regenerative in nature.”
In accepting the board’s definition, the CDFA will not be pursuing a regulatory or statutory action. They will, in essence, be agreeing to follow a guideline that includes eight targeted outcomes. At this time, there is no funding allocated for outcome assessment, verification, or third-party audits.
What Prompted the Definition, and What It’s Supposed to Do
Agriculture plays a significant role in climate change, producing 10 percent of U.S. and 8 percent of California’s greenhouse gas emissions, mostly from croplands, industrial vehicles, and livestock.
In 2022, California’s Climate Innovation Program provided $525 million in financial incentives to California-based companies, including agriculture businesses, to develop and commercialize technologies to help California meet its climate goals. Regenerative agriculture efforts were specifically mentioned.
This prompted CDFA Secretary Karen Ross to turn to the State Board of Food and Agriculture, an advisory board consisting of members from across the sector. The board appointed a work group to establish a definition that would help guide farmers who want to increase sustainability practices, as well as state agencies and programs looking to focus their funding.
Since the passage of the 2022 bill, Governor Gavin Newsom has removed its funding to help address the projected state budget shortfall, so it is unknown at this time what programs farms would be eligible for if they adopt qualifying regenerative practices.
“I really do think it was a pretty remarkable effort by the most remarkable state in our economy in the agriculture space,” said Elizabeth Whitlow, who until recently was the executive director of the Regenerative Organic Alliance and she was part of the work group that hammered out the guidelines. “Secretary Ross said we need to define this so we can have money to reward the practices. I listened and said, ‘You are stepping into muddy waters here. You should back away from this definition and call it ‘agroecological’ or ‘holistic.’”
In a state with more than 1,500 soil types and 400 crops, the work group’s central tension from the outset was—as Tom Chapman, co-chief executive of the Organic Trade Association, described it—“whether to go narrow and meaningful, or wide but not that deep.”
The group, directed by Secretary Ross to provide a “big tent” in which all stakeholders could operate, went with the latter. The definition’s harder edges were softened as large farms and conventional agriculture industry groups weighed in. For instance, from an early draft that sought the “elimination” of reliance on pesticides—a key tenet of organic farming—language changed in the final draft to a “reduction” of reliance.
Many in the industry, especially in the conventional sector, feel this broader definition, anchored by its first target outcome of “building soil health, soil organic matter and biodiversity,” is a good place to start.
“In agriculture, nothing is one size fits all, so the adoption of systems has to be realistic for each particular kind of crop,” said Renee Pinel, president of Western Plant Health, a nonprofit trade organization that represents the interests of fertilizer and pesticide manufacturers. She says she sees this definition as a starting point, as “someplace from which to constructively move forward.”
For conventional farmers in California who contend with year-round pests and diseases in the state’s mild climate, she said, “We have to be realistic about how quickly we can move to softer biological products. We can’t mandate the removal of products until we have replacements, or farmers can’t defend themselves and you’ll have massive crop failures.”
A broader definition allows for innovations in technology or advances in inputs or soil amendments to be incorporated, Pinel and others have argued.
What the Definition Doesn’t Do
But a lack of specificity in the definition is problematic for many farming experts.
“I could survey 100 farmers and show them this definition and they would each have a different interpretation of what this means,” said Rebekah Weber, policy director for California Certified Organic Farmers. “And the verification and accountability pieces just aren’t there.”
In fact, at the Jan. 7 meeting to finalize a definition, State Board of Food and Agriculture member Michelle Passero, director of The Nature Conservancy’s climate change plan for California, spoke up, saying she was hoping for a definition that was “a little more outcomes-oriented.”
“If I was trying to use it in a legal sense, how would it be helpful? How do you apply it? Does it mean if you do one [of the eight targeted outcomes,] then it’s fine or sufficient?” she asked.
The definition ends with a guidance for state agencies and departments to coordinate with the CDFA, and, “contingent upon resources,” to develop measurable, verifiable outcomes. Agencies and programs are also responsible for keeping track of verification and reporting.
The fact that organic has been minimized in the definition also bothers many. These farmers view regenerative agriculture as steeped in organic, biodiverse practices that rely on plants and other organisms to produce soil fertility and control pests, instead of on industrial fertilizers and pesticides. For them, the definition does not go far enough.
Bryce Lundberg is vice president of agriculture at Lundberg Family Farms, a fourth-generation organic rice and quinoa company. He is a member of the state advisory board as well as the work group that oversaw the regenerative definition. In the group’s final meeting, he said that he appreciated the definition’s approach to the health of humans and the environment, but underscored that the organic component was vital.
Bryce Lundberg of Lundberg Family Farms. Photo courtesy of Lundberg Family Farms.
“To have organic as a baseline to regenerative agriculture, that would be my hope,” he said in the meeting. “That ‘regenerative’ would be beyond organic as a standard, that would be my preference.” In a subsequent interview, Lundberg said, “I’m proud of the organic community in California that advocated that ‘organic’ be the baseline for this definition. Two-thirds of the comments have been from the organic community [saying] that we need a higher bar.” Farming according to a watered-down regenerative definition, he suggested, is like getting a “participation trophy.”
California has more than 3,000 organic farms and ranches but more than 70,000 farms and ranches total, meaning only 4.2 percent of California’s farms are certified organic.
Using the word “organic” would immediately exclude thousands of farmers and ranchers who may want to adopt regenerative practices but have not yet. And in the wake of the hottest year on record and a new administration that has expressed tepid enthusiasm for climate-change mitigation efforts, more producers need to adopt at least some regenerative practices, said Andrew deCoriolis, executive director of Farm Forward, a nonprofit focused on reducing animal suffering.
USDA really needs to be the one setting the definition—they label food products nationally.
“Even if this ends up being marginally better practices across all of California, that would be a net good,” he said.
Weber says this new definition could be cataclysmic for certified organic farmers in the state.
“Organic farmers have to meet strict requirements. And now they will be in the same marketplace as a ‘regenerative’ farmer who is being subsidized by the state of California, but there isn’t verification behind that word? That’s an unfair market advantage,” she said.
Whitlow echoed that sentiment, saying the definition might lead consumers to choose “regenerative” over “organic.” “If all you have to do is spray one fewer time or use a little less fertilizer, and you can use the term ‘regenerative,’ consumers may say, ‘I’m going to buy this regenerative product, that sounds pretty good.’ We are concerned that it could have unintended consequences for organics.”
What Happens When the Definition Gets Loose in the Wild
Secretary Ross has underscored that the definition will help determine where state resources go, and that it is not consumer-facing or about retail labeling claims or certifications.
Many farming advocates think that’s naïve.
“I’d pose the question back to the CDFA: How do you plan on assuring this doesn’t influence the marketplace or embolden folks who put a regenerative claim on their product?” Weber asked. “There hasn’t been enough discussion around that.”
In the past few years, label claims have proliferated, with climate-related terms such as “net-zero” or “climate-smart” beef drawing little scrutiny, and package claims like “pure” and “all-natural” energizing consumer class-action lawsuits. The new, loose definition might unleash more greenwashing, and consumer confusion.
Also, there are several regenerative-associated marketing certifications already in existence, including what’s considered to be the highest bar for farming: Regenerative Organic Certified, which builds on the USDA Organic certification.
“USDA really needs to be the one setting the definition—they label food products nationally,” said Anne Schechinger, Midwest director for the nonprofit Environmental Working Group.
She added, “We support California’s attempt, but they obviously need to include specific practices, a way to measure the benefits of these practices, a way to show that there are water or climate benefits.”If California’s definition of regenerative does, in fact, encourage widespread healthier soils in the state, it will be interesting to see whether it gains traction with supporters of regenerative ag at the federal level—including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. His Make America Healthy Again platform includes regenerative agriculture as a central pillar.
+ + +
An earlier version of the article misspelled the name of Annie Brown at Rodale Institute.
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]]>The post Growing Corn in the Desert, No Irrigation Required appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>When Michael Kotutwa Johnson goes out to the acreage behind his stone house to harvest his corn, his fields look vastly different from the endless rows you see in much of rural North America. Bundled in groups of five or six, his corn stalks shoot out of the sandy desert in bunches, resembling bushels rather than tightly spaced rows. “We don’t do your typical 14-inch spaced rows,” he says.
Instead, Kotutwa Johnson, an enrolled member of the Hopi tribe, practices the Hopi tradition he learned from his grandfather on the Little Colorado River Plateau near Kykotsmovi Village in northeastern Arizona, a 90-minute drive from Flagstaff: “In spring, we plant eight to 10 corn kernels and beans per hole, further apart, so the clusters all stand together against the elements and preserve the soil moisture.” For instance, high winds often blow sand across the barren plateau. “This year was a pretty hot and dry year, but still, some of the crops I raised did pretty well,” he says with a satisfied smile. “It’s a good year for squash, melons, and beans. I’ll be able to propagate these.”
Hopi corn fields look vastly different from the tight rows typically seen across North America. Little Colorado River Plateau, northeast Arizona. (Photo courtesy of Michael Kotutwa Johnson)
Dry farming has been a Hopi tradition for several millennia. Kotutwa Johnson might build some protection for his crops with desert brush or cans to shield them from the wind, but his plants thrive without any fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides, mulch, or irrigation. This is all the more impressive since his area usually gets less than 10 inches of rain per year.
“We chose this land, and we’ve learned to adapt to our harsh environment. The culture is tied into our agricultural system, and that’s what makes it so resilient.”
In the era of climate change, the practice of dry farming is met with growing interest from scientists and researchers as farmers grapple with droughts and unpredictable weather patterns. For instance, the Dry Farming Institute in Oregon lists a dozen farms it partners with, growing anything from tomatoes to zucchini. However, Oregon has wet winters, with an annual rainfall of over 30 inches, whereas on the plateau in Arizona, Johnson’s crops get less than a third of that. Farmers in Mexico, the Middle East, Argentina, Southern Russia, and Ukraine all have experimented with dry farming, relying on natural rainfall, though conditions and practices vary in each region.
For Kotutwa Johnson, it’s a matter of faith and experience. Between April and June, he checks the soil moisture to determine which crops to plant and how deep. He uses the traditional wooden Hopi planting stick like his ancestors, because preserving the topsoil by not tilling is part of the practice. “We don’t need moisture meters or anything like that,” he explains. “We plant everything deep—for instance, the corn goes 18 inches deep, depending on where the seeds will find moisture.” His seeds rely on the humidity from the melted winter snow and annual monsoon rains in June.
Kotutwa Johnson with an ear of his Hopi white corn. (Photo courtesy of Michael Kotutwa Johnson)
His harvest looks unique, too. “We know 24 varieties of indigenous corn,” he says, showing off kernels in indigo blue, purple red, snow white, and yellow. His various kinds of lima and pinto beans shimmer in white, brown, merlot red, and mustard yellow. Studies have shown that indigenous maize is more nutritious, richer in protein and minerals than conventional corn, and he hopes to confirm similar results with his own crops in his role as professor at the School of Natural Resources and the Environment at the University of Arizona, and as a core faculty member with the fledgling Indigenous Resilience Center, which focuses on researching resilient solutions for Indigenous water, food, and energy independence. He earned a PhD in natural resources, concentrating on Indigenous agricultural resilience, not least to “have a seat at the table and level the playing field, so mainstream stakeholders can really hear me,” he says. “I’m not here to be the token Native; I’m here to help.” For instance, he attended COP 28, the 2023 United Nations climate change conference in Dubai, to share his knowledge about “the reciprocal relationship with our environment.”
Kotutwa Johnson was born in Germany because his dad was in the military, but he spent the summers with his grandfather planting corn, squash, beans, and melons the Indigenous way in the same fields he’s farming now, where he eventually built an off-grid stone house with his own hands. “As a kid, I hated farming because it’s hard work,” he admits with disarming honesty, followed by a quick laugh. “But later I saw the wisdom in it. We’ve done this for well over 2,000 or 3,000 years. I’m a 250th-generation Hopi farmer.”
Unlike many other Indigenous tribes, the Hopi weren’t driven off their land by European settlers. “We’re very fortunate that we were never relocated,” Kotutwa Johnson says. “We chose this land, and we’ve learned to adapt to our harsh environment. The culture is tied into our agricultural system, and that’s what makes it so resilient.”
However, the Hopi tribe doesn’t own the land. Legally, the United States holds the title to the 1.5 million acres of reservation the Hopi occupy in Northwestern Arizona, a fraction of their original territory. Kotutwa Johnson estimates that only 15 percent of his community still farms, down from 85 percent in the 1930s, and some Hopi quote the lack of land ownership as an obstacle.
Hopi corn thrives without fertilizers, herbicides, mulch, or irrigation. (Photo courtesy of Michael Kotutwa Johnson)
Like on many reservations, the Hopi live in a food desert, where tribal members have to drive one or two hours to find a major supermarket in Flagstaff or Winslow. High rates of diabetes and obesity are a consequence of lacking easy access to fresh produce. “If you’re born here you have a 50 percent chance of getting diabetes,” Kotutwa Johnson says. “To me, this is the original harm: the disruption of our traditional foods. By bringing back the food, you also bring back the culture.”
Traditionally, Hopi women are the seed keepers, and the art of dry farming starts with the right seeds. “These seeds adapted to having no irrigation, and so they are very valuable,” Kotutwa Johnson says. He is fiercely protective of the seeds he propagates and only exchanges them with other tribal members within the community.
Left to right: A variety of Hopi beans, a squash in the field, and an old Hopi corn variety grown from an 800-year-old seed. (Photo courtesy of Michael Kotutwa Johnson)
In that spirit, he was overjoyed to receive 800-year-old corn ears from a man who recently found them in a cave in Glen Canyon. Kotutwa Johnson planted the corn, and about a fifth actually sprouted. He raves about the little white corn ears he was able to harvest: “It’s so amazing we got to bring these seeds home. It was like opening up an early Christmas present.”
From a traditional perspective, “we were given things to survive,” he says. “In our faith, we believe the first three worlds were destroyed, and when we came up to this world, we were given a planting stick, some seeds, and water by a caretaker who was here before us.”
Kotutwa Johnson’s stone farm house in northern Arizona. (Photo courtesy of Michael Kotutwa Johnson)
He doesn’t believe that climate change can be stopped. “But we can adapt to it, and our seeds can adapt.” This is a crucial tenet of Hopi farming: Instead of manipulating the environment, they raise crops and cultivate seeds that adjust to their surroundings. His crops grow deep roots that stretch much farther down into the ground than conventional plants.
“Our faith tells us that we need to plan every single year no matter what we see,” even in drought years, he explains. “Some years, we might not plant much, but we still plant regardless because those plants are like us, they need to adapt.”
Roasted corn in a Hopi pit. (Photo courtesy of Michael Kotutwa Johnson)
Dry farming is “not very economically efficient,” he admits. “Everything is driven towards convenience nowadays. We’re not trying to make a big buck out here; we’re here to maintain our culture and practice things we’ve always done to be able to survive.”
Kotutwa Johnson does not sell his produce. He keeps a percentage of the seeds to propagate and gives the rest to relatives and his community, or trades it for other produce.
But his vision far surpasses his nine acres. He wants to pass on his dry-farming methods to the next generation, just as he learned them from his grandfather, and he often invites youth to participate in farming workshops and communal planting. That’s why he recently started the Fred Aptvi Foundation, named after his grandfather, to focus on establishing a seed bank and a Hopi youth agricultural program that incorporates the Hopi language. Aptvi means “one who plants besides another,” Kotutwa Johnson explains. “It’s about revitalizing what’s there, not reinventing it.”
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]]>The post Good Goats Make Good Neighbors appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>On a sunny California day, Ricky Bobby the goat chomps across a hillside with the speed and pizazz of his NASCAR driver namesake from Talladega Nights.
Along with his fellow herd members, all employed by the nonprofit Happy Goat to reduce wildfire risks, Ricky Bobby is doing what he does best, gobbling up weeds, shrubs, and leaves from low-hanging branches. No plant appears to be too much of a challenge, including poison oak and spiky live-oak leaves. He and 100 caprine teammates can clear about an acre a day.
“I really think that this is a hope of the future—organizations like them who really care about the environment, who care about the welfare of the Earth, who care about the climate and the quality of life for people,” says Carole Beckham, who hired Happy Goat to graze a portion of her 23-acre residential property in the Sierra Nevada. “With all the big fires we’ve had over the last several years, it’s really impacted the quality of life for a lot of people. It seems like Mariposa County has been in PTSD every year.”
A goat nips on a branch on a hillside property outside of Mariposa. The goats are part of Happy Goat of Mariposa, California which provides the vegetation-clearing creatures to landowners to reduce wildfire risk. Photo by Craig Kohlruss.
Founded in 2020, Happy Goat farm sits on a 2,000-acre property in Mariposa County, near Yosemite National Park. The organization’s Goats for Good program leases out its grazing herd to nearby landowners in the Sierra Nevada at a reduced price, and hopes to make the service free of charge for some residents via a lottery. The farm also teaches local students about agriculture and conservation—and donates much of the fruits and vegetables it grows to people in need.
“It’s a crazy twisted road that I went down that ended up here in this magical place,” says John Cahalin, one of three Happy Goat co-founders (and the one who named Ricky Bobby).
Ricky Bobby is doing what he does best, gobbling up weeds, shrubs, and leaves from low-hanging branches.
The San Diego transplant came to Mariposa several years ago in search of land for an off-road vehicle rally school, but his vision for the property changed after he met Jesse Fouch, a sixth-generation farmer, rancher, and owner of Fouch Farms. As Cahalin learned more about his new home, he decided farming was a better fit—something intrinsic to Mariposa and good for tourists, too. Fouch joined him as one of three co-founders of Happy Goat.
Cahalin wanted goats to be a big part of the farm. “Goats are mischievous, they’re affectionate, and they’re just the most beautiful animals to me,” Cahalin says. “They make me laugh every time I see my favorite ones.”
Happy Goat co-founder John Cahalin holds a baby goat on the nonprofit’s farm in the Sierra Nevada foothill community of Mariposa. Photo by Craig Kohlruss.
Lacey Sharp, Happy Goat’s daily operations manager, among other things, launched the organization’s Goats for Good grazing program over a year and a half ago, and since then, the goats have cleared more than 40 properties in the Mariposa area. That amounts to approximately 200 acres in addition to the 220 acres the goats take on each year back at the farm.
Sharp runs a holistic program that puts the health of all involved—the animals, the landscape, and the humans seeking fewer wildfire risks—at the center of every decision. The goats spend a limited amount of time in each section of a property, managed by a moveable fence and the watchful eyes of a couple of shepherds and dogs. Sharp is careful not to let the goats overgraze, which can compact soil.
“We’re very in tune with the climate around us and the land we’re working on,” she says. Sharp is also a veterinary technician, and runs a small cattle business influenced by the Texas ranch where she grew up.
Happy Goat grazing director Lacey Sharp pets Ricky Bobby, one of the many goats that Happy Goat uses for Sierra foothill wildfire mitigation. Photo by Craig Kohlruss.
The nonprofit has around 450 goats—primarily the cashmere type—with plans to grow the herd to nearly 3,000. About 100 billy goats currently handle the grazing contracts, while the nannies grow the herd back at the farm. Their kids enjoy a happy youth that includes scrambling all over a massive jungle gym called the “Goatnasium.”
The goats are part of a growing trend of using livestock to mitigate wildfire risks across the West. That need is acute in California’s Sierra region, where catastrophic fire presents an unprecedented challenge. More than 880,000 people live in this mountainous stretch of the state, according to the California Wildfire & Forest Resilience Task Force.
Mariposa County, where 16 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, is still recovering from the particularly devastating Oak Fire, an arson-caused blaze that leveled 127 homes and 66 outbuildings in 2022. In July, a new threat, the 908-acre French Fire—caused by a lawn mower that ignited dry grass—burned dangerously close to Mariposa’s historic main street and destroyed or damaged 18 structures.
The use of goats for targeted grazing is becoming more popular statewide as it is consistent with increasing the protection of people, structures, and communities
“The use of goats for targeted grazing is becoming more popular statewide as it is consistent with increasing the protection of people, structures, and communities,” says Kara Garrett, coordinator of Cal Fire’s Community Risk Reduction Program. “Many have found grazing to be an effective tool. Not only do [the goats] help clear annual vegetation, but they also browse up trees and reduce fuel loads, helping property owners with their fuel reduction.”
Cal Fire doesn’t hold contracts specifically for grazing, Garrett says, but 18 of the Wildfire Prevention Grants it awarded for 2022-2023 went to projects that included grazing. “Lawn mowers, weed eaters, chainsaws, tractors, and trimmers can all spark a wildland fire if used during the wrong time of year,” Garrett says. “And with work still left to be done across California, the grazing goats are a safe alternative to help maintain vegetation.”
Happy Goat co-founder John Cahalin, in lime green, tosses out feed to a mob of goats as they climb over him and some fellow Happy Goat supporters during a break in the daily work effort. Photo by Craig Kohlruss.
Nearly a third of all acres treated in fuel-reduction projects by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in California utilize grazing, which includes goats, says Sarah Denos, a spokesperson for the BLM in California. Acres grazed for fire mitigation through the agency more than doubled between 2018 and 2022, Denos says. BLM data shows a spike from about 5,400 acres in the state to 18,000 acres during that period.
Goats can be used in lieu of herbicides to target invasive plants in a way that helps restore balance to the ecosystem, including by adding nutrients back to the soil through their waste, Denos says. Additionally, goats can navigate steep, rugged terrain where machines aren’t practical, she adds.
There are drawbacks, of course. A herd of goats, if not properly monitored, can mow through a lot of land, eating up everything.
But if they’re well guided, goats can also be an appropriate tool in locations requiring a “lighter touch,” such as sensitive cultural sites, says Mark Thibideau, a spokesperson for the U.S. Forest Service Pacific Southwest Region. Beyond general grazing permits, which the Forest Service has issued since its inception, Thibideau says that last year his region used livestock to graze 4,544 acres specifically to mitigate wildfire.
In rural Mariposa County, where many large, historic ranches have been replaced by smaller residential parcels that can easily get overgrown, Happy Goat provides help. Goats’ love of leaves means they create extra clearance between the ground and low-hanging branches, which helps prevent fire from jumping into the tree canopy. Happy Goat’s humans also assist by doing some pruning to ensure that clearance extends to six vertical feet.
Other goat operations in California include those led by the Ojai Valley Fire Safe Council, City Grazing in San Francisco, and numerous Sonoma County grazing cooperatives. “They’re more sustainable—they have less impact to the environment,” one Southern California Edison worker told The Fresno Bee about using goats from Chasin Goat Grazing for vegetation management beneath power lines in the Sierra. “And from a sociological perspective, people can get behind goats.” A free, online search tool and map called match.graze, launched by the University of California Cooperative Extension and previously reported on by Civil Eats, displays many more California herds for hire.
“In California every year, everyone gets nervous for wildfire season, and rightfully so,” says entrepreneur Willie Morris, the third Happy Goat co-founder. “But the fact that we can take goats—which to me are like such silly, funny creatures—and they can be the frontline of fire prevention, and they can get to places we could never really do with machinery, to me, it’s just a no-brainer.”
Jessica Segale talks about her work as Happy Goat’s greenhouse manager and produce grown on their regenerative farm in the Sierra Nevada foothill community of Mariposa, California. Segale is also director of Happy Goat’s farm-to-school program. Photo by Craig Kohlruss.
Grazing is just one of the programs that makes Happy Goat a boon to its community.
Happy Goat’s farm-to-school program connected with around 1,400 students last year from several local schools, supported by federal and state grants, for hands-on learning experiences in agriculture and conservation. That outreach continues, and the farm recently became a new contracted provider of produce for Mariposa County Unified School District. Happy Goat also helps recycle food waste from local school cafeterias, using it to create compost for small school gardens and its farm.
Meanwhile, Happy Goat is working toward regenerative farm certification from the Savory Institute, a nonprofit focused on restoring grasslands through holistic management. “We’re building topsoil, we’re sequestering carbon, we’re improving the forage, the trees, the grasses,” says Fouch, who designed the farm and is also an associate educator with the Savory Institute. “We monitor insect populations, the birds, the bees—everything.”
Goats can be used in lieu of herbicides to target invasive plants in a way that helps restore balance to the ecosystem, including by adding nutrients back to the soil through their waste.
The farm grows a wide variety of fruits and vegetables by intercropping them, choosing varieties that are “happy around each other,” says Jessica Segale, director of its farm-to-school program. This classic organic farming technique promotes biodiversity and can also reduce pests. Also, plants are sprayed with natural compost extracts instead of harmful chemicals.
Happy Goat donates much of its produce to food banks. It gave away 4,400 pounds of produce last year—more than a third of all it grew—and plans to double that number. Beyond goats, other animals on its farm include chickens for eggs, sheep, pigs, ducks, guineafowl, and a goose. None are used for meat.
The organization also has a goat therapy program that provides stress relief for humans—including some college students who got to enjoy the animals at the University of California, Merced, campus during finals week.
Funding for Happy Goat’s philanthropic efforts comes from related enterprises, like its for-profit diner, Happy Goat Farm to Table, which opened last fall in the town of Mariposa just down the road. Happy Goat was also awarded a rural development grant from the United States Department of Agriculture last year to research the feasibility of using the goats’ hair for cashmere production, which is limited in the United States.
Happy Goat Farm to Table diner in downtown Mariposa offers meals with ingredients from the nearby Happy Goat farm. The for-profit diner opened in the fall of 2023 and its proceeds support the work of nonprofit Happy Goat. Photo by Craig Kohlruss.
Happy Goat intends to keep growing, all with the help of Ricky Bobby and the rest of the goats.
“They have limitless land to range on.” Sharp says. “They never run out of feed. They are not put into a holding pen where they spend 24/7 on a dry lot. We literally use them for what they were created for, and that’s what makes them so happy—and it’s what makes us happy.”
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]]>The post Weathering Climate Shocks: How Restaurants Survive Supply Disruptions appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>This is the second article in a five-part series about restaurants and climate-change solutions, produced in collaboration with Eater.
When Peter Platt was in Newport, Oregon in 2018, visiting Local Ocean Seafoods to bring them on as a supplier, he spoke with some of the fishermen docked outside the waterfront fish market and restaurant. “All the salmon fishermen were like, ‘We don’t even bother to fish off the coast here anymore. Everyone heads to Alaska,’” says Platt, founder and owner of Portland’s high-end Peruvian restaurant Andina. “‘There’s just no fish.’” The dearth of Pacific salmon, he learned, was partly due to warming waters in salmon streams and drought-fueled water shortages, which are lethal to salmon eggs and juvenile fish. Platt, who is in charge of sustainability initiatives at Andina, did the only thing he could: He and his staff took salmon off Andina’s menu.
“We’re just not going to offer it,” he says. “It’s either unavailable or too expensive for the quality. . . . climate has a lot to do with it.”
With all the challenges restaurants have faced in the past five years—COVID, inflation, price gouging—the impact of climate change on their supply chains has often been overlooked. Yet global warming is steadily affecting fisheries and farms around the world and the foods they yield.
Here in the U.S., extreme climate-related events like forest fires, floods, and drought ruin crops and harm aquatic life. They also cause power outages and disrupt transportation and distribution, which increases the price of all goods, including food.
For many restaurant owners and chefs, the impact is a real, daily challenge, causing a shortage of quality ingredients and sudden fluctuations in price. All of this makes it harder to keep menu prices consistent and run a profitable business. “There’s a lot of topsy-turviness right now,” Platt says.
Staple Ingredients in Short Supply
Climate change has affected the supply of other foods, too. Cocoa yields have already fallen due to changes in rainfall patterns, an uptick in pest and fungus infestations, and increased droughts. Half the suitable land for coffee will be gone by 2050. And there’s mustard: Prices skyrocketed in 2021 due to a severe drought in Canada, the world’s largest producer of brown mustard seeds.
Andina founder Peter Platt. Right, Andina’s shrimp ceviche with local ocean-farmed dulse seaweed. Photos by Anna Caitlin.
Salmon is just one of the menu problems Platt has had to deal with recently. Citrus is another. Andina requires a steady supply of key limes for leche de tigre, the marinade that’s used for ceviche, Peru’s flagship dish. Andina sources them mostly from Mexico, where a perfect storm of colder weather, floods, and price manipulations by drug cartels caused prices to fluctuate between $37 and $67 per case from July 2023 to July 2024. Nevertheless, Platt and his brother, Victor, who leads the chef team, did not raise the price of ceviche. “Like most restaurants, we have simply had to decrease or even forgo margins on certain dishes to avoid passing on the sticker shock to our customers,” Platt says. “You just have to suck it up, you know?”
The croque madame at Mabu Kitchen, a French and Southern–inspired restaurant. Photo by Grace Cavallo.
Ayad Sinawi, chef-owner of Mabu Kitchen in Philadelphia, has had no choice but to suck up the cost increases, which are crippling for a small operation like his. A beloved French restaurant serving bistro classics and Southern comfort food, Mabu has paper-thin margins and no liquor license to bring in extra cash from the bar.
“Prices tend to take a weird roller coaster ride on a weekly basis,” he says. “I get 15 dozen eggs for $25 one week and then $52 the next.” Last winter, when there was a national egg shortage, that price shot up to $89. The shortage was caused in part by farmers culling millions of birds due to an outbreak of avian flu, which, experts increasingly believe, is worsening as climate change alters the migration patterns of wild birds that spread the disease. Other factors are at play as well, like the rising costs of fuel, feed, and packaging.
Mabu’s brunch is tremendously popular, filled with eggy specialties like a French omelette, croque madame and fried-chicken, and waffles Benedict. “We had to charge a little more for our eggs for a while,” Sinawi says. But he did so with extreme reluctance, wanting to abide by his principles of offering excellent yet affordable food. “The business plan was always about being a local bistro, catering to the neighborhood, keeping prices within the parameters that will encourage people to be impulsive [with their orders],” Sinawi says. “The minute I start making it a ‘destination,’ I’m going to lose all my locals. It’s not worth it to me.” When prices went back down to $52 for 15 dozen, he lowered menu prices accordingly. “But that’s still 29 cents [per] egg. That’s a lot for a restaurant!” he says. During the worst of the egg shortage, that added roughly $500 to his monthly costs.
Mabu Kitchen in Philadelphia, PA. Right: Chef and owner Ayad Sinawi. Photos by Grace Cavallo.
When factoring in rising inflation and hikes in other costs besides food, the financial environment feels increasingly insurmountable for many restaurants. Everything from internet connections to waste removal services has gotten more expensive. For example, Sinawi had originally contracted with a garbage removal service that charged $129 a month. The business was bought out by a bigger company that increased his bill by $40 without warning, meaning he was now expected to pay $169 for the same service with no time to negotiate or plan. (This happened at the same time as the egg shortage.) Three months later, his bill rose again, to $228.
Given these combined financial pressures, it’s no wonder that small independent restaurants often go out of business. According to a report released in February 2024 by the Global Food Institute, 26 percent of single-location, full-service restaurants fail in the first year. Mabu Kitchen is still going strong after two years, but Sinawi admits he doesn’t know how much longer he’ll be able to make it.
A Surge in ‘Unnatural Disasters’
Tara A. Scully, associate professor of biology at George Washington University, is one of the report’s authors. The 60-page document, titled “The Climate Reality for Independent Restaurants” and released in collaboration with the James Beard Foundation, drives home how vulnerable independent restaurants are to climate change disruptions. Furthermore, Scully and her colleagues write, “We choose to call these ‘unnatural disasters’ because they are driven by the increase in greenhouse gases generated by human activities. To call these events ‘natural disasters’ ignores their true origin.”
Though meat, poultry, and fish have never been high-profit menu items, the margins have grown even slimmer as protein prices have spiked, increasingly due to climate events that can unfold rapidly.
Scully, who is also director of curriculum development for the Global Food Institute, says that the most alarming part of the report to her is the data about global climate incidents. In just the past three years—2020 to 2023—storms have increased by an annual average of 19 percent, floods by 23 percent, and wildfires by 29 percent, according to the International Disaster Database. “I literally called up my colleague and said, ‘you are not going to believe this!’” She hopes this panic-inducing statistic will serve a purpose. “It should be a total wake-up call,” Scully says.
Whether extreme heat, hailstorms, flooding, or forest fires, these unnatural disasters lead to a plethora of correlated financial crises for restaurants. These can range from power outages, air-conditioning breakdowns, delivery delays, and loss of food quality to ingredient shortages that lead to the unpredictable price spikes both Platt and Sinawi are experiencing. Also, crop shortages are directly tied to inflation, the report found, taxing restaurants further. A study from the European Central Bank estimates that by 2035, inflation will increase U.S. food prices by an additional 0.4 to 2.6 percent in a best-case scenario—if emissions are drastically decreased. If they are not, inflation could rise as much as 3.3 percent over its current values.
A Pivot to Local Sourcing—Mostly
To avoid climate-caused supply chain disruptions, many U.S. chefs and farmers are trying to source more ingredients locally.
For the past two decades, Platt has sourced ají chiles from Peru, which was the only place you could find these flavorful peppers so essential to Peruvian cuisine. But over the past 15 years, he’s been collaborating with a farm in Corvallis, Oregon called Peace Seedlings. “They’ve been patiently hybridizing varieties [of ají] and finding out which seed varietals grow best in this climate,” Platt says. “To my knowledge, we’re the first growers of this product locally.”
Peace Seedlings farmers Dylana Kapuler and Mario D’Angelo; aji amarillo, a Peruvian pepper, at the farm. Photos courtesy of Andina.
Now Andina has diversified its sources of ají: their Peruvian supply is vacuum-sealed fresh organic ají paste, supplemented with fresh ajís—several hundred pounds this fall—from Peace Seedlings. They also purchase frozen ajís from GOYA and other mainline importers. One of Andina’s major ingredient suppliers, Charlie’s Produce, is also experimenting with growing ají chiles in its fields in California. Expanding their domestic farming partnerships gives Andina a more reliable source than Peru, which is facing its own set of climate-change challenges.
However, local sourcing isn’t always a guarantee of supply. In 2011, 90 percent of Texas—one of the U.S.’s largest agricultural producers—was classified as being in “exceptional drought.” The drought was devastating, causing $7.6 billion in losses and lowering the agricultural GDP in the state to a mere .8 percent. According to Tara Scully of the Global Food Institute, it’s highly likely we will continue to see an increase in extreme weather, and ultimately U.S. restaurants will have to start importing more ingredients from other countries. “We’ll have no choice,” she says.
Adapting to Change as the New Constant
Though meat, poultry, and fish have never been high-profit menu items, the margins have grown even slimmer as protein prices have spiked, increasingly due to climate events that can unfold rapidly. Within a matter of days, warming waters can cause massive algae blooms that suffocate marine life, depleting populations of fish and shellfish—and, if the blooms release toxins, make them unsafe for people to consume. Or, as with salmon, the higher temperatures can reduce fish runs, driving prices so high that it doesn’t make sense for chefs to keep salmon on the menu.
Being nimble, quickly finding answers to problems like these, makes all the difference. Buying in bulk is one solution. Andina buys so many limes—50 cases per month—that Platt was recently able to negotiate bulk purchases on an annual basis.
Platt has also staved off price volatility by precontracting with suppliers. That’s what he did with shrimp. He signed a purchasing contract at the beginning of the year to lock in a price for a given number of pounds. “Oftentimes that would save us a lot of money, because they would have some kind of hurricane or another algae bloom or something along those lines that would wreak havoc on the fishery there,” Platt says.
George Frangos, co-founder and president of Farm Burger, resolves supply-chain issues by developing strong, personal connections with a wide network of local sources. The Georgia-based restaurant chain has 11 locations throughout the Southeast, and serves 100 percent grass-fed (and grass-finished) beef burgers, pasture-raised pork burgers, seasonal salads, and, in the summer, peach compote with local goat cheese.
Left to right: Farm Burger; George Frangos, co-founder and president of Farm Burger; grass-fed beef burger. Photos courtesy of Farm Burger.
Frangos says he’s learned to avoid surprise price fluctuations by knowing each of his suppliers by name and relying on them to give him and his team a heads-up when prices head south. “We try to work together, so it’s not just an overnight thing of, ‘Our prices are going up 50 cents a pound.’”
One of Farm Burger’s main beef suppliers is Hickory Nut Gap, a fourth-generation family-owned regenerative ranch based outside Asheville, North Carolina, that is a network itself, partnering with 22 ranches across the South. In Hickory Nut, accredited by the Savory Institute, Frangos feels he’s found a resilient partner for his key ingredient. In addition to the animal welfare benefits of most grass-fed beef, there are also likely climate benefits. Another perk: its relatively consistent price. “When there is a shortage of feed from drought or other climate related hardships, the price of grain-fed beef increases, whereas the price of grass-fed beef is very resilient to climate forces,” says Frangos. That said, even grass-fed beef prices have gone up in recent years due to ranchers’ increased operating costs, labor costs, and the cost for hay and silage (reflecting slower grass growth due to heat waves).
In Philadelphia, chef Sinawi resolves the high price of beef through his relationship with his customers. He’s broken his unspoken rule to keep entrees under $30 with only one item: steak au poivre, which he’d been selling for $29. The dish, which Sinawi makes with USDA Choice New York striploin, is seared to order with cracked peppercorns and comes with a Cognac cream sauce that gives it an umami richness. “I had no choice. I took it off the menu for a month and people were asking for it,” he says. Ultimately, he put it back on the menu and raised it to $36. Having conversations with his customers, sharing his pricing challenges with them so they have a context for the increases, is key to their acceptance of the cost.
Plant-Based Alternatives
Higher protein prices—beef is up 4.5 percent over last year and whole-chicken prices increased by 26.6% from 2021 to 2024—are ultimately driving some restaurants like Andina to shift to more plant-based alternatives. “[Higher protein prices are] a big part of what’s driving a shift towards more vegan and vegetarian menus,” Platt says, drawing on his longtime observations of the restaurant industry. Also, there’s another incentive for the shift: He sees customers increasingly opting for vegan and vegetarian menus for environmental and ethical reasons.
Quinoa salad with cucumber, corn, olives and cotija cheese at Andina. Photo courtesy of Andina.
Andina has several vegetarian main courses on the menu, and has always offered quinoa, a Peruvian mainstay grain, as part of several dishes. Victor Platt (Peter’s brother), who leads the chef team at the restaurant, will soon be launching a quinoa risotto (“quinotto”). Peace Seedlings is beginning to grow quinoa domestically, but quantities are small, so Victor Platt sources bulk organic quinoa mostly from Bob’s Red Mill (who in turn sources it from Peru and Bolivia—also a climate consideration).
Quinoa has an auspicious climate future, says Peter Platt. “It’s incredibly adaptive. It’ll grow in sub-standard soil, in conditions that wheat won’t,” he says. “It’ll grow wherever you plant it. And it’s one of the world’s most nutritious foods.” He points out that quinoa, like meat, contains all nine essential amino acids, and is delicious when well prepared.
Tara Scully says that many of the chefs she interviewed for the GFI report were reducing the portion size of protein, because it’s now so much more expensive. She heard echoes of this refrain at a Food Tank discussion this past week in New York City about how restaurants can take action on climate change. “Plants are more climate-friendly and they cost less,” Scully says. “So if you’re looking to reduce your costs and also deal with climate change as a chef, it’s a win-win.”
She also thinks consumers—especially younger ones—are willing to pay for vegetable-based dishes because they’re healthier, better for the planet, and taste amazing. Meat seems simplistic, almost too easy to make taste good, while vegetables can showcase a chef’s skill and creativity: “You can transform a portobello mushroom into something that’s over-the-top umami.”
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]]>The post 17 Food and Ag Approaches to Tackling the Climate Crisis appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Although the food system generates one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions, it has largely been excluded from the climate agendas of most governments. Only last year did the food system become a major topic of international debate, during the 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference.
But as Civil Eats’ reporting has shown, the food and agriculture system is full of examples of how farmers, ranchers, fishers, chefs, restaurants, grocery stores, and consumers are addressing climate change, with strategies that sequester carbon, slash emissions, save water, reduce plastics, and open new markets.
Farmers, for example, are experimenting with the wild seed relatives of domestic crops that may be able to withstand extreme weather. Researchers have also discovered that kelp growing alongside mussels and oysters can act like a sponge, soaking up excess nutrients while increasing critical oxygen levels in surrounding waters. And lawmakers and the U.S. Department of Agriculture are crafting policies that support local food systems and regenerative agriculture.
Here are some of the most important and promising climate solutions stories we published this year.
As Saltwater Encroaches on Farms, Solutions Emerge From the Marshes
In the Mid-Atlantic, sea level rise due to climate change is already changing what farmers can grow.
These State Lawmakers Are Collaborating on Policies that Support Regenerative Agriculture
Progressive state legislators often find themselves in a David-and-Goliath battle against the conventional ag industry. One organization is equipping them with resources to support producers using regenerative practices instead.
Investment Is Flowing to US Grass-fed Beef Again. Will It Scale Up?
Rupert Murdoch’s Montana ranch is at the center of an effort to get grass-fed beef into mainstream grocery stores; others are using investments to build new markets entirely.
At Climate Dinners Hosted by Chefs Sam Kass and Andrew Zimmern, The Meal Is The Message
To create awareness and inspire action, their carefully curated meals feature coffee, chocolate, and other foods that will become costlier and more difficult to produce due to climate change.
Micro Solar Leases: A New Income Stream for Black Farmers in the South?
EnerWealth Solutions wants to bring the benefits of renewable energy to Black farmers and landowners in the Carolinas.
Can Taller Cover Crops Help Clean the Water in Farm Country?
In Minnesota, a local water quality program might serve as a model for incentivizing the next steps in regenerative farming.
Regenerative Beef Gets a Boost from California Universities
The U.C. system is using its purchasing power to buy grass-fed meat from local ranchers for its 10 universities and five medical centers.
Fungi Are Helping Farmers Unlock the Secrets of Soil Carbon
By tapping into underground fungal networks, farmers are learning how to build lush, spongy soil that supports healthy plants and stores carbon underground.
Florida Banned Farmworker Heat Protections. A Groundbreaking Partnership Offers a Solution.
The Fair Food Program offers the strongest, legally binding protocols to keep people safe when politicians fall short.
Vineyards Are Laying the Groundwork for a Regenerative Farm Future
A new study finding that regenerative practices build more soil carbon in vineyards points to a path for the industry to create broader models for agriculture.
Seeds From Wild Crop Relatives Could Help Agriculture Weather Climate Change
The hardy wild cousins of domesticated crops can teach us how to adapt to a hotter, more unpredictable future.
New School Meal Standards Could Put More Local Food on Students’ Lunch Trays
USDA’s nutrition standards aim to support farmers by increasing the number of schools getting fresh fruits, vegetables, and meats from nearby farms.
Changing How We Farm Might Protect Wild Mammals—and Fight Climate Change
Nearly a quarter of U.S. mammal species are on the endangered species list. Researchers say farming with biodiversity in mind may help stave off further decline.
Climate Solutions for the Future of Coffee
Farmers, researchers, and coffee devotees are refocusing on agroforestry and developing hardier varieties and high-tech beanless brews to save our morning cup of Joe.
Can Seaweed Save American Shellfish?
Seaweed farms on both coasts are beginning to take hold, tapping into decades of painstaking science, and could help shellfish thrive in waters affected by climate change and pollution.
Zero-Waste Grocery Stores in Growth Mode as Consumers Seek to Ditch Plastic
Food packaging is a significant contributor to the plastic pollution crisis. These stores offer shoppers an alternative.
Rescuing Kelp Through Science
Breakthrough genetic research at a Massachusetts lab could save the world’s vanishing kelp forests—and support American kelp farming, too.
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]]>The post Vineyards Are Laying the Groundwork for a Regenerative Farm Future appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>On a cold, rainy day in late February, it’s hard to picture the bunches of juicy cabernet and chardonnay grapes that will decorate the Vineyards at Dodon’s neat rows of gnarled vines come summer, the fruit ripening in the hot sun.
But even during these dormant months, across 17 rolling acres just 30 miles east of Washington, D.C., the landscape is filled with life.
Long, diverse grasses blanket the ground around and between the vines. In one section, two dozen vocal sheep munch happily on those plants, leaving their waste to stimulate regrowth up and down the aisles. Three acres of meadows provide habitat for insects. A petite blue bird darts across the horizon, flitting between a few of the 600 diverse young trees—loblolly pines, hazelnuts, and plums among them—that are just establishing themselves around and within the perimeter.
This is what Tom Croghan means when he says that, “under the right conditions,” grapevines are especially good at executing nature’s most common magic trick: absorbing carbon dioxide from the air during photosynthesis and then depositing it far below ground, hopefully for a long while. “We can pay [to create those conditions],” says Croghan, Dodon’s co-owner, “because we can use a byproduct of that system to produce wine.”
In other words, farmers lucky enough to produce a high-value product—especially when it’s intrinsically tied to the soil it’s grown in—may be uniquely positioned to help experiment, develop, and de-risk regenerative practices across all kinds of farms.
“If we take this as a holistic system . . . we probably shouldn’t even be looking at practices, we should be looking at outcomes, but the practices are a way to get there. Soil carbon sequestration is one indicator that we’re on the right track.”
That’s the conclusion researchers came to in a study published in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems earlier this year, which found that a slew of soil-building practices, especially in combination, added more carbon to soils when used in vineyards compared to being used on annual cropland.
“If we take this as a holistic system . . . we probably shouldn’t even be looking at practices, we should be looking at outcomes, but the practices are a way to get there,” explains researcher and study author Jessica Villat. “Soil carbon sequestration is one indicator that we’re on the right track.”
Compared to staple crops like corn and rice, wine grapes barely occupy a speck of the world’s farmland, at about 18 million acres. As a result, carbon stored in vineyard soils won’t ever add up to a meaningful reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions. But Villat and others see the fields as unique spaces where innovation can happen, spurring the ability to improve regenerative practices and increase adoption across agriculture.
“The viticulture sector is notoriously one of these ‘bubble sectors’ that stays within itself and isn’t talking as much to the rest of the ag community,” she said. “They’re trying to solve the same problems and the same issues. We’re talking about animal integration, we’re talking about integrating trees, we’re talking about integrating other crops. It really is regenerative agriculture, even if we might take a viticulture lens.”
A Model for Maximizing Soil Carbon Storage (and Other Benefits)
Zoom in on a map of California farms that have become Regenerative Organic Certified (ROC) and you’ll notice a theme: More than a third are vineyards.
ROC executive director Elizabeth Whitlow attributes that partially to the fact that since ROC’s launch in 2017, Paul Dolan, a pioneer of organic, biodynamic, and regenerative winemaking in the state, chaired the organization’s board. Dolan spearheaded the certification of the big-name wineries he worked with, Fetzer and Bonterra. Other lauded wineries, such as Tablas Creek and Grgich Hills Estate, were also early adopters of ROC standards.
“I do think vineyard operators are not under the same stress of harvesting kale and rushing to market five days a week, so there’s a real cushion,” Whitlow said. “It is a rapidly growing category.”
Dodon is not certified organic and still applies pesticides when needed, especially fungicides, which East Coast vineyards often rely on due to a much more humid climate than California’s. But most of its other regenerative practices overlap with what ROC vineyards are doing on the West Coast: Living roots in the soil year-round, animal integration, and biodiversity boosts.
Since Croghan first planted the vineyard, he said that based on soil testing, organic matter in the soil increased from .3 percent to 3.2 percent. About 60 percent of organic matter is carbon. Croghan is so proud of those results, he jokes that he introduces himself differently now.
“I’m in the carbon capture and storage business,” he says.
Villat’s research supports the general idea.
In reviewing studies done to date that fit their criteria, Villat and her co-author, Kimberly Nicholas, found that many common regenerative practices—such as grazing sheep between vines, cover crops, and non-chemical pest management—resulted in much more carbon sequestration in vineyards compared to in fields dedicated to annual crops.
However, the number of available studies was too small to come to big conclusions about any individual practice resulting in more sequestration over another.
“We actually need a lot more studies to prove those claims. However, what we are seeing is that across the board there is carbon sequestration happening,” she said. “So, what we can say is that all practices sequester carbon . . . and that when you mix different practices together, it actually increases the benefits. So, there’s something to be said for a holistic view of integrating practices together.”
Clover grows among the grapevines at Dodon in August 2020. (Photo courtesy of Dodon Vineyards)
Why exactly vineyard soils might hold onto more carbon compared to annual cropland is also a complex, open question. Villat said the soils might have started with less carbon to begin with. But the deep roots of the vines are also likely interacting with the cover crops and increased microbial activity as a result of animal waste, possibly holding it there longer. With cover crops, it could be as simple as the fact that the plants remain year-round rather than only being planted in between crop cycles, said Paul West, a senior scientist for ecosystems and agriculture at Project Drawdown.
West said that while the volume of carbon held in vineyard soils wouldn’t be significant enough to affect global greenhouse gas reduction goals, he said the conclusions could be used to identify best practices that could also be used in farming other crops. They might especially apply to other shrubby perennial crops, like blueberries, but the practices are similar across agriculture. A diversified farm that is growing vegetables and raising livestock, for example, might incorporate more perennial plants into their system to encourage carbon storage in deep roots.
And he pointed to other important factors for the grape growers themselves. “Many of the other benefits [of these practices] in addition to [building] soil carbon likely help the health of the vineyard even more,” he said. “For example, as you’re building up organic matter, the soil is able to hold a lot more nutrients. It’s able to hold a lot more water.”
Building Resilience in Vineyards—and Beyond
At Dodon, for example, Croghan hasn’t had to irrigate in years. Of course, there’s been a lot of rain. Too much, in fact. But the healthy soil dense with living roots has also prevented the vineyard from getting muddy and inaccessible. In the past, he said, when the soil was bare between the rows, it could be three days before the team could take a tractor back out in the field after a big storm. Today, it’s usually 30 minutes.
On the other coast, regenerative practices are also helping vineyards deal with hot, dry summers.
In Napa in 2022, Whitlow remembered, a particularly searing heat wave hit right at harvest time. “Truly, it was like biblical devastation,” she said. “Fruit shriveled on vines, and there was a complete crop failure for many operations.” At ROC vineyard Grgich Hills, where lush cover crops blanketed the ground in between vines, the team measured significantly lower temperatures just off the ground compared to a neighboring vineyard with bare soil.
As the climate crisis intensifies and extreme weather events become more intense and more frequent, these practical advantages could make or break a vineyard—or any farm’s—ability to save a single harvest and make it to the following season.
Grape harvest photo courtesy of Dodon.
For example, Croghan is currently focused on pests called sharpshooters, which have been given a boost by rising temperatures. While a few days of cold-enough temperatures can kill off the population before grape season begins, fewer of those days come around. The sharpshooter drills and deposits bacteria into vines, causing the devastating Pierce’s Disease. At a recent gathering of winemakers in the region, the majority reported they already had sharpshooters in their vineyards, and Croghan was anxiously anticipating their arrival.
A more traditional-leaning agriculture consultant advised Croghan to mow down his grasses to destroy potential habit the sharpshooters might live in. He was resistant, since he’d already put in so much time building up that habitat to accommodate insects that like to eat other pests, and the meadows that will bloom in a few months host crucial pollinators, providing countless other ecosystem benefits beyond the vines. Instead of chopping it all down, Croghan is betting on the whole regenerative system working in his favor, from carbon-holding roots up to the insects flying above ground.
“We’re gonna stick to our guns,” he said.
If it works and his vineyard is better able to manage the pest pressure with its cover crops in place, in the future, other farmers could benefit from his willingness to take the risk.
As Villat says, “The nice thing I think about viticulture is that, it’s not always the case, but often you have farmers who can . . . innovate, do something a little bit differently.”
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]]>The post Fungi Are Helping Farmers Unlock the Secrets of Soil Carbon appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Timothy Robb peers into a microscope to reveal the underground realm of the living and dying within a fistful of soil. On the glass slide, he sees clumps of golden-brown minerals and organic matter particles, like pebbled splotches of ink. Nearly everything else in the landscape is a microbe, a motley crew of roving shapes, preparing to eat or be eaten. Hairy orbs of protozoa glide around in search of snacks in the flecks of bacteria scattered all around. A nematode, a microscopic worm, thrashes through the scene in a hurry. A tubular strand of fungi stands still, perhaps absorbing the dust of dead plants.
“This is called shadow microscopy,” says Robb, the co-owner of Compostella Farm in southern Mississippi, bringing the microorganisms into focus. It’s a way of viewing living specimens under an oblique light, so they appear backlit and magnified, like a shadow box theater. Just prior to this, he diluted the sample in water and shook it, like a “hurricane or earthquake, any biblical catastrophe motion for that soil.” This broke apart the soil’s structure so he could see everything holding it together, like the dark brown curl of fungi.
Soil microorganisms busy decomposing, magnified by shadow microscopy.
(Photo credit: Timothy Robb)
“This is what a really good, healthy fungi strand looks like,” he says. Its uniform, segmented structure, thickness, and color are often good signs, though he adds that it’s not a hard and fast rule, just clues that this might be an architect of healthy soil.
As a vegetable farmer, Robb is mostly in the business of life. But his interest in building healthy soil led him down into this shadowy world of decay, where microbes shuffle carbon and nutrients in an endless cycle that sustains all life on Earth. This world appears chaotic at first glance, but Robb insists that it is elegant. An orderly marketplace, really. He’s been working to understand and strengthen this underground economy to replenish his soil.
Researchers have increasingly recognized how essential fungi are to sequestering carbon in the soil and some have come to appreciate the outsized role they play in supporting crop health, mitigating climate change, and even sheltering crops from disease. As fungi’s vast benefits come to light, more farmers are tapping into this vital network, learning how to work with beneficial fungi to encourage its growth in the soil, swapping tilling for microscopes.
This growing interest in fungal networks on farms quietly challenges the underpinnings of U.S. agriculture. The prevailing model involves taking care of the crop’s nutritional needs with chemicals, bumping up the nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium in an effort to maximize the yield of the crop. Farm ecosystems are controlled with herbicides that kill weeds and fungicides that kill the fungi in the soil. Common practices, like tilling the soil, disturb the fungal networks and then deepen the dependence on chemical inputs.
“It’s a criticism of how agriculture is currently conducted, and it’s a methodology of introducing the microorganisms that are absent from the soil.”
“We’re reliant on these cheap inputs that are no longer cheap,” says soil ecologist Adam Cobb, whose research focuses on mycorrhizal fungi. He notes that farmers are then subject to the whims of a global market, which tends to skyrocket in price during geopolitical conflicts.
These chemical-based practices degrade the soil over time, stripping it of its ability to cycle carbon and nutrients without its supportive network of decomposers. But working to both protect and encourage fungi on farms is a way to reverse course. Robb sees his work of coaxing beneficial fungi back into the soil, which he largely learned from an online program called the Soil Food Web School, as both a challenge to mainstream agriculture and as a way forward to restore agricultural soils.
“It’s a criticism of how agriculture is currently conducted,” says Robb. “And it’s a methodology of introducing the microorganisms that are absent from the soil—the chain of organisms that release different minerals from rocks, clay, or silt particles in the soil.”
The Nutrient-for-Carbon Exchange
Fungi are effectively merchants of carbon. In the soil, they give plants the water and nutrients they need, while the plants provide fungi with carbohydrates (i.e., carbon) from photosynthesis. Fungi can act like a second set of roots, extending the plant’s ability to draw in water and nutrients.
Mycorrhizal fungi, which encompass thousands of species, can form large, underground networks, connected by branching filaments called hyphae, threading through the soil in every direction. One type of this fungi, known as arbuscular mycorrhizal, attaches directly to the cell membranes of a plant’s root, facilitating a smooth delivery. Other microbes in the soil, like protozoa and nematodes, participate in this cycling, too, digesting fungi and bacteria to release their nutrients in a more available form to plants.
“The microbes engineered habitats around the plant roots that would be high in organic matter and make it more efficient for them to be able to obtain water and nutrients that they could then–in this carbon economy–essentially sell it to the plant,” says Kris Nichols, a leading researcher on soil microbiology. “It’s really an economic relationship.”
This relationship becomes especially interesting when business is booming—when the plants are delivering a lot of carbon into the soil that is used to build larger and larger fungal networks while distributing carbon across the soil profile. The carbon accumulates in the soil in many forms, from fungal cell walls to soil aggregates, or pellets of very alive soil that Nichols describes as “little microbial towns,” like economic hubs.
Fungi threading through the soil of Compostella Farm in Mississippi. (Photo credit: Grey Moran)
When these microbial communities develop, mycorrhizal fungi use their hard-earned carbon to build a protective coating around them, sheltering them from disturbances while more stably storing carbon. To the naked eye, these pellets look like crumbs in the soil.
The accumulation of carbon in the soil effectively slows the carbon cycle, causing carbon to linger in the ground for a longer period of time rather than quickly releasing into the atmosphere, where it takes the form of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas driving climate change. That’s the goal of what’s been popularly described as “climate-friendly farming,” or regenerative agriculture: keeping as much carbon in the soil for as long as possible, in part by keeping these underground networks undisturbed.
And increasingly, fungi have gained scientific recognition for their essential role in slowing this life-ending and -giving cycle. A recent study found that the world’s mycorrhizal fungi store the equivalent of a third of fossil-fuel emissions.
How Farmers Can Tap Into Fungal Networks
Peering through the microscope, Robb’s task is relatively simple: He counts and measures each microbe—fungi, nematodes, protozoa, and bacteria—to understand the microbial relationships in the soil and gauge its health. He also looks for the indicators of beneficial fungi and a diversity of microbes: different colors, lengths, and shapes.
“You’re introducing millions of fungi and bacteria species to the soil. And that’s as far as the management really needs to go.”
There’s no shortage of bacteria on the slide. It’s common for agricultural soils to be dominated by bacteria, which Robb is hoping to shift on his farm, building a more balanced ratio of fungi to bacteria in his soil. It’s not that bacteria should be scorned; they too are important decomposers that collaborate with fungi. But it’s hard to beat fungi at its game, rightfully a kingdom of its own. Fungi, more complex organisms, are more efficient at storing carbon across vast networks in the soil and more effective at delivering nutrients for certain plants.
The ratio of fungi to bacteria depends on the plants, explains Robb. He mostly grows salad greens across 3 acres of farmland. For his bok choy, mustards, and kale, he’s aiming for a 1-to-3 ratio of fungi to bacteria, but his lettuce requires a bit more fungi, closer to 1-to-1. He steeps the compost like a tea, extracting the microorganisms in water, and then runs it through his irrigation system.
“You’re introducing millions of fungi and bacteria species to the soil. And that’s as far as the management really needs to go, because once the plant gets established, then it’s controlling [the relationship with the microbes],” says Robb. He’s essentially just giving a plant options, a pool of microbes at its service.
In addition to applying compost tea, Robb supports fungal life by creating mulch from wood chips, which the fungi help decompose.
Robb shows me a pile of wood chips softening in the sun. It’s just 3 months old, but already threaded with fine white hairs of saprophytic fungi, resembling a cobweb. “When you can see it visually like this, what you’re actually seeing are like thousands of strands wrapped around each other,” says Robb, given that hypha are just several microns in size.
Before planting, he’ll also coat his seeds in a mycorrhizal treatment, a powder of spores. This inoculates this critical, network-building fungi in the soil. So as soon as the plant germinates, the fungi will be available to swap nutrients for carbon. Periodically, he’ll feed the fungi, adding liquid kelp, fish hydrolysate, and humic and fulvic acids to encourage its growth.
Every month or so, Robb peers at a soil sample under the microscope, assessing his progress. It has been about a year since he bought his first microscope and began surveying the local microbes. Most of his soil still isn’t where he’d like it to be, still dominated by bacteria, but it’s steadily improving. He essentially started from scratch on sandy soil that couldn’t hold onto much water or nutrients.
Rows of salad greens growing on Compostella Farm in Mississippi. (Photo credit: Grey Moran)
The most visible marker of improvement, at least to the naked eye, might be the crops themselves. A couple years ago, he observed “a precipitous decline in the quality” of his vegetables. They were yellowing and stunted. His lettuce was drooping. Disease was a regular occurrence. This prompted him to look into how to build soil that could hold onto more nutrients, which led him to fungi.
So far, his focus on improving decomposition has improved the health of his crops—now, rows of mostly bright green, leafing, upright crops emerge from dark brown, lush soil.
A Symbiotic Relationship That Predates Humans
The critical relationship between fungi and plants dates back 470 million years, when aquatic plants first transitioned to land. It was a barren landscape, without trees or soil, just endless sand, silt, and clay.
“We had a very mineral land base, but we didn’t have soil,” said microbiologist Kris Nichols. As plants began washing up on shore, it’s thought that mycorrhizal fungi helped them siphon nutrients and water, providing what they needed to move to land, in a symbiotic relationship for the ages.
“We know that this relationship existed,” said Nichols. “We have the genetic markers and we have the fossilized plant roots to be able to see, structurally, that it has been this same type of relationship for hundreds of millions of years.”
It has taken a while for the role of fungi in supporting plants and soil health to gain mainstream scientific recognition, however. Elaine Ingham, a pioneer in the field of soil microbiology, recalls facing pushback in the early 1980s when she proposed researching the role of soil microorganisms for her dissertation at Colorado State University. She met with her professors to propose her field of inquiry, only to be sternly dismissed.
“They’d look me in the eye and say, ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. Bacteria and fungi in the soil—they’re just there. They don’t do anything,’” she recalls. “All of them agreed that I was endangering my ability to get a job at the other end of my research project.”
But Ingham was undeterred. “I wanted to understand what bacteria and fungi in the soil were there for,” she says. “In all the literature I looked at, you couldn’t find anything about what these organisms in the soil actually do.” With the blessing of her advisor, she was allowed to pursue a dissertation project, along with her husband Russell Ingham, studying how soil fungi, bacteria, and nematodes interact with plants.
“We like to think of these wood chips as encouraging the fungi from the native forest around to come into our fields and partner with our orchards and with our crops.”
It was the start of her life’s work to help peel back the layers of the mysterious world of microbes within the soil. To date, the vast majority of the millions of fungi species on Earth remain unknown by scientists, but it’s now abundantly clear that many fungi play a critical role in soil health. Ingram, who grew up on a farm, now works with farmers to reintroduce soil fungi through the Soil Food Web School.
Robb came to learn how to work with fungi on his farm when he stumbled upon the school by chance in a footnote of a book. He attended the program without a background in science, but it didn’t take him long to feel comfortable behind a microscope. It was an “aha moment” when he realized his soil was depleted of fungi and other microbes—with this, he had the clarity of a diagnosis.
The Vast, Untapped Potential of Fungi
While the Soil Food Web School is one approach, there are practically infinite ways to work with beneficial fungi and microorganisms on farms. Many practices associated with regenerative agriculture and long-standing Indigenous methods encourage fungi. Even if not measured with a microscope, there are signs of fungi at work—like dark, spongious soil.
The roots of a cowpea plant, with fungi stained in blue, under a microscope.(Photo credit: Adam Cobb)
“We never leave our soil bare. It is always covered with straw, leaf mold, or wood chips,” says Leah Penniman, the co-founder of Soul Fire Farm in upstate New York. “We like to think of these wood chips as encouraging the fungi from the native forest around to come into our fields and partner with our orchards and with our crops.”
In 2006, when she started Soul Fire Farm, the soil was very degraded and the organic matter—which includes soil carbon—was only at 3 percent. But they’ve since increased it to 10 percent to 12 percent in some areas. “That has been through a partnership with fungi,” Penniman says. Slowly but surely, fungi have emerged from the forest, building carbon in the soil.
Robb also thinks of the forest on the outskirts of his fields. The trees have a relationship with mycorrhizal fungi and microbes that take care of all their needs, without any human intervention. “Those are nitrogen-rich plants, and nobody’s applying fertilizer,” he says.
He currently adds organic nitrogen to his farm, but hopes to add less and less, allowing the fungi and microbes to increasingly take over in tending to his crops.
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]]>The post Regenerative Beef Gets a Boost from California Universities appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>It’s no wonder that hospital food gets a bad rap, says Santana Diaz, executive chef at the University of California Davis Medical Center, a sprawling, 142-acre campus located in Sacramento, California. As a seeming compromise between nutrition and institutional efficiency, food has long been dished up as an afterthought to patient care. “That was never the focus of hospitals,” he adds.
But for Diaz, good food is key to good health. Since taking the helm of the facility’s nutrition and dining services in 2018, he has worked to revamp the cuisine, including sourcing almost half of ingredients from farms and ranches within a 250-mile radius of the Sacramento Valley. Food grown in local fields, orchards, and pastures with healthy soil management practices simply make for healthier, more nutritious, and more flavorful meals, he says—the perfect ingredients for changing the “stigma” associated with hospital fare.
Diaz is not alone in making this shift, but he may be ahead of the game. In 2022, the University of California (U.C.) system—a network of 10 campuses and five medical centers—committed to supporting regenerative farming as part of U.C. President Michael Drake’s vision to mitigate the effects of climate change and drive a more equitable food system. And as an advisor to an initiative lead by the nonprofit organization Roots of Change, Diaz is helping to steer the larger institution toward local agriculture—through the system-wide procurement of regeneratively ranched beef.
Santana Diaz, Executive Chef, U.C. Davis Med Center. (Photo courtesy of Roots of Change)
The term, a general reference to pasture management that prioritizes soil health and perennial plants by grazing livestock through rotated paddocks, encompasses a set of practices that advocates say results in healthier animals and pastures. Research also shows that beef from cattle raised strictly on grass is more nutritious than conventional beef, although it’s not yet clear how regenerative practices may impact those findings.
Cumulatively, the U.C. dining system serves more than 600,000 meals a day during the academic year. By ensuring reliable demand for regeneratively raised meat, proponents of the system’s new procurement pledge see the sizable volume giving the state’s independent ranchers and rural economy a huge boost, and bolstering the local and regional meat supply chain.
It’s a tall order, but Diaz knows the sway that comes with institutional demand. The former executive chef at the Sacramento Kings’ Golden 1 Center and the San Francisco 49ers’ Levi’s Stadium is also a founding member of Beef2Institution, a non-profit program helping K-12 schools, hospitals, and sports venues in California source beef from local, family-owned ranches.
Institutions are the perfect outlet, says Diaz, for ground, braising, and stewing meat and the other lower-value, secondary cuts that make up nearly two-thirds of every beef carcass. So featuring hamburgers, boneless short ribs, and carne asada as part of a local farm-to-fork menu offers nearby ranchers a prime bread-and-butter opportunity, he says—all the while exposing a captive audience to the value of beef raised on regenerative pasture.
“Obviously, we’re not going to change patient behavior . . . in [one] hospital stay.”
“Obviously, we’re not going to change patient behavior . . . in [one] hospital stay,” Diaz notes. But because diet plays a major role in raising the risk of heart disease, diabetes, and other chronic conditions, there’s huge merit, he adds, in educating them about preventative and nutritional approaches to health management.
And with his kitchen alone churning out 6,500 meals a day—along with patients, the medical center feeds an army of clinicians, staff, and medical and nursing students—the appetite of the entire U.C. system will likely have a resounding impact on the larger beef market in the state. “That’s how institutions can flex their buying power,” Diaz says.
A Premium Product
Despite research showing that eating less beef has significant health and environmental benefits, including shrinking an individual’s carbon footprint by as much as 75 percent, America’s steak and burger consumption is on the rise.
Currently, the vast majority of U.S. beef comes from cows raised on pasture for about the first year of their lives, then moved to concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs)—large-scale industrial facilities that grain-finish cattle in confinement for six to eight months before slaughter. Along with concentrated levels of environmental pollution, critics deride beef feedlots as places where hundreds if not thousands of cattle are crowded together. These conditions typically require antibiotics to prevent herds from getting sick; subsequently, this “subtherapeutic” use has also been linked to antibiotic resistance.
Nevertheless, CAFOs are also the basis of a “hyper-efficient” commodity system, says Renee Cheung, managing partner at Bonterra Partners, an impact investment advisory firm for regenerative agriculture and co-author of a market analysis of grass-fed beef. These operations pump out a consistent, year-round supply of beef for the meatpacking industry, a sector dominated by a handful of multinational giants that control more than 80 percent of the country’s beef market.
Grazing cattle on pasture for the entirety of their lives, on the other hand, is far less productive. As such, strictly grass-fed or grass-finished operations tend to be modest in scale, says Cheung, with the majority of ranches in the U.S. herding around 50 heads. The smaller volumes and seasonality of pastures create more variability in slaughter weight and harvest windows, running counter to the conventional year-round commodity model.
As a result, non-CAFO operations don’t benefit from the economy of scale built into the heavily consolidated processing and marketing infrastructure, Cheung says. With limited access to centralized meatpacking facilities, these producers are often saddled with high overhead for transport, cold storage, and market delivery—all of which add to premium prices at the meat counter.
The cost, however, also reflects a more superior product. Compared to conventionally raised beef, studies show that strictly pasture-fed beef contain higher nutrients with less fat, often with lower levels of antibiotics, hormones, and risk of food contamination. And grass-fed cuts simply taste better, according to Chef Dan Barber, sustainable and ethical farming advocate and author of The Third Plate, who extols its rich, complex, and “undeniably beefy” flavor.
Not all pasture-based ranchers have adopted paddock-based regenerative practices, but the number appears to be growing. That’s in part because the holistic principles of regenerative ranching go hand in hand with land stewardship and animal welfare, says Michael Dimock, executive director of Roots of Change. By “mimicking nature,” the grazing patterns of ruminants benefit from natural forage and room to roam, all the while “maximizing soil health and biodiversity” of plants, insects, and other animals.
Preparing grass-fed beef for serving at the Meat Summit. (Photo courtesy of Roots of Change)
Regardless, recent research shows that 100 percent grass-fed cattle have a larger carbon footprint than those finished on grain because they fatten at a slower rate, yet also weigh as much as 20 percent less at maturity. And while regeneratively managed pastures have been shown to sequester carbon, the science behind the potential for “carbon-neutral beef” has been overblown. Still, Dimock adds that well-managed, rotational grazing enhances pasture productivity, helps restore spent cropland, and prevents wildfires by keeping invasive grasses and dry brush in check.
It’s also a highly efficient use of marginal land, notes Dimock—a classification of the 70 percent of the world’s arable regions unsuited for crop production due to poor soil, aridity, or steepness. As he sees it, regenerative ranching is also accessible and practical for smaller operations because it’s scalable, and lowers the financial risks associated with compliance-centered practices like organic farming.
The Power of Procurement
Making regenerative beef a more attainable business model requires developing a resilient supply chain, says Dimock, one that caters primarily to smaller producers. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the vulnerabilities of a heavily consolidated industry, including bottlenecks in meat processing due to labor shortages and transportation breakdowns. Along with the USDA’s recent $1 billion investment in expanding the nation’s meat and poultry processing capacity, he sees California’s $600 million Community Economic Resilience Fund (CERF) giving a major boost to the state’s meat supply infrastructure.
The targeted funding includes shoring up the network of smaller, regional harvest, processing, and storage facilities, he adds, and will help rural communities develop stronger economic hubs that decentralize the current top-heavy model. But those new and expanded facilities won’t succeed if there isn’t a consistent market for the kind of meat they process.
“If we want to give small-scale ranchers a fair shot,” Dimock says, “we have to break up [the current corporate stronghold].”
Going up against the commodity system, however, comes with additional challenges. While grass-fed beef accounts for roughly $4 billion, or 4 percent of the overall U.S. market, an estimated 80 percent of the supply consists of imports, largely from Australia, Uruguay and Brazil—countries where raising livestock on pasture is far more economical. Passed through a USDA-inspected plant, these products can be labeled “domestic,” leaving true domestic producers at an economic disadvantage.
“If you talk to 12 people about regenerative [practices], you’ll get 12 different definitions.”
In fact, the general lack of standards and regulations for the grass-fed sector has created a Wild West landscape of labels, says Bonterra’s Cheung. For its part, the USDA has recently announced stepping up its labeling guidelines, which distinguish true grass-fed beef from confusing claims such as “pasture-raised,” “50 percent grass-fed,” and “grass-fed and grain-finished.” These are highly misleading terms, she notes, given that most cattle are pastured for the first year of their lives. And “there has been a lot of outright cheating in the industry,” she adds—for instance, grass-fed labels can still apply to confined cattle raised on grass pellets.
The fundamental practices of regenerative ranching align with California’s efforts to promote farming “in a manner that restores and maintains natural systems,” says California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) Secretary Karen Ross. The approach also complements the state’s climate smart initiatives and efforts to advance social equity through the support of small-scale farms and ranches.
Still, Ross acknowledges that the term’s inherent flexibility can make it a fuzzy concept. That’s especially true in California, where regional variations in microclimates, precipitation levels, and soil structure reflect a wide practice spectrum—some ranches in the state’s mountainous reaches, for example, may winter their herds on dried silage when fields are bare, while others may have the means to transport them to greener pastures.
“If you talk to 12 people about regenerative [practices], you’ll get 12 different definitions,” Ross says.
Currently, several certifications such as the American Grassfed Association (AGA), Regenerative Organic Certified, and Land to Market provide a range of overlapping criteria that ensure the regenerative provenance of meat. By outlining transparent measures, these voluntary labels are intended to legitimize and safeguard the premium nature of regeneratively produced beef.
Last month, the CDFA began work on officially defining regenerative ranching and agriculture. Rather than developing standards for state certification, and the goal is “to make sure that when we use the term, we have a shared understanding of what the practices are,” says Ross. The “inclusive” set of parameters will help inform state policy around regenerative food production, she adds—including public procurement initiatives.
Public institutions are “a ready-made way” to spur and ensure market demand for healthy food from sustainable sources, adds Ross, who has been involved in discussions about the UC initiative. “We’re investing in better outcomes for farmers, the community, and the environment,” she says. “That’s the power of procurement.”
Building the Supply Pipeline
Balancing supply and demand is nonetheless a delicate endeavor, says Tom Richards, co-owner of Richards Grassfed Beef in Yuba County, California. The fifth-generation rancher has been a key voice in both the UC initiative and Beef2Institution.
Most of California’s pasture-grazing operations focus on a premium, direct-to-consumer market. Between online sales, farmers markets, restaurants, and specialty retailers, year-to-year demand tends to be stable—and manageable.
The supply of better beef “isn’t something you can just dial up,” says Richards. Increasing herds is a risky investment—“it takes three years to raise one of these animals,” he notes—so clear market forecasts are imperative. “The biggest thing that we need from the industry is for somebody like a Santana [Diaz] or UC to say, ‘we’re committed to [helping you] map out a three- to five-year plan to grow your supply,’” he says.
“Right now, the market’s operating on a push,” Richards adds. “But what the industry needs is the pull”—with heavy strings attached.
For smaller-scale operations in particular, committed relationships all along the supply chain are essential to staying afloat. Yet that business model runs counter to industry approach, says Clifford Pollard, the founder of Cream Co. Meats. The Oakland, California-based meat processor “bridges the gap” between regenerative ranches and broadline product distribution on the West Coast, and has played a central role in promoting Beef2Institution’s efforts.
Conventional meat processors “trade in commodities,” Pollard says, sourcing raw material at the lowest price possible. Cream Co., on the other hand, cultivates its supply pipeline “over many years of sustained [purchasing] commitments” to individual operations, he says.
Ultimately, with demand driving supply, the large-scale procurement will undoubtedly influence the equation. Nevertheless, even incremental steps by institutions can pave the way for meaningful change, Pollard notes. “There’s often a hesitation that it has to be all or nothing, but shifting even a small portion of your spend towards [regeneratively minded sourcing] is impactful,” he says, and U.C.’s commitment really gives regenerative producers “a seat at the table.”
“We don’t need the whole table,” Pollard adds. “Just a seat.”
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]]>The post Can Taller Cover Crops Help Clean the Water in Farm Country? appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Under pewter-colored skies, Alan Bedtka tramps through the snow and past a stand of sorghum-sudangrass, its chest-high stems rattling in the harsh wind. The tall forage stands out in southeastern Minnesota’s corn and soybean fields, which this time of year have been reduced to stubble poking through the snow.
Bedtka is in his mid-30s and working to raising a small cow-calf beef herd profitably. That requires cutting costs and labor, and he’d like to keep input-intensive corn and soy out of the picture if he can. Instead, he wants his cattle to harvest their own feed via managed rotational grazing, even in the winter.
“Any day you can graze is better,” says Bedka.
It turns out a system that relies less on row crops isn’t just good for a time- and resource-strapped young farmer. A snowball’s toss away, a trout stream called Crow Spring snakes through the white landscape. Yet the bucolic scene belies an environmental problem roiling beneath the surface: The groundwater in this part of Minnesota is so contaminated with nitrates running off farm fields that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has recently called on three state agencies to take action to protect the health of rural residents.
The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency says 70 percent of the state’s nitrate pollution is coming from cropland.
That’s where the sorghum-sudangrass comes in. It works as both a cover crop and forage for the cattle, and it’s helping Bedtka build up organic matter in his soil. He was paid to plant it by the Olmsted County Groundwater Protection and Soil Health Program, a local effort that seeks to reduce overall fertilizer use by building soil—therefore cutting down on the nutrients that enter waterways—while helping farmers save money.
In its inaugural season, the program has already helped keep tens of thousands of pounds of nitrates out of area water. The initiative goes beyond pushing the establishment of an isolated practice to take a holistic, integrative approach. And its early success has conservationists and lawmakers hoping it can become a model for local, state, and federal farm conservation programs, and in the process serve as a way of disrupting the corn-bean-feedlot machine that dominates Midwestern agriculture.
Nipping Nitrates at the Source
In 2022, Olmsted County commissioners Mark Thein and Gregg Wright approached staffers in the local soil and water conservation district office and asked a seemingly straightforward question: How can we keep nitrates out of the groundwater? Thein, whose family runs a well drilling business, is troubled by the increase in contamination he’s seen over the past few decades in the aquifers he taps throughout southeastern Minnesota.
“It’s not in society’s best interest to look the other way,” he says. “I don’t think it’s fair to the next generation.”
Southeastern Minnesota is a hollow land—its geology is characterized by porous limestone that allows contaminants to easily make their way into underground aquifers. Nitrates are a particularly troublesome pollutant, given their ability to escape the surface and seep deeper into the Earth, often in a mysterious and unpredictable manner. High nitrate levels can cause a sometimes-fatal condition called “blue baby syndrome” and has been linked to colorectal cancer, thyroid disease, and neural tube defects.
The EPA has set the drinking water standard for nitrate at 10 milligrams per liter, or 10 parts per million. Recently, research has hinted at serious health problems associated with nitrate levels lower than that. Minnesota Department of Agriculture testing has shown that over 12 percent of the private wells tested in the eight-county karst region of southeastern Minnesota exceeded the EPA’s drinking water standard. More than 9,000 residents in the region have been or still are at risk of consuming water at or above the EPA standard, according to a letter the agency released in November 2023.
A winter view of Alan Bedtka’s sorghum-sudangrass cover crops during a soil health field day led by Olmsted SWCD staff. (Photo courtesy of Alan Bedtka)
The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency says 70 percent of the state’s nitrate pollution is coming from cropland. Corn requires lots of nitrogen, and it’s by far the most commonly used fertilizer in the United States. Iowa farmers, for example, apply it on 87 percent of their fields at a rate of 149 pounds per acre. Annual crops take up only about half of the nitrogen applied, and the rest often ends up polluting groundwater in the form of nitrate.
This doesn’t just create problems in local drinking water wells. Nitrogen and phosphorus escaping Midwestern farm fields are the major cause of the hypoxic “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico, which is about the size of Yellowstone National Park. The EPA’s latest National Rivers and Streams Assessment found close to half of the country’s waterways were in “poor condition,” and nutrients such as nitrogen are a leading culprit.
Southeastern Minnesota’s Olmsted County is a microcosm of agriculture’s dependence on nitrogen fertilizer. Since the 1940s, oats, wheat, hay, and pasture have been replaced by a duoculture of corn and soybeans. In addition, large concentrated animal feeding operations, which have become more prevalent there in recent years, add to the problem by disposing millions of gallons of nitrogen-rich liquid manure.
Olmsted County officials acknowledge that water in certain areas of the county will continue to see increasing nitrate levels as the contaminant moves deeper into aquifers. And when nitrates are present, it’s inevitable that other contaminants, such as pesticides, are also polluting the water. “We’re allowing this to happen,” says Caitlin Meyer, the water resources coordinator for the Olmsted SWCD. “But what can we do to prevent this in the first place?”
Dialing up Diversity
One standard approach to cleaning the water that runs off farms is planting cover crops. Indeed, studies have shown that when cover crops grow between the corn and soy seasons, they provide the kind of soil environment that builds natural fertility and cuts nitrate leaching by anywhere from 40 to over 70 percent.
Cover cropping has also gained a reputation as a tool for sequestering carbon and thus mitigating climate change. Since 2016, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has made available more than $100 million in funds to help farmers establish cover crops.
Despite the resources devoted to advancing the practice, however, only around 5 percent of U.S. farmland is regularly cover cropped. The cost can be prohibitive, and it can be tricky to fit them into a conventional row-cropping system. A 2022 Stanford University satellite study reported that although cover cropping reduces erosion and improves water quality, it also causes significant yield hits for corn and soybeans. And some scientists are concerned that cover cropping’s role in climate change mitigation has been overplayed.
For a time, the Olmsted County SWCD administered a traditional cover-crop program funded by the USDA that helped farmers with establishment costs. Angela White, a soil conservation technician for the SWCD, says the program was valuable in getting cover crops established in the region and showing that it could work, but it had limitations as far as producing environmental benefits. Farmers would often plow the cover under early in the spring before it could provide optimal soil health benefits, and USDA restrictions didn’t allow much flexibility.
Ray Weil, a University of Maryland soil ecologist who has worked with farmers in numerous states, says when farmers are paid to implement an isolated practice such as cover cropping, they can become too focused on the minimum needed to qualify for payments, and they don’t consider the overall soil health picture.
But Weil and other experts also say cover cropping can be a “gateway practice” for implementing the five principles of soil health promoted by the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service or NRCS: armor the soil, minimize disturbance (i.e., reduce tillage), increase plant diversity, keep roots in the soil as long as possible, and integrate livestock.
Plant diversity and covering the land has long been associated with more resilient soil. But experts say the integration of livestock via rotational grazing can also help reduce reliance on continuous plantings of fertilizer-intensive crops. And that’s where the Olmsted County Groundwater Protection and Soil Health Program enters the picture. The program pays farmers to plant cover crops, but it digs deeper to ensure that they get real results.
Research shows that allowing cover crops to grow to significant heights can dramatically reduce pollution. So, the program pays a farmer $55 an acre to grow their cover crops to at least 12 inches; at 24 inches, they receive an additional $20 per acre. Planting a cash crop within a living stand of cover crops, a technique called “planting green,” garners a farmer an additional $10 an acre. Farmers can also receive payments for growing so-called “alternative” crops such as oats and other small grains, and for converting crop acres to deep-rooted perennial systems like hay and pasture.
Each farm can qualify for a maximum of around $15,000 in payments per year. When Olmsted County SWCD staffers originally brainstormed with area farmers about setting up the soil health initiative, they considered a per-farm cap of $20,000 to $25,000. However, the farmers insisted on a lower cap so that more money could be spread around on more acres.
“I put $6,500 total expenses into seeding—the program paid back $3,500,” says farmer Logan Clark, who used the program to convert cropland to rotationally grazed pasture on his hilly, erosion-prone farm. “So, I’d at least be $3,500 more in the hole if I didn’t have the program.”
SWCD staffers say one advantage of the program is that because funding comes from the county—the commissioners agreed to set aside $5 million in American Rescue Plan Act funds for the program—rather than the USDA, they have more freedom to allow farmers to experiment and learn from their mistakes.
“I know farmers who have been cover cropping or strip tilling for decades … Now they are hungry for what’s next.”
Mark Stokes has been using no-till cropping for 26 years. Around five years ago, he noticed that even on his no-till acres he was seeing erosion, so he started growing cover crops utilizing traditional cost-share programs. He isn’t afraid to experiment—he’s grazed his beef cow herd on a mix of nine cover crops, and a few years ago, after seeing it being done on YouTube, mounted a seeder box on his combine so he can plant cover crops while he’s harvesting corn.
Stokes enrolled in the Olmsted SWCD program in 2023 to help cover the risk of yet another innovative practice. Through the contract, he agreed to plant his corn and soybeans into growing cereal rye green and terminate the rye after it hit 12 inches tall. It turns out the dry conditions made it a bad year to let a cover crop grow tall. On the other hand, the oats he raised in 2023 thrived.
When it came time to sign up for the 2024 round of the program, Stokes took advantage of its flexibility. “I signed up for more oats, so we don’t have to worry about the cereal rye so much, and if we have to, we can terminate it sooner.”
Not all participants in the program are going to check all five soil health principle boxes, but flexibility can serve as a seedbed for aspirational farming. Alan Bedtka wants to follow as many of the principles as possible. In 2023, he used the program’s funds to grow his cover crop to 12 inches. He also signed up to raise cover crops for seed production, which qualified him for the alternative crop portion of the initiative. Finally, his use of rotational grazing and the growing of forages on formerly row-cropped land qualified him for the haying and grazing payment.
“Protecting water quality is a perk, but the main reason I’m doing it is to try to be more profitable,” says Bedtka as he stands in a recently grazed cover-cropped field that he hasn’t had to add fertilizer to for two years. Nearby is an exposed limestone hillside, a reminder of the area’s vulnerable karst. Bedtka explains that his healthier soil absorbs and stores precipitation better. “So that means you’re growing more grass and more cows per acre. All the benefits are kind of tied up into one.”
Like Stokes, Bedtka is now able to take a more integrative, whole-systems approach with less financial risk.
“I know farmers who have been cover cropping or strip tilling for decades . . . Now they are hungry for what’s next,” says Kristi Pursell, who, when she headed up the watershed group Clean River Partners, supported farmers adopting practices to keep ag pollution out of southeastern Minnesota’s Cannon River. “The Olmsted SWCD program respects the knowledge that these farmers have of their land and their previous experience.”
Truckloads of Disruption
Soon after the Olmsted County program was launched as a pilot in 2022, 52 farmers signed up to grow tall cover crops—more than double what was expected. In total, they agreed to grow cover crops up to 12 inches high on over 5,300 acres and 24 inches on 2,700 acres. This year, over 70 farmers have signed up to raise cover crops under the program, representing almost 13,000 acres.
There are 240,000 acres of cropland in the county, so the majority of the area’s farmers aren’t participating in this initiative. But the program may be having an outsized impact on soil health. The SWCD estimates the environmental results of the program by combining the nitrate reduction directly observed on its own research farm with some of the wider research that’s been done. It estimates that in 2023, the program kept roughly 310,000 pounds of nitrates out of the county’s drinking water.
Surveys show that most farmers plant more cover-crop acres than they are getting paid for— something they can afford to do because the SWCD contracts pay so well, says Martin Larsen, a farmer and conservation technician for the district. When the SWCD includes those additional acres, the amount of nitrates being kept out of the water goes up to 560,000 pounds—or the equivalent of 23 semi-truckloads of urea fertilizer.
“The contracts are generating a nearly two-to-one payback in terms of soil health practices that are put in place on the farms,” says Larsen.
At the SWCD office, Caitlin Meyer, the water resources coordinator, points to a color-coded map that shows where farmers have signed up for the program so far; soil-friendly practices are being used in most areas of the county. “If we could get 30 percent in our subwatersheds put into cover crops, we’d be making real progress,” she says. One estimate is that some watersheds are approaching the 20-percent mark.
Larsen, who got his start using regenerative practices by planting cover crops a few years ago, then displays a chart showing what kind of acreage changes could occur if the program lives up to its potential over the next five years—9 percent less corn, 13 percent fewer soybeans, 417 percent more cover crops, 95 percent more oats, and 5 percent more pasture. If the effort succeeds, in other words, it could significantly disrupt the corn-soybean system in the region.
“For generations we’ve been telling farmers to do exactly what they’re doing. If we want them to change, we need to change.”
It might also serve as a model in other counties in Minnesota and beyond. Dagoberto Driggs, who coordinates the National Healthy Soils Policy Network, says the data from the Olmsted effort’s research farm helps determine an accurate estimate of the program’s benefits, ensuring public resources are being invested wisely. He adds that a program like this fits well with the current push on the part of regenerative agriculture groups across the country to create conservation incentives that are flexible enough to allow farmers to innovate and adapt. Driggs would like to see something like the Olmsted County program tried in other parts of the country.
“We really need a more holistic approach based on the soil health principles, which is what I find striking with this program,” says Driggs.
Mark Thein, the well-driller and county commissioner, hopes a cost-benefit analysis could show that such a proactive program saves taxpayer money by reducing the need for new drinking water infrastructure to deal with pollutants. It would be ideal, he adds, if the state would create a large-scale version of the program, taking pressure off local governments.
The timing could work in his favor. An analysis by the Star Tribune newspaper found that despite the fact that Minnesota has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to reduce nitrate pollution over the past few decades, the problem has not gone away.
When the 2024 session of the Minnesota Legislature convened in February, lawmakers began drafting legislation that would create a pilot nitrate-reduction program modeled after the Olmsted County initiative. Pursell, who is now a state representative, is working on the legislation. She’s frustrated with the lack of progress made to reduce ag pollution and blames federal policy such as the farm bill, which encourages farmers to grow little other than corn and soybeans.
If a local pilot is successful, Pursell says it could help farmers transition out of the corn-soybean duoculture in a financially viable manner—and give taxpayers a return on their investment in the form of clean water, a crucial public good.
“I want to make sure that when we are spending money, it’s for an outcome, and it’s not just to tick a box,” she says. “For generations we’ve been telling farmers to do exactly what they’re doing. If we want them to change, we need to change.”
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]]>The post From Civil Rights to Food Justice, Jim Embry Reflects on a Life of Creative Resistance appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Jim Embry sees tending to land as a sacred and spiritual responsibility. The food systems advocate, land steward, and beekeeper came of age during the civil rights movement in Kentucky and has spent five decades working for social and racial justice.
In 1972, he founded the Good Foods Co-op in Lexington. Then, in 2001, at a pivotal point of his life, Embry moved to the heart of Detroit, assuming the role of director at the Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership, where he began integrating his work for social justice into the effort to bring nutritious food to underserved communities.
This move marked the culmination of 30 years of political collaboration with luminaries Jimmy and Grace Lee Boggs. Embry’s focus on urban agriculture and food justice in Detroit drew a global audience, where he hosted audiences include the British Parliament, the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, and distinguished personalities such as Danny Glover, David Korten, and Joanna Macy.
“I have developed a worldview that enlarged my concern for all the human and non-human people: the plant people, the animal people, the water people, the air people, the rock people, the fire people. These are all our relatives, and we are all children of the Earth.”
Embry returned to his home state of Kentucky in 2006, and founded the Sustainable Communities Network (SCN), a nonprofit that connects and supports a variety of entities in a larger effort to build justice in the local food system. SCN works with nonprofits and schools in the region to integrate farming and food production into their work and advocates for local policy that supports school gardens, urban farms, and community gardens and helps get fresh produce to food insecure residents. He is also part of the Ujamaa Cooperative Farming Alliance, a Black- and Indigenous-led organization with a focus on African and African American crops.
Since then, he has traveled and spoken extensively, including trips to the World Social Forum in Brazil and to Terra Madre, the International Slow Food Gathering in Italy. Embry now lives alongside his cousin in Richmond, Kentucky, on the 30-acre Ballew Farm, named after his great uncle Atrus, who died at age 100. In June 2023, Embry received a James Beard Leadership Award that recognized his many years of leadership within the justice food and food sovereignty movements.
Embry strives to balance community activism and writing with “soil activism,” embodying the essence of a life dedicated to weaving harmony between humanity and the natural world. His ethos extends beyond human boundaries; he sees himself as “stardust condensed in human form, collaborating with kindred spirits to foster beloved communities where every being, from human to water, air, rock, animal, and plant, is held in sacred regard.”
Civil Eats recently sat down with Embry to talk about his farm, his family’s agrarian history, and how he approaches his current role as an elder in the food system.
Drawing from your experiences as an activist, farmer, and social justice leader, how have historical events influenced and shaped your passion for the social justice movement?
I’ve been a participant in all the social justice movements for the past 65 years. In 1959, when I was a 10-year-old, I was a member of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). My mother was the local chapter president.
Those years of activism inspired me to develop a worldview that moves beyond 45, 90, and 180 degrees and approaches 360. My involvement in social justice movements encompasses all forms of oppression that humans are subject to. But I have also developed a worldview that enlarged my concern for all the human and non-human people: the plant people, the animal people, the water people, the air people, the rock people, the fire people. These are all our relatives, and we are all children of the Earth.
As a social justice activist and organizer, I have not only participated in historical events, but I have also helped to plan and organize historical events. One case in point is the 1964 March on Frankfort, Kentucky, led by Dr. King and Jackie Robinson. As a president of the state youth chapter for the NAACP, my role was to travel around Kentucky and organize other young folks to attend the march, which attracted 10,000 people. I have gone on in my life to help organize probably 30 or 40 large events, have helped found 30 to 40 organizations, and I have never felt like dropping out.
One very important historical moment that influenced my journey was attending Dr. King’s funeral in 1968. It was here that I met Ernie Greene, well known for his involvement in the Little Rock school integration effort. He invited me to spend the summer in New York City in 1968 working construction. It seemed like the whole world was in New York City. There were people there from all over the world, interacting together. It was there that I was exposed to questions around food justice, food apartheid, food access, and the racism within the food and agricultural system.
Can you share the driving force behind your commitment to activism and the social justice movement, particularly in the context of fostering a more socially and environmentally sustainable world?
I grew up with a closeness to the land because of my upbringing in Madison County, which sits at the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, is fed by the Kentucky River watershed, and is nourished by soil heavy mineralized in limestone rock.
My grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins were all small farmers. So, my family culture was a culture of people connected to the land. I call us agrarian intellectual activists. Everything I do has been influenced by my family legacy as small farmers.
How does your family history inform your understanding of the challenges faced by today’s small-scale farmers?
My family’s history provides me an understanding that conditions during the years of enslavement, during the period after the Civil War, are all connected to what is happening today. The conditions that we faced after the Civil War were not resolved towards justice and are thus still prevalent.
There were 180,000 Black men and women who fought . . . [and] brought about the Union victory, defeated the Confederacy, and reunified the country. Most all of those Black soldiers were listed as farmers for their occupation. So, it was Black farmers who saved the union. This is the history and legacy of Black farmers.
Are you still actively involved in farming?
Yes, I’m currently actively involved in farming, but in defined ways. I’m a beekeeper and I love all those momma bees that go out and gather pollen and nectar on our 15-acre pollinator conservation project as part of our 30-acre family farm. I currently [have] about 30 fruit trees with most every kind of fruit growing. And I have all kinds of berries and fig trees and a whole variety of medicinal and cooking herbs.
On our property we have two high tunnels where we’re growing an assortment of veggies. And we do host farm tours, women’s retreats, dinners, and other educational activities here. My cousin next door raises chickens and makes value-added products from elderberries, herbs, teas, and tinctures.
We have invested in mushroom logs, and we are replenishing native tree varieties while also intentionally planning additional medicinal herbs that are native to Kentucky forests. We have two ponds on the property, and they get used periodically by family members or friends to catch fish. We have adopted an organic agricultural transition plan and we are in the second year of that activity. But honestly, because of my speaking engagements, I’m away from home for about one-third of the year.
Leadership winners Ira Wallace, Savonala “Savi” Horne, Valerie Horn, and Jim Embry speak onstage at the 2023 James Beard Restaurant And Chef Awards at Lyric Opera Of Chicago on June 5, 2023 in Chicago, Illinois. (Photo by Jeff Schear/Getty Images for The James Beard Foundation)
For most of my life, I have not been involved in farming full-time. I moved to our family farm in 2012 to help look after our aunt and uncle who were both 90 years old at the time. They were like second parents to me, and so much that I do now in the food and agriculture system is based upon their teachings.
This property that I live on now goes back to the year 1800 or so, when our ancestors were brought across the Appalachian Mountains to live here in Madison County. So, we claim ancestral stewardship of this land. We purchased it in 1889 from those folks who stole the land from Indigenous peoples.
“Each decision we make around food is a political choice. It’s an economic choice. It’s a cultural choice. It’s a spiritual choice.”
Over the years I’ve developed extensive knowledge about every aspect of the food agriculture system and recognize my role. My role as an elder is to have this systems view, to create synergy, to speak to everyone and point out that everyone has to change since everyone eats. Everyone has to change in how we relate to the food and agriculture system in our daily practice and the food choices we make.
Each decision we make around food is a political choice. It’s an economic choice. It’s a cultural choice. It’s a spiritual choice. My dear friend, Wendell Berry, who I met as a student at the University of Kentucky back in 1968, says, “Eating is an agricultural act.” This means everyone is involved in the food agricultural system. Everybody has to change.
I have spoken to presidents, peasants, university professors, preschoolers, famous actors, and to kids who are doing hip-hop, beats, and rhymes and working in some of our urban garden projects. I’ve talked to members of the Nobel Committee and kids in FFA, governors, mayors, local schoolteachers, and military veterans with missing limbs who want to farm. These are a few of the people, organizations, and institutions that I’ve been blessed to work with over the years.
What are some notable best practices and challenges you believe exist in agriculture?
If we lift up one of Albert Einstein’s famous quotes, which is, “We can’t solve today’s problems with the same way of thinking we used when we created them,” then we have to deeply examine that way of thinking. [We have] created unsustainable farming practices, damaging practices, toxic practices, practices that create injustice, health disparities, economic inequalities, loss of biodiversity, and environmental pandemics. Oftentimes, the “best practices” that emerge over time become “worst practices” and create even more problems.
“Oftentimes, the ‘best practices’ that emerge over time become ‘worst practices’ and create even more problems.”
There are many different schools of thought or different methodologies that people embrace as we do our farm work, and I have borrowed from many, but my favorite is agroecology.
Agroecology is an integrated approach that combines ecological and social principles for sustainable agriculture and food systems. It emphasizes optimizing interactions among plants, animals, humans, and the environment while fostering equitable food systems where people have a say in their food choices and production. Agroecology has evolved to include ecological, sociocultural, technological, economic, and political aspects of food systems.
The key elements of agroecology involve empowering farmers, promoting local value addition, and supporting short value chains. It enables farmers to adapt to climate change and sustainably manage natural resources and biodiversity. Agroecology stresses local knowledge, biodiversity, synergy, knowledge sharing, and economic diversification. It also focuses on fairness, connectivity, land governance, participatory learning, circular economies, and polycentric governance, serving as a science, practice set, and social movement.
How do you envision agriculture’s role in shaping our future?
Agriculture has had the biggest role in shaping human culture for the past 15,000 years. Agriculture developed some 12,000 to 15,000 years ago and was a gift to our species by women.
Agri-culture—or the growing of food through the use of seeds—allowed us to move away from being primarily hunter-gatherers. This development (and domestication of animals) gave rise to what we call modern human civilization. In my view, it is within agriculture where we have the most profound need for change, and it is within agriculture where we have the most powerful fulcrum point for social transformation of all other human institutions.
“In my view, it is within agriculture where we have the most profound need for change, and it is within agriculture where we have the most powerful fulcrum point for social transformation of all other human institutions.”
After a sharp and comprehensive critique of our prevailing and dominant worldview of agriculture, we need to develop a farming philosophy, farming practices, farming research whose primary aim is the health of the people, health of the planet, health for all other species on the Earth, and the health of the economy.
Right now, the dominant food and farming systems are used to promote profit, plunder, and have a predatory relationship with the Earth. We need a huge paradigm shift in both the philosophy and the practices of farming. That will mean changes in every aspect of the food and agriculture system from seeds to planting to production to harvest to distribution to education to marketing to eating to disposal. In the face of climate change and environmental devastation, every sector will require lots of significant changes or shifts in how we go about the work in this area.
For us to enact changes we will need to develop an integrated systems approach. But we don’t have any choice if we want to become good ancestors and leave our great-great-grandchildren an Earth of abundance.
What is your philosophy on caring for and giving back to the planet?
George Washington Carver said any injustice to the soil is injustice to the farmer. Any injustice to the farmer is injustice to the soil.
Our human quest now is to have a much more expanded view of our responsibility not just to resolving the conflicts and contradictions within the human realm but it’s also to be stewards of Earth protectors or protagonists in maintaining the sacred Earthly balance.
What advice do you have for those looking to become more involved in advocating for their communities, land, and people striving to heal, reshape, and sustain our environment?
I encourage people reading this to contact me. I invite folks to, as Bill Withers would say, use me up. I’m in my last quadrant. I’ve done all kinds of things and recognize the importance of passing on these understandings to the next generations.
Secondly, get involved in organizations; they are critical to making change. Then form study groups to discuss ideas. Get out of the U.S.; travel internationally to see the cultures, the histories of other parts of the planet. Get engaged in your community. Become a voracious reader and read books like Farming While Black by Leah Penniman, We Are Each Other’s Harvest by Natalie Baszile, Freedom Farmers by Monica White, Collective Courage by Jessica Nembhard, and the great work of Thomas Berry and Wendell Berry.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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]]>The post Investment Is Flowing to US Grass-fed Beef Again. Will It Scale Up? appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>When two small Western grass-fed beef brands combined forces in the name of growth in fall 2022, Jeff “Trip” Tripician was tapped to lead the newly formed company, Grass Fed Foods. As CEO, one of his first actions was to send an employee on a quest: Find the “most regenerative” ranch, he instructed. “But they have to be big. Do not bring me a small ranch,” he said.
That’s how, a year later, he ended up at the largest cattle ranch in Montana, where the only thing more vast than its approximately 380,000 acres is the wealth and power of the man who owns it: one Rupert Murdoch.
“Cream Co. is the first one that we worked with in the beef space. It’s not gonna be the last.”
On a sunny September afternoon, Tripician stood in front of a small crowd to present Bert Glover, the managing director of Impact Ag Partners, an Australian firm that helps people like Murdoch make and manage regenerative agriculture investments. Glover’s eyes gazed out at an audience made up of a few dozen representatives of America’s largest grocers and food-service companies from beneath the brim of a straw cowboy hat. Behind them, green pastures stretched into the distance toward looming, sand-colored peaks.
“How do you make the best beef business in America?” he asked, crossing one brown leather boot in front of another. “How do you do that and create ecological change, economic value, and social benefit? That’s what you’re gonna learn over the next 12 or 14 hours.”
The September Montana ranch tour and presentation. (Photo courtesy of Grass Fed Foods)
Buyers from Costco, Sysco, and Whole Foods climbed onto a hay wagon, eager to get started.
Tripician dreamed up the tour of the Matador Ranch in southwestern Montana to sell the buyers on the idea of stocking their meat cases and commercial food service kitchens with an up-and-coming supply of domestic grass-fed beef.
And it’s a more radical idea than it may at first sound.
While health, environmental, and animal welfare concerns have contributed to an increase in demand for grass-fed over feedlot beef over the past decade, the last reliable data estimated it accounted for 4 percent of the commercial market in 2016—and nearly all of it is imported from Australia, New Zealand, and other foreign countries, where grass-fed production costs less. (Experts say those numbers have likely increased somewhat, but good data is hard to find.)
Tripician projects that Grass Fed Foods will buy 2,500 head of cattle from the ranch in 2024, 4,500 in 2025, and 7,000 in 2026.
Meanwhile, grass-fed beef from U.S. cattle is primarily sold regionally at farmers’ markets, through meat shares, and in restaurants. And despite an abundance of optimism in recent years, countless efforts to shift more domestic production toward grass-fed have failed.
Now, despite numerous policy and economic hurdles, Murdoch’s money is not the only pot of capital flowing into what many consider to be “better” beef. In August, Oakland-based Cream Co. Meats raised $4 million in funding with the help of Provenance Capital Group, an investment bank that works primarily with extraordinarily wealthy families.
“Cream Co. is the first one that we worked with in the beef space. It’s not gonna be the last,” said Adrian Rodrigues, Provenance’s CEO. Will Harris’ White Oak Pastures in Georgia recently raised $1.2 million, and Old Salt Co-op in Montana raised $1 million through Steward, an alternative lending platform for regenerative agriculture.
There is no doubt that globally, methane and other emissions from beef production are contributing to climate change. And in Western countries, reducing overall beef consumption is one of the most effective climate interventions available. Yet advocates for regenerative grazing, like Tripician and the Impact Ag team, believe the right practices, which can store carbon in healthy soils, can balance out a significant portion of those emissions while providing other benefits. Many experts imagine a future that includes both shifts: less—and better—beef.
Although all of the companies mentioned above want to shift more beef production toward systems that employ regenerative grazing, eliminate the need for commodity grain as feed, and produce healthier meat, they have very different ideas about how to create success in the industry. Tripician is hoping one big supplier can catapult him toward plugging more grass-fed beef into the same efficiency-obsessed system that currently runs on a cheap supply of commodity beef provided by four large meatpackers. Think American grass-fed ground beef and steaks in the trucks of UNFI and the other distributors that supply large grocery and restaurant chains.
But many in the industry say that will never work, because American producers can’t compete on price with cheap imports. And while they may be able to command a premium among buyers who prefer domestic, that pathway is stymied by the fact that loopholes in federal policy have allowed imported meat to be labeled “Product of USA” if it is packaged stateside—even if the animal was born, raised, and slaughtered elsewhere. (The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) proposed changing that last spring, but the agency has not yet finalized the rule.)
Instead, businesses like Cream Co. and Old Salt are working to create new systems entirely, to change not just how cattle are raised, but how the meat is sold and who benefits as it moves from field to plate.
“For our entire food system, not just grass-fed beef, we really need to move . . . to a more localized and regionalized model,” said Allen Williams, who trains farmers on regenerative systems, including intensive grazing and grass-fed finishing in all 50 states through his consulting company, Understanding Ag, and is a founding partner of the regenerative agriculture certification Regenified. “Every economic study you’ve ever seen shows that the way to true prosperity in our country is a vibrant rural economy coupled with a strong small-business infrastructure, not a handful of major mega-corporations. None of their money turns over in any of our rural communities.”
Raising Grass-fed Cattle
Not only has Tripician heard that argument, in the past he has labored in service of it. In the 15 years he spent at Niman Ranch, he increased the network of small family farms raising animals on pasture from 160 to over 850. “We positively affected the lives of those people, but all their land added up . . . it’s smaller than the Matador,” he said. His tune has changed because, in his mind, “We didn’t solve the problem.”
The goal, as he sees it, is replacing as much conventional feedlot beef as possible.
Photo courtesy of Grass Fed Foods
But one thing that became apparent on the tour is that even at the Matador, which is being presented as a model for grass-fed, the ranch’s bottom line is still reliant on the ongoing production of a lot of conventional beef. The more expansive side, called the Beaverhead division, makes up more than 80 percent of the acreage and still sends all of its cattle to conventional feedlots. Murdoch bought Beaverhead from none other than the Koch brothers in 2021 for $200 million.
He combined it with a smaller ranch called La Cense, which he bought the same year. There, ranch manager Race King had already been implementing a paddock-based system referred to as regenerative, mob grazing, or intensive grazing and finishing the animals on grass instead of in a feedlot. The idea, the Matador team said, is to gradually spread the practice of combining regenerative grazing with grass finishing throughout the entire ranch.
Tripician projects that Grass Fed Foods will buy 2,500 head of cattle from the ranch in 2024, 4,500 in 2025, and 7,000 in 2026. And while those numbers are a drop in the bucket, Tripician said that right now, he can only guarantee so much demand. Not only does he want to get to a place where he’s buying tens of thousands of cattle from the Matador, he said the ranch operators also know neighbors who are interested in raising grass-fed cattle nearby.
“I fully expect those numbers to change,” he said, as he signs on more customers. That was the point of inviting retailers and distributors to the ranch, after all.
At one stop on the tour, shiny black cattle huddled quietly in the center of a pasture, watching the noisy group of humans with still curiosity. Then, a skilled ranch employee removed a line of polywire fence in one fell swoop, and the cows charged forward as fast as they could, together, like a group of 5-year-olds playing soccer. Instead of a ball, their target was tall, fresh grass; their enthusiasm created a symphony of mooing.
“Chow time!” yelled King, with gusto.
Photos courtesy of Old Salt.
King described how the ranchers move the animals to fresh paddocks daily, as Lora Soderquist, a colleague of Glover’s at Impact Ag Partners, explained how that movement prevents overgrazing, keeps living roots in place at all times, spreads the manure to stimulate grass regrowth and microbial communities, and sequesters carbon in the soil.
“Soils that hold a lot of carbon hold a lot of nutrients; they hold a lot of moisture, and they are able to adapt,” Soderquist said. “That bank account of soil carbon we’re building is a buffer to make us more resilient.”
Rich, healthy soil is unquestionably a good thing, but grass-fed beef’s status as a climate-friendly food is up for debate. How much carbon the soil holds and how long it stays there is still an open question with many variables; the Matador is currently involved in several projects to measure carbon in its soils for that reason. Whatever the number, another big question is whether it’s enough to counter the methane emitted by burping cows as they munch away.
Still, at another stop on the tour, a researcher from the University of California, Davis, showed off the first in-field trial that involves feeding seaweed supplements to cattle to reduce methane. While he spoke, one cow wandered over to the hulking metal machine, stuck its head in a chute, and was fed a pellet while emissions measurements were taken. So far, they’ve seen about a 50 percent average reduction in emissions, he said, although those results are preliminary and the study is small. It’s also not clear how ranchers would deliver the supplements to a herd of thousands of grazing cattle on a regular basis.
During the wagon ride, a buyer from one company that runs corporate and university cafeterias confided that she heard feedlot beef production emits less methane than grass-fed production, since feedlot cattle live shorter lives and have less time to burp methane. That’s a message the commodity meat industry is investing time and resources in promoting and which some studies support. One recent analysis found higher emissions from grass-fed systems primarily due to increased land use. At her company, the buyer said, regardless of other impacts within the supply chain, cutting carbon (or its equivalents) and sharing those numbers on menus was all that the higher-ups cared about.
Zach Jones of Impact Ag Partners speaks to the group in Montana in September. (Photo courtesy of Grass Fed Foods)
Glover and other members of the Impact Ag team spoke openly about questions related to climate and other production impacts related to grass-fed beef and the challenge of communicating what they see as the best approach. But they largely dismissed questions about pitching a climate-friendly product born on a ranch owned by a public figure who has made a fortune on media that regularly peddled climate denial and misinformation. Just a week prior, as the news that Murdoch was stepping down from News Corp and Fox spread, climate scientists from all over the world told The Guardian that no other person in the world had done more to delay climate action.
“Murdoch will be looked back on by historians as someone who used their media monopoly to influence the destabilization of the Earth’s climate,” said Joëlle Gergis, an Australian climate scientist. (Not to mention the fact that in 2022, the Murdoch family’s private jet flights alone produced more planet-warming emissions than 280 average Americans’ annual carbon footprints, according to ClimateJets.)
While billionaires owning ranch land in Montana is apparently about as surprising as billionaires owning homes in the Hamptons, the staff insists Murdoch took on the project out of passion and is intimately involved in the environmental mission. And while he didn’t attend the gathering, his son-in-law, Alisdair Macleod, did. Macleod owns multiple regenerative ranches in Australia, one of which recently generated $500,000 of carbon credits purchased by Microsoft, and he made the rounds at all the important international climate gatherings last fall.
As to the Murdoch family’s legacy of climate disinformation, Macleod said, “We’re all learning that we’ve all got to be doing our bit . . . and so what we’re doing here is ensuring that people that are concerned about decarbonization are getting a product that they can put on their plate that’s suitable for a decarbonized world.”
Selling Grass-fed Beef
For some grass-fed beef entrepreneurs, however, reaching climate-conscious consumers isn’t the end goal.
“There’s one philosophy that says, ‘Well, better agriculture is just about a better product. It’s got this set of attributes that a conventional product doesn’t necessarily have,’” said Cole Mannix, the founder of Old Salt Co-op, over the phone recently as he scraped ice off the windshield of his pickup truck. “But we feel that it’s not just the better product that’s important—it’s a better process to get it to people.”
“What’s important is to move away from the ‘move fast and break things’ model when it comes to regenerative agriculture and to instead move slowly and with intention.”
Mannix created Old Salt to build a regional meat supply chain that bypasses the consolidated food system and keeps dollars and ecosystem benefits within local communities. Based in Helena, Montana, about two hours north of the Matador, the company currently sells meat from four family ranches and runs on relationships with neighbors through local pick-up and delivery and two restaurants, the larger of which he expects to open by March.
All the beef Old Salt sells is grass-fed, but Mannix bristles at that simplified descriptor. If you think of the larger agricultural system as a canal, he says, he’s trying to turn it into a stream. “A canal gets water from point A to point B just like a stream does, but it strips out the inefficiencies where life exists. It doesn’t have the ripples and the logs and the rocks and all the life that feeds fish,” he said.
In agriculture, the grizzly bear habitat and soil microbiology—and also farm families and farm labor—are inefficiencies to eliminate if you’re just trying to get a product from field to consumer. “But we want long-term, enduring agriculture,” he said, “and some of those inefficiencies are actually critical.”
Mannix thinks one reason other companies have failed at expanding grass-fed beef production is that they’ve tried to replicate the commodity approach to distribution and marketing. “It’s like, ‘Let’s get a better product with better labels and then go sell it through the same channels,’” he said. “There are a lot of people who are recognizing how vulnerable that can leave a food system,” because after years of building up supply, those buyers might demand lower prices. Or, “consumer trends,” which drive the whole tractor in big box grocery, may change. This year, The New York Times says being a “regenivore” is in; next year it might be out.
At Provenance Capital, Rodrigues said that despite what he sees as growing demand for grass-fed beef, he thinks many have failed because companies took on the wrong kind of investors. Venture capital, for instance, works on a time frame and return rate that is impossible for agriculture to keep pace with. That’s especially true when an approach invites inefficiencies for the sake of health and the environment.
“What’s important is to move away from the ‘move fast and break things’ model when it comes to regenerative agriculture and to instead move slowly and with intention,” in terms of investment and scale, he said. That’s what Cream Co. has done, growing from a network of three small to medium-size family ranches in California in 2016 to about 30 on the West Coast today. Aggregating the meat has allowed him to get regional grass-fed beef into tech company cafeterias and 30 school districts. With the new investment, there’s more growth ahead.
Aside from competing on price, one of the biggest challenges companies like Cream Co. and Grass Fed Foods face is that they have to buy whole animals, despite the fact that grocers and restaurants only want certain cuts. Tripician said he needs a buyer like Whole Foods to buy steaks for its meat counter and a customer like Chipotle to buy ground beef for its burritos. Grass Fed Foods has created a line of processed products—including a new line of vegetable-infused hot dogs designed for school food service—to make use of what’s left.
“I’m in a race to be able to have you go anywhere you want in this country and order the kind of food I can be proud of. And for that, I need big partners.”
When companies order grass-fed beef from Australia, on the other hand, they can ask for the cuts they know they can sell. Despite that, both companies currently bring in some grass-fed beef from Australia to increase their volume enough to access larger buyers.
Tripician said he isn’t worried about it undercutting his business as he works simultaneously to expand domestic production. But Allen Williams was adamant that the practice is strangling the economic prospects of the farmers and ranchers he works with across the country. “It sends mixed signals to all of us [domestic producers],” he said.
Williams was involved in a 2017 report that predicted bold, fast growth for American grass-fed beef, but that has yet to materialize. He pointed to the fact that grass-fed beef imports increased dramatically after Congress repealed a law in 2015 that required meat to be labeled with its country of origin. “It’s been a major, major factor,” he said.
Carrie Balkcom, who has run the American Grassfed Association (AGA) for the past 20 years, agreed. The group has been working to bring about policy that promotes truth in labeling for the past two decades. This year, its work to get the USDA to change which meat can be labeled “Product of U.S.A.” finally paid off. In March, the agency proposed a rule that would update the regulations to allow the claim only on meat “derived from animals born, raised, slaughtered, and processed in the United States.” Now, Balkcom and other advocates are pushing the agency to finalize it.
But even if that happens and it charts a better economic path forward for American ranchers dedicated to regenerative grazing (she believes it will), Balkcom said that within the AGA, most producers still won’t be able to get their products on the shelves of large, conventional retailers. In fact, even those who have made some in-roads seem to be pulling out of those relationships, she said. At the same time, companies like New Zealand’s Silver Fern Farms are ramping up their imports; in 2022, it launched a “Net Carbon Zero” grass-fed beef line in 1,600 Costco stores across the country.
On the day we spoke, Balkcom had just arrived home from a conference where, she said, Will Harris of White Oak Pastures, “an icon in our industry,” had told attendees that his wholesale business isn’t penciling out because he can’t compete with imports. She said most producers she works with are doubling down on building their own regional supply chains and direct-to-consumer online sales.
That’s where Mannix at Old Salt is investing his energy. “It’s not as if I believe there’s a one-size-fits-all scale where everybody has to sell direct to consumer. . . . It’s just that our food system has gone so far down the path it’s on that there’s very little opportunity—in the form of wholesalers that will buy from us at the prices we would need, distributors who will work with us, or regional processing capacity that is easily accessed.” he said. “We’re really starting at the ground level to rebuild.”
He’s interested in how the Matador Ranch’s plan for the future turns out, but personally, he’s not up for investing in a system that ultimately depends on the shifting demands of packers, distributors, retailers, and landowners who historically have cut and run if the numbers didn’t quite work the way they wanted them to.
Tripician, on the other hand, is intent on making Grass Fed Foods a part of that production, and at the Matador, where the landscape seemed to continuously unravel in every direction, he looked out and saw only opportunities ahead for American grass-fed beef.
In the past, buyers from Costco, Kroger, and Sysco would look at his products and ask if he had the volume to meet their customers’ demand. “And for grass-fed beef, that answer has always been ‘no’ domestically,” he said. “I’m in a race to be able to have you go anywhere you want in this country and order the kind of food I can be proud of. And for that, I need big partners.”
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]]>On a crisp weekend this past fall, 30 state legislators from across the nation descended on TomKat Ranch, an 1,800-acre ranch focused on regenerative agriculture in Pescadero, California, an hour south of San Francisco. In addition to learning about regenerative farming practices, the diverse group had gathered to understand how state-level agricultural legislation can bring about climate resilience, food security, and social equity.
As Georgia state senator Kim Jackson began her welcome speech, she instructed the group to look around the room. “We are female; we are male. We are queer; we are people of color; we are Indigenous. We are rural, urban, and suburban,” she said. “Now raise your hand if this is what your [state’s] ag committee looks like.” Despite all hands staying down, “this is exactly why we’re here,” she continued, “because we all have a stake in ag.”
The two-day workshop, which was organized by the State Innovation Exchange (SiX), a nonprofit, non-partisan national policy, resource, and strategy center, highlighted the power of states to drive progressive change in food and agricultural policy. Against the backdrop of a carefully managed perennial pasture, the gathering focused on legislative approaches to promoting regenerative farming and ranching practices, which the group believes can galvanize support across partisan and rural-urban divides.
The national farm bill often “sucks a lot of the wind out of the room,” says Kendra Kimbirauskas, the senior director of agriculture and food systems for SiX, making state-level initiatives seem like “the little sibling of federal policy.” But local and regional actions can counter the country’s “highly centralized and dominant” industrial food and farm system, she adds, and lay the blueprint for transformative large-scale measures.
Packed with experiential learning sessions with experts and advocates, field walks, and farm-to-table meals featuring ingredients sourced from nearby growers, the forum in Pescadero was primarily designed to connect lawmakers, says Kimbirauskas. Reinforcing the network can arm legislators with the resources needed to tackle “tough decisions” in their State Houses, she adds, and expose them to perspectives outside the typical ag lobbying groups on abstruse measures and less-obvious implications of bills.
Attendees at the TomKat Ranch tour organized by the State Innovation Exchange (SiX). (Photo courtesy of SiX)
And because agricultural policy is typically shaped by large agribusiness interests, advocates say efforts to foster greater inclusivity is paramount to changing the status quo. “This,” proffered Jackson, a Black urban farmer from a multi-generational farming family and Georgia’s first openly gay senator, “is how we raise our collective voices.”
Power of State Policymaking
The Cohort for Rural Opportunity and Prosperity (CROP)—a subset of SiX’s Agriculture and Food Systems program—currently includes elected officials from 43 states who are positioned to advance socially and ecologically responsible rural, agricultural, and food policy.
When it comes to deciphering rural and farm-related issues, progressive legislators often face a steep learning curve, says Kimbirauskas. Many tend to hail from urban areas and are better versed on issues such as public health or education; even those with farming roots may not have direct field experience. As a result, they may lack the capacity to be “champions for food and ag policy,” she notes, despite the broad impacts of farming legislation on cities, the environment, and the larger food system.
Historically, that space has been dominated by state level farm bureaus and the larger federal, Kimbirauskas says. Heavily backed by large agriculture trade groups with deep pockets, the nation’s most powerful agricultural lobbying group is, generally speaking, the sole voice leading those conversations at the state level. “The corporate ag lobby absolutely knows the power of state policymaking,” she says. “That’s why they have a stable of lobbyists in every state house across the country.”
Depending on the state, legislators may be severely under-resourced and overworked—nationwide, their salary averages less than $44,000, with state lawmakers in New Hampshire and New Mexico working as volunteers, requiring many to hold second jobs.
“The corporate ag lobby absolutely knows the power of state policymaking. That’s why they have a stable of lobbyists in every state house across the country.”
State budgets can also hamper in-house agricultural knowledge. Less than half a percent of Hawaii’s annual budget, for instance, goes to its department of agriculture, thereby limiting the robust collection of crop statistics and other data critical to making industry decisions. Recently, the state also slashed 20 percent of university extension staff.
As an “organizing vehicle” designed to help “disrupt the legislator-to-lobbyist pipeline,” CROP equips progressive leaders with robust support and expertise to fill these voids, says Kimbirauskas. Rather than relying on ag industry lobbyists to shape boilerplate legislation—a tactic frequently used by conservative national policy organizations such as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)—SiX connects lawmakers to policy advocates and agriculture-based organizations to share information and strategies in creating more effective policies.
Although organic practices are federally certified, “regenerative” methods—which hold many commonalities—are not typically strictly defined or certified. However, for the same reason, they are also often seen as more accessible to growers and less divisive than organic agriculture. And when done right, regenerative farming has been shown to have multiple benefits that appeal across partisan, racial, and geographic divides, says Renata Brillinger, executive director of the California Climate and Agriculture Network (CalCAN), an advising partner to SiX.
Along with reducing the need for synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides, practices that build healthy soil, for example, make land more resilient to drought, flooding, wildfires, and erosion. And the perks go far beyond the pastures, Brillinger says: “We get cleaner air and water, healthier communities, and a huge reduction in greenhouse gas emissions” through carbon sequestration.
As the gains become more obvious amid the growing challenges of the climate crisis,“the more conservative champions [can] get on board,” Brillinger adds, “because they [also] appreciate the benefits to the farmer and the farm economy.”
Since its implementation in 2017, California’s Healthy Soils program—part of the state’s suite of Climate Smart Agriculture initiatives aimed at mitigating the impacts of climate change and fostering sustainability across various sectors—has influenced similar policies throughout the country. Last year alone, six states passed bills that advance healthy soil management policies, programs, and funding.
For lawmakers from states short on resources or lagging in support for these measures, frontrunners like California help gauge effectiveness and build momentum for similar measures back home, says Brillinger. Along with sowing the seeds for incentive programs and educational resources down the line, more moderate initiatives can make it possible to collect federal funds.
Last April, Montana took a notable step in promoting good soil practices by designating an official Healthy Soils Week. Rather than laying out imperatives, the state act helps “gently lead people” towards regenerative practices, says the bill’s author, State Senator Bruce Gillespie, by recognizing the benefits of soil conservation and range management, particularly through rotational livestock grazing.
Despite being one of the country’s driest states, agriculture is Montana’s leading industry, “so there’s a big opportunity here” to promote the merits of building and preserving rich soil, adds the third-generation rancher, who was not in attendance at the Pescadero event. In addition to absorbing precious precipitation, he points to the fact that well-managed pastures can capture carbon, harbor wildlife, and become more resistant to erosion.
The “win-win” proposition has the support of Gillespie’s Republican and Democratic colleagues alike, he says, as well as farmers and conservation groups in the region. He hopes that Montana’s actions inspire other states in the grassland region—a sizable area that includes Wyoming, Nebraska, and the Dakotas—to adopt similar measures.
In the best-case scenario, state-level initiatives can influence federal policy, says CalCAN’s Brillinger. Congress is currently mulling the Agriculture Resilience Act, which would incentivize farmers and ranchers to engage in climate-friendly practices if its language gets included in the next farm bill. That proposition has been markedly influenced by similar state policies including California’s Converting Our Waste Sustainably (COWS) Act, which aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through pasture-based manure management.
Laying the Foundation for Change
Nevertheless, in most farm states, the existing legislative structure firmly favors commodity agriculture and the companies it benefits, making even incremental policy changes daunting, says Liz Moran Stelk, executive director of the Illinois Stewardship Alliance (ISA), a Chicago-based nonprofit organization. Built to serve “a massive, complex, and incredibly productive and efficient food system,” its presence, she adds, is unyielding.
In past decades, the large-scale consolidation of the food supply chain has reduced processing, aggregation, and transportation to a handful of companies. As a result, smaller producers often face greater hurdles in adopting any practices that sit outside the mainstream. Without access to markets and appropriate infrastructure (think: organic grain elevators and slaughterhouses) growers can’t fetch added premiums for sustainable practices. “It’s hard to do the right thing,” notes Stelk, “if you’re getting paid the same as your neighbor who doesn’t do anything extra.”
“It’s hard to do the right thing if you’re getting paid the same as your neighbor who doesn’t do anything extra.”
Several Western and Midwestern states, however, have managed to promote conservation-minded practices through modest incentives. The Illinois-based Saving Tomorrow’s Agricultural Resources (STAR) Program sets standards for regenerative practices such as crop rotation, tillage, and nutrient applications. Based on their level of stewardship, the voluntary grading system awards farmers with one to five stars, with “pay-for-performance” incentives based on their rating.
Created in 2017, STAR programs have spread to more than 10 states, and a national organization was established earlier this year. As momentum builds throughout various regions, it has spawned wider discussions about incentivizing other parts of the supply chain for regenerative producers, says Stelk.
‘Context Is Everything’
Although the weekend workshop in Pescadero revealed many approaches to strategic state-level governance, it also exposed stark differences in the operational landscape. “Context is everything,” says Hawaii State Representative Amy Perruso, whose state’s plantation history has resulted in a distinct political and agricultural landscape. Big ag continues its outsized presence on the islands in the form of seed companies—GMO seed corn is Hawaii’s top cash crop—so the power they exert “is a big obstacle to systemic change,” she says.
Yet exposure to the broad implications of regenerative farming was eye-opening, says Perruso, in understanding the larger framing of agricultural policy. In the aftermath of her state’s devastating recent wildfires, the effectiveness of policies that promote managed grazing—which reduces fire risk by increasing soil moisture and keeping invasive grasses in check—seem self-evident, she notes.
In addition to bolstering climate resilience, many regenerative practices are also the cornerstone of Native Hawaiian farming systems, which prioritize soil and water stewardship. And because propelling these efforts can impact food sovereignty, it also carries “strong political implications,” she adds.
Perruso’s insight also underscores the importance of considering the diversity of stakeholders invested in regenerative farming. And Indigenous perspectives are especially relevant to shaping effective state-level food and agricultural policy, says Yadira Riviera, associate director at the nonprofit First Nations Development Institute (FNDI).
As a presenter at the Pescadero workshop, Rivera reminded lawmakers that Native farmers, ranchers, and food producers—including foragers and harvesters—hold deep-rooted, traditional expertise. Their insight is essential to creating sustainable, culturally sensitive, and region-specific policies, she says.
Soliciting input from a broad pool of stakeholders also helps lawmakers formulate more effective policy, says Riviera. Funding for fencing, for instance, may not have obvious regenerative benefits, but for farmers and ranchers practicing managed grazing—which requires rotating livestock between multiple fenced paddocks—it’s an absolute necessity.
CalCAN’s Brillinger believes that building a more resilient food and farming system is in everybody’s interest, so collective action is imperative to shoring up effective policies. And unlike the drastic climate solutions needed in the energy and transportation sectors, many agriculture- and land-based strategies don’t require expensive, high-tech approaches, she notes, and can be easily implemented—given the political will. “The benefits are just so multifaceted,” she says, “that it’s kind of a no-brainer.”
And finally, the weekend gathering highlighted yet another perk to regenerative farming: “mind-blowing” produce cultivated in rich healthy soil. “It was such an experience eating that food,” says Perruso, of the generous spreads served on the ranch. “I’ve never tasted vegetables like that.”
Civil Eats receives funding from TomKat Educational Fund. We also receive funding from FNDI to support our Indigenous Foodways reporting.
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]]>For three years, Nathanael Gonzales-Siemens drove up California’s coast for 14 hours every month for a routine task: milling his grain into flour. “I was literally not able to find a flour mill at my scale, and we’re not tiny,” he said. “We’ve got 150 acres of grain.” He found this disconcerting, not only for himself but the future of small-scale grain farming in California, once known for its golden hills of grain.
As California has lost much of its grain to higher value crops, small flour mills and grain cleaning businesses have disappeared, too. It’s a symptom of what Gonzales-Siemens sees as a larger problem facing many farmers, awash in a marketplace dominated by highly concentrated operations as regional farm infrastructure atrophies. This specialized, often professionally operated equipment—and all farm equipment, for that matter—can be prohibitively challenging for many farmers to buy and maintain.
“This does not feel like I am living on planet Earth, where humans live,” said Gonzales-Siemens, laughing at the absurdity of the drive north to find a mill.
“It’s not a novel idea. Farmers have been sharing equipment forever. But it seems like farmers are becoming less and less neighbors of each other.”
He eventually bought a mill from a grain farmer who went out of business, but finding the other equipment necessary for both farming and processing grain was an ongoing struggle.
So, Gonzales-Siemens got to talking with other farmers in the region. He learned nearby grain farmers, Clayton Garland and Melissa Sorongon in Santa Barbara, were in a similar position. In 2019, the trio decided to work together to lift this equipment burden, pooling funds to buy their first combine. Prior to that, they had all either harvested by hand, an intensely laborious process, or hired someone with a combine. Next, they purchased a no-drill seeder together, and it allowed them to plant rows of grain directly into orchards and pastures without tilling, a practice known to benefit the soil.
As word spread, other small-scale farmers joined them, and they became a more formalized collective with a name: California Plowshares.
“It’s a programmatic way for us to be a little more collaborative and supportive of each other’s work,” said Gonzales-Siemens. “It’s not a novel idea. Farmers have been sharing equipment forever. But it seems like farmers are becoming less and less neighbors of each other. Most of my neighbors—the people actually adjacent to me—are corporate entities,” where the farm owner is often absent, and the workers don’t have a say in the equipment.
In this sense, California Plowshares is a return to the kind of rural sharing economies that once arose naturally between farmers in tight-knit communities but have become much less common in recent years. The collective currently consists of around 50 farmers located along California’s southern Central Coast who share equipment that they co-purchase and individually own, often with a rental fee.
The original idea was to form a collective for just grain farmers, given that “grain farming is so rare that we need all the infrastructural and equipment help we can,” said Gonzales-Siemens. But then it became clear that the collective could benefit a wide range of small-scale farmers.
The collective doesn’t charge a membership fee, but they each contribute in other ways. There’s the “sweat equity type of guy,” who jumps in wherever needed. Another farmer with storage for equipment. Others chip in financially when they’re having a good season. There’s a skilled welder who fixes loose parts. As for Gonzales-Siemens, he often helps transport equipment between farms. They tend to lean on each other’s strengths.
In the near future, he hopes to contribute further by building out a local grain processing operation, filling a gap in regional infrastructure. He is now the proud owner of three flour mills, two of which he shares, and the co-owner of a grain cleaner—the building blocks of the processing operation in the works. Long gone are his days of driving up the coast to find a flour mill, and he hopes to spare other farmers from that fate as well.
Collective Response to Farming’s Steep Costs
Collective approaches to farming, like equipment sharing, often emerge from a stark realization: The current farm business model in the U.S. isn’t working for many small producers. The median farming income in the U.S. was less than zero in 2022: -$849. Meanwhile, the cost of farm production expenses are expected to reach a record high in 2023. It’s a balance sheet that isn’t adding up, and equipment is a part of the equation.
“We thought it was so stupid to have all this steel sitting in the field that we were using just twice a year.”
Next to land, equipment is a farmer’s biggest investment. While farm equipment collectives are still relatively rare in the U.S., they tend to share a similar origin story: Farmers begin informally swapping farm equipment to ease costs, building a sense of trust. Then they realize that sharing tools makes sense and they build a more formal system. This is the story of Tool Legit (yes, named after the MC Hammer song), a farm equipment library in North Carolina.
“It started off with a couple of buddies. I owned the tiller. Someone owned a bush hog. Someone owned a flail mower. We would just swap them back and forth as needed,” said George O’Neal, a vegetable farmer who started Tool Legit. “We thought it was so stupid to have all this steel sitting in the field that we were using just twice a year.”
In 2011, they formed an LLC with a rotating president and treasurer, supported by a $27,500 grant from the Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI). This helped them buy their first cache of shared equipment: a tiller, a harrow, a manure spreader, a trailer to move equipment between farms, and a log splitter for heating greenhouses with wood. Every year, they pool funds to add to their growing collection of tools.
A decade later, the collective is still thriving. “We’re all very community and civically minded, but I feel like that’s very true for 90 percent of small farmers,” said O’Neal. “We don’t see each other as competition in any meaningful way. We see Walmart or shitty food or HelloFresh as competition—not each other.”
O’Neal estimates that he saves about $1,000 every year in equipment upgrade costs. The collective charges an annual membership fee, but aims to keep it low, below $400 per year, so it’s accessible.
It helps that, like California Plowshares, Tool Legit has low overhead costs; they store the equipment on their farms and use Google Calendar to reserve it. Other equipment-sharing models involve renting space, a system that works for some farming communities but can add to the costs.
The list of equipment shared between the farmer members of the Intervale Farmer Equipment Company in Burlington, Vermont.
One example is the Intervale Farmer Equipment Company, a farmer-owned cooperative in Burlington, Vermont. Hilary Martin, one of the farmers in the cooperative, said the space they rent is their largest expense annually. They spread out the cost through a fee structure based on either the number of acres on which the equipment is used or the number of hours it is in use. It’s an evolving system, said Martin.
“Every year we have to take a look at [whether] we’re charging enough,” she added. “We’ve been well in the black some years, and other years we’re in the red.”
So far, they’ve been able to accommodate seven farms of varying size. They have the advantage of being close neighbors, and all rent land from the Intervale Center, a nonprofit that supports farm viability. The center originally owned the equipment cooperative, then sold the business to the farmers. “We’re kind of pre-organized to work together,” said Martin.
Still, she wasn’t sure they’d be able to make it work. “I was worried about a tragedy of the commons scenario . . . people would be in a rush, misuse the equipment, and leave problems for everybody else.” Instead, she has been pleasantly surprised by her neighbor’s capacity to look out for each other.
Environmental and Social Benefits of Equipment Sharing
The range of equipment available in collectives also allows for experimentation, giving the farmers the freedom to test out what works. It also allows them to try out more regenerative practices, which typically require new equipment.
For instance, prior to the formation of California Plowshares, none of the group’s members owned a spreader for mulching, which helps retain moisture in the soil. Once ubiquitous, spreaders have become harder to come by in California’s Central Valley, where many of the corporate farms hire private companies to deliver and spread mulch. The companies are often booked months in advance. “To get [your mulch or compost] spread in a timely manner was really quite impossible,” said Gonzales-Siemens.
“Building efficiencies and healthy movement patterns into your farming business is such an important way to protect yourself and not burn out.”
Everything changed when the collective bought a small-scale spreader from the 1980s, relying on a grant they obtained. Now, the farmers’ soil will be better protected during dry times of the year. Similarly, buying a no-till drill allowed Gonzales-Siemens to expand the use of cover crops in his orchards and further protect the soil.
“[The drill] made a huge difference. It has allowed us to do much more creative things in orchard systems,” said Gonzales-Siemens. It’s also helped him experiment with intercropping, another practice that builds soil health and biodiversity on the farm. And, at $6,000, he wouldn’t have been able to afford one on his own.
Over at Tool Legit, the farmers share similar goals of farming ecologically and productively at a human scale, which lends to knowledge-sharing, too. “It functions kind of like an informal discussion network,” said O’Neal. “Every time you go pick something up, there’s usually a 15- or 20-minute chat, like, ‘What are y’all up to today? Oh, that’s cool. I’ve never seen that. What is that? What are you growing?’”
Nathanael Gonzales-Siemens demonstrates how to use California Plowshare’s no-till drill to grow cover crops in an orchard. (Photo courtesy of Nathanael Gonzales-Siemens)
They’ll also often advise one another on the best, most efficient ways to use the equipment. For instance, O’Neal said farmers will send the entire group a text, such as, “Hey, I offset the potato digger and it can do two rows at once. Has anyone tried this?”
Connecticut farmer Mary Claire Whelan, who helps run a new tool-sharing network with the New CT Farmer Alliance, has also observed the mental health benefits that come from having a supportive network of farmers and access to the right tools and equipment.
“It’s so emotionally draining to use the wrong tool over and over again,” said Whelan, who works as a farm crew member on a vegetable and flower farm. “Building efficiencies and healthy movement patterns into your farming business is such an important way to protect yourself and not burn out.”
She recalls working on a previous farm where she was required to break heads of garlic into individual cloves for planting. “It’s hard on your thumbs. I would get all these calluses,” she said. Then she learned of a tool that can quickly split garlic heads. It could have finished the task in a few hours, saving days of hard, repetitive labor.
Whelan hopes to one day own her own farm in Connecticut, the state that she notes has some of the most expensive farmland in the country. She sees building social and resource networks as essential to making it as a first-generation farmer.
Connecticut farmers standing in front of a winnower, built by Dina Brewster, which she has made available for nearby farmers to share. (Photo courtesy of Dina Brewster, Hickories Farm.)
“I don’t think [owning a farm business] would be possible if I didn’t have a robust community to rely on and folks who I could borrow equipment from, or purchase it in common with,” she said. “It helps me feel like the future I desire and see for myself is a possibility.”
Slow Shift to Collective Tool-Sharing
Despite these benefits, farm equipment collectives and sharing models are still few and far between in the U.S., especially compared to other countries. France has the most developed sharing system, which includes a network of over 12,000 agricultural equipment cooperatives, involving a third of all French farms.
These cooperatives have allowed farmers to share equipment and infrastructure, including compost facilities, and have been integral in helping a growing number of farmers there adopt agroecological practices. “Since the 1980s, some Coopérative d’Utilisation de Matériel Agricole (CUMAs) have taken initiatives that pertain to agroecology: purchases of specialized harvesting equipment necessary for more diversified farming systems,” observed French scholars Veronique Lucas and Pierre Gasselin in a 2022 article.
There have been some recent efforts to support more robust farm equipment-sharing in the U.S. Earlier this year, California Assemblymember Steve Bennett introduced a bill aimed at funding regional equipment-sharing hubs for equipment needed for soil health and conservation practices, as well as storage and processing. It also would have provided training for farmers on how to design their own equipment cooperatives. The bill passed in both the Senate and House last spring, but it was vetoed by the governor due to budget concerns.
“It just makes sense to have it be a piece of equipment that gets rotated around and shared,” Assemblymember Bennett told Civil Eats. And while he’s not ready to commit to introducing the bill again next year, he’s considering it.
Faith Gilbert, the author of a popular guide on tool-sharing, attributes the slow uptake in the U.S. to the effort it takes to organize. “Few of us have time to go organize a whole new program in order to save $3,000 to $5,000 annually,” she said. And while sharing farm equipment can chip away at the high costs of farming, she notes that “it’s not going to fundamentally shift the business model” of most farms.
Still, she acknowledges, most small-scale farms work with small margins, and any boost to the bottom line can make a difference.
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]]>The post Can Virtual Fences Help More Ranchers Adopt Regenerative Grazing Practices? appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>At Georges Mill Farm in northern Virginia, Molly and Sam Kroiz’s goats are on the move. Some roam through pastures testing bunches of fescue, a cool-season grass, for the sweetness the frost brings. Others push into a strip of bushes, munching through brambles. One scales a boulder and balances on its hind legs to take bites out of a tree branch.
This herd, however, is not quite as free-range as it appears.
All 70 of the animals wear what look like big, boxy cowbells around their necks. When one goat gets close to an invisible fence line the farmers set up on an app, the box emits a high-pitched tone, eliciting an immediate response. Any goat within hearing distance perks up, freezes, and then slowly moves away from the line, despite the lack of any physical barrier.
The system was created by a Norwegian company called Nofence, and Molly and Sam are among 43 pilot farms testing it ahead of an official United States debut expected in early 2024. And Nofence is just one of several companies getting into the virtual fencing game. U.S.-based Vence, which was acquired by veterinary pharmaceutical giant Merck Animal Health in 2022, has been slowly rolling out a similar system on larger cattle ranches across the West since 2019. Other systems, including eShepherd and Corral Technologies, are also in development.
Virtual fencing is gaining traction in American agriculture because it can save farmers time and money. But it could also enable them to more easily adopt practices—and entire systems—that promote environmental benefits. When farmers are able to control how, where, and when their animals move between pastures, they can more easily accomplish ecological goals that might include increasing soil carbon, reducing water pollution, or incorporating trees. The technology also has the potential to rid the West of barbed wire that negatively impacts wildlife migration and adapt grazing to an age of increased wildfires by making it easy to keep cattle out of burned areas.
Virtual fencing is gaining traction because it can save farmers time and money. But it could also enable them to more easily adopt practices—and entire systems—that promote environmental benefits.
Given how few farms are using it, there are still many questions about limitations—like the absence of cell service in some rural areas, farmer acceptance, accuracy, and ongoing costs—but buzz about virtual fencing’s applications continues to grow. In September, a project dedicated to sustainable beef production in the Southwest created a Virtual Fence Forum for farmers on Facebook; in November, ranchers gathered in Arizona for a workshop on the technology.
“People have been talking about virtual fencing for a long time,” said Juan Alvez, an extension research associate at the University of Vermont’s Center for Sustainable Agriculture, whose expertise includes grazing management, “and now it’s just coming to market.”
More (Virtual) Fencing Facilitates Animal Movement
Sam’s family has been farming Georges Mills’ 90 acres since the 1750s, and the infrastructure harkens back to a time before farmers used even simple machinery. At night, the goats sleep in a barn built in the mid-1800s from large blocks of local stone and weathered wood.
But since the couple took over about a decade ago, they’ve been looking to the future to make their goat dairy and cheesemaking operation more sustainable—both financially and ecologically.
In past grazing and milking seasons, which run from March through December, Sam regularly had to move fencing—sometimes every day—to keep providing them access to new fields with fresh plants and keep their waste dispersed across the landscape. He also had to construct pathways to move the goats back to the barn for milking.
“He was having to put out posts, roll out four wires. He put a lot of steps in, and it took a lot of hours,” Molly said of Sam’s efforts. Now, with the virtual system, “Sam can update the fence lines while he’s drinking his coffee in the morning.”
He does that using Nofence’s app, which creates and updates the boundaries by GPS, with no physical infrastructure other than the collars worn by the goats. Each collar is outfitted with tiny solar panels to continuously charge the battery, and Molly said it’s usually about a month until they have to take them off to charge them manually.
While physical fencing for cattle can be slightly less involved than for goats, since a single electrified wire will keep cows in place (most of the time), cattle grazers need a lot of fencing and frequent movement if they’re pursuing climate and other environmental goals.
To effectively build soil health, Alvez said, farmers and ranchers who use systems referred to as rotational, intensive, or mob grazing, should move their animals to new pastures at least once a day. While continuous grazing depletes pastures and overloads fields with waste, these alternative approaches build soil health by naturally spreading the manure, fertilizing new grass growth, and building healthy communities of microbes.
Traditionally, many farmers struggle to set up enough paddocks for continuous movement, because installing fencing can be expensive and labor intensive, Alvez said. “More paddocks versus less is always better for grazers and climate-smart goals, because you’re always moving these animals to a fresh pasture,” he said. “Fresh pastures mean most [of the other] pastures are in a vegetative state, often accumulating carbon from the atmosphere into the soil where it belongs.”
With virtual fencing, there’s an upfront investment, but adding new paddocks can be done on the fly, without additional costs. Nofence’s collars cost $299 each for cattle and $199 for goats or sheep, and come with a five-year lifespan. In addition, farmers then have to pay a monthly subscription fee that varies depending on herd size and other factors. It’s no small cost—for Georges Mill farm’s 70 goats, it would cost around $14,000 for the collars—but fencing, depending on the type, generally costs thousands of dollars per acre upfront, plus the added daily labor.
The biggest limitation with virtual fencing, however, is connectivity—Nofence needs a cell phone signal to operate, which can be a challenge in many rural areas.
One drawback is that since the lines the system draws are not as exact as a physical barrier, farms may still need to put permanent physical fences up in places where a hard stop is needed, like along busy roads. At some, a physical fence creates the overall farm barrier, while virtual lines create pasture barriers.
The biggest limitation with virtual fencing, however, is that depending on the system, connectivity could be an issue. With Nofence, strong Wi-Fi is not required, but a cell phone signal is, and Meghan Filbert, the company’s adoption program manager, said that if a farmer can’t typically receive calls or texts in their pastures, the system won’t work for them.
That could be a major issue in lots of rural places, including Alvez’s neck of the woods in Vermont, where cell service often cuts in and out. It’s something he hopes will improve (and there are many efforts currently underway to improve broadband in rural areas around the country) because he believes his area could benefit more from virtual fencing.
“In areas where it’s more mountainous, with rugged landscapes and lots of marginal land, having this technology would really simplify the amount of paddocks you can establish,” he said. That’s because putting physical fencing in those places is more difficult compared to areas with flat, open terrain.
Controlling Grazing Near Water and Trees
Virginia’s landscape also has unique characteristics that make virtual fencing an attractive option said Alston Horn, a restoration specialist at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation who works with farmers, including Molly and Sam, to implement conservation practices.
In the field at Georges Mill, Horn said that a lot of land in the hilly, populated region is better suited for grazing than other types of agriculture and that he got interested in virtual fencing through his work making sure that grazing benefits the Chesapeake Bay watershed instead of contributing to its pollution. Continuous grazing that allows manure to build up can result in excess nutrients ending up in waterways, and cattle getting into streams can also deposit nutrients and contribute to erosion.
He sees the technology—which can enable more movement and control where animals are in relation to water sources and trees—as one tool farmers could use to better manage pastures.
“Well-managed pastures [are] good for water quality because we’re actually infiltrating more water, and there’s less runoff going down to our local creeks and streams,” he said. “If our local creeks and streams are cleaner, ultimately, the rivers—and as we go east, the Bay and everything else—they have better water quality too.”
Virtual fencing may also aid farmers in implementing agroforestry practices that reincorporate trees into farm systems and come with significant climate and biodiversity benefits. For example, a quick swipe of a finger on a virtual fencing app could allow a farmer to protect riparian buffers, strips of bushes and trees alongside streams that prevent runoff and support wildlife, from cattle until the plants are well-established.
That’s the application Alvez is most excited about, because the difficulty of putting up fencing that can contain animals and also protect trees as they grow is often a complicating factor in getting agroforestry systems off the ground.
And in a system where sheep are grazing in alleys between fruit trees, a farmer might try to put up a fence and encounter difficulties because of tree roots. “With virtual fencing, you could put the line six feet off the trees and still have the benefit of the shade for the animals and at the same time protect the trees,” he said.
The Way Forward for Virtual Fences
At this point, of course, agroforestry systems are about as novel as virtual fencing. And even with the many companies gearing up to expand, it will be some time before the systems are widely available. Nofence is prioritizing its sales in Norway, the United Kingdom, and Spain, where it is already widely available. While the system will officially roll out in the U.S. in 2024, Meghan Filbert said it will be slow and that “availability will be limited.”
Alvez is working with a developer in Brazil to bring another product to the U.S. that works in a similar way but uses an ear tag instead of a collar. That system will also provide data like body temperature from the cattle that wear it, and Alvez hopes to begin using it as a research tool.
Back at Georges Mill, Molly and Sam didn’t opt to use virtual fencing in order to better incorporate trees and livestock, but during their pilot of the system, that happened naturally.
One recent morning after a thunderstorm, they moved the goats to a distant field across a road. Only after they got them there did they notice a cherry tree—which is toxic for goats—had fallen in a thicket within the field.
In the past, Molly said, that would have meant “moving the herd all the way back into the barn while Sam totally cuts it up and clears it out, because you can’t have any of the leaves around—if they eat them, they’ll die. It’s a huge disruption, a huge amount of time.”
This time, however, “We were able to just draw an exclusion zone around it and keep everybody off of it,” she said. “That was huge.”
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