The post US Importers Sued for ‘Greenwashing’ Mexican Avocados appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Avocados are a regular part of many consumer’s weekly shopping—a key ingredient in guacamole, a slice on the side of a buddha bowl, and a healthy topper for toast—and sales are steadily rising.
But there’s a dark side to this booming market. Nearly all avocados sold in the U.S. are imported, and most of those come from just two western Mexican states—Michoacán and Jalisco—where serious concerns are being raised about their environmental and human impacts.
A 2023 investigation by the NGO Climate Rights International found vast tracts of forest being cleared for avocado plantations, water being diverted to irrigate the thirsty crop, and evidence of the mucky fingerprints of organized crime.
It concluded that virtually all deforestation for avocados in Michoacán and Jalisco over the past two decades was illegal. As a result, the report holds the industry liable for taking a serious toll on local communities, contributing to land grabs and water shortages, degrading the soil, and increasing the risks of lethal landslides and flooding.
A follow-up study the following year with the Mexican NGO Guardián Forestal concluded that little had changed. Now, U.S. avocado growers and consumer groups are accusing major fruit firms of falsely portraying imported fruit as a sustainable option.
The non-profit Organic Consumers Association (OCA) fired the first shots, filing lawsuits in 2024 against four of the biggest avocado importers: Calavo, Mission, West Pak, and Fresh Del Monte. These companies import avocados from Mexico and supply them to major supermarket chains throughout the U.S., including Costco, Walmart, Trader Joe’s, and Whole Foods. OCA claims statements on these companies’ websites and social media that their avocados are sourced responsibly and sustainably are untrue.
A marketing claim from Del Monte’s website, cited in the OCA lawsuit against the company.
Alexis Baden-Mayer, political director of OCA, notes that all imported avocados must be labeled with the country of origin, but that’s often the only truthful statement conveyed to the consumer. “The impact of avocado farming is a carefully guarded secret that the companies conceal with elaborate greenwashing,” she said. “That’s what we took action against.”
In February, Calavo Growers, Mission Produce, and West Pak Avocado pledged not to buy avocados grown on recently cleared land as part of a new Mexican certification scheme.
OCA subsequently dropped its case against West Pak, saying the company had agreed to stop using the “challenged marketing claims and to employ enhanced due diligence mechanisms to identify and stop sourcing from orchards in Mexico identified as existing on land that has been deforested since January 1, 2018.”
But it maintains that the other three companies continue to mislead the public. The lawsuit against Del Monte was allowed to proceed in February after a court denied the company’s attempt to dismiss it, rejecting arguments that the link between OCA and Del Monte was too tenuous to bring a claim. The other two claims, against Calavo and Mission Produce, are still pending.
The Del Monte lawsuit notes that people are becoming increasingly concerned about the impacts of their food. Consumers, says the filing, are motivated to buy produce marketed as “sustainable” and are often willing to pay more for it or to buy more of it. “Corporations that market these products, such as Del Monte, are keenly aware of this consumer willingness,” the filing states.
OCA says it is bringing the claim on behalf of consumers in the District of Columbia and is not seeking monetary damages. Instead, it wants the court to declare Del Monte’s practices false and deceptive and to order it to stop.
U.S. Avocado Growers Join the Fight
In Southern California, a group of companies that own and operate avocado orchards—Kachuck Enterprises, Bantle Avocado Farm, Maskell Family Trust, and Northern Capital—were growing increasingly frustrated about being undercut by importers. They were already reeling from poor domestic harvests, growing utility costs, tougher regulatory requirements, and a shortage of skilled labor, and having to compete with cheaper imports reduced their profitability even further.
Norm Kachuck is CEO of Kachuck Enterprises, and his family and partners have farmed 370 acres of Hass avocados in Valley Center, California, since 1969. He thinks consumers generally realize they’re eating avocados that have travelled from outside the U.S. But they’re “only now becoming aware of the implications of how that sourcing compromises the attractiveness of that imported fruit,” he said.
In February, the California firms jointly filed a lawsuit against Mission, Calavo, and Fresh Del Monte.
The California-based avocado growers say the companies mislead consumers by marketing their avocados as sustainable, even though the fruit comes from orchards where the local environment is being destroyed through deforestation, water shortages, soil degradation, and biodiversity and habitat loss.
They also say dubious sourcing of avocados contributes to climate change through deforestation and the subsequent loss of a natural carbon sink. This, the lawsuit claims, breaches California’s False Advertising and Unfair Competition laws.
Kachuck points to a trade imbalance within the agriculture sector. “Regulatory oversight and validation of good practices are very difficult to document for compliance over the border,” he noted, “They are of course done much better here. And there are validated and official fair market agreements between wholesalers and retailers that require documentation and compliance.”
From the OCA lawsuit against Del Monte: “Based upon Mexican government shipping records, in 2022, Del Monte sourced 49,394 kilograms from orchards in the municipality of Zacapu, Michoacán, shown in the images below. Satellite photography from May 2012 shows native forest covering this land; photography from October 2020 shows the land deforested and replaced with an avocado orchard from which Del Monte sourced avocados.”
The importing companies have filed requests for dismissal. If the court rejects those, the case will rumble on to the discovery phase, where both sides will exchange information pertinent to the trial.
None of the companies subject to lawsuits responded to requests for comment. Reuters was also rebuffed by nine major U.S. supermarkets and food chains it contacted in a report last year about avocado supply chains; only Amazon’s Whole Foods Market responded in that report that it was actively working with its suppliers to “prioritize Fair Trade certified and other responsibly sourced avocados.”
Awareness of the impact of imported avocados is growing. Following concerns raised by Senator Peter Welch (D-Vermont) and others, then U.S. ambassador to Mexico, Ken Salazar, noted the proliferation of orchards on illegally deforested land during a visit to Michoacán last year. He was reported as saying that Mexican avocado exporters “shouldn’t have the opportunity to sell those avocados to the United States market.”
President Joe Biden’s administration subsequently released a policy framework on combatting demand-driven deforestation of all agricultural imports. But OCA’s Baden-Mayer says the Trump administration has not followed through on this. And it has maintained a zero percent tariff on Mexican avocado imports.
Kachuck hopes the lawsuits will raise wider awareness of the impacts of avocado growing in Mexico among the public and consumers, as well as at the government oversight level.
The cases are part of a wider trend of greenwashing litigation, which is increasingly challenging sustainability and carbon-neutrality claims. Earlier this year, one of the U.S.’s biggest sugar firms, Florida Crystals, and its parent company, the Fanjul Corporation, were accused of misleading consumers and endangering public health because they claim to follow environmentally friendly practices, yet undertake pre-harvest burning of crops.
While OCA is gratified that most of the avocado importers it originally sued have pledged to stop contributing to deforestation, Baden-Mayer notes that it is much easier to police false marketing claims than it is to make sure companies follow through on their commitments.
“So far, we’re pleased with the impact and outcome of the cases we’ve brought, but the future for the larger problem of deforestation is uncertain,” she said, recommending that consumers choose California-grown organic and Mexican-grown organic fruit from Equal Exchange when shopping.
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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.
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]]>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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]]>On a stormy spring day, Devon Peña stood atop a sagebrush-covered hill and looked down on Colorado’s San Luis Valley. Dark clouds had unleashed a deluge just a few hours earlier, but now they hovered over the mountains, veiling the summits above.
Below, rows of long, narrow fields extended from Culebra Creek toward a man-made channel, the main artery of the valley’s centuries-old “acequia” irrigation system. This was the “People’s Ditch,” a waterway holding the oldest continuous water right in Colorado. The channel carried water from tributaries of the Rio Grande, high in the Sangre de Cristo mountains, down to the fields below.
There, the flow was diverted into smaller ditches that irrigated fields of alfalfa, cabbage, and potatoes, the water seeping naturally through the earthen walls. In the San Luis Valley as a whole, 130 gravity-flow ditches irrigated 30,000 acres of farmland and 10,000 acres of wetlands.
“This is an incredibly productive, resilient, and sustainable system,” said Peña, founder of The Acequia Institute, a nonprofit that supports environmental and food justice in southern Colorado.
“[Water managers] are starting to appreciate us a lot more than they did 20 or 30 years ago when they thought we were backward, primitive, and inefficient.”
The acequia system was once dismissed by Western water managers. But as a changing climate brings increasing drought and aridification to the Southwest, time-tested solutions like this one could hold the key to mitigating the worst impacts of climate change, especially in rural communities.
“[Water managers] are starting to appreciate us a lot more than they did 20 or 30 years ago when they thought we were backward, primitive, and inefficient,” Peña said.
An Ancient History
Water management in what is now New Mexico dates back to at least 800 A.D., to the Pueblo people, who used gravity-fed irrigation ditches for their crops. The acequia system, which arrived with Spanish colonizers in the 1600s, is not merely hydrological. It is political, even philosophical.
An illustration of how acequias work. (Illustration credit: Jerold Widdison for the Utton Center at the University of New Mexico)
The word acequia—from the Arabic word “as-saquiya,” which means “that which carries water”—was used to describe the irrigation ditches that evolved in the Middle East and were introduced to the Iberian Peninsula during the Islamic Golden Age. In New Mexico, these systems were often put in place even before a church was built.
Acequias operate under the principle of “shared scarcity,” rooted in Islamic law, whereby every living thing has a right to water, and to deny them water is a mortal sin. Water is thus treated as a communal resource to be shared, rather than divvied up and contested.
“They all share something in common, which is community governance,” Peña said. “It’s a water democracy.”
An acequia is both a physical canal system and a political structure, which includes an elected mayordomo, or ditch boss, along with commissioners who govern management and operations. Acequias are self-sufficient and collectively owned by members, each with water rights to the ditch and an equal vote regardless of property size.
The Spanish built acequias throughout the Southwest, but most in Arizona and California were abandoned or replaced by modern irrigation systems. In Texas, a few remain, including the San Antonio Mission Acequias.
“Our ancestors and predecessors created a cultural landscape and spread a broad ribbon of life that is an extension of the river,” said Paula Garcia, executive director of the grassroots New Mexico Acequia Association. “They have literally shaped the landscape.”
Acequias are central to the system’s resilience and adaptability, New Mexico State University hydrologist Sam Fernald said. “By having people on the ground, connected to every drop, they are able to adapt,” he said. “They have been adapting to changes in water and land for 400 years.”
Unlike conventional irrigation systems, the physical design of the acequias mimics natural hydrological and ecological functions, slowly distributing water throughout the landscape through unlined ditches that allow seepage. This “keeps surface and groundwater connected,” Fernald said, recharging the aquifer, reducing evaporation and aridification, enhancing biodiversity, and returning flows to the river.
A Model for Modern Times
Modern management of rivers for commercial agriculture has reduced this connectivity through channelization, levees, and dams. These have stopped streams and rivers from meandering into the floodplain, reducing aquifer recharge and late-season groundwater return.
But the modern system is under stress, as a changing climate reduces mountain snowpack, the main source of Western water. Snowpack acts as a water bank that holds frozen water in the mountains into the spring and releases it throughout the summer. Changing climate patterns also mean shifts in melt patterns, and all of this makes managing water flows through dams a challenge.
“They all share something in common, which is community governance. It’s a water democracy.”
Adding to the uncertainty, the Trump administration is making cuts to the Interior Department’s Bureau of Reclamation, which manages dams, and President Donald Trump has shown a willingness to demand water releases himself, as he did recently with two dams in California, to the consternation of farmers and water managers.
“The acequias and Rio Grande have given life, food, and shelter to people and wildlife, but they’re at risk if we don’t value and better adapt these systems and ecosystems for future conditions,” said Yasmeen Najmi, a planner for Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District, which helps manage irrigation in the valley, including the acequias.
Industrial agriculture exacerbates climate change through its use of synthetic fertilizers, whose production generates significant fossil-fuel emissions, and soil tillage, which disrupts soil’s ability to capture carbon. According to José Maria Martín Civantos, an expert in landscape archaeology at the University of Granada, in Spain, this kind of agriculture is “literally building the desert.”
By contrast, traditional irrigation systems like acequias enhance water quality, expand wildlife habitat, increase soil fertility, and—crucially—support highly productive food systems.
After New Mexico was ceded to the U.S. in 1848, Americans quickly recognized the productivity of acequia agriculture, said Sylvia Rodriguez, an anthropologist and author who grew up in an acequia community in Taos, New Mexico. “American takeover incorporated the acequia system into the state statutes because it was so efficient. Local management is hard to improve on,” she said.
Acequia Soil and Community
The San Luis Valley, along with many other high desert communities, would look markedly different without its acequia. Nestled at the base of the San Juan and Sangre De Cristo mountains, this region is the driest in Colorado, receiving only seven inches of rain annually.
Youth interns from the Move Mountains Project harvesting corn in Colorado’s San Luis Valley. (Photo courtesy of the Move Mountains Project)
In an acequia community, land-based ecological knowledge is passed down through generations along with time-tested practices such as companion cropping, crop rotation, seed-saving, fire ecology, and agroforestry. “Literally all the tenets of regenerative agriculture that were here well before anyone was talking about it,” Peña said. Many of these practices originated with Indigenous farmers.
Sustainable acequia irrigation regenerates the soil horizon, bringing mineral and sediment-rich water from the mountains to the fields. While acequias remain the primary irrigator in northern and central New Mexico, small-scale farming has declined in the region through massive economic restructuring, depopulation of rural areas, and the move from diversified crops to monocultures.
Today, few farmers grow food in the region. “We’ve become an alfalfa monoculture and beef export colony,” said Peña. “We need to transform farming back to polyculture.”
For Peña, local water management improves soil and crops. But it also means self-determination when it comes to healthy food. On the Acequia Institute’s 181-acre farm, Peña and others are reviving traditional farming practices and crops such as heirloom corn, beans, and squash.
Heirloom varieties of corn grown as part of the acequia system. (Photo courtesy of the Move Mountains Project)
The institute also provides no-interest loans to acequia farmers who are paid by the acre instead of by yield. Farmers have access to youth interns through the Move Mountains Project, aimed at creating “the next generation of farmers,” Peña said.
In 2022, the Acequia Institute purchased R&R Market, the oldest grocery store in Colorado, which was going to close. The institute is converting the space into a worker-led community co-op, a place to distribute the bounty of the acequia system.
The market, now renamed The San Luis Peoples Market, will reopen in late April and include a grocer, deli, commercial kitchen, community center, and market featuring produce from acequia farmers in the valley. In the years to come, Peña plans to open a second commercial kitchen, a USDA-certified slaughterhouse, and a solar-powered greenhouse.
“I know we’re going to bring healthy food and nutrition to the community,” Peña said, as the storm clouds above Culebra Peak cleared. “The model is, we don’t want to go outside the valley.”
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]]>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 Our Best Climate Reporting of 2024 appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Droughts, heatwaves, wildfires, hurricanes, and flooding brought on by climate change all have a massive impact on the food system. Farmers are having to adjust what they grow and how they grow it, and people all along the food chain—from the workers who harvest the crops to the consumers who eat them—feel the effects. At the same time, agriculture is a major contributor to the climate crisis, producing one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Civil Eats has long been committed to covering the intersection of the food system and climate change. In addition to looking at the greenhouse gas impacts of growing, harvesting, transporting, processing, packaging, and distributing food, we also examine the ways food-system players are addressing climate change with strategies that sequester carbon, cut emissions, save water, and establish new markets.
This year, for example, we looked at the meat industry’s influence on climate research and the presidential candidates’ stances on climate change. We also reported on farmers experimenting with the wild seed relatives of domestic crops, which may be better able to withstand extreme weather, and the underground fungal networks that trap carbon and support healthy plant life.
Additionally, we published a four-part series examining the challenges and potential of kelp as a regenerative crop, a four-part series on the power and impact of the pesticide industry, and a five-part series looking at how the climate crisis is affecting restaurants, asking ourselves: What is a climate-conscious restaurant, if that even exists?
Here are our best climate stories of 2024.
As Saltwater Encroaches on Farms, Solutions Emerge From the Marshes
In the Mid-Atlantic, sea level rise due to climate change is already altering what farmers can grow.
The USDA Updated Its Gardening Map, But Downplays Connection to Climate Change
The USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map has been updated after more than a decade. It confirms what anyone who’s planted seeds recently already knows.
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.
Photo credit: dhughes9/Getty Images
New Research Shows How the Meat Industry Infiltrated Universities to Obstruct Climate Policy
We look at how Big Meat seeks to influence climate understanding, climate-friendly farming practices, and more.
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.
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.
Climate Solutions for the Future of Coffee
In the face of severe climate change, 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.
Kelp’s Tangled Lines: Charting the Future of Seaweed in the Face of Climate Change
This in-depth four-part series, produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center, looks at kelp as a valuable regenerative crop for both U.S. coasts, tracing the rise of the industry and the challenges it faces in fulfilling its potential.
(Illustration by Civil Eats)
Chemical Capture: The Power and Impact of the Pesticide Industry
In this investigative series, we examine whether consolidated corporate power may be contributing to the ubiquitous use of pesticides and other chemicals, and whether the influence that chemical companies wield in the halls of power make it difficult to sort facts from marketing or engage in rigorous cost-benefit analyses.
The Pawpaw, a Beloved Native Fruit, Could Seed a More Sustainable Future for Small Farms
As festivals celebrate the pawpaw for its tropical flavor and custardy texture, researchers explore its potential as a low-input, high-value crop that’s easy to grow organically.
Why Are US Agricultural Emissions Dropping?
The EPA’s annual emissions report points to declines in cattle numbers and fertilizer use, data that could inform major climate events this fall.
Climate on the Menu
In this five-part series, produced in partnership with Eater, we examine how climate change is driving a shift in farm relationships, supply chains, labor, waste disposal, and service, aiming to better understand the ongoing climate realities that restaurants face—and we ask ourselves: What is a climate-conscious restaurant, if it even exists?
Climate on the menu. (Illustration by Ellie Krupnik)
Where Do the Presidential Candidates Stand on Climate Change?
We examined their track records and party platforms to explore the approaches each might take if elected, and how those might impact food and agriculture.
Colorado’s Groundwater Experiment
Farmers in the San Luis Valley mount an all-hands effort to restore the shrinking aquifers that make agriculture possible here. Their tactic: groundwater conservation easements.
Utah Tries a New Water Strategy
Amid drought and demand, this state is trying to circumvent one of the oldest water rules of the West: ‘Use It or Lose It.’
Farm Runoff May Be Tied to Respiratory Illness Near the Salton Sea
New research on California’s largest landlocked lake suggests agricultural runoff in the water is feeding ‘extreme microbes’ that can emit harmful compounds into the air.
Southern Black Farmers Sow Rice and Reconciliation
Jubilee Justice grows rice regeneratively while reclaiming the past.
The post Our Best Climate Reporting of 2024 appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>The post Should We Be Farming in the Desert? appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Just north of the U.S.-Mexico border, California’s Imperial Valley is both a desert and an agricultural wonder. Bordered by sand dunes and barren mountains, the region receives less than three inches of rainfall per year, 27 inches less than the U.S. average. From June to September, high temperatures here often exceed 100 degrees Fahrenheit. By most measures, the Imperial Valley is not a great place to grow food. Yet carrots, cauliflower, sweet onions, honeydew, broccoli, and alfalfa all grow here, incongruous crops that spread across half a million acres of cultivated land.
Ronald Leimgruber farms 3,500 of those acres. Given the lack of rain in the region, Leimgruber says he has “about seven” different irrigation projects on his farm, where he grows an array of crops, including carrots, lettuce, watermelon, and hay. Leimgruber, a third-generation farmer whose grandparents helped build the All American Canal, estimates he has spent millions of dollars on various water conservation techniques over the years. Some of that spending was subsidized by the federal government; some came out of his own pocket. He’s not sure it was worth it, especially because the government does not fund the upkeep of new systems.
“The jury’s still out,” he says. “Short term, there’s no maintenance. Long term, these things don’t last. Technology changes. They get worn out. We get a government grant to get them put in, and they look good at first, and then all of a sudden, we have to operate them.”
“I use about 7,000 gallons of diesel per field per year. . . . And everybody says that’s real efficient. Well, it is efficient around water, but that’s the only thing it’s efficient on.”
Leimgruber has implemented a number of projects—including drip, linear, and solid set irrigation systems, plus more—all designed to improve efficiency. But many of these drought mitigation techniques are costing him tens of thousands of dollars each year to maintain. And they are less efficient than they seem.
“I use about 7,000 gallons of diesel per field per year,” he says. “The system itself has 1,000 plastic nozzles and regulators and hoses. It has 35 rubber tires on it. It has 15 electric motors on it, a 300-horsepower diesel engine blaring away, emitting carbon into the atmosphere. And everybody says that’s real efficient. Well, it is efficient around water, but that’s the only thing it’s efficient on.”
Illustration by Nhatt Nichols. Source: “Review and Synopsis of Natural and Human Controls on Fluvial Channel Processes in the Arid West,” by John J. Field and Robert W. Lichvar.
Leimgruber and countless farmers like him are the beneficiaries of massive government efforts to make the arid western United States more habitable.
This level of agriculture was not possible in the Imperial Valley until the construction of the Alamo Canal, also known as the Imperial Canal, in 1901, which diverted water from the Colorado River. Now, climate change is challenging these efforts, and forcing an unsettling question: On a warming planet, how much tech will it take to farm an increasingly hostile environment?
Water Adaptation
In the desert, getting water to crops often requires irrigation. The USDA’s Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) provides both technical and financial assistance to farmers for conserving ground and surface water, reducing soil erosion, and mitigating drought through increased irrigation efficiency.
Critics, however, say these programs don’t address the bigger picture, and may not be of much help as the climate shifts weather patterns, precipitation, and temperature. In June, the nonprofit Environmental Working Group (EWG) published a report admonishing the U.S. Department of Agriculture for a lack of programs to help farmers to make major changes.
Farmers received more than $6 billion from the USDA from 2017 to 2023, the report notes, including $521.7 million from EQIP (and $5.6 billion in payments from the agency’s crop insurance program). California and Colorado alone received more than $1 billion. The EWG estimates that only around 30 percent of EQIP funding goes toward helping farmers reduce their emissions and adapt to climate change.
“Conservation dollars spent to update irrigation systems are funds that aren’t spent helping Western farmers adapt and become more resilient to climate change,” EWG’s Midwest Director Anne Schechinger says in the report. Instead, she writes, EQIP funding needs to help farmers in the Colorado River region better adapt. “[Funding] should focus more on paying farmers to switch to more drought-tolerant crops, to incorporate conservation crop rotations and to adopt other conservation practices that make their operations more resilient to climate change.”
One tool for resiliency is the Water Adaptation Techniques Atlas (WATA), another USDA initiative, which provides an online resource for users to explore different techniques being applied in the Colorado River Basin. At the Yuma Agricultural Center at the University of Arizona, for example, a company called Desert Control is working to improve soil moisture retention by “spraying a mix of nano clay particles and water onto the soil surface.”
And along the Colorado River, the Cocopah Tribe is clearing out invasive, water-sucking plant species and replacing them with native trees. Users of the atlas can explore projects that might help them with their own water adaptation. That’s important, since the simple act of watering crops is, in much of the West, incredibly complex.
“Maybe somebody’s first thought is, well, what if we just converted to more efficient irrigation systems?” says Noah Silber-Coats, a research scientist at the USDA Southwest Climate Hub who helped create the WATA. “Well, now we’re potentially increasing the amount of water that a crop is taking up, right, and we’re reducing the return flow downstream.”
More efficient watering, in other words, could mean healthier crops and higher yields, but an increase in overall water use.
“So from the get-go, we’re kind of aware of all the tradeoffs involved in any sort of solution to water scarcity,” Silber-Coats says.
Silber-Coats acknowledges that some of the most popular crops in the West, like alfalfa, are driven by demand—not solely by subsidies—which means farmers are loath to leave them. Alfalfa is primarily used as an animal feed, and as demand for animal products increases worldwide, experts expect the alfalfa market to increase, too. And it grows well in the arid West, where there is a lot of sunshine. However, alfalfa is an incredibly thirsty crop, requiring 20 to 46 inches of water per season. In a region that receives less than three inches of rain per year, almost all of the water for alfalfa growth must come from irrigation.
“Farmers plant alfalfa because it’s the highest-margin crop they can plant,” says Ethan Orr, an agriculture and economics expert at the University of Arizona. “Say you move your alfalfa crops to somewhere like the Midwest, and you said, ‘OK, there’s a lot more water here.’ But you have less sunshine, so you’re going to get five to six cuttings, about half the productivity of [Arizona] alfalfa, and then you’re going to have to ship it here for the dairy farmers. So you’re going to create transportation costs and a large carbon footprint, because you didn’t count all of the inputs.”
Alfalfa farming in the Imperial Valley. (Photo credit: Timothy Hearsum, Getty Images)
Arizona, Nevada, and California—the lower Colorado River Basin states—have each committed to reducing their water usage by 3 million acre-feet (1 acre-foot is about 325,000 gallons) through 2026 as all the Colorado River states negotiate a new water plan amid ongoing drought. It isn’t yet clear exactly how these reductions will happen. Right now, farmers have little incentive to plant alternatives, while there are still programs, like the USDA’s, dedicated to propping up existing irrigation infrastructure.
In the Upper Colorado River Basin, the System Conservation Pilot Program pays farmers to fallow their land to conserve water. But that program is off to a rocky start, with farmers complaining of low offers for payment. Other agencies, like the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, are looking to potentially pay farmers in the Imperial Valley to fallow their land for a season.
“If you were to do anything to limit alfalfa use in Arizona, you’d probably have a farmer that would fallow one field and still plant alfalfa in the other, because the margins are so much better than some of these other crops,” Orr says.
The Limits of Tech
But Schechinger argues that no amount of technical changes can keep up with the depletion rates in the Colorado River Basin.
“We know that 75 percent of the Colorado River water withdrawals go to irrigate crops, and the crops are being grown in an area that’s running out of water,” she says. “So, really, in the not-too-distant future, it’s going to be very difficult for Colorado River state farmers to farm what and how they farm today.”
Schechinger calls for a more holistic approach to water management in the region—one that involves growing different crops each year and not just improving irrigation practices. This approach also involves turning away from planting on marginal acreage that is not ideal for crops.
“When you are growing in a floodplain and you get more rain or more frequent precipitation events because of climate change, then those floodplain acres are really more vulnerable to the increased precipitation,” she says.
“In the not-too-distant future, it’s going to be very difficult for Colorado River state farmers to farm what and how they farm today.”
Orr advocates for an overhaul of the one-size-fits-all system and tailoring practices to each farm. “We need grand ideas,” he says. “I don’t want to solve a one-time problem of using less water and then not take care of the soil and let the salinity go up and let crop productivity go down.”
Tech still has a role to play, he says, including broadband infrastructure in the fields. With expanded broadband, for example, farmers can use global positioning systems and live drone monitoring to measure how thirsty certain plants are. These highly specific monitoring techniques, which have been used in U.S. agriculture since the 1990s, are known as “precision agriculture.”
“One of the issues that precision agriculture gets to is the overuse of inputs,” Orr says. “When you look at the environmental degradation, like the seepage of nitrogen fertilizer into water systems, simply having the ability to know exactly how much fertilizer and water should go on the plants is the best way to avoid that.”
When it comes to water use, precision agriculture can help farmers determine what is best for their own land—which may differ from what their neighbors need.
“[These issues are] basin-wide, but when it comes down to it, it has to be a conversation with an individual farmer,” Orr says. In his role in the extension office, he meets regularly with Arizona farmers to discuss which tools are best for their land. “Every field is different, and so I think that’s really what we have to do is study this before we do it.”
Silber-Coats hopes the WATA can help farmers and researchers begin adapting to water scarcity.
“We want to see specific action affecting water use or availability,” he said. “The atlas part of it helps us remember that context matters, and everything takes place somewhere.”
Technique Over Tech
In other parts of the region, farmers are relying more on conservation techniques than on the tech of the future.
“It’s [a matter] of respecting the water that we’ve been given as a gift, and we use it as many times as we can, as efficiently as we can.”
The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MWD), for example, pays the Quechan Tribe to forgo irrigating part of their land in the Imperial Valley. Through a pilot program, MWD pays the farmers leasing the land and the tribe up to $473 per acre. The farmers, who are both tribal and non-tribal, receive 75 percent of the payment, while the tribe receives the other 25 percent.
The Quechan used the money to contribute to a decades-long conservation project, restoring the wetlands surrounding the Colorado River. The tribe supplants pink saltcedar fronds, an invasive species that pulls water from the river, with native vegetation, including cottonwoods, willows, and honey mesquite.
In the Mojave Desert, 240 miles from the Imperial Valley, Michael Kotutwa Johnson lives and farms 11 acres on the Hopi Reservation. Johnson, an assistant professor at the University of Arizona School of Natural Resources and the Environment, dry farms with Hopi methods that do not require irrigation. These methods include wide row spacing, planting multiple seeds per hole, and planting drought-tolerant varieties of seeds.
“Our crops are suited to fit the environment,” he says. “Our seeds have been adapted for over 3,000 years to be raised with little moisture.”
For him, agricultural resilience in the West means less manipulation of the environment. “The only agriculture left in Arizona after about 20 years will be Indian agriculture,” he says, “because they do have the water rights, they do have the land.” Indigenous agriculture relies on an approach to land that is grounded in time-tested, abiding ecological principles rather than technical innovation.
“We respect the land, and we respect the impact that we can have on the ecosystem,” he says. “It’s [a matter] of respecting the water that we’ve been given as a gift, and we use it as many times as we can, as efficiently as we can.”
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]]>The post Utah Tries a New Water Strategy appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Before he was appointed head of Utah’s Department of Natural Resources, Joel Ferry was a full-time farmer—and a very good one. “I was the top ‘Young Farmer and Rancher’ in the state of Utah a few years ago,” he said on a recent phone call, as he drove across the state, minutes before heading into a meeting with the governor. “My wife was the Utah ‘Farm Mom of the Year.’ I’m raising my kids in agriculture.”
Illustration by Nhatt Nichols. Source: “Review and Synopsis of Natural and Human Controls on Fluvial Channel Processes in the Arid West,” by John J. Field and Robert W. Lichvar.
In Corinne, Utah, where his family has farmed for 125 years, Ferry, who is 46, raises cows, corn, and alfalfa. His is the last ranch before the Bear River—the longest river in North America that does not empty into an ocean—flows into the Great Salt Lake. On his farm, Ferry is witness to the effects of water usage in a drought-ridden region. “I’m personally seeing the impacts on the ecosystem, the impacts on the environment,” Ferry said, “and then also trying to balance these competing demands for agriculture and city growth. We’re right in the thick of it.”
The whole state of Utah, like many western U.S. states, is in the thick of it. Utah recently emerged from its driest 20-year period since the Middle Ages, while the Great Salt Lake, an iconic landmark of the West, is on course to dry up completely in a matter of years, not decades.
“In most other places, you’re penalized because you ‘use it or lose it.’ We flip that completely on its head through some of the statutes and laws that we’ve adopted.”
Ferry must now not only think of his ranch, but his neighbors, and their neighbors, and everyone else in the state, not to mention fish and wildlife that rely on rivers, lakes, and streams. Here, those resources are managed through a prioritization of water rights, where the oldest claims are first in line to receive an allocation of the water that flows through the basin. “The priority system has helped us manage a limited water resource in the West for over a century,” Ferry said.
But amid climate change, drought, and increased demands for water, Utah is trying to change the system, bucking one of the oldest water rules in the western U.S.
As it does in other Western states, Utah’s water policy fits under a principle of “beneficial use,” which declares that water rights holders must use their water for beneficial purposes, such as agriculture, or give up those rights. In Utah, though, the state legislature has passed multiple statutes that are attempting to encourage farmers to use less water without losing rights to it.
“Through our laws, we promote conservation,” Ferry said. “You’re benefited by conserving water. In most other places, you’re penalized because you risk forfeiture, you ‘use it or lose it.’ We flip that completely on its head through some of the statutes and laws that we’ve adopted.”
Water Rights in the West
The “first in time, first in right” doctrine, also known as “prior appropriation,” stems from the 1850s California Gold Rush, whose miners claimed stakes along rivers or streams and diverted the water as they needed it. Older claims, no matter where they were on the waterway, had priority rights to use the water. In 1928, California amended its constitution to include “beneficial use,” requiring those who claimed rights to water to make use of it. Today, Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming all abide by the doctrine.
Utah is primarily tackling the problem through its Agricultural Water Optimization Program, which awards farmers funding to become more efficient with their water use.
In the past, the doctrine prevented conflicts over water, especially for people coming from the Eastern United States, where water was plentiful and so-called “riparian rights” are related to land ownership along a waterway. But it also created an entanglement of rights, and as more people moved into the West, putting a strain on water use, this entanglement has become a real obstacle to conservation.
In these states, the right to use a certain amount of water is granted by date. Those with the oldest water rights have first claims to the water, no matter where they are on the river—as long as they continue to use it. If you don’t use water, you can lose your right to it, which hardly incentivizes conservation.
These water rights are incredibly important right now for states and tribal nations along the Colorado River, which winds its way out of the Rocky Mountains, through the desert Southwest and (almost, under the right conditions) into Mexico.
More than 40 million people rely on the Colorado River and its tributaries in Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming (the Upper Basin States) and in Arizona, California, and Nevada (the Lower Basin States). Through a complex legal agreement, these states share water from the Colorado River with each other and with tribal nations: the Ute, Ute Mountain Ute, Southern Ute, Jicarilla Apache, Navajo Nation, Chemehuevi, Colorado River Indian Tribes, Fort Mojave, Quechan, and Cocopah.
This agreement, known as the Colorado River Compact, is now under renegotiation, after prolonged drought and overuse of water caused a huge drop in the water held in Lake Mead—a key water bank and hydropower source for the region. If the states and tribes cannot agree on how to share the river, the federal government will take over. This has created a series of tough negotiations, as each state must agree to cutbacks—and to find the best ways to use the water they do have.
Utah’s Solution
Amid these conditions, Utah wants to do something different. It wants to find a way around the “use it or lose it” doctrine, to encourage farmers to conserve water without punishing them for it.
“I don’t want to say Utah is doing better than anyone else,” said Warren Peterson, an agriculture and water attorney who also grew up on a Utah farm, “but I’d like to think that if there’s a pack at the lead of the race, we’re in that pack.”
“These investments that I’ve made are to make my farm sustainable, so the next generation can farm and be successful.”
Utah is primarily tackling the problem through its Agricultural Water Optimization Program, which awards farmers funding to become more efficient with their water use. Utah’s new initiatives are meant to address stress and uncertainty for farmers. But on a larger scale, these initiatives are aiming to thwart, or at least delay, catastrophic water shortages in the region. If water consumption in the region continues at the current rate, Food and Water Watch warns, food prices, energy systems, and ecosystems could be impacted indefinitely.
At Ferry’s farm, for example, the fields are water optimized. He has thousands of feet of pipeline, drip irrigation, and GPS monitoring. He’s measuring his water use and the flow rate. In 2024, 190 farms received more than $20 million in funds to improve their on-farm practices. Each farm received an average of approximately $106,000. Forty-five irrigation companies received approximately $22 million to improve their practices.
“These investments that I’ve made are to make my farm sustainable, so that the next generation can come and farm and be successful, and so that I can continue to farm,” Ferry said. “I don’t want to have the stresses of drought and of a changing climate and of uncertainty. I want certainty in what I do. And by doing these and implementing these types of projects, I then gain the certainty.”
The Agricultural Water Optimization Program was passed in 2023. Along with acquiring funding to improve water practices, farmers can also file a “change application” to lease out any “saved water” through a water marketplace.
“It kind of gives an incentive to save that consumptive use and potentially be able to lease it or do something else with it,” said Utah State Engineer Teresa Wilhelmsen.
Wilhelmsen estimates that around 400 farmers applied for grants this year. However, not all farmers are jumping on board. “As you can imagine, there’s a fear of the state engineer with some folks,” she said, because the state engineer is often the one enforcing water rights and making sure people do not pull more water than they should. Peterson describes her as “the lead water cop.” This is why she is trying to frame these programs as opportunities to “tune up your water rights.”
Still, many farmers find the programs beneficial. Stanford Jensen, who runs a rotational grazing operation with cows, pigs, and chickens on a 560-acre no-till irrigated farm, is among them. Jensen’s irrigation is controlled by a local company. “All the water rights were put in the company years ago, so the company delivers all the water through a canal system that was put in in the late 1800s,” he said. “I’m a board member of that company. So, I went out and applied for the water optimization grant.”
“A lot of these challenges we’re looking at have taken many years to fully develop, and it takes years to respond.”
That grant of $500,000 went toward a $2 million upgrade to the irrigation system by implementing automated canal readers and controllers to reduce waste in the system. Jensen saw the optimization program as a chance to “make sure that we deliver water accurately, timely, and then hold back as much water as possible.”
Not all new water programs are taking hold. In 2020, Utah introduced a statute known as the Water Banking Act, whereby farmers who do not use their full water right can lease their water to others. In theory, this would allow farmers to lease out their water rights. The law led to the establishment of the First Water Bank of Utah, where water is treated as a currency. The bank aims to protect water rights and other assets. “Just depositing water in our bank eliminates the need to prove beneficial use,” the bank claims.
Ideally, this idea will promote water savings. Wilhelmsen notes that the adoption rate for water banking is currently low. According to her, the one application for the program that has been accepted is not yet set up or operating.
Future Use
Even with the more popular Agricultural Water Optimization Program in Utah, some believe more needs to be done. Burdette Barker, an irrigation expert at Utah State University, thinks efficiency is not the only issue that needs to be addressed; adaptation needs to be at the forefront, too.
“Will [the optimization program] alone meet the objectives that the state and others have?” he asks. “Probably not. Will it allow farmers to adapt better as tighter crunches come? I think so. They will help provide farmers with tools to cope or adjust.”
Barker notes that the Colorado River Basin has always faced problems with competing needs for water. “You’re running into issues where there’s less supply available, or going to be less supply available,” he said. While he thinks the state should be credited for finding ways to ensure that farmers remain safely in production, he is worried about the timeline.
“A lot of these challenges we’re looking at have taken many years to fully develop, and it takes years to respond,” he said.
Still, Peterson is holding out hope that these new programs will be more than a drop in the bucket toward improving water use. Farmers, who are sometimes blamed for the depletion of the Great Salt Lake, could actually lead the way toward saving it. And many have a personal incentive: protecting farms for future generations.
“Farmers are forward-thinking because they know the law of the harvest,” he said. “They aren’t going to foul up our water supply system so that their grandchildren cannot do what they do, and maybe even do it better. You hear farmers say that all the time, ‘I want to leave this so my grandkids can do this better than I did.’”
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]]>On a dry, hot day in June, water manager Chris Ivers plunged his hand into San Luis Creek and extracted a tangled mat of weeds that had blocked icy snowmelt from reaching nearby farms. The free-flowing water is a welcome sight in southern Colorado, an agricultural region in the throes of a groundwater crisis.
Ivers, who helps farmers and ranchers in this arid valley use the scarce resource wisely, pointed out the full ditch and green shoots emerging nearby—a byproduct, in part, of a regional experiment in water conservation. “I’m encouraged,” he said as crows squawked overhead and mustard grass waved in a slight breeze. “I really haven’t been walking out here in a while.”
Farmers in this sprawling valley have just seven years to replenish overtapped groundwater to levels required by law or face state-mandated well shutdowns.
Producers in this sprawling valley, cradled between the San Juan and Sangre de Cristo mountains, have just seven years to replenish overtapped groundwater to levels required by law or face state-mandated well shutdowns. Aquifer storage plunged in 2002 on the heels of a severe drought and hasn’t markedly recovered, and much of the region is currently under a federal disaster declaration. Following the 2002 drought, farmers voluntarily created seven governing bodies, called water subdistricts, in the hopes of replenishing two aquifers that make growing food viable here in North America’s largest high-altitude desert.
Fields in the San Luis Valley yield two billion pounds of potatoes a year, making the region the nation’s second-biggest spud producer. But the valley’s irrigation outlook is dire: Water withdrawn by wells exceeds the amount of snowmelt refilling aquifers, and there are more claims to water rights than there is water in streams. The expanse is among the most densely irrigated regions on Earth. To reach that seven-year target, farmers and residents will have to further curtail water use by retiring wells, fallowing fields, and switching to less water-intensive crops; otherwise, the state engineer may intervene and order well curtailments.
That puts Ivers, a program manager for two subdistricts with the Rio Grande Water Conservation District, at the center of difficult decisions about how to use, and conserve, the valley’s shrinking water supplies. He is also implementing an innovative project designed to add water back into the aquifer. If successful, the experiment could provide a roadmap for hundreds of farming and ranching communities nationwide whose groundwater stores are dwindling at unprecedented rates.
An ‘All Hands’ Crisis
Illustration by Nhatt Nichols. Source: “Review and Synopsis of Natural and Human Controls on Fluvial Channel Processes in the Arid West,” by John J. Field and Robert W. Lichvar.
At Peachwood Farms, a flat, 1,897-acre expanse at the heart of the valley’s groundwater conservation trial, Ivers stood amid fallowed fields bordered by circles of barley and areas being revegetated with native seeds. This patchwork of land marks the personal sacrifices that are keeping the region’s agricultural industry—its largest employer—alive.
“If you ask somebody who works in water like me, this looks great,” Ivers said, as pronghorn observed him from a distance and a golden eagle circled overhead. The goal, he added, is to significantly curtail water use on the property in order “to help make farming in the rest of this region more sustainable.”
In 2022, the nonprofit Colorado Open Lands forged what’s known as a groundwater conservation easement with Peachwood Farms’ owner. The agreement retired pumping on seven of 12 crop circles over the next decade and halved water use from the remaining five, in exchange for an undisclosed cash payment to the farm and state and federal tax credits. The easement saved 560 million gallons a year and made the aquifer in this part of the valley whole. The unconventional deal ensured that the property’s neighbors, like David Frees, will not face well shutdowns, and is an example of the kind of complex solutions needed to keep farms going in the current climate.
“The Peachwood easement allowed us to drop groundwater pumping by 10 percent. Without it, we might have had to curtail everyone’s water use by 10 percent.”
“The Peachwood easement allowed us to drop groundwater pumping [in the subdistrict] by 10 percent,” Frees said in a recent interview. “Without it, we might have had to curtail everyone’s water use by 10 percent.”
Instead, the easement allowed the subdistrict’s farmers to continue their operations much as they have in the past, said Frees, who runs 60 head of cattle and is president of one of the valley’s seven water subdistricts. “As the aquifer fills up, we will have more stream flow extend to other parts of the valley.”
Groundwater depletion is by no means unique to this corner of Colorado. Across the U.S., groundwater stores are in the red and dropping fast. Aquifers that farmers rely on for irrigation in California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nebraska, and elsewhere have fallen by dozens of feet since 2002, satellite imagery shows.
Amid this national crisis, the attempts by the farmers in the San Luis Valley to moderate their own use caught the eye of U.S. Senator Michael Bennet (D-Colorado). In 2023, Bennet introduced a bill in the Senate that would increase nationwide funding for groundwater conservation easements akin to the one on Peachwood Farms. Bennet is currently working with fellow senators to include either funding for such programs or a pilot groundwater easement project in the 2024 Farm Bill, said Rosy Brummette Weber, a policy advisor to Bennet.
The Peachwood Farms groundwater conservation agreement has also prompted water managers in overdrafted basins from California to Kansas to approach Colorado Open Lands for information on how to use similar arrangements to preserve water for their growers.
The stakes are high and mounting: The nation’s aquifers are dwindling due to rising temperatures, drought, and overuse. Many are not replenishable. Disappearing groundwater threatens the livelihood of crucial agricultural regions like the San Luis Valley, which in turn diminishes the national food system, making the U.S. more reliant on imports. The breadth of the problem prompted President Biden’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology to issue a warning in December, calling the crisis “an all-hands-on-deck moment for groundwater sustainability.”
The refusal of some growers nationwide to curb groundwater pumping became evident in May, when Idaho’s water agency ordered limitations on the use of wells serving a half million acres of agricultural land, an action described as “the largest curtailment” in state history.
In southwestern Colorado’s high desert, producers already till fewer acres, tax themselves to fund fallowing programs, and plant less water-intensive crops. Taxpayers are also footing the bill for a $30 million program approved by the state legislature, in which the Rio Grande Water Conservation District uses funding from the American Rescue Plan Act to pay farmers for retiring their wells.
Yet even after growers here cut pumping by a third, in 2022, water in one of two aquifers fell to its lowest level on record, after extreme heat led to diminished snowpack. Throughout the West, the snowpack of the mountains acts as water bank, with snowmelt filling creeks and streams throughout the summer that help irrigate fields and recharge the aquifer. (The San Luis Valley floor receives only seven inches of rain per year.)
To ensure its aquifers remain sustainable amid an uncertain climate future, the Rio Grande Water Conservation District must permanently withdraw up to 60,000 acres of land from irrigation, about 10 percent of the valley’s arable land. After two decades of effort, the aquifers are only a third of the way charged, and frustration with the pace of recovery is high among water managers, producers, and residents.
“The aquifer has not recovered, and we have spent tens of millions of dollars on programs to reduce groundwater withdrawals,” said Amber Pacheco, the Rio Grande Water Conservation District’s deputy general manager, who oversees irrigators in six subdistricts. (A seventh is operated by the Trinchera Ground Water Management Subdistrict.) Some of the region’s subdistricts still haven’t seen any aquifer recovery and, she added, they “are in a fight against Mother Nature.”
Easements Ain’t Easy
Most of the water-saving programs in the valley so far have focused on short-term drying up of land. None have created perpetual groundwater savings or allowed people to keep farming by reducing irrigation over their entire property.
Enter groundwater conservation easements. These are legal tools that restrict pumping on a certain piece of property, and in the arid West and Midwest, they present innovative solutions to aquifer depletion.
Such agreements, like the one forged on Peachwood Farms, allow growers to reduce the number of acres they plant, and thus the amount of water they use, in perpetuity, in exchange for federal and state tax benefits. These agreements can overlap with other solutions. The Rio Grande Water Conservation District, for example, is using money from the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service to revegetate easement land with drought-resistant native and non-native plants.
“The aquifer has not recovered, and we have spent tens of millions of dollars on programs to reduce groundwater withdrawals. [The region is] in a fight against Mother Nature.”
Even so, this promising tool faces challenges to its potential. Chief among them are both a lack of funding for such deals and the fact that appraisers who value conservation easements are unsure how to put a value on groundwater.
“People call me and say they want to put in place a groundwater conservation easement and I say, ‘That’s great: We have no idea what we would pay you,’” said Sally Wier, groundwater conservation project manager at Colorado Open Lands, who lives and works with producers in the San Luis Valley. “I have people who are 70 years old, and they are trying to decide whether to fallow their land or stay optimistic and continue farming.”
Appraisers are adept at valuing traditional conservation easements, in which farmers and ranchers receive tax breaks and grants in exchange for placing deed restrictions on their operations that bar most development. Such deals exploded in popularity over the last decade as agricultural producers sought to stave off big-box stores, self-storage complexes, and residential construction, all of which already consume millions of acres of fertile open space. But applying the same approach to water is tricky.
The Spread of Innovative Easements
In the San Luis Valley, Colorado Open Lands also pioneered a conservation easement program that ties surface water rights to the land. This legal assistance project paired farmers with law students to formalize verbal water-sharing agreements into bylaws. As a result, it preserved a network of centuries-old irrigation ditches known as acequias, whose operators hold the state’s oldest water rights.
Similar efforts are underway elsewhere in the West. Just a six-hour drive to the south, near Clovis, New Mexico, lies another arid region desperate to replenish its drought-stricken aquifer.
“I have people who are 70 years old, and they are trying to decide whether to fallow their land or stay optimistic and continue farming.”
Here, the Ogallala Land and Water Conservancy is pursuing short-term conservation easements on groundwater rights while it works to secure more funding for perpetual deals. It’s a sprint to refill the massive Midwest aquifer, which spans eight states and declined about 17 feet, on average, from when irrigation began in the 1950s through 2017, a U.S. Geological Survey study found.
The diminished water supply requires sacrifices like those made on Peachwood Farms. Eight landowners have forged groundwater leases with the conservancy in which they’ve agreed to stop pumping from 51 wells, saving about 4 billion gallons a year. Their actions will help secure groundwater supply for Cannon Air Force Base, the city of Clovis, and Curry County—and will protect habitat for endangered species.
To figure out how to fairly compensate the landowners for their water, the conservancy installed a special flow meter on center-pivot sprinklers to calculate total gallons per minute of annual groundwater production, said Ladona Clayton, the Ogallala Conservancy’s executive director.
The organization also reviewed crop budgets to analyze harvests over previous years and the herbicides used, as well as insurance, labor, and other production costs, she added. Using about $5 million in federal and state funds, it then annually paid the landowners for 100 percent of the appraised value of their groundwater, allowing them to keep 20 percent of their water. Agreements extend for three years while the nonprofit works to secure further funding for conservation easements.
“These producers who have lease agreements shut off wells in 2022, many that were dry on certain parts of their land,” Clayton said. “Now those wells have water—it’s music to my ears—they can haul water for their livestock.”
Such deals are showing promise, and more will be needed. Extended drought throughout the West is unlikely to abate, nor is demand for water.
Meanwhile, farmers in the San Luis Valley who raise livestock near Peachwood Farms hold high hopes for the groundwater conservation easements. Such deals may eventually play a key part in the ongoing effort to restore the region’s aquifer system.
“I’m the fifth generation to farm in the area, and I wouldn’t mind doing more deals” like Peachwood, said Pete Stagner, who is vice president of the water subdistrict overseen by Frees and runs 200 head of cattle on a ranch adjacent to Peachwood. “I’m hoping that I can see in my lifetime that our aquifer can get back up to where it was in the 1950s.”
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]]>The post The ‘Soft Path’ of Water for Farmers in the Western US appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>When Peter Gleick moved to California in the 1970s, the state had more than a million acres of cotton in production and little control over the use of its rapidly depleting groundwater. Today, California grows a tenth the amount of cotton and groundwater use has been brought under control. For Gleick, an author and cofounder of the water-focused Pacific Institute, these are signs that change can happen. But there’s much more to be done, and quickly, especially in the arid western United States, where water use is extremely high—and climate change and drought are increasing pressure on a region that already uses a tremendous amount of water.
“We have to fundamentally rethink agriculture. How much agriculture do we want? What kind of crops are we going to grow?”
In his latest book, The Three Ages of Water, Gleick describes what he calls a “soft path” for water conservation, moving beyond the hard infrastructure and rigid policies we’ve relied on in the past. This means rethinking attitudes toward growth, while recognizing water as a fundamental human right and a source of broader ecological health. In the West, that also means reconsidering our approach to agriculture. Civil Eats caught up with Gleick to understand what that means and how we should think about water in the near future.
When it comes to water, agriculture, and the arid West, how should we be framing the challenges ahead?
Illustration by Nhatt Nichols. Source: “Review and Synopsis of Natural and Human Controls on Fluvial Channel Processes in the Arid West,” by John J. Field and Robert W. Lichvar.
- The ‘Soft Path’ of Water for Farmers in the Western US
- Colorado’s Groundwater Experiment
- Utah Tries a New Water Strategy
- Should We Be Farming in the Desert?
There’s a mismatch between how much water there is and what humans want to do with it. It used to be mining. Mining was the dominant user of water. But really, for our lifetime and certainly our immediate predecessors, agriculture has been the dominant user of water. So, how can we continue in the West to do the things that we want to do within the constraints of nature, the constraints of how much water is available, and the growing constraint of the realization that even the limited amount of water that’s available has to serve multiple purposes?
We built a whole series of systems, both physical and institutional, that brought enormous benefits to us—hydropower, irrigated agriculture, water for cities. It was at a cost we didn’t fully understand at the time—in particular, the devastation of natural ecosystems that were also very dependent on limited water.
How do we need to think about agriculture differently in the West if we’re going to have enough water in the future?
We have to fundamentally rethink agriculture, very broadly. How much agriculture do we want? What kind of crops are we going to grow? How are we going to water those crops, and how are we going to manage the institutions that give the signals to farmers about what to grow, that determine how markets develop, that subsidize good or bad things, that allocate water from one user to another? Those are all things we designed 100 years ago or more, and they no longer serve their purpose.
“Everywhere I look there are smart farmers and smart cities doing innovative things. There are people nibbling around the edges of the water rights discussion.”
The arid West is a great place to grow alfalfa. Some farmers can get three or four or five crops a year of alfalfa. It’s easy to grow. The problem is it takes a lot of water, and farmers grow it because they have available water, because of the institutions or the laws or the economics that give that water to them. And subsidies for certain kinds of things, like transportation, make it economical to grow. We’re now in a world, I believe, where the water laws and the markets that encourage farmers to do certain kinds of things are no longer appropriate.
The challenge is, how do we redesign those things? How do we change those things? You can change it by limiting water availability to certain farmers. You can change it by changing the price of water or subsidies for alfalfa. You can change it by regulatory changes. You can change it by economic changes. But we haven’t figured that out yet.
What are the strongest levers we have right now to move things quickly?
Changing water rights, which is a legal issue, and policy, in the broad sense: subsidies, economic strategies, assistance to farmers, information about extreme events from the climatic point of view. We can make improvements in technology to some degree, and I think that’s really important, but the really big changes will come about on the legal and institutional side.
Prior appropriation, where water rights were given out 100 years ago or more based on first come, first served, those water rights are badly monitored and enforced. They also don’t lead to efficient use of water. If you have a senior water right and there’s water scarcity, you get your water first—it doesn’t matter how efficient you are, and you have to use it or you lose it.
The prior appropriations doctrine made sense 100 years ago, but it no longer makes sense. But it’s so heavily ensconced in law and culture that changing that is probably the biggest barrier to moving agriculture in the West into the 21st century.
Where can we look to find solutions to these challenges?
I think there are solutions to every one of these problems. We’re already seeing the elements of it in what I call the “soft path” for water. The hard path is what we did in the 20th century, the hard institutions, infrastructure, and economics that brought us the benefits of the 20th century, but also the problems we see. The soft path says we have to rethink the supply of water.
We have to stop thinking that finding a new source of supply is always the solution. There are no new sources of water, in the traditional sense, but there are non-traditional new sources of water: recycled water, reclaimed water, desalinated water. Most of those are expensive, and urban. But they are new sources in the sense that they don’t require tapping another river over, tapping groundwater, or building a pipeline from the Great Lakes or from Canada. Those days are over, although some people haven’t realized that yet.
The soft path also says rethink demand, and that’s this question of efficiency and conservation. Do what we want with less water, and rethink what we really want to use our water for. What’s our demand really about? Do we really want to grow as much alfalfa in the West as we’re growing today? I think that’s a question we’re starting to ask, and we need to ask more questions like that.
And the soft path says we have to rethink our institutions, economics, management, politics, and laws. Everywhere I look there are smart farmers and smart cities doing innovative things. There are people nibbling around the edges of the water rights discussion. So, the challenge is to find the success stories. Figure out why they’re successes and implement them to scale.
This interview was lightly edited for length and clarity.
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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 Republican Plans for Ag Policy May Bring Big Changes to Farm Country appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>David Andrews’ farm is about nine miles away from the small, aptly named Iowa town of State Center. The 160-acre farm has been in his family since 1865, and Andrews grew up there.
Despite the landscape’s signature flatness, his land “rolls a little bit,” he said. So, 30 years ago, he decided to plant 60- to 100-foot strips of tall grasses within and along the edges of fields to prevent erosion. To pay for it, he enrolled a total of 14 acres, made up of those strips, in the federal government’s Conservation Reserve Program (CRP).
Through CRP, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) pays farmers not to farm on less-productive parcels of land, often in areas that are corn and soy fields as far as the eye can see, to be left alone to reduce runoff, improve biodiversity, and hold carbon. “It’s a great program, and a lot of these farms have some marginal ground on them that would be better off in CRP than growing crops,” Andrews said.
Project 2025 proposes eliminating CRP. The Republican Study Committee proposes ending enrollments in the program, as well.
As of March 2024, the most recent month for which data is available, more than 301,000 farms had close to 25 million acres enrolled in CRP; that’s a lot of acreage, but it represents less than 3 percent of U.S. farmland.
Project 2025, a conservative Republican presidential transition blueprint spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, proposes eliminating CRP. The Republican Study Committee (RSC), an influential caucus of House conservatives, proposes ending enrollments in the program, as well.
It’s just one of several cuts to federal programs serving commodity farmers that Republican operatives and lawmakers have recently proposed in policy documents. Project 2025 also proposes reducing crop insurance subsidies and “ideally” eliminating commodity payments altogether. The RSC’s budget, meanwhile, proposes putting new limits on commodity payments, reducing crop insurance subsidies, and ending enrollment in another popular conservation program called the Conservation Stewardship Program.
While cutting government spending may seem like a run-of-the-mill party goal, many of these programs have long been politically sacred in farm states. If implemented, the plans could transform the nation’s safety net for farmers growing corn, soy, and other row crops.
Most Washington insiders say that’s unlikely to happen and point to the RSC-heavy House Agriculture Committee’s recent farm bill draft, which puts more money than ever into commodity programs and leaves crop insurance intact. Plus, the most powerful groups representing commodity crop interests—the American Farm Bureau and the National Farmers Union—both typically lobby hard to keep farm payments flowing.
But while conservative advocacy groups and far-right Republicans have unsuccessfully proposed similar cuts in the past, Republican politics have shifted further right in the age of Trump, and fiscal conservatives wield increasing power within the party. More than 83 percent of House Republicans are now members of the RSC, compared to about 70 percent in 2015. Former RSC chair Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) is still a member—and is now the Speaker of the House. On a 2018 panel, he said the RSC is “now mainstream.”
“I don’t think we’re going to go to a ‘no government intervention in agriculture’ approach. It’s just not likely, but it’s certainly the dream of every conservative agriculture prognosticator.”
In early July, Trump attempted to distance himself from Project 2025, but many of its architects are former Trump administration officials and have worked on the party’s 2024 platform. The Heritage Foundation claims that during Trump’s last term, he embraced two-thirds of their policy proposals within his first year in office. A spokesperson for the Heritage Foundation declined a request for an interview on Project 2025.
“I think it’s more likely that [elected Republicans will] just do what the commodity groups and Farm Bureau want,” said Ferd Hoefner, a policy expert who has worked on nine previous farm bills and is now a consultant for farm groups. “I don’t think we’re going to go to a ‘no government intervention in agriculture’ approach. It’s just not likely, but it’s certainly the dream of every conservative agriculture prognosticator.”
With so many competing interests at play, the party’s true plans for agriculture are as muddy as an unplanted field in spring. And with Trump leading in the polls after a shocking few weeks of politics, anything now seems possible.
Cuts to Conservation Programs
Andrews got out of farming in 1999. His own operation had been diversified, with cows, pigs, and various grains and alfalfa grown in rotation. But when he hung up his hat, he rented the land to a farmer who was—for better or worse—following the crowd.
“He put it all in corn and soybeans, which is natural. That’s what everybody does nowadays,” Andrews said. But CRP had worked so well for him in creating the erosion control strips, he decided to enroll nearly all of his acres for a time. “When I moved back to the area, I told him that I thought the farm needed a rest, because continuous corn and soybeans is very hard on the organic matter. I told him I was going to put it in CRP, and he said he didn’t blame me. That’s what I ended up doing.”
CRP enabled Andrews to preserve the land, restore its fertility, and sequester carbon, because instead of a farmer paying him to rent the cropland, the government paid him—less, but enough—to fallow it. But the program has long been a target of conservatives as an example of wasteful spending. Project 2025 proposes eliminating it entirely, while the RSC would prohibit new enrollments in both CRP and the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP).
CSP pays farmers to implement conservation practices on land they are actively farming. The program is so popular that even after the Biden administration added money to the pot through the Inflation Reduction Act, only 40 percent of applications were funded in 2022.
Jonathan Coppess, the director of the Gardner Agriculture Policy Program at University of Illinois, said that while he doubted Republican lawmakers would be able to eliminate CRP altogether, they could slowly gut the program in the same way that some have weakened CSP over the last decade. Initially, CSP was capped based on acres, and lawmakers began cutting the acreage cap. Then, they changed the structure to a funding cap, which further shrank enrollment. The changes effectively cut funding for the program in half between 2008 and 2023.
Most conversations about conservation funding right now are focused on Republicans’ efforts to strip the focus on climate-friendly practices from extra conservation money provided by the Inflation Reduction Act.
“It can be kind of a death spiral type thing, where fewer farmers can get the funds, so the Congressional Budget Office projects less spending, so the baseline shrinks,” said Coppess, who previously worked on federal farm policy as a Senate legislative assistant and as administrator of the Farm Service Agency at the USDA. “Eventually that becomes self-defeating for the program, because farmers are angry because they spend all this time signing up and they don’t get in. So, the farmers turn on it and you can slowly kill off the program over time that way, because it loses its political support.”
The current House draft of the farm bill includes some small tweaks to CRP, but it’s unclear what the impacts of those changes would be. Instead, most conversations about conservation funding right now are focused on Republicans’ efforts to strip the focus on climate-friendly practices from extra conservation money provided by President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.
Changes to Commodity Programs
The Republican plans to cut environmental funding—especially for climate projects—are to be expected. But nowhere is the tug-of-war between fiscal conservatism and farm support more apparent than in their proposals for the future of commodity programs, which essentially pay crop farmers when prices fall beneath a certain level. Those programs primarily benefit growers of corn, soy, wheat, cotton, and a few other commodity crops. But because so much acreage is devoted to those crops, the groups that represent their interests, like the National Corn Growers Association and the National Association of Wheat Growers, hold considerable sway in D.C. And most Republicans (and Democrats), especially in farm states, generally try to court them.
However, over the past few decades, progressive Democrats and farm groups such as the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, Farm Action, and the Environmental Working Group (EWG) have called attention to the fact that the largest, wealthiest farms have received close to 80 percent of the nearly $500 billion paid out between 1995 and 2021. As a result, they’ve fought for payment caps within the programs as a way to limit spending and distribute funds more fairly.
Surprisingly, the RSC budget does something similar by proposing that only farms with an adjusted gross income below $500,000 receive payments. “This was a policy proposed in the FY 2021 Trump Budget and would ensure that commodity support payments are going to smaller farms that may struggle obtaining capital from private lenders,” the RSC budget reads. Project 2025 goes even further and proposes “ideally” eliminating commodity programs altogether.
But when House Republicans released their latest farm bill draft, it included increases to commodity payments, at a projected cost of an additional $50 billion. In other words, they veered in the exact opposite direction.
In response, the Heritage Foundation has been pushing back on the spending bump, in conjunction with other conservative think tanks, as well as the progressive EWG.
The unlikely policy alignment is politically convenient on this one point, but in the end, the two sides have differing goals. The progressive groups want policymakers to shift funding away from commodity programs into more funding for conservation, research, local food, and specialty crops; the conservative groups just want to cut spending, period.
“Every farm bill, hope springs eternal that there will be a left-right coalition that can win some major changes,” Hoefner said. “There have certainly been many tries at that,” he added—and they haven’t stuck yet.
Another issue that’s kept those groups far apart is ethanol, which many progressive groups see as a false climate solution. Traditional farm groups, on the other hand, fight like hell to keep in place the Renewable Fuel Standard—the policy that sets a minimum amount of ethanol required in gas and other fuels. The RSC budget proposes eliminating the standard altogether.
“There’s way more interest in that issue among commodity groups than what happens in the farm bill,” Hoefner said. It’s been a sticky issue for Republicans in the past. Florida Republican Ron DeSantis once supported eliminating the standard, until he tried to run for president. Trump boasts often of his support for ethanol, but his administration exempted more than 30 oil refineries from the standard, allowing them to avoid selling ethanol, angering commodity groups.
Crop Insurance Complications
Some of the disconnect between Republican ideals that point toward farm program cuts and what gets into policy may simply be attributable to the reality of politics, Coppess said.
“There’s the cognitive dissonance kind of challenge that we see with any heavy focus on budget issues,” he said. “So, we wanna cut spending, we wanna balance the budget . . . and that always is easy to say and sounds good, but it is really difficult to do in practice, because every one of those items has a constituency. It is a difficult governing reality.”
As the weather has become more unpredictable due to climate change, for example, crop insurance has become a bigger political priority for farm groups and also the most expensive farm program, outpacing commodity spending.
During farm visits, Johnson said, “the most common thing we heard from producers was, ‘Don’t screw up crop insurance.’”
Both Project 2025 and the RSC budget propose reducing the portion of premiums paid by the federal government so that farmers shoulder more of the cost, while the RSC budget proposes a crop insurance subsidy cap of $40,000 per farmer. Project 2025 says farmers should not be allowed to get commodity payments if they get crop insurance subsidies.
All of those cuts are at direct odds with the powerful National Farmers Union’s 2024 policy book.
And at a panel on the National Mall hosted by the Association of Equipment Manufacturers in May, House Ag Committee members Dusty Johnson (R-South Dakota) and David Rouzer (R-North Carolina) both seemed to be reading from that policy book, despite the fact that both are members of the RSC.
During farm visits, Johnson said, “the most common thing we heard from producers was, ‘Don’t screw up crop insurance.’” Rouzer described crop insurance as one piece of a strong farm safety net. “If you want to preserve green space and rural areas, [then you need to] have a good, strong, safety net in place so that our farm families can continue to make ends meet and continue to do what they do best, and that’s feed and clothe the world,” he said.
Neither Dusty Johnson nor David Rouzer’s offices responded to requests for interviews.
An Opaque Future for Farmers
Time will tell if elected Republicans will act on the farm program cuts proposed by the most conservative members of their party. While some of the dynamics of farm-state politics are longstanding, others are changing.
Hoefner points out that in the 1980s and 1990s, Democrats and Republicans both represented many districts with commodity interests. Today, it’s nearly all Republicans. But rural areas are also being hollowed out as farms disappear or get bigger, which could one day shift power away from those farm states.
Consolidation in seeds, pesticides, grain trading, and meat (which most commodity crops funnel into) has also shifted power to commodity groups. These, in some ways, represent row-crop farmers, but they are also dominated by the ag industry. As a result, some conservative lawmakers from farm states have told Civil Eats they hear from industry, not farmers.
That’s one reason both Coppess and Hoefner said what will likely happen is what usually happens: Lawmakers will put out budgets and proposals that bolster their fiscal conservative credentials but then will govern in a way that bucks those policies to keep the support of ag industry players with deep pockets. “They would never dream of saying any of those things when they’re meeting with their farm constituents,” Coppess said.
In Rep. Dusty Johnson’s case, when asked about conservation programs at the May equipment manufacturers’ panel, he answered with political dexterity, praising conservation programs but indicating he may in fact be on board with the RSC proposal to eliminate CRP.
“Conservation is critically important,” he said. “I think this farm bill is gonna acknowledge the importance of working lands conservation even more than past farm bills have. That’s not to say there’s never a role in idling acres, but, listen, we can do some incredible things with soil health, water quality, habitat, while working those lands.”
Back in the middle of Iowa, one of the outcomes Andrews is most excited about when it comes to how CRP has impacted his farm is that its effects didn’t end at the borders of his fallow fields. On his own farm, he’s reduced soil loss, built organic matter, and watched wildlife return. But it’s also improved the sustainability of the surrounding farm landscape, where most farmers are doing plenty of planting and harvesting.
“I’ve got two or three farms that their water drains onto my farm, and some of that water is carrying chemicals and nitrogen, and my land is really cleaning up their water,” he said. “I think it’s a great program . . . but there’s not as many CRP acres around as what there used to be.”
If the conservative budget hawks get their way, there could be even fewer.
The post Republican Plans for Ag Policy May Bring Big Changes to Farm Country appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>The post Across Farm Country, Fertilizer Pollution Impacts Not Just Health, but Water Costs, Too appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>When Jeff Broberg and his wife, Erica, moved to their 170-acre bean and grain farm in Winona, Minnesota in 1986, their well water measured at 8.6 ppm for nitrates. These nitrogen-based compounds, common in agricultural runoff, are linked to multiple cancers and health issues for those exposed. Each year, the measurement in their water kept creeping up.
In the late 1990s, Broberg decided it was time to source from elsewhere. He began hauling eight one-gallon jugs and two five-gallon jugs from his friend Mike’s house. That was his drinking water for the week.
Six years ago, Broberg said, he was “getting too old to haul that water in the middle of the winter.” So, he installed his own reverse-osmosis water filtration system. The measurement of nitrates in his well has now reached up to 22 ppm. Post-filtration, the levels are almost nonexistent.
Broberg, a retired geologist, has committed what he calls his “encore career” to advocating for clean water in Minnesota. He only leases out around 40 percent of his tillable land and has retired much of the rest due to groundwater pollution concerns. Almost one year ago, a group he co-founded, the Minnesota Well Owners Organization, joined other groups to petition the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to address groundwater contamination in southeast Minnesota.
The EPA agreed, stating that “further action is needed to protect public health” and requested that the state create a plan for testing, education and supplying alternative drinking water to those most affected. Advocates in Wisconsin filed a petition, too. Last month, 13 separate groups in Iowa did the same.
This advocacy comes in light of increased regional attention on nitrate pollution and its health effects. In Nebraska, researchers have connected high birth defect rates with exposure to water contaminated with nitrates. In Wisconsin, experts warn that exposure to nitrates can increase the risk of colon cancer.
Access to clean water, as defined by the United Nations, is a human right. And yet many currently don’t have that right, even in a country where potable water is taken for granted. What’s more, the cost of clean water falls more heavily on less populated areas, where fewer residents shoulder the bill. A report by the Union of Concerned Scientists concluded that the cost for rural Iowa residents—who often live in areas with smaller, more expensive water systems—could be as much as $4,960 more per person per year to filter out nitrates from their water than their counterparts in cities like Des Moines. Nitrates are affecting water utilities from California to D.C., and the reason comes down to one major source: Agricultural runoff.
Where The Trouble Begins: ‘A Leaky System’
The root of water-quality issues in the Midwest starts with its cropland drainage system, a network of underground, cylindrical tiles that drain excess water and nutrients from the land and funnel it downstream. Those tiles, which were first installed in the mid-1800s and have now largely been replaced with plastic pipes, ultimately allowed farmers to grow crops on land that was once too wet to farm.
Lee Tesdell is the fifth generation to own his family’s 80-acre farm in Polk County, Iowa. Tesdell explained that when his European ancestors settled in the Midwest, they plowed the prairie and switched from deeply rooted perennial plants to shallow-rooted annual crops like wheat, oats, and corn instead.
“Then we had more exposed soil and less water infiltration because the roots weren’t as deep,” he said. “The annual crops and drainage tile started to create this leaky system.”
This “leaky system” refers to what is not absorbed by the crops on the field, most dangerously, in this case, fertilizer.
“It’s a leaky system because it’s not in sync,” said Iowa water quality expert Chris Jones, author of The Swine Republic book (and blog). “And farmers know they’re going to lose some fertilizer. As a consequence, they apply extra as insurance.”
Fertilizer as Poison
The U.S. is the top corn-producing country in the world, with states like Iowa, Illinois, Nebraska, and Minnesota supplying 32 percent of corn globally. Corn produces lower yields if it is nitrogen deficient, so farmers apply nitrogen-heavy fertilizer to the crop. In fact, they must use fertilizer in order to qualify for crop insurance. The ammonia in the fertilizer oxidizes existing nitrogen in the soil, turning it into highly water-soluble nitrates that aren’t fully absorbed by the corn. Those nitrates leak into aquifers.
In 1960, farmers used approximately 3 million tons of nitrogen fertilizer a year. In 2021, that number was closer to 19 million. Farmers can use a nitrogen calculator to determine how much nitrogen they need—but nearly 70 percent of farmers use more than the recommended amount.
“Other people also have an American dream, and they want to be able to turn on their faucet and have clean water, or know that if they put their baby in a bath, they’re not going to end up in the hospital with major organs shutting down because they have been poisoned.”
As Jones explains in his blog, even with “insurance” fertilizer use, yields can often turn out the same: “What happened to that extra 56 pounds of nitrogen that you bought? Well, some might’ve ended up sequestered in the soil, but a lot of it ran off into lakes and streams or leached down into the aquifer (hmm, do you reckon that’s why the neighbor’s well is contaminated?), and some off-gassed to the atmosphere as nitrous oxide, a substance that has 300 times more warming potential than carbon dioxide.”
Commercial fertilizer is just one contributor to high nitrate levels in groundwater. The other main factor, manure, is also increasing as CAFOs become more prevalent.
Nancy Utesch and her husband, Lynn, live on 150 acres of land in Kewaunee County, Wisconsin, where they rotationally graze beef cattle. In 2004, a family nearby became very ill from E. coli poisoning in their water.
“I was really upset that this had happened in our county,” she said. “A lot of the support was for the polluting farmer, and you know, farming is right there with the American flag and grandma’s apple pie.”
Utesch worries that the current system of industrialized agriculture has created a world where people living closest to the polluters do not have access to clean water themselves, and are afraid to speak out against the actions of their neighbors.
“Other people also have an American dream, and they want to be able to turn on their faucet and have clean water, or know that if they put their baby in a bath, that they’re not going to end up in the hospital with major organs shutting down because they have been poisoned,” she said. “If they clean a scrape because their grandchild fell down in the driveway, they could be hurting them if they use the water from the tap.”
The Plight of the Small Town
In June 2022, fertilizer runoff pushed Des Moines Water Works, the municipal agency charged with overseeing drinking water, to restart operations of their nitrate removal system—one of the largest in the world—at a cost of up to $16,000 per day. Des Moines finances its removal system from its roughly 600,000 ratepayers.
“Financially, Des Moines can spread out needed treatment over many thousands of customers, whereas a small town can’t do that,” Jones said. “If you have a small town of 1,000 people, your well gets contaminated, and you need a $2 million treatment plan to clean up the water, that’s a burden.”
“Financially, Des Moines can spread out needed treatment over many thousands of customers, whereas a small town can’t do that.”
While cities like Des Moines are willing to pay the cost to remove nitrates, other small communities will have a tougher time doing so. And once their aquifer is contaminated, “it doesn’t go away for a long time, in some cases, thousands of years,” Jones said.
Utica, Minnesota, which has fewer than 300 residents, has two deep wells, both measuring at unsafe levels for nitrates.
“[Residents are] scared to death,” Broberg, who lives in a neighboring town, said. “The city has investigated water treatment expenses at around $3 million for reverse osmosis, and they only last 10 years. A town of 85 households can’t amortize that debt by themselves.”
The town has applied for a grant from the state and is waiting to hear back.
Another nearby town, Lewiston, dug a new, deeper well to solve their nitrate problem.
“They went down there, and the water was contaminated with radium. It’s radioactive,” Broberg said. “So they kept their nitrate-contaminated well and their radium-contaminated well and blended the water so that it doesn’t exceed the health risk limit for either nitrates or radium.”
However, as Chris Rogers reported in the Winona Post, that plan didn’t quite work. Thus, Lewiston dug another well at a cost of $904,580, and is now sourcing all of their water from that new well. That well is now testing trace amounts of nitrates and has less radium than before.
Many rural residents also rely on private, personal well systems, which aren’t regulated for contaminants, to source their water. Forty million people rely on well water nationwide.
“Public water systems have these maximum contaminant levels that are set by the EPA. There are rules and regulations that they have to follow, but private wells aren’t covered by the Safe Drinking Water Act,” said Stacy Woods, research director of the food and environment program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “It’s really on individual well owners to decide whether to test their wells and what contaminants to test their wells for, and these tests can be really expensive.”
Broberg and his group are working to extend the protection of the Safe Drinking Water Act to well water. In southeast Minnesota, the EPA agreed to the plan, though the path forward is still uncertain as funding packages move through the legislature.
“I’ve spoken with people who simply don’t want to test their well water because they can’t afford to do much about it if they find out that their nitrate levels are unsafe.”
Without these protections in place, or intervention at the pollution source, rural residents often find the responsibility of clean water falling on them.
“I’ve spoken with people who simply don’t want to test their well water because they can’t afford to do much about it if they find out that their nitrate levels are unsafe,” Food and Water Watch Legal Director Tarah Heinzen said. “They are basically powerless to protect their drinking water resources from sources of pollution that aren’t being adequately regulated by the state.”
The solution, according to Woods, “is to protect the drinking water sources from that pollution in the first place.”
Conservation on the Farm
One way to do this is by using less fertilizer on the field. Another is to introduce on-the-field and edge-of-field conservation practices, like Tesdell is doing on his Iowa family farm.
Tesdell’s farm is not the typical Iowa farm, which averages 359 acres. Tesdell’s is 80. He does, however, rent 50 acres to a neighbor who grows corn and soybeans, like most Iowa farmers.
Where Tesdell’s farm differs is how he deals with excess nitrate. In 2012, Tesdell, who has always been drawn to conservation, became interested in adding cover cropping to his fields. Through his research, he came across other conservation practices such as wood chip bioreactors. He installed his first bioreactor that same year.
“There’s a chemical and biological reaction between the wood chips and the nitrate in the tile water,” Tesdell said. “Much of the nitrate then is turned into nitrogen gas, which is a harmless gas. We don’t take out 100 percent of the nitrate, but we take out a good percentage.”
According to Iowa State University, a typical bioreactor costs around $10,000 to design and install. Tesdell paid for his bioreactor partly out of pocket, but also acquired funding from the Iowa Soybean Association. For his saturated buffer, an edge-of-field practice that redirects excess nitrates through vegetation, Tesdell received funding from the USDA’s Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP). To install the saturated buffer, Tesdell needed his neighbor to agree.
“We put that one on a tile that actually comes from my neighbor’s farm. Because the creek is going through my farm, it’s a more direct route to come off a hill [on] his farm,” he said. “Neighbors need to work together.”
Roughly 80 percent of the farmland in Iowa is owned by offsite landlords, who rent it out to farmers. Tesdell cites this as a roadblock to conservation practices.
“If the landowner doesn’t care, why would an operator care? They want to pull in with their 24-row planter, plant their corn, come in with the 12-row corn head in October and harvest, then truck it off to the ethanol plant,” he said. “I don’t blame them.”
Iowa currently has a “Nutrient Reduction Strategy” plan, which outlines voluntary efforts farmers can take to reduce their pollution. There is no active legislation that limits how much fertilizer farmers use on their cropland.
Heinzen, of Food and Water Watch, explained that agricultural pollution is largely unregulated, with the exception of concentrated animals feeding operations (CAFOs). “In fact, even most CAFOs are completely unregulated, because EPA has completely failed to implement Congress’s intent to regulate this industry, which we’re suing them over,” she said, referring to a new brief filed by multiple advocacy groups in February aimed at upgrading CAFO pollution regulation.
Even Des Moines Waterworks, with its state-of-the-art nitrate removal facility, is calling for change.
“We cannot keep treating water quality only at the receiving end,” spokesperson Melissa Walker said. “There needs to be a plan for every acre of farmland in Iowa and how its nutrients will be managed, as well as every animal and its manure.”
“You’re either going to have to change your practices, change your farming, or you’re going to have the accept the risk of preventable disease.”
Some communities have sued for damages related to nitrate-contaminated groundwater. In Millsboro, Delaware, residents received a payout but still have contaminated water. In Boardman, Oregon, five residents are suing the Port of Morrow and multiple farms and CAFOs due to their well-water testing “at more than four times the safe limit established by the U.S. EPA,” Alex Baumhardt reported in the Oregon Capital Chronicle.
A few weeks ago, 1,500 tons of liquid nitrogen were spilled into an Iowa river. No living fish were found nearby. Today, polluted water flows downstream into the Gulf of Mexico, where it causes “dead zones” stripped of marine life.
“You’re either going to have to change your practices, change your farming, or you’re going to have the accept the risk of preventable disease,” Broberg said. “And you need to put that equation in your family budget. If you’re going to get bladder cancer, diabetes, birth defects, juvenile cancers—what are those going to cost?”
When asked why protecting water is so important, Tesdell paused and looked away. His voice cracked with emotion. “It’s for the grandkids.”
The post Across Farm Country, Fertilizer Pollution Impacts Not Just Health, but Water Costs, Too appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>The post Seeds From Wild Crop Relatives Could Help Agriculture Weather Climate Change appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>In the rugged Tumacácori mountain region 45 minutes south of Tucson, the Wild Chile Botanical Area (WCBA) was established in 1999 to protect and study the chiltepin pepper—the single wild relative of hundreds of sweet and hot varieties including jalapeño, cayenne, and bell peppers, found on dinner plates worldwide.
The isolation of this ecologically rich archipelago of peaks, located in a “sea” of desert that stretches from northern Mexico into southern Arizona, means that plants grow here that don’t grow anywhere else. Its 2,800 acres—the first protected habitat for the wild relatives of crops in the United States—now shelter not just a single pepper but at least 45 different species.
Between 2021 and 2022, the Borderlands Restoration Network (BRN), an Arizona-based conservation non-profit, worked with the U.S. Forest Service to identify and collect other wild relatives of crops in this area. The idea behind the project was to build food security in a world where all climate models are pointing to hotter and dryer extreme conditions.
“You have this dramatic topography that provides all these different ecological niches for different things to grow,” said Perin McNelis, 36, native plant program director at the BRN. “Where better to start than an area that is already hot and dry, with all these wild relatives that are really adapted to conditions that will be more widespread in the future.”
Crop wild relatives, or CWRs for short, are the hardy wild cousins of domesticated crops. In the U.S. alone, thousands of crop wild relatives exist in their natural habitats, often thriving in harsh conditions. In Arizona this includes wild species of onion, wheat, squash, strawberry, grape and many other important crops. Increasingly, farmers and scientists are looking at them as reservoirs of genetic diversity with traits that can be bred into domesticated crops to improve drought, heat, and disease resistance—and perhaps serve as the key to the future of farming.
“What makes them important is they have traits that can help crops be more adapted and resilient to climate change,” said Stephanie Greene, a retired plant geneticist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Agricultural Research Service.
Erin Riordan, a conservation research scientist at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum outside Tucson, works to expand the regional food system to include dryland-adapted plants such as agave, mesquite, prickly pear, and tepary beans with low-water use agricultural practices. For instance, tepary beans—a tiny brown bean with a sweet chestnut flavor—require about 1/5 the water of pinto beans.
Arizona is the third driest state in the U.S. It also has the highest diversity of crop wild relatives due to the state’s wide-ranging topography and habitats, “from low deserts to high elevation alpine, to everything in between,” said Riordan. One thousand of the estimated 4,500 CWRs in the U.S. are found in the state, including desert-adapted relatives of critical domesticated foods—not just peppers, but also tomatoes, squash, amaranth, beans, corn, and wheat.
An Arizona Walnut tree. (Photo CC-licensed by Whitney Cranshaw, Colorado State University.)
Wild cotton grows in the parched grasslands of the Sonoran Desert, surviving without irrigation, pesticides, or other human inputs that domesticated cotton depends on. The wild Arizona walnut, found in desert riparian areas, has been used as a rootstalk for domesticated walnut trees to increase their tolerance to drought and diseases.
Currently, 44 percent of the world’s food is produced in arid and semi-arid lands. According to a 2017 report from the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, “80 percent of global cropland and 60 percent of global food output could be markedly affected by climate change, particularly in arid and semi-arid areas.” Riordan said protecting desert-adapted CWRs will be particularly important in a changing climate.
One issue complicating the use of wild relatives as a solution, however, is that these banks of genetic resilience are under threat through habitat destruction and global biodiversity loss caused by development and climate change. A 2020 paper in the National Academy of Sciences’ journal found that over half of the 600 CWRs identified in the study were either endangered or threatened. When a wild species goes extinct, so do the evolutionary traits that have allowed it to survive environmental extremes.
While the momentum for studying and conserving crop wild relatives has grown in recent years, few CWR species are protected at either a state or federal level. Arizona has been at the forefront of conservation efforts, protecting CWRs on public lands like the WCBA, at botanical gardens like at the Desert Museum, and at seed banks.
Heat Stress, Water Scarcity, and the Need to Adapt
Last year was the world’s hottest summer on record; in Arizona, temperatures routinely exceeded 110 degrees. Across the state, crops withered in the punishing dry heat, and farmers left land fallow amid statewide water cutbacks driven by a historic megadrought.
“These last few years are indicative of the sorts of extreme conditions that are increasingly becoming the new norm,” Riordan said. “Arizona farmers have always experienced periodic drought and bouts of heat, but these events are happening with greater frequency, becoming more severe, and lasting longer.”
At the same time, other sources of water are becoming increasingly scarce in the west, putting stress on farmers and making some crops untenable. Last year, Arizona’s allotment from the Colorado River was cut by 21 percent.
“These last few years are indicative of the sorts of extreme conditions that are increasingly becoming the new norm.”
Benjamin Ruddell, director of the National Water-Economy Project, said that Colorado River water shortages left large areas of farmland in Arizona unsowed, a bellwether of things to come. “Up to 40 percent of farmland has been fallowed in some parts of Arizona,” he wrote in an email. Additionally, in some parts of the Southwest, states are paying farmers to fallow their fields to save water.
According to the Arizona Department of Water Resources, three quarters of Arizona’s total water supply is used for agriculture. “It’s going to be increasingly less feasible to irrigate things,” said Riordan. “If you’re not relying on surface flows, you’re relying on fossil water [groundwater], and we don’t have enough rain to be recharging.”
Dr. Michael Kotutwa Johnson, a Hopi dryland farmer and academic, pointed out that for millennia, Hopi farmers have successfully farmed, without irrigation, on ancestral lands that receive an average of 10 inches of rain or less per year. Farmers plant seeds deep in the soil, use passive rainwater harvesting, and rely on hardy desert-adapted seeds. “Our seeds are very resilient,” said Johnson. “They are just amazing in the way they can survive heat and lack of irrigation.”
Johnson said that unlike conventional farming, every aspect of Hopi farming has been refined to retain soil moisture with agricultural practices and crops that fit the environment, not the other way around.
Counter to this approach, many crops grown in Arizona require vast amounts of water and are maladapted to the environment, Johnson said. “As the temperature increases in Arizona, more water will be needed for commodity crops like cotton and alfalfa,” he said. “Those two crops are not place-based and will require even more water in the future.”
For Johnson, statewide water scarcity will require a move away from these water-thirsty crops towards desert-adapted varieties. “We need crops that use less water,” he said.
“Our seeds are very resilient. They are just amazing in the way they can survive heat and lack of irrigation.”
Author and ethnobotanist Gary Nabhan has been studying crop wild relatives for over 50 years. According to Nabhan, plant breeders and agronomists have been slow to accept the fact that we need desert-adapted crops, even as all signs point to a hotter, dryer future. “For nearly a century, crop wild relatives were neglected because plant breeders did not need drought and heat tolerance as long as they had plenty of irrigation water,” said Nabhan.
As a university student in the late ‘70s, Nabhan recalls a professor explaining why desert-adapted crops were unnecessary. “‘The more water you put on a crop, the more yield you get. We have the water, so why would you want to go back?’” said Nabhan of the conversation. “I mean, it’s just amazing in retrospect that he said that to me in 1976. [They saw] water as unlimited.”
With growing heat stress and water scarcity, breeders will increasingly need the genetics from their desert-adapted cousins to survive. “Wild crop relatives will be the only alternative to deal with climatic changes on two fifths to one half of the continental U.S.,” said Nabhan about the impact of global warming on our semi-arid and arid lands.
Nationally, the Botanic Garden Conservation International (BGCI) and the U.S. Botanic Garden (USBG) are working to increase the number of crop wild relatives at botanical gardens to fill gaps in gene bank collection and maintain samples from wild populations.
But while some are working to identify and protect CWRs, Nabhan believes much more needs to be done. “Federal agencies have hardly ever invested time or funds in their protection or management,” he said.
Protecting and Breeding CRWs
Access to the critical traits crop wild relatives possess requires protection both in the wild and in the lab, said Riordan and the BRN’s McNelis.
Both are proponents of a “trans-situ” approach to CWR conservation, or the combination of in-situ (on-site) protection of plants in their native habitats and ex-situ (off-site) conservation at seedbanks, gene banks, and gardens. “We have these important efforts to conserve them, both through protecting their wild habitats and through these backup collections,” said Riordan.
Once researchers identify a desirable trait, breeders can cross pollinate the CWR with a domesticated crop. “The more genetically related the CWR and crop, the easier this is to do,” said the USDA’s Greene.
Examples of wild and domesticated forms of crops. The first image of each row is the wild relative. a) teosinte and maize (Zea mays); b) chilli pepper (Capsicum annuum); c) common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris); d) cotton (Gossypium hirsutum). (Images CC-licensed, from Botanical Sciences 95(3):345).
Past examples include breeding wild wheat with domesticated varieties to boost disease resistance. Wild relatives of potatoes have been used to increase frost resistance and blight—the cause of the devastating Irish potato famine in the mid-19th century. Sunflower wild relatives “have contributed genes for disease resistance, salt tolerance, and resistance to herbicides,” said Greene. Another notable success story was the introduction of hardy American grape rootstalks to help counter Phylloxera, an aphid-like insect that nearly wiped out European Vitis vinifera.
Nabhan said root stalks from crop wild relatives, such as grapes, hold vast potential as well. “Using hardy wild root stalks on grapes, apples, raspberries, blackberries is really viable,” he said. This is already being done on a commercial level. . . . It’s not pie in the sky.”
Increasingly scientists are using molecular techniques to bring adaptive traits from CWRs into domesticated species through precise genome editing. Using CRISPR, researchers have modified genes from wild tomato relatives to increase fruit size and nutrition in an engineered tomato crop.
A Botanical Area and a Desert Museum
In Arizona’s Wild Chili Botanical Area, unique regulations help protect the CWRs, including an exclusion on cattle, limits on extractive industries such as mining, and the banning of road construction.
To identify CWRs in the area during the recent survey, McNelis explored a remote portion of the Coronado National Forest, helping identify high-priority species such as canyon grapes, desert cotton, black walnut trees, tepary beans, and wild relatives of corn and wheat. She found many species surviving in nutrient-poor soils, growing on rock faces, or in overgrazed and disturbed environments.
“It really does speak to what persists in this landscape,” said McNelis. Her experience reinforced the importance of preserving CWR in what she described as an era of mass extinction. “The genetic material holds so much potential for creating more resilient crops in a world where extreme climate events are likely to occur.”
Meanwhile, at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, Riordan is heading up a first-of-its-kind research program to conserve arid-adapted crop wild relatives. The 98-acre complex is a combination of zoo, aquarium, natural history museum, and botanical garden that includes one the largest living collections of crop wild relatives in the United States.
“The Desert Museum is leading an effort to better understand and conserve the CWRs of the Sonoran Desert region by documenting important species, developing conservation priorities, and building partnerships,” including a collaboration with the Desert Museum in Phoenix and the Chicago Botanical Garden, said Riordan of the project.
“Botanical gardens like this one play a key role in conservation,” said Riordan, as we walk past a mountain lion in the mountain woodland exhibit. Organized into various biomes of the Sonoran Desert, the museum has over 200 CWRs in its live plant and seed bank collections. One-hundred-thirty crop wild relatives are grown outdoors in the climate of southern Arizona, where desert adaptions can be maintained.
“We need to keep that selective pressure of the heat and the drought on the plants,” said Riordan, pausing at a grapevine covering a section of rock wall. This crop wild relative, Vitis arizonica, grows in the canyons of Arizona and is being studied for its potential to improve disease resistance in wine grapes.
Other important CWRs at the museum include relatives of domesticated beans, sunflowers, and peppers–including the chiltepin, which also thrives in the mountains and canyons of northern Mexico. “I picked them from the side of the road in Sonora,” she said, opening a plastic container with a few dozen sun-dried samples. The fiery peppers have a fruity vegetable aroma and a smoky sweet heat that builds and lingers.
Later, we pass a wild tepary bean plant, the ancestor of the legume domesticated by Indigenous Sonorans many centuries ago.
From her satchel, she takes out a container of the small speckled wild beans, along with another bag holding a dozen or so brown domesticated versions. These cultivated teparies are nutrient and protein dense and far more climate resilient than the much more common pinto bean.
“[This is] a result of thousands of years of native desert peoples domesticating a wild plant into an incredibly heat-hardy and drought tolerant crop,” said Riordan.
Further along the path is a desert cotton plant—long utilized by indigenous Sonorans. A ProPublica investigation found that conventional cotton grown in Arizona requires six times more water than lettuce and 60 percent more than wheat. Its existence is made possible by massive federal subsidies and billions of gallons of water imported into Arizona to grow cotton as well as water-thirsty crops such as alfalfa, corn, and pecans.
Though it bears a close physical resemblance to domesticated cotton, the drought-tolerant shrub growing in the botanical garden requires a fraction of the water. This species, she explained, has been researched for “drought resistance, salt tolerance, pest resistance, and crop quality.” It is also critically endangered.
“It’s thousands of years of adaptation,” said Riordan. “When it’s gone, it’s gone.”
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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 The Iowa Trout Stream at the Center of a Feedlot Fight appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>In 2017, Larry Stone heard whispers about construction taking place near his home in Clayton County, Iowa. A retired photographer, Stone pulled up to the site, located around 20 miles away from where he lives, and began taking photos.
“A guy came roaring up on his little ATV and said, ‘Hey, what are you doing?’” Stone recalled recently.
His curiosity eventually landed Stone a tour of the project: Walz Energy, a joint venture between a cattle-feeding operation and an energy company. The idea, the manager explained, was that Supreme Beef would run a feedlot, and Feeder Creek would supply a biodigester, a machine that would process manure and capture the resulting methane to be sold as energy.
“The [manager] said, ‘This is not a feedlot; it’s a renewable energy project. We need at least 10,000 cows to get enough manure for the amount of methane we want to generate,’” Stone said.
“Anything that is a contaminant on the surface can get down into the fractured bedrock very easily and very quickly contaminate the groundwater.”
The biodigester project fell apart, but the plan for a 11,000-head feedlot moved forward. Without the biodigester, Supreme Beef—which is perched on the headwaters of Bloody Run Creek, a spring-fed trout stream filled year-round with rainbow, brook, and brown trout—had to come up with a plan to get rid of its manure, known as a nutrient management plan (NMP), which would need to be approved by Iowa’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR).
According to the DNR, any open feedlot operation with 1,000 or more animal units needs to submit a plan to ensure the operation does not over-apply manure to surrounding cropland.
Seven years ago, the Iowa Sierra Club, the Iowa chapter of Trout Unlimited, and a group of concerned citizens formed the Committee to Save Bloody Run in response to that plan, which they saw as scientifically incomprehensible. Since then, the committee has been opposing Supreme Beef’s operations and fighting the feedlot’s manure management plans.
The scrutiny of these plans is timely, as Iowa now has the second highest cancer incidence in the country, and it is the only state where rates are increasing. Many cancers are linked to nitrates, which are found in drinking water contaminated with manure or nitrogen fertilizer, and advocates are concerned about the link.
The fight to keep Iowa waterways clean is decades long—and the increase in concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) there is only making the fight more difficult. Each year, animals in CAFOs produce twice as much waste as the entire U.S. population. Although the state is known for hog production—hogs outnumber people 7:1—the number of cattle in Iowa feedlots is increasing, too. And for good reason: Cattle is the top-ranked agricultural commodity in the U.S.
The fight is especially contentious in northeast Iowa because the region is unlike the rest of the state, where fertile layers of soil were left behind from glacial drift and now act as a filter for water that moves down into the aquifers below. Northeast Iowa’s Driftless region has not seen glacial drift in over 2 million years.
An aerial view of the Supreme Beef facility taken by drone. (Photo credit: David Thoreson)
Chris Jones, a retired University of Iowa research engineer and the author of The Swine Republic, explains that because of this difference in the soil, the region has never been well suited for large-scale industrial agriculture. “Anything that is a contaminant on the surface can get down into the fractured bedrock very easily and very quickly contaminate the groundwater,” he said. “So, when we try to farm at these very large scales . . . that presents a real acute and chronic hazard to the water resources in that area.”
According to the committee, Supreme Beef likely first moved cattle to its farm in 2021, when it was operating on a NMP approved by the DNR, but that plan was later thrown out after the Committee to Save Bloody Run challenged it in court. In November 2023, DNR accepted a new NMP from Supreme Beef, despite years of opposition.
Advocates say they’re up against collusion between the DNR and the Iowa Legislature, which they believe to be doing everything in its power to keep the cattle feedlot open—regardless of its impact on water quality. DNR claims it is simply following standard procedure.
Now, the committee is attempting to defend against agricultural pollution using a new approach: It’s taking the DNR to court over its water use permit laws.
“All those cattle drink a lot of water,” said Jones, who is an expert witness in the case. “There has been some concern that the Supreme Beef well would rob water from other nearby wells that serve both homesteads and that are used for watering livestock.”
One resident who lives not far from the Supreme Beef operation, Tammy Thompson, claims in the suit that she needed to drill a new, deeper well because their water was contaminated.
“DNR strongly believes that the water use permit should be renewed. They feel that it’s not their responsibility or obligation to determine how the water is being used and how that use might impact the environment,” said Jones.
Supreme Beef did not respond to Civil Eats for comment for this story,
Origins of the Current Fight
Retired chemist Steve Veysey has been fishing in Bloody Run Creek for decades. The creek is 50-70 degrees Fahrenheit year-round, and thanks to natural springs, it never freezes over. He also likes the fact that it’s shallow enough to wade in.
In 2006, Veysey was one of the plaintiffs in a group that sued the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for not requiring the state of Iowa to enforce standards in the antidegradation policy nestled within the Clean Water Act. The policy states that “existing instream water uses and the level of water quality necessary to protect the existing uses shall be maintained and protected.” Veysey and other plaintiffs claimed Iowa regulations did not ensure this.
“In terms of water quality, there was the presumption of crap instead of the presumption of quality,” Veysey said. “And we won. EPA forced the state, essentially, to adopt new rules that presumed a stream or river segment had beneficial uses unless it was proven otherwise.”
As a part of that victory, the state created a list of “Outstanding Iowa Waters” deemed worthy of protection. Bloody Run Creek was one of them.
Then, in 2017, over a decade after the Clean Water Act victory, Veysey found himself again advocating to get the government to keep Bloody Run clean.
“There were a couple of, I would call them, con men, who went to the Walz family, which had a very small cattle operation at that time. They convinced them they could make lots of money by expanding their operation and having it be a methane digester and a waste energy operation,” said Wally Taylor, legal chair of the Iowa Sierra Club who argued the antidegradation case in 2006.
Under the initial biodigester plan, the DNR permitted Walz Energy as an industrial wastewater treatment facility. During that construction, they created and received permitting for an industrial wastewater treatment lagoon. According to Veysey, when the biodigester plan stalled, the feedlot repurposed the basin as a 39-million-gallon earthen lagoon to house raw manure right on top of the Bloody Run watershed.
In a 2021 petition for judicial review submitted in Iowa District Court, the Committee to Save Bloody Run argued that the lagoon directly defied state’s definition of an “open feedlot structure,” but due to a technicality, which states that open feedlots can use “alternative technology” to “dispose of settled open feedlot effluent,” the judge ruled that it was legal.
“If manure gets in a stream [and] decays, it sucks the oxygen out of the water,” Veysey said. “Now, all of a sudden, the dissolved oxygen that fish need to survive goes below a certain threshold and your fish die.”
Steve Veysey fishes for trout in Bloody Run Creek. (Photo credit: Larry Stone)
Pollution by way of the Supreme Beef operation is not purely hypothetical. In 2018, the Iowa DNR fined Walz Energy $10,000 for illegally discharging stormwater into Bloody Run Creek while building the feedlot. They were fined again for other violations, and in 2018, the DNR attorney recommended the case be taken up by the Iowa attorney general’s office.
Then, in an unusual move, the Iowa Environmental Protection Commission (EPC), a long-standing group comprised of Iowans appointed by the governor, decided to allow the DNR to resolve the problem on its own, and gave the agency full jurisdiction over Supreme Beef, without an attorney general investigation.
A DNR for Whom?
In September 2023, Supreme Beef submitted what would become its final NMP and, after multiple revisions, in November, the DNR accepted a revised plan it never opened for public comment.
The day after the plan was accepted, Taylor, legal chair of the Iowa Sierra Club, said Supreme Beef began spreading manure onto nearby farm fields—a move that members of the committee worry will oversaturate crops and result in the remaining manure leaking into the headwaters of Bloody Run.
The advocates say the pattern is part of a familiar history. “We think that the DNR gave Supreme Beef a heads-up ahead of time before they even actually approved the plan,” said Taylor. “The DNR has, for years, taken a hands-off approach on animal feeding operations and let them get by with lots of things.”
“The DNR has, for years, taken a hands-off approach on animal feeding operations and let them get by with lots of things.”
Back in 2021, open records requests filed by a reporter from the Cedar Rapids Gazette confirmed that Senator Dan Zumbach, the father-in-law of Jared Walz, a co-owner of Supreme Beef, worked with the DNR to find ways to get the plant approved. Zumbach, who is vice chair of the Iowa Senate Appropriations Committee, has received campaign donations from Monsanto, Bayer, Koch Industries, Smithfield, and DuPont, all large agribusinesses that might impact his decision. Zumbach did not respond to Civil Eats for request for comment for this story.
In 2022, Veysey, Taylor, Stone, and Jessica Mazour submitted an ethics complaint to the Iowa Senate against Zumbach. They referred to emails between Iowa government officials accessed through a public record request to argue that Zumbach was misusing his power as a state senator to assist with his son-in-law’s feedlot.
The complaint also noted various instances where Veysey attempted to verify the math in the NMP and said he found faulty calculations, which the group believes ultimately allows Supreme Beef to “significantly underestimate the number of crop acres they would really need for manure application.”
“The mistake was clearly pointed out to DNR staff during the public comment period by many reviewers but was ignored,” the complaint read. It was ultimately dismissed by the Iowa Senate.
In response to these claims and the others in this story, the DNR told Civil Eats that it “approved the NMP under the parameters set forth in state law and administrative rules” and then referred to a set of specific requirements and environmental protection codes.
It has been widely reported that Zumbach likely used his position in the legislature to pressure Chris Jones to stop writing his University of Iowa blog, which featured his research on Iowa water quality data. As Robert Leonard reported in Deep Midwest, Jones alleges that the pressure came with an implied threat that funding for monitoring systems could be impacted.
A few weeks later, Zumbach co-sponsored Senate File 558, which was signed by the governor in June 2023 and effectively shifted funding away from water sensors put in place to measure water pollution. Earlier that year, a sensor Jones had installed at Bloody Run Creek measured levels as high as 23.9 mg of nitrate and nitrite per liter. The EPA’s safe drinking water standard is 10 mg per liter, and new research shows that any more than 5 mg puts people in danger
“This was sort of a brazen abuse of power,” said Jones. “He’s defunding the water quality sensors that are immediately downstream from the Supreme Beef operation.
After previous efforts to push back against Supreme Beef’s NMPs proved unsuccessful, members of the Committee to Save Bloody Run are now involved in a lawsuit against the DNR focused on water use permit regulations.
Attorney James Larew is arguing that the DNR did not consider the public interest—which included around 70 comments in opposition—when it renewed Supreme Beef’s water use permit, which allows it to withdraw an anticipated 21.9 million gallons per year. Goat farmer Tammy Thompson, whose farm is located approximately 500 feet away from the feedlot, declared in the suit that “the contamination was so bad that it prohibited us from being able to move forward with our entrepreneurial endeavor of selling goat milk.”
“If you’re doing something right, Satan’s going to keep coming after you. I don’t understand why they keep coming after Supreme Beef.”
The approach to regulation—or lack thereof—is familiar to those who have been watching the farm landscape in Iowa. “There’s only one instance that we could find where an application for a water use permit had ever been denied by the Department of Natural Resources,” said Larew. “We’re talking tens of thousands going back into the 1950s, never challenged. The statutes themselves indicate that it’s not just the quantity of water the department should be concerned with but also these larger public interests.
While Supreme Beef did not respond to Civil Eats’ request for comment, at the hearing in the DNR building in the beginning of February, co-owner Jared Walz expressed frustration about the latest lawsuit.
“If you’re doing something right, Satan’s going to keep coming after you,” Walz said. “I don’t understand why they keep coming after Supreme Beef.”
The Committee to Save Bloody, however, doesn’t intend to stop fighting for clean water. The seven-year battle has been driven by retirees hoping for a better future for Iowa waterways. It’s an uphill battle, but the stakes are high, said Veysey. “If we can’t protect the best [waters] we have, we can’t protect any of it.”
Some farmers are also resisting the expansion of large agribusinesses like Supreme Beef. As Aaron Lehman, president of the Iowa Farmer’s Union, put it, “Food is being controlled by folks who have very little concern for our communities and our landscapes.”
Iowa lakes and streams feed into the Mississippi River, which flows thousands of miles across the country before reaching the Gulf of Mexico, where agricultural runoff is a major contributor to hypoxia in the dead zone.
“Our waterways do not stop at the state line,” Lehman said.
The post The Iowa Trout Stream at the Center of a Feedlot Fight appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>The post Walmart Heirs Bet Big on Journalism appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>This article was co-produced and co-published with Nonprofit Quarterly.
From vast riparian watersheds to fisheries to croplands, few corners of the nation’s—and the world’s—food systems have escaped the eyes of the Walton family. The children and grandchildren of Walmart co-founder Sam Walton have long embedded their interests, and, more importantly, their money, among industry groups, policymakers, academics, activists, and NGOs active in the future of food. Now, they’re expanding their philanthropy to news organizations that report on food, agriculture, and the environment and, in turn, amplifying the family’s other efforts.
The Waltons aren’t the only philanthropists pumping money into the news industry, and the family, America’s richest, gives even larger sums to other interests. But with increasing emphasis over the past decade, the Walton Family Foundation and individual family foundations have directed tens of millions of dollars to support journalists, newsrooms, and journalism organizations whose coverage overlaps with subjects about which Walton family members are passionate—and passionately funding.
Aside from the Walton Family Foundation, Walton family members also give to causes and to journalism through other foundations including the Catena Foundation, Builders Initiative, the Penner Family Foundation, the Wend Fund, and the Zoma Foundation.
Journalism is welcoming the new infusion of philanthropy. Since the decline of the industry’s ad-driven business model was hastened by the Great Recession, more than half of newspapers have shuttered across America and the industry has shed more than 20,000 jobs. Thirteen years ago, fewer than a dozen digital news nonprofits led the charge to shift news to a nonprofit model. Now, there are more than 400 digital news nonprofits nationwide, supported by an ever-growing coalition of philanthropies that include the Walton charities.
It’s not just digital news nonprofits that benefit from their giving; the Waltons also give to legacy newspapers, websites, magazines, radio stations, and trade journals covering such subjects as agriculture, water policy, fisheries, conservation, and climate. That giving has grown even as the family has increased its funding of groups that discuss, study, or promote policy related to these subjects and often drive the news that Walton-funded outlets cover.
There’s more. As Civil Eats has documented, Walmart, the family business, has over the past two decades used its economic and political muscle to lower the bar for what qualifies as “organic” foods and “sustainable seafood” and the Walton Family Foundation has also supported seafood sustainability projects that didn’t ensure safe practices for Central American lobster divers.
Notably, Walton family journalism philanthropy is focused in overlapping areas. The foundation board is legally independent of Walmart. And grants are promised with no strings attached. Nonetheless, with journalists accepting hundreds of millions of dollars in Walton philanthropy, it is important to consider how news coverage may be affected.
Indeed, Walton family funding is so widespread that environment-focused reporters working for nonprofit news organizations funded by Walton philanthropy often cover, interview, or analyze organizations and individuals who are also grantees of the family’s foundation and/or family members’ individual foundations. As the field of potential sources not supported by the Waltons narrows, reporters risk tilting discussions about sustainability, resource management, conservation, or other subjects toward solutions favored by the family’s philanthropies.
“The Walton Family Foundation works from the belief that fact-based, independent journalism is essential to making sure communities have the information they need on the issues that matter most,” said Walton Family Foundation spokesman Mark Shields in a statement to Civil Eats. “Journalists and outlets—including Civil Eats—who receive support from the foundation have full editorial control over their content.” (Civil Eats does not accept grants and donations from the Waltons or their associated charities, although Civil Eats has indirectly received such funding through its work with other partners.)
Observers of the industry, however, are concerned about a new era in journalism in which a limited class of grantmakers is defining narratives and the flow of information.
Will Sennott, a staff reporter with the nonprofit Massachusetts newsroom The New Bedford Light, said reporting on fisheries in New England is complicated because “the world of fisheries policy of today is one that was molded by the Walton Family Foundation.” He said the foundation’s prior grants to NGOs enabled its priorities to seep deep into policymaking through the appointments of its grantees to the regulatory councils that govern American fisheries.
Now, “it’s hard to even extract their influence from fisheries policy,” Sennott said. “When it comes to groundfish especially, all fisheries policy today is based entirely on the kind of policies they peddled about 10-12 years ago.”
The Walton Family Foundation and some individual Walton family members’ own foundations continue to support organizations and media, including trade journals and industry newsletters, that target agriculture and fisheries. They have made engagement on “restorative aquaculture” one of their philanthropic planks, funding numerous ventures on both sides of the notebook.
“When it comes to groundfish especially, all fisheries policy today is based entirely on the kind of policies [Walmart and the Walton family] peddled about 10-12 years ago.”
For example, Lukas Walton chairs the family foundation’s environmental program and, since 2021, has supported journalism-related nonprofits—such as Chicago Public Media, Grist, Sentient Media, and the Reader Institute for Community Journalism—through his private foundation, Builders Initiative. Builders Initiative also gives extensively to seafood and ocean conservation related programs.
Much of Builders’ grantmaking in these areas also supports Walton Family Foundation beneficiaries like the Nature Conservancy and the World Wildlife Fund for programs focused on such subjects as “market-based solutions for Kelp Recovery” and “Seaweed and Mollusks aquaculture,” as well as the “aquaculture media strategy” of seafood advocacy organization, Stronger America Through Seafood, Inc.
The Walton Family Foundation also supports SeafoodSource, the leading industry publication for seafood news. It’s hard for SeafoodSource, or anyone discussing sustainable seafood, to ignore the Walton Family Foundation and other Walton family organizations and interests and the perceptions readers might have about their influence on SeafoodSource’s coverage.
“That’s a really tough one because Walton has their fingers in almost every nonprofit in sustainable seafood,” said Ned Daly, who is a contributing editor at SeafoodSource and a sustainability strategist for its parent company, Diversified Communications. Daly manages grants made by the Walton Family Foundation in support of SeafoodSource’s “Seafood2030” platform. “I think it would be hard to not engage with those groups or work with those groups but in terms of special treatment, I think it’s really more what’s newsworthy and what’s going to drive interest in stories.”
Daly, who writes about sustainability, says the Walton Family Foundation doesn’t have a say in the publication’s coverage, much like other funders of Diversified Communications’ products as well as advertisers in SeafoodSource. But foundations and nonprofits in general, Daly said, do occasionally benefit from blurred lines in Diversified’s content, if to a lesser degree at SeafoodSource.
For the perennially underfunded business of journalism, the idea of using editorial firewalls has served as the best defense against funders seeking to influence reporting. But in the case of Walmart, the Walton Family Foundation, and its family members’ many individual foundations, the funding can saturate an entire region or subject, meaning that reporters doing their jobs simply can’t avoid the Walton family’s influence.
For the perennially underfunded business of journalism, the idea of using editorial firewalls has served as the best defense against funders seeking to influence reporting.
“It’s a sin of omission, not of commission,” said Joel Dyer, the former editor of The Boulder Weekly in Colorado. Dyer spoke to Civil Eats at length about the challenges of reporting on water issues in areas where the Walton family and their foundations have extended their philanthropic nets.
“It’s problematic,” Dyer said. “It’s beyond problematic. In essence there is evidence of oil companies paying for energy coverage, the Waltons paying for water coverage. Nothing actually sort of pisses me off more. Journalists of all people know better than to say, ‘Well, hey, it doesn’t influence what I write.’ We’ve been covering academics that take money from Monsanto and good lord everybody, and we know how much it influences what they do. And journalism is no different.”
Louisiana-based photojournalist Julie Dermansky shares the view that editorial firewalls don’t sufficiently prevent meddling by newsroom funders. Fishermen and others in the Mississippi Delta’s seafood industry have lost all trust in local media, she said, because Walton-backed media and the NGOs working in the area, including many backed by the Waltons, combine to amplify narratives that drown out and marginalize fishermen’s views and avoid reporting that is at cross-purposes with Walton aims.
“I think it’s naive to think you could take massive amounts of money from an organization and then write about other organizations it gives money to,” Dermansky said.
She said fishermen are at odds with a Mississippi River diversion project that’s supported by the Waltons and environmental groups in the delta. In an article published last year in DeSmog, Dermansky notes local fishermen’s belief that the Walton Family Foundation and Walmart’s interests align with the oil and gas industry in the Gulf: By implementing the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion project, independent fishermen’s livelihoods will be destroyed, they say, while also removing a check-and-balance their presence has on offshore oil and gas drilling in the same region, she said.
“I think it’s naive to think you could take massive amounts of money from an organization and then write about other organizations it gives money to.”
The Louisiana fishing industry is one of the last substantial, competitive, independent fishing industries in the world, she said, a dynamic that challenges Walmart’s market dominance. “So you get rid of them, and then they’ve got the market,” said Dermansky, referring to Walton family interests. “There’s an overlap with the desire of oil and gas and the Walton foundation in the case of the Mississippi River because fishermen are a pest for the oil and gas industry because they’re the eyes and ears” on the waterway, she said.
Striking a balance between funding journalism and continuing to use that journalism to hold the powerful accountable is an ongoing struggle. Sara Shipley Hiles, executive director of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, a reporting project based at the University of Missouri that is funded in large part by the Walton Family Foundation, said concerns about the Waltons’ involvement are a reality for newsrooms.
“These issues are not new and they’re not exclusive to nonprofit journalism,” Shipley Hiles said. “Every business, nonprofit or for-profit, have funding sources. We all have to answer for that. Civil Eats has to answer for that.”
“The Walton Family Foundation has been an outstanding funder,” said Shipley Hiles. “From the beginning we were clear that we had to have editorial independence and they did not push back against that. They’ve funded journalists enough now and I think folks who came before us were very clear on that. I can thank all the previous grantees as well for making it very clear that this is how journalism works. Without editorial independence, we have no credibility. We absolutely, fundamentally, must have editorial independence.”
Journalism produced by Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk reporters includes disclosures of Walton Family Foundation funding in part to address concerns about funder influence on reporting.
But what are the impacts on public understanding of complex issues, and on the availability of reporting on important topics, when one interlinked set of funders is so omnipresent? If a reporter can’t find a reputable source without ties to Walton money, how does that inform what news gets published?
History Repeats, in New Ways
Jim Friedlich is executive director and CEO at the Lenfest Institute, a philanthropy that exclusively supports local journalism. He says the tension between journalism and its funding is not at all new. He said, when done well, nonprofit journalism is “non-partisan, inclusive, and reflective of a broad array of voices across the political spectrum or field of ideas.”
Friedlich said Lenfest works to support multiple news organizations in one place to promote a diversity of ideas and concepts, and points to two examples: Spotlight PA, a nonpartisan statewide news organization in Pennsylvania, which distributes government accountability journalism for free. And Every Voice, Every Vote, which covered recent city elections in Philadelphia through grants to 25 different news organizations from nearly every neighborhood, ethnic, and racial group or political affiliation. “The effect was a broad and echo-free journalistic exploration of the issues at hand,” Friedlich added.
Most philanthropy in journalism doesn’t fit that profile, instead funding issue-based work in areas where foundations and donors also concentrate their giving.
“If your first initiative is education, then your second should be news and information around those topics,” said Tyler Tokarczyk, a senior program officer at the Inasmuch Foundation, which focuses on journalism and education. “You should be looking to elevate the conversations around issues in your community that are important to the foundation. I think that’s very common. The need for news and information in nonprofit journalism is pretty overwhelming across the country.”
Indeed, the need for support for local journalism is so acute that a coalition of philanthropies recently came together to seed a $500 million effort called Press Forward to put more reporters in underserved communities.
It is in funding-saturated areas where the sheer volume of giving presents new challenges. In the case of the Waltons, seafood and watershed programs are densely packed with Walton-backed initiatives, as is the attending journalism.
For example, the Walton Family Foundation has had a years-long relationship with the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ), an organization that has long attempted to mirror news outlets’ “church and state” separations between editorial and business operations. Those separations have become more complicated as SEJ funders, including the Walton Family Foundation and groups to which the family has heavily donated, have become more visibly involved in the organization’s events and publications.
Civil Eats is a member of SEJ, and while Civil Eats has striven to not accept funding from the Walton Family Foundation or the individual family foundations, it has been the recipient of grants that might have been funded by Walton Family Foundation donations.
For example, in partnership with Earth Island Journal, Civil Eats produced this story, which was supported by an SEJ grant, and was likely originally sourced from Walton Family Foundation funding, unbeknownst to Civil Eats. Despite some newsrooms’ stringent efforts to avoid Walton Family Foundation funding, it remains widespread in nonprofit news.
Since 2013, SEJ has received more than $1.8 million from the Walton Family Foundation to help develop specialized environmental reporting initiatives and support conferences and other events. SEJ’s former executive director, Meaghan Parker, insisted on a stark line between the fundraising that she oversees and editorial operations, like the content of its conferences and publications, which is managed by member volunteers.
“I talk with the money people,” Parker said, who stepped down from the executive director position at the end of 2023 and is now a senior advisor to SEJ. During her time as executive director, she added that she turned down “huge” sums from potential funders, and that every grant SEJ receives has clearly spelled-out stipulations about its strict firewalls. “In every grant agreement that SEJ has with any funder, we have a line in there that says the donor and the funder have no right of interference or the review in editorial decisions made by the SEJ,” she said.
The Walton Family Foundation’s Shields confirms that journalists who receive support from the foundation have full editorial control, and that the foundation’s priority is fact-based information on important topics.
“For example, in the early phase of the pandemic, the Walton Family Foundation contributed funds to the Society of Environmental Journalists’ Rapid Response emergency story grants,” Shields said in a statement. “Those funds were especially important for environmental journalists at a time when an unprecedented number of jobs were being cut, leaving fewer reporters to cover critical issues.”
Flooding the Colorado River with Walton Funding
Time will tell how much journalism—and the public—will benefit from philanthropic support, but the public relations benefit for donors is clearer. Philanthropic support of newsrooms and reporters is an explicitly stated piece of the Walton Family Foundation’s strategic planning since 2021, and the foundation has been laying the groundwork for this strategy for the better part of a decade.
Perhaps nowhere is the strategic intent more evident than in the family’s myriad investments in the Colorado River Basin, whose waters and surrounding lands are—and have long been—among North America’s most prized and, increasingly, most imperiled, natural resources, and in reporting about the basin. The Walton Family Foundation, Catena Foundation, Wend Foundation, and the Penner Family Foundation (the family foundation of Carrie Walton Penner and her husband, Greg Penner) have all funded journalism in the basin.
These foundations, as well as Zoma Foundation and the Rob and Melani Walton Foundation, have all philanthropically supported other non-journalism initiatives in the basin, and many of the Walton family’s associated businesses have invested in the region.
Since 2016, the Walton Family Foundation has directed more than $200 million in funding to grantees both inside and outside journalism with emphasis on the Colorado River. They’ve been a crucial part of the conversation about the future of the river and the water it provides to the 38,900 farms that generate about $47 billion a year in economic impact.
The Waltons aren’t alone among large grantmakers interested in the Colorado River. For example, in 2016, the Walton Family Foundation formed the Water Funder Initiative in collaboration with six other philanthropies. That collaboration began with these philanthropies committing $10 million over five years to support restoration and management of California’s Salton Sea, an imperiled inland water body in California near the terminus of the Colorado.
Since 2016, the Walton Family Foundation has directed more than $200 million in funding to grantees both inside and outside journalism with emphasis on the Colorado River.
Since at least 2017, the Walton Family Foundation has given millions of dollars to the Water Funder Initiative by way of an Arabella Advisors-managed fund, the Windward Fund, which described its mission at the time as advancing “public awareness about conservation, climate, and environmental issues, sustainable food systems, and the protection of land, wildlife and natural resources.”
Arabella Advisors guides the philanthropy of other Walton family members’ foundations, often through such funds. At least three other members of the Water Funder Initiative gave through the Windward fund. (In 2022, Civil Eats received a $5,000 unrestricted grant from New Venture Fund, which is also managed by Arabella Advisors.)
The same year as the Salton Sea donation, the Water Funder Initiative published Toward Water Sustainability, which it summarized as a “Blueprint for Philanthropy.” This blueprint outlines six “funding action plans” for future water-related giving. One of these plans focused on “Communications and Political Will” and aimed to “identify near-term opportunities, such as expanded water journalism, to improve the field’s communications capacity, build political will, and cultivate diverse constituencies needed to support water reforms.”
The Waltons’ support of SEJ and their seeding of the Colorado River Basin and Mississippi reporting hubs suggest serious interest in how the public discusses the interplay between the human and natural world in the 21st century. One of the goals for the Walton Family Foundation’s most recent giving cycle: learning “how our journalism support could help us better serve communities that may not have access to trusted, accurate, and relevant information.”
That focus has continued through this year, as Walton Family Foundation Communications Director Daphne Moore wrote this November in a report reflecting on a year of community journalism grantmaking.
“We want to learn the most innovative and cost-effective ways to reach diverse sectors of communities through journalism and the news,” Moore wrote.
“I joked about it with a colleague that every time I do an interview, now my last question is, ‘We disclose funding relationships in our reporting, is any of your current work receiving funding from the Walton Family Foundation?’” said Luke Runyon, whose reporting on the Colorado River has been funded by Walton family money since 2017.
That year, Runyon launched the Colorado River Reporting Project at KUNC, a public radio station and NPR affiliate in Greeley, Colorado. Grant money from the Walton Family Foundation funded the position. In leaving KUNC in 2023 for his current position as co-director at the Water Desk, he joined an environmental journalism initiative that the Waltons played an integral role in launching.
Based at the University of Colorado in Boulder, the desk provides focused, ongoing coverage of water issues in the Western U.S., especially the Colorado River Basin and provides grants to reporters to execute that work. It was launched with a $700,000, two-year grant from the Walton Family Foundation, which made additional grants of $600,000 and $900,000 to the Water Desk in 2021 and 2023.
The Walton Family Foundation always respected the editorial control Runyon insisted on, he said. “There was never really an instance where I felt any sort of undue pressure on what to cover as a reporter.” He also made it a policy to disclose as best he could if a source took funding from the foundation as well.
Now that he’s out of the KUNC position, Runyon believes the transparency improved his reporting, after asking about the family’s involvement so regularly became his “running joke.” He told Civil Eats that there’s no avoiding the Waltons’ presence in the Colorado River Basin, whether through the Walton Family Foundation, individual Walton family members’ separate private foundations, or their business or personal interests, like rafting.
“I feel like I knew the landscape pretty well, but that was something that we felt was really important to tell people,” Runyon said. “Not just our relationship to this particular foundation, but also that some of the sources that we’re talking to also have this relationship.”
The ubiquity of Walton-related funding can muddy the waters for reporters covering the beat. A November 2023 article by Annie Ropeik in the SEJ’s online digital news magazine on approaches for reporting on environmental solutions and equity within watershed-level stories shows how pervasive this funding is.
The article itself is based on reporting for a day-long workshop Ropeik moderated before 2023’s SEJ conference in Boise, Idaho. It is a straightforward, thorough survey of the challenges facing watershed managers, conservation groups, and the reporters who cover these beats. However, the article features multiple perspectives from groups extensively funded by the Walton Family Foundation, from photography to quoted sources.
These include the Nature Conservancy (which also receives funding from multiple individual Walton family members’ philanthropies), the Mississippi River Cities and Towns Initiatives, which has received more than $1.1 million from the Walton Family Foundation since 2016, and the Colorado River Sustainability Campaign (CRSC), which is partially backed by the Walton Family Foundation and is also managed by Arabella Advisors.
Sources whose organizations receive significant Walton Family Foundation funding supplied nearly every comment in Ropeik’s piece while example coverage cited links to articles produced by Ropeik’s news organization, as well as the Walton-backed Colorado Water Desk, and their partner newsrooms. The piece’s accompanying images were also supplied by Lighthawk, a Grand Junction, Colorado-based organization that coordinates volunteer pilots and photographers to provide aerial photography to conservation groups. Lighthawk has received at least $300,000 from the Walton Family Foundation since 2018. Its photos have also frequently appeared in both Walton-funded news operations.
How can newsrooms track, much less disclose, all these connections in an era of shoestring budgets and widespread layoffs?
Shipley Hiles, of Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, said her organization has a robust fact-checking operation and constantly discusses ideas over Slack and other venues. “We have put our effort into good reporting, wherever that takes us,” she said. While the network fact checks every piece, she said it has not spent extensive time investigating how subjects of its coverage are funded.
“That would be a very difficult process to do if we had to investigate the funding of every source, unless it becomes a question or an issue,” she said. What matters more, she said, is diverse sources who have something unique to contribute to environmental and agricultural coverage.
When the Water Desk launched in 2019 amid a flurry of activity surrounding the Colorado River’s fate—and a flood of philanthropic investment from the Walton Family Foundation and other major donors—it continued a model for grantmaking toward environmental journalism the Walmart fortune’s heirs have been honing since at least 2013, when it began its support of coastal reporting initiatives focused on the Mississippi River Delta with grants supporting a coastal desk at WWNO and The Lens.
Mitch Tobin, a former consultant who edited the 2016 “Blueprint for Philanthropy” and helped the Water Funder Initiative identify how to deliver funding to journalism through interviews with newsrooms and journalists, took the helm when the Water Desk launched, with Runyon joining the team at the end of 2023. Tobin told Civil Eats that the Water Desk and other philanthropy-supported initiatives present a lot of opportunity to support public service journalism.
“It’s a win-win. They get to support something they think is important, journalists get to do the work that they want to do without any control by the funder or anyone breaching the editorial firewall,” he said. “There are innumerable examples, innumerable Pulitzer Prizes that you can point to that have been funded by philanthropy. And so clearly it works, provided there are guidelines and people are thoughtful and mindful of what they’re doing.”
Tobin said the Water Desk guarantees editorial transparency to its grantees, and vets grant applications from reporters and news organizations through review committees that have included fellow journalists and the Director of the Center for Environmental Journalism (CEJ), where the Water Desk is based. The work is then edited by the publications that accept the journalists’ stories. (Civil Eats, for example, received funding from the Water Desk to produce this story, which was not funded by Walton family donations.)
“Journalists, all journalists, decide on the proposals. We cut a check and we wish people well,” Tobin said. The Water Desk began producing its own reporting only after Runyon’s addition to the staff last fall.
Since its inception, the Water Desk has awarded 113 grants totaling $638,704 to journalists and newsrooms. Tobin said any reporting proposal related to water within the coverage area is eligible for funding. The Water Desk highlights its funders when seeking requests from proposals, and Tobin said he expects grantees will be mindful of who is funding the publications and sources they cite in their work as they report, and to be thoughtful about conflicts. “That’s basic journalism,” he said.
A Problem Bigger than the Waltons, and Bigger than the Colorado River
The influence of the Walton family on the food system is both ineffable and hard to understate—throughout our Walanthropy series, Civil Eats has shown how their philanthropy and business practices are shaping the food system. But stepping back puts the concern in a new light: The Waltons are among a class of billionaires who are reshaping the social, economic, and political landscape.
“We have a barbell class of these super rich tech billionaires who are funding media and influencing how we consume and share news without having any inclination to ensure that journalists are paid a living wage,” said Heidi Legg, a former fellow at the Future of Media Project at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University, whose research deeply documented funding in the news media. Legg has not conducted specific inquiries into Walton-related giving, but said that, in general, giving trends in nonprofit news are worrisome.
She points to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, Laurene Powell Jobs, Google, and Facebook as among the largest emerging media donors, competing with forces like Bloomberg, Sinclair, and Rupert Murdoch in a polarized media environment. While at Harvard, Legg created indexes to help readers navigate media ownership transparently in an era defined by large donors.
Legg says it is increasingly important for journalists to be transparent about funding in an era of influential donors. She echoed Runyon in saying that thoroughness in transparency is the best defense against conflicts of interest, or the appearance of such conflicts, when journalists accept philanthropy or source information from similarly financed networks.
“The Waltons have no intention of buying water rights so that the river can have more water. The only thing they’re trying to save is the economic vitality and the profit that can be made from the Colorado River.”
“The country has lost almost two-thirds of its newspaper journalists—43,000—since 2005,” Mark Shields, the senior communications officer at the Walton Family Foundation, told Civil Eats. “If philanthropy doesn’t support reporters who independently cover environmental issues, how will these stories get told?”
In the Colorado River Basin, Shields says, that means “promoting conservation and nature-based solutions that keep more water in the river. In the sustainable seafood space, that work focuses on supporting healthy ocean ecosystems and the communities that rely on them.”
Dyer, the former editor of The Boulder Weekly, said reporting on the Waltons’ influence on the future of the Colorado River is the most important story in the region. He said Walton philanthropy supports efforts to convert water rights into a market-based system and he believes Walton funding in journalism chills reporting on their initiatives. The effect is that it’s compromising newsrooms and journalists in the same manner that agribusiness dollars, such as from Monsanto, have compromised ag science and undermined academic research, he said.
“The Waltons have no intention of buying water rights so that the river can have more water. The only thing they’re trying to save is the economic vitality and the profit that can be made from the Colorado River.” He points to Imperial Valley farmers, crops grown along the river, and cities like Las Vegas that depend on Colorado River water as among those that will be impacted if water markets take hold.
While Walton money flows to journalism, “the journalists who say it’s not influencing their work aren’t lying in a sense. It’s not influencing the good work they’re doing on whatever tiny part of the Colorado River problem they’re doing,” Dyer said. “I have friends who are getting money from the Water Desk. Good lord, they are doing great work and they wouldn’t be surviving if they weren’t getting it. But none of them can do the story on the Waltons.”
“They’re just not addressing the biggest threat to the river,” he said, “which is turning it into a commercial stream of water. That’s the story that can’t be told.”
Bill Lascher was a member of the Society of Environmental Journalists from 2010-2017. Lee van der Voo, also a member of SEJ, contributed reporting. Lisa Held contributed research.
Civil Eats is a member of the Institute for Nonprofit News, which receives funding from the Walton Family Foundation. Civil Eats participates in News Match, an annual grantmaking INN program, but has not accepted offers of individual grants from the Walton Family Foundation via INN.
This article was updated to clarify when the Walton family began funding coastal reporting initiatives in the Mississippi River Delta region.
The post Walmart Heirs Bet Big on Journalism appeared first on Civil Eats.
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]]>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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]]>According to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) assessments, water pollution from the meat industry poses an urgent problem. The agency recently reported that more than half of the country’s rivers and streams are in poor condition due to nitrogen and phosphorous pollution from agriculture, which later contributes to dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere. Much of that pollution flows off farm fields, but the EPA’s data also shows the facilities that slaughter animals and process meat are the leading industrial source of phosphorous pollution and the second highest source of nitrogen.
However, tackling the problem won’t be straightforward. A new EPA proposal to significantly reduce water pollution from slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants is facing backlash from the meat industry as well as environmental groups, with one side expressing concerns about increased costs and the other worried that the agency may choose significantly weaker rules to minimize financial impacts on the industry.
“EPA’s continued failure to stand up against industry pressure ignores and perpetuates the potentially devastating impacts of industrial animal agriculture on our communities.”
In 1974, after the Clean Water Act was signed into law, the agency tried to tackle water pollution from meat processing for the first time. In 2004, it made a minimal update, but the current limits only apply to about 150 of the more than 5,000 facilities in the country, and they address nitrogen only, with no constraints on phosphorous. That lax approach to regulation prompted a lawsuit filed in 2019 by environmental groups, which then prompted the agency to begin the process of revising the standards in 2021.
However, after at least two years of work, instead of presenting one plan to bring the regulations in line with what the Clean Water Act requires, the EPA provided three options along a continuum. Now, the agency is taking public comments before deciding on which path to take.
Option 3, the most restrictive, would prevent 76 million pounds of nitrogen and 20 million pounds of phosphorous from entering waterways; option 1, the weakest, would prevent 9 million pounds of nitrogen and 8 million pounds of phosphorous.
Less pollution would be stopped in option 1 primarily because the rules would not apply to smaller processing plants, which currently send their wastewater to public treatment plants before it enters waterways. And the EPA has stated that plan is its “preferred” option, because stricter regulations of those plants could clash with the Biden administration’s recent efforts to reduce concentration in the industry by supporting smaller, independent meat processors. Based on an economic analysis included in the proposed rule, its analysts predict 53 facilities could close under option 3.
At a public hearing at the EPA’s headquarters last week, Jon Elrod, an executive vice president at Darling Ingredients, testified that the stricter options would hurt the company’s smaller facilities, many of which are located in metropolitan areas and “could make it impossible for some facilities to continue to operate.” Darling is a rendering company that processes meat industry byproducts, with annual revenue just under $7 billion in 2023.
After Elrod, environmental advocates stepped up to the podium one by one to counter that argument and push the agency toward option 3.
“We at Waterkeepers’ Alliance and our supporters are deeply concerned that EPA is proposing to exempt most slaughterhouses and rendering facilities from updated water pollution control standards,” said Jacqueline Esposito, the nonprofit’s director of advocacy. “EPA’s continued failure to stand up against industry pressure ignores and perpetuates the potentially devastating impacts of industrial animal agriculture on our communities.”
Sarah Kula, an attorney for the Environmental Integrity Project, told Civil Eats that by her reading, the agency’s decision to even consider business impacts while setting pollution limits is outside the scope of what it can do under the law. While the EPA contends that it’s allowed to consider other factors, Kula said that is meant to apply to other things within their purview, such as environmental justice, not entirely different goals outside of the work the agency is tasked with.
Many of the advocates also noted that while industry players have said the rules are not needed for the smaller plants since the water already goes through a public treatment plant, the EPA’s analysis found that most of those public treatment facilities lack technology to remove nitrogen or phosphorous. As a result, they found meatpacking plants “may be causing or contributing” to high rates of permit violations at those facilities.
Advocates also highlighted the agency’s findings that the technology needed to reduce processing plants’ nutrient pollution is already available and being used successfully, resulting in pollution well below what the rules would require.
Many of the meatpackers, however, say even option 1 is too restrictive, and the industry is pushing back forcefully.
At the public hearing, representatives from JBS, which operates more than 50 slaughter and processing plants that could be subject to the new regulations, sat quietly, listening. A week earlier, in an online hearing, industry speakers asked the EPA to extend the comment period on the proposal, echoing a request from the North American Meat Institute (NAMI) the industry’s largest trade group.
In addition to needing more time to assess the three options, NAMI President Julie Potts told Meat + Poultry that plant closures under all three options would hurt farmers and ranchers. She believes EPA “has grossly underestimated the costs to comply.”
While the EPA has made the most significant attempt in decades to change how it regulates water pollution from slaughterhouses, the battle over what the effort will ultimately accomplish is just getting started.
Then, last week, Representatives Eric Burlison (R-Missouri) and Ron Estes (R-Kansas) introduced a bill that would stop the EPA from finalizing or implementing the proposed rule, regardless of which option they chose.
The bill has little chance of going anywhere, but it signals a larger fight behind the scenes that has precedent. Seemingly endless battles over the Waters of the United States (WOTUS) rule, which regulated a different aspect of water pollution from agriculture, are still ongoing. Now, while the EPA has made the most significant attempt in decades to change how it regulates water pollution from slaughterhouses, the battle over what the effort will ultimately accomplish is just getting started.
The EPA is planning a third hearing for March 20. It has not yet responded to the industry’s requests to extend the comment period, which currently ends March 25.
Read More:
EPA to Revise Outdated Water Pollution Standards for Slaughterhouses
The Clean Water Act Has Failed to Curb Ag Pollution
Farm Runoff in U.S. Waters Has Hit Crisis Levels
Biden Targets Consolidation in the Meat Industry (Again)
Farm Bill Slog. Agriculture committees in the House and Senate are publicly doing very little at the moment to move the long-delayed 2023 Farm Bill process forward, aside from slowly hinting at priorities. But that hasn’t stopped lawmakers from continuing to introduce additional marker bills or slowed advocates pushing to advance their priorities.
Last week, lawmakers introduced two separate bills that would tweak conservation programs toward rewarding practices that build soil health and store carbon. At the same time, the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) released an analysis of how additional funds funneled to popular conservation programs from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) for climate-smart practices impacted participation in the programs. The IATP analysis found that while 3,000 additional farmers were awarded contracts in fiscal year 2023, demand also increased so much that the proportion of farmers turned away did not decline.
The data is especially relevant because some Republican lawmakers would like to move the IRA funding to other programs. Democrats, meanwhile, are fighting to keep it focused on climate, citing unmet demand. American Farmland Trust also released a report on the climate benefits of easements that ensure that land stays in farming rather than being developed and called for more funding—including in the farm bill—for easements.
This week, the National Family Farm Coalition will bring a group of small-scale farmer members to D.C. to advocate for farm bill policies that level the playing field via proposals for fair credit, farmland access, and milk prices.
Read More:
This Farm Bill Really Matters. We Explain Why.
Climate Change Is Walloping U.S. Farms. Can This Farm Bill Create Real Solutions?
A Potential Bite Out of Hunger. In the kind of bipartisan compromise that is nearly unheard-of these days, House lawmakers passed a tax bill to reinstate Trump-era deductions for businesses while also expanding the child tax credit. The bill is headed to the Senate, where it is facing resistance from Republican senators for policy and political reasons.
In 2021, during the height of the pandemic, expansions of the child tax credit kept more than 2 million children above the poverty line, and most families used the credit to pay for basic necessities such as food, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
“The bill’s enhancements to the tax credit will benefit 16 million children currently left out of receiving the full or any credit, and will lift 400,000 above the poverty line,” Luis Guardia, president of the Food Research & Action Center, said in a statement. “Investing in families is crucial to ending hunger and fostering a more prosperous society.”
The move comes despite lawmakers’ recent decision not to boost funding for the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), which will likely lead to a shortfall for the program which supports the nutrition needs of mothers and young children.
Read More:
WIC Shortfall Could Leave 2 Million Women and Children Hungry
For Many Kids, a Boost to Summer School Meals Is a “Game Changer”
Food as Medicine. Government officials and members of Congress came together with representatives from nonprofits and big food companies for the first “Food as Medicine” summit last week. Integrating food and nutrition into health care is a popular initiative among Biden administration officials and was featured prominently at the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health in September 2022. In conjunction, the Rockefeller Foundation announced it would increase a $20 million investment in “food as medicine” initiatives and research to $100 million, funding projects like the American Heart Association’s Health Care by Food Initiative.
Read More:
Voices from the White House Conference on Hunger and Nutrition
Can Prescriptions for Produce-Focused Meal Kits Fight Diabetes?
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