Are Hydroponic Vegetables as Nutritious as Those Grown in Soil?

Are vegetables grown hydroponically as nutritious as those grown in soil?

The bottom line is it depends on the nutrient solution the vegetables are grown in, but hydroponically grown vegetables can be just as nutritious as those grown in soil.

“Much as I think that soil is just great for growing plants, hydroponics has come a long way,” said Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University. “I’ve seen hydroponic producers who have tested their leafy greens for key nutrients, and the amounts fall well within normal limits for their crop and are sometimes even higher.”

Traditionally, plants obtain nutrients from soil. With hydroponics, the plants get nutrients from a solution instead. (Aeroponics, in which the plants’ roots are suspended in the air, is similar except fertilizer is misted onto the roots.) Usually inhabiting large warehouses or greenhouses, hydroponic plants are arranged indoors, often in tall shelves, and they rely on artificial light rather than sunlight.

Plants make their own vitamins, so vitamin levels tend to be similar whether a vegetable is grown hydroponically or in soil. It’s the mineral content that can vary in hydroponic crops, depending on the fertilizer used.

“You can enhance” a plant’s nutrient levels “simply by adding nutrients to the solution" they’re grown in, said Allen V. Barker, a professor at the Stockbridge School of Agriculture at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. “You could add whatever you wanted: calcium or magnesium, or minor elements like zinc or iron.” The result is that vegetables grown hydroponically could even be “nutritionally superior” to traditionally grown ones, he said.

Keep in mind that nutrient content varies for produce in general, regardless of the growing method. The differences relate to the type of fruit or vegetable, the time of year it is harvested, how long after harvesting the crop gets eaten, and how it is handled and stored from farm to fork.

Remember, too, that these differences in nutrient levels are unlikely to have a significant impact on overall health. The key message from most nutrition experts is simply the more vegetables you eat, the better.

Sophie Egan is the author of "Devoured." Follow her on Twitter @SophieEganM

Watch Interviews With experts. View All The Materials From The Seventh International Forum on Food and Nutrition

Watch Interviews With experts. View All The Materials From The Seventh International Forum on Food and Nutrition

Following the 7th International Forum on Food and Nutrition, the BCFN Foundation has published interviews with the event’s experts. Watch online to learn about their reflections and analyses on the work completed and the challenges ahead to create new spaces for discussion and detailed study.

BCFN would also like to take this opportunity to wish you the best in the New Year and invite you to discover the Foundation’s projects for a 2017 full of initiatives aimed at promoting sustainability for food and the environment.

View all the materials from the seventh International Forum on Food and Nutrition: videos of presentations, in-depth explorations and documentation.

USDA Officials Tour New York City’s “Urban Ag” Successes

USDA Officials Tour New York City’s “Urban Ag” Successes

The U.S. Department of Agriculture Farm Service Agency Administrator Val Dolcini and New York State Executive Director, James Barber, traveled to Brooklyn Monday to tour urban agriculture operations that were funded by USDA microloans. As more urban farms start in New York City, consumers can find a wider variety of fresh, locally grown vegetables, year round.

“The USDA microloan has expanded funding and opportunities for beginning, niche and small farmers to start or expand their agriculture operations,” said Dolcini. “As urban agriculture continues to grow, FSA loan programs have evolved to keep up with the needs of these unique, creative and trend-setting urban farmers.”

Nine urban entrepreneurs worked with Square Roots and USDA to start their urban farming operation. Square Roots is an organization that promotes urban farming and coaches people with a passion for local food to grow and sell produce locally while building a sustainable business. The urban entrepreneurs each used the USDA microloan program to secure a low-interest loan to lease a vertical farm from Square Roots and pay for operating expenses such as seed, water and electricity costs.

Vertical farms are repurposed shipping containers tailored for hydroponically growing vegetables and include a water system, heating and cooling units and light-emitting diodes (LEDs) designed to mirror sunlight. Each vertical farm is capable of producing the equivalent of what is grown on two acres of farmland.

Square Roots aims to connect local consumers to the urban farmers who grow a variety of greens and herbs that will be sold at local farmers markets and to local restaurants. The producers expect to harvest their first crop this month.

USDA microloans are low interest loans developed to better serve the unique financial needs of new, niche and small to mid-sized family farm operations. Microloans offer more flexible access to credit and serve as an attractive loan alternative for smaller farming operations, like specialty crop producers. Borrowers can use the microloan for operating expenses or to purchase, expand or improve a farm. The maximum loan amount is $50,000.

To learn more about the USDA microloan program, visit www.fsa.usda.gov/microloans or contact your local FSA office. To find your local FSA office, visit http://offices.usda.gov/.

Are These Startups The Future of Food Tech?

Are These Startups The Future of Food Tech?

Cheap and accurate weather forecasting and indoor LED farms were just some of the offerings at the Nobel Week Dialogue in Stockholm

Wednesday 21 December 2016 11.06 GMT

he ability to forecast tomorrow’s weather is something farmers have at their fingertips in many parts of the world, but in some regions weather forecasting is much trickier.

“In the tropics, weather processes are faster and up to a thousand times smaller than up here,” says Liisa Petrykowska, managing director of Ignitia, a Stockholm-based startup. “The weather forecasting systems developed by western governments haven’t focused on the tropics.”

Existing next-day forecasts are accurate less than half the time, she says, making them next-to-useless for farmers. Ignitia has built its own atmospheric models to deliver forecasts that are right up to 85% of the time, and sends them out as simple text messages costing just 4 cents (2p) a day.

“Many farmers were sceptical at first,” says Petrykowska, “But we quickly built up trust. Now 90% of Ghanaian farmers who receive them say the forecasts have helped them to make the correct decisions about planting, sowing, spraying and transportation.”

Indoor LED farms

Ignitia was one of a number of food tech startups that gathered in Stockholm last week for the Future of Food, an event organised by the Nobel Foundation. The startups believe applying technologies such as machine learning, advanced materials and open-source practices can revolutionise food production.

“What happens in the next 50 years will determine what happens to society over the next 10,000,” Johan Rockström, professor of environmental science at Stockholm University, told the conference. “Food is the deciding factor. Food is the primary cause behind loss of diversity, the largest user of fresh water, and is responsible for 30% of all greenhouse gas emissions. If we get it right on food, we are likely to get it right for planet Earth.”

Caleb Harper, director of Open Agriculture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, thinks sensor-controlled hydroponic and aeroponic growing systems are part of the answer. “We are slaves to climate in agriculture. But what if we could give every country access to good weather?” he said.

In his lab, plants grow under LED lights and the watchful gaze of dozens of sensors – collecting more than 3m data points for every plant. Harper claims his crops grow five times faster than they would outdoors, and need 90% less water while doing so. Everything his lab discovers is then made freely available through open source hardware and software websites. “The open food movement gives access to biology, in the same way that HTML gave us access to the internet,” says Harper.

Fish farms and reuseable chill bags

Aside from weather, another big topic at the event was the shift away from raising animals for meat, which is responsible for a disproportionate share of the land, water and energy used in food production. “Americans eat four times as much beef as all seafood combined, but aquaculture is emerging as a possible solution,” says Peter Tyedmers of Dalhousie University in Canada.

He has been evaluating new, floating semi-closed fish farming tanksthat can recycle fish waste as fertiliser and avoid contaminating nearby water systems. One drawback is that they need more energy than traditional open-water farms, meaning they might increase carbon emissions even as they reduce pollution.

Tyedmers also warns that fish food should be sourced from low-impact agricultural crops rather than other marine organisms. “Aquaculture is not a panacea but it can be a key wedge in moving away from land-fed livestock to the sea,” he says.

Food technology is also giving us solutions at home. As more people use online grocery or meal services, there has been a growing demand for refrigerated lorries, together with expensive Styrofoam boxes and gel packs to keep food hot or cold on that last mile.

The Food Climate Research Network estimates around half a percent of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions come from mobile refrigeration units moving chilled food around the country. iFoodbag, another Stockholm startup, aims to replace traditional delivery methods with reusable, recyclable bags made from laminated paper.

The bag can keep chilled groceries from becoming dangerously warm for around five hours, which its makers think is long enough to use a normal van (or presumably a drone, in the future) for delivery. Adding a frozen gel pack extends the time to eight hours, and the bag can be reused up to seven times.

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IoT and Agriculture: A Natural Combination

IoT and Agriculture: A Natural Combination

Solid examples of IoT applicability are sometimes hard to articulate. But agriculture provides a use case that is quite concrete, even if in rural environments.

By Andrew Brust for Big on Data | December 16, 2016 -- 20:14 GMT (20:14 GMT) | Topic: Big Data Analytics

We all know that the Internet of Things (IoT) represents game-changing transformation in the industrial application of technology...or at least we think we do. Perhaps more accurately, we sense that denying IoT's significance would be foolishly contrarian. And while we might have an innate sense of why IoT is so important, we also might come up short when pressed to describe specific applications of IoT technology.

That's why I love learning about real use cases, especially ones that veer off the path of domains like preventive maintenance, which are almost cliché. Recently, I had the chance to learn of one such IoT application. It's rich, complex and it satisfyingly broadened how I think about IoT. Specifically, I spoke with the Daniel Koppel, Co-Founder and CEO of Israeli company Prospera, which focuses on the application of IoT in agriculture.

The use case
Prospera, a company founded about 2 years ago by a team of computer scientists and agronomists, has built some very interesting technology that centers around monitoring crop growth, in order to optimize it. While farmers have long had some data -- like weather readings and low-resolution satellite images -- available to them, it turns out not to be enough. And even if it were, weather data from a government weather station -- which might be 30km away from the actual growing area -- doesn't deliver the "hyper-local" climate data that is crucial.

When you grow in volume, though, the geographic dispersal of your farmland makes it difficult to go around and collect that data manually -- and the rural settings for that farmland make the electrical and network connectivity, that had been necessary to collect that data, hard to come by.

It's different now
But now low-cost sensors can obtain temperature and humidity data; and low-cost cameras can measure light/radiation and gather valuable images. The devices can communicate over WiFi or 3G mobile data technology and can often run on solar power. This approach has been making technology with great efficacy in indoor agriculture, increasingly applicable in outdoor settings too.

Prospera does not view itself as a sensor company though, but rather as a data company. And not just one that helps customers collect data and act on it, but one that builds data intelligence and thus domain expertise.

In other words, there is an element of crowd-sourcing here: although granular data is kept private, all data (which, in aggregate, amounts to hundreds of thousands of readings per day) benefits the construction, testing and accuracy of predictive models. These models help track the correlation between specific values in the collected data, crop growth and output. Understanding those correlations, and making predictions based upon them, is where Prospera hits its value proposition sweet spot.

The vision thing
Beyond predictive applications, there are prescriptive applications too. Computer vision/imaging has serious applicability in this domain, as the capture of images combined with pattern recognition technology can help detect crop disease and, on an automated basis, dispatch personnel to address it. It can also help alert farmers to where they need to prune and harvest. So not only is the data collection made more economical, but the methodical analysis of the collected data, and the dispatch of responsive action, is made more feasible and economical as well.

While expense was once an issue, Prospera's Koppel says that "sensors are commodities" now. In fact, the company says that three conditions in the market have combined to make its technology so effective and efficacious: the neural network technology behind the machine learning has become much better; the sensor hardware has become much cheaper and, because of greater mainstream appreciation for Big Data and machine learning, market readiness has crossed the chasm too.

Why Israel?
Israel is a high-tech country, well-populated with venture-funded tech startups. Top-notch technical universities like Technion and Hebrew University (Koppel's alma mater), as well as byproducts of, and veterans from, tech research in the country's defense forces, provide much of the raw material for such commercial, entrepreneurial activity.

Israel also has a history as an agricultural society, centered around Kibbutzim and Moshavs, both of which are collective agricultural settlements, the former sometimes likened to communes. Further, because much of Israel is desert, irrigation techniques and other technological optimizations have been part of its agricultural approach since the country's founding.

Put all of this together and you have a place that, industrially and culturally, is predisposed to growing its crops in a scientifically-influenced fashion.

How far beyond?
While kibbutzim and moshavs in Israel have served as test labs for Prospera's technology, the company has customers who have deployed the technology in Europe and Mexico. The US is next -- and for some customers there, Prospera expects to collect data not just from stationary sensors over terrestrial wireless data connections, but via drone and over Satellite data links as well.

Some current customers implement Prospera's technology in parts of their farms, to compare data-driven farming with those of more traditional methods, and results have been good. Prospera says that customers have used the company's technology to discover problems in irrigation, ward off disease and reduce yield volatility.

Prospera's technology has even allowed farmers to make course corrections in their growing techniques, in order to maximize output in the current growing cycle, and not just apply lessons learned to the next cycle.

All roads lead to analytics
As fascinating and as far-flung as Prospera's IoT use case may seem to some of us, it ultimately comes back to the mainstream of BI and Big Data: collecting data and analyzing it. In fact, Prospera's software delivers rather familiar-looking dashboards on computers and mobile devices, just like the technology with which we may be more familiar.

Ultimately, that may be the most valuable lesson of all. The stuff we already know -- the OLAP cubes, the MapReduce jobs, the streaming data processing and the D3 visualizations -- can be thought of and implemented in very specific and very impressive industrial use cases. The technologies needn't be relegated to isolated discussions of their own rigors. In fact, when we think of the technology in applied capacities, we provide a lot more value, and we help Big Data and IoT move past their hype cycle quasi-paralysis.

We need more companies like Prospera, that combine tech with domain expertise, cultural idiosyncrasies and a lot of imagination. That's how this field will get to the next level. The value of vision goes beyond data captured from image sensors.

The Seedstock 'Future of Food - Urban Ag Field Trip'

The Seedstock 'Future of Food - Urban Ag Field Trip'

DESCRIPTION

Urban agriculture ventures of all different stripes - from commercial hydroponic enterprises and rooftop aeroponic farms to community gardens planted atop formerly vacant lots - are not only disrupting the food system, but also generating community and economic capital. 

To give you an up close and personal look at a series of innovative urban farming operations that have emerged to tackle challenges to food access, meet marketplace demand for local food, and increase food security, Seedstock, a social venture that seeks to foster the development of sustainable local food systems, has put together the 'Future of Food - Urban Ag Field Trip'.

Slated for Friday, January 27, 2017, the field trip will look at the impact of urban farming in Los Angeles County, the most populous county in the United States, and include lectures on such topics as the past, present, and future of urban agriculture, vertical farming, and sourcing local food from urban farms.

Spots on the 'Future of Food - Urban Ag Field Trip' are limited, and it will sell out. So grab your tickets before it's too late!

Scheduled Field Trips Stops include:

• The USC Teaching Garden is utilizing aeroponics to challenge the food systems status quo on campus. The University of Southern California (USC) Teaching Garden was established this spring to supply fresh produce to the university’s on-campus restaurants, dining halls, catering services, and hotel, while also teaching students and staff about flavor and sustainability. The garden utilizes aeroponic towers to produce chemical-free fruit, vegetables, herbs, and edible flowers without traditional soil growing media.

• Local Roots Farms is an indoor vertical farming company based in Los Angeles that designs, builds, deploys, and operates controlled environment farms. Situated in shipping containers, the farms (called TerraFarms) grow with up to 99% less water, 365 days a year, pesticide and herbicide free, and with absolute consistency in production. Their plug and play form provides an innovative solution to the retail and foodservice sectors by greatly reducing supply-chain risks such as price volatility and food safety exposure.

• The Growing Experience is a seven-acre urban farm in North Long Beach that is located on a previously vacant lot. The Growing Experience urban farm is unique in that it is owned and operated by the Housing Authority of the County of Los Angeles (HACoLA), which manages 3,229 units of public and other affordable housing for the county’s Public Housing program. “The North Long Beach community has been historically under-served and classified as a food desert,” says Holly Carpenter, program manager with the Housing Authority of the County of Los Angeles. “The Growing Experience was designed to help meet the needs of the community by increas[ing] access to healthy foods.”

Confirmed Speakers include:

• Rachel Surls - Sustainable Food Systems Advisor for UC Cooperative Extension and co-author of the book 'From Cows to Concrete: The Rise and Fall of Farming in Los Angeles'. From the book jacket: "From the earliest pueblo cornfields to the struggles of farm workers to the rise of the environmental movement, From Cows to Concrete tells the epic tale of how agriculture forged Los Angeles into an urban metropolis, and how, ultimately, the Los Angeles farm empire spurred the very growth that paved it over, as sprawling suburbs swallowed up thousands of acres of prime farmland. More than 150 vintage images enhance and expand the fascinating, detailed history" An option to purchase the hardcover book at discount is available for purchase with your ticket for the field trip. 

• Erik Oberholtzer - Co-founder and CEO of Tender Greens

• Chef Eric Ernest - Executive Chef of USC Hospitality

A farm-to-fork lunch hosted by Local Roots Farms featuring lettuce grown on site in the company's TerraFarms will be provided by sponsor:

Ticket Refund Policy: Please note that we do not offer refunds on tickets, but you are welcome to transfer your ticket to a friend or colleague at any time up until 2 days before the event. To do so, please email us at admin@seedstock.com and include your name, order number and the name of the person to whom you would like to transfer your ticket.

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Furniture Maker Partners On Urban 'Agrihood' Project

Furniture Maker Partners On Urban 'Agrihood' Project

December 12, 2016

| By Charlsie Dewey |

TAGS GM / HERMAN MILLER

A furniture maker is teaming up on a building renovation project that will bring a community resource center focused on agriculture to a Detroit neighborhood.

Zeeland-based Herman Miller said last month it is joining forces with Sustainable Brands, BASF, General Motors and Green Standards to support The Michigan Urban Farming Initiative, or MUFI, a Detroit-based nonprofit with a mission to use urban agriculture as a platform to promote education, sustainability and community and to uplift and empower urban neighborhoods.

MUFI said it is “debuting America's first sustainable urban agrihood,” an alternative neighborhood growth model in Detroit's lower North End, which “positions agriculture as the centerpiece of a mixed-use urban development.”

Community Center Design

Herman Miller will lend its design expertise to the new MUFI Community Resource Center, or CRC, being renovated in the agrihood — to create “purposeful, multi-use spaces” that will “enhance collaboration and foster a sense of community.”

The project partners plan to restore a three story, long-vacant building across from MUFI's urban garden into the Community Resource Center and transform adjacent vacant land into a healthy food café.

The 3,200 square foot, box-shaped CRC will offer educational programs, event and meeting space and serve as MUFI’s new headquarters.

It will also house two commercial kitchens on the first floor that will service the café and allow for the future production and packaging of "valued goods."

The project is scheduled to be unveiled as part of the Sustainable Brands '17 Detroit conference, held at the Cobo Center from May 22-25.

Surplus Furniture

Herman Miller will also help outfit the CRC through its recently announced rePurpose partnership with GM.

GM is repurposing tens of thousands of surplus office assets resulting from the renovations occurring at its Warren Technical Center, Milford Proving Ground and global headquarters in Detroit.

Managed by the Toronto-based environmental firm Green Standards, rePurpose diverts 99 percent of no-longer-needed office furniture and supplies from landfills and "transforms them into valuable in-kind donations" to nonprofits.

Since Herman Miller launched the rePurpose program in 2009, it has diverted more than 27,000 tons of product from landfills and generated $18 million in charitable in-kind donations.

Agrihood

MUFI's urban agrihood features a two-acre urban garden with more than 300 vegetable varieties, a 200-tree fruit orchard, a children's sensory garden and more.

Annually, the urban garden provides fresh, free produce to about 2,000 households within two square miles of the farm.

Since its first growing season in 2012, MUFI has distributed more than 50,000 pounds of free produce.

"Over the last four years, we've grown from an urban garden that provides fresh produce for our residents to a diverse, agricultural campus that has helped sustain the neighborhood, attracted new residents and area investment," said Tyson Gersh, president and co-founder, MUFI.

He said this is part of a larger trend being seen across the country where “people are re-defining what life in the urban environment looks like.”

“We provide a unique offering and attraction to people who want to live in interesting spaces with a mix of residential, commercial, transit and agriculture,” Gersh sai

Residential Dining Centers Embrace Farm to Table

12 Dec, 2016

by Sylvia Cranmer

A fresh, contemporary concept in dining is hitting the residential dining centers on campus.  CSU’s Housing & Dining Services is embracing the farm-to-table concept, expanding fresh, local and sustainable food options for students.

CSU recently started serving freshly grown, hand-picked lettuce from on-campus greenhouses. Corbett/Parmelee and Durrell Dining Centers are serving the greens, which are grown in six different hydroponic tables located at CSU’s new Horticulture Center on Centre Avenue.

The initiative has been brewing since about 2010, when Residential Dining Services was looking for a location to grow herbs for the dining centers. At that time, undergraduate horticulture student Royce Lahman was working at Ram’s Horn Dining Center. In coordination with Horticulture professor Steven Newman, Lahman saw a perfect opportunity to connect the worlds of horticulture and dining while fulfilling a need on campus, and implementing the eco-friendly farm-to-table concept for food service.

“Dr. Newman and I have always had this awesome idea to provide farm-to-table food (on campus), Lahman says. “It was really a dream of both of us to connect those two worlds for collaboration.”

Lahman has since graduated and is now working full-time as the RDS Meal Access Coordinator, involved with the project he helped to establish.

Hands-on harvesting

With the construction of the new horticulture center in 2015, the opportunity to collaborate with an academic department to mix academics and dining became a reality. Student volunteers get hands-on experience harvesting the lettuce with the help of the Horticulture Center staff, and multiple varieties of lettuce find their way to dining center salad bars on a weekly basis. In one recent harvest, 193 pounds of lettuce were harvested and served. The recent cultivars have included Flandria butterhead lettuce, Cornucopia green salad bowl mix and a mixed cultivar variety.

Not only is this home-grown lettuce a healthy alternative, it also supports the university’s commitment to sustainability. Knowing where our food comes from and what went into both growing it and getting it to our plates is important on many levels, particularly when it comes to health and sustainability. It’s also a big picture, campus-wide educational opportunity.

“We want to be as sustainable as possible and drive our students to sustainable food choices,” says Lahman. “Locally grown, sustainable produce gives students and customers (of the dining centers) the opportunity to learn about programs at CSU, different growing methods, sustainable farming practices as well as the farm-to-table program benefits.”

Benefits to the university

One recent harvest yielded nearly 200 pounds of mixed lettuce varieties for fresh on-campus dining.

On a larger scale, there are also many benefits to the university. Aside from providing great-tasting lettuce, CSU-grown produce provides a local product to the campus population, with the added benefit of hands-on learning and collaboration among various departments that otherwise may not cross paths.

As the farm-to-table concept gains traction, consumers are increasingly looking for these products, but it’s challenging when most of the U.S. produce is shipped to Colorado from warmer locations.  One of the goals of this collaboration is to make students aware of how to grow crops closer to their consumer.

According to student volunteer Naomi Mathew, “I think the concept is an amazing idea. I feel like it gives an opportunity for new ideas to develop and that’s great. The lettuce tastes richer and fresher than what was previously served. This might sound odd, but it tastes healthier and cleaner.”

While lettuce is the first product to be entirely grown and served on campus, this initiative may expand to other products in the future.

“We do see opportunity for growth in this program…with multiple options regarding expansion that include additional crops, additional serving locations and creation of a living laboratory/course,” adds Lahman.

One consideration for expansion is adding fresh herbs or a soft fruit crop, such as tomatoes. During the summer months, an outdoor student garden may be able to offer more products as the program grows.

Asia Digs Deep To Upgrade Its Agriculture

Asia Digs Deep To Upgrade Its Agriculture

Perfect storm of population growth and climate change spurs farming innovation

TADANORI YOSHIDA, Nikkei senior staff writer

Consider it a wake-up call from nature. Asian crops were devastated by a severe drought this year, highlighting the urgent need to stabilize farm output and brace for the consequences of climate change. And with the region's population projected to continue growing over the long term, this is no easy task.

The good news is that answers are starting to emerge. Agribusinesses are harnessing information technology. Organic farms and so-called plant factories are becoming hothouses for innovation. International investors are keen to water the seeds.

This week, we head out into the fields -- and some cutting-edge facilities -- to glimpse the future of Asian farming.

TOKYO Even the most technologically advanced indoor farm starts with a very basic problem. When you take sunlight out of the equation you gain more control, but you also lose a whole lot of free energy.

The bankruptcy of a Japanese farming venture in 2015 highlighted this dilemma. The factory had been touted in the media as the future of farming. Partly due to power costs, however, its break-even price was simply too high compared with conventional farms.

Still, the bankruptcy does not mean the hype was baseless. Under new ownership, the factory is becoming a viable business by finding buyers who are willing to pay a premium for high-quality produce. Similar indoor farming ventures are adding value by growing vegetables rich in specific nutrients.

And then there is Spread, which is taking a different approach. It wants to win in the mass market -- in supermarkets -- and that means competing against veggies grown in the field.

Spread's secret? Volume. The company packs a lot of lettuce into its 3,000-sq.-meter factory in western Kyoto, Japan's ancient capital. The heads grow on rows upon rows of shelves under fluorescent lights. The factory has the capacity to ship 21,000 of them per day -- enough to make the lettuce profitable even if it sells for 198 yen ($1.79). The average price in Tokyo as of November was 251 yen, according to Numbeo, which tracks the cost of living in big cities.

The facility, which started operating in 2008, was stuck in the red for the first five years. But efficiency improvements lifted it into the black in the year ended March 2014. Shinji Inada, Spread's CEO, explained that putting the hardware in place is only half the battle. "It is up to the staff to adapt to the environment," he said. "Once the business becomes profitable, profit is generally stable."

Just because the lettuce grows indoors does not mean the weather is a complete nonfactor. Air conditioning must be set up to keep the temperature steady for all four seasons. Even then, there are changes in humidity. So it takes time to determine how to manage all the variables, including the light and carbon dioxide essential for photosynthesis.

All this is part of Spread's plan to live up to its name. The company is building expertise for a new factory in Kansai Science City, a research hub that straddles the prefectures of Kyoto, Osaka and Nara. The plant, now under construction, will use artificial intelligence to automate tasks like sowing seeds, replanting and harvesting. The new facility is expected to be completed in 2017.

Whether by growing crops indoors or other means, Asia needs to boost yields and mitigate extreme weather. Consumption in big markets like China and India is likely to continue growing steadily.

"Asia cannot produce enough to support itself," the Netherlands' Rabobank wrote in its "Asia-Pacific: agricultural perspectives" report. The bank noted that "limited arable land, inadequate water and poor resource management" are constraining production.

That is at the best of times. This year, vast swaths of Asia were hit by drought linked to the El Nino weather phenomenon, resulting in massive crop failures.

RESILIENT RICE To feed itself, Asia needs solutions, and Singapore's Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory aims to provide some.

The nonprofit research institute is funded by Temasek Trust -- the philanthropic arm of sovereign wealth fund Temasek Holdings. TLL, as the lab is known, spent eight years developing Temasek Rice, a resilient breed capable of withstanding extreme weather conditions and producing higher yields.

Temasek Rice was created using a modern technique known as marker-assisted selection. This allows scientists to zero in on desired traits and breed new, improved crops. Yin Zhongchao, TLL's senior principal investigator, said this type of breeding can enhance food security by increasing production "in a more efficient and sustainable manner."

Since land is limited in Singapore, TLL's rice is being grown in Indonesia, and the lab wants to partner with more companies to boost production.

The 2008 global food crisis was a key motivator behind the Temasek Rice project. Rising oil prices and severe weather sent food prices soaring. In developing countries, domestic rice prices climbed as much as 90% between the third quarter of 2007 and the same period of 2008, according to the FAO.

Peter Chia, TLL's chief operating officer, said the crisis showed "how vulnerable rice cultivation could be as a result of climate change."

"As agriculture becomes more knowledge intensive," he added, "our role in agriculture is not limited to production but using science, innovation and technology to create a positive impact across the whole value chain."

Thanks to the spread of mobile communications, farmers have quite a bit of knowledge at their fingertips. Even without souped-up seeds, detailed weather data and other information can help them to cope with climate change -- and other threats that come their way.

This past January, Vietnamese state telecom company VinaPhone started a service called Nong Thon Xanh, or Green Country. Basically, it turns mobile phones into farm assistants.

Through a social network, farmers can subscribe to three packages. For 10,000 dong (45 cents) per month, they get access to an agricultural warning package that includes a range of information: weather forecasts, prices, plant disease alerts, guidelines on relevant state policies, advisories on abnormal conditions affecting agriculture and so on. Coffee and rice packages, available for 31 cents and 22 cents a week respectively, offer tailored guidance to help farmers prevent diseases from wiping out their crops.

With a local partner, AgriMedia, VinaPhone has set up automated weather stations across the country. AgriMedia, in turn, has partnered with Japan's Weathernews in an effort to improve its forecasts.

VinaPhone's next step will be to build a call center, where agriculture experts will be on hand to answer questions from farmers. It also plans to expand the advice to cover gum trees, pepper and cashews.

In Indonesia, startup 8Villages provides similar services.

The advent of the internet of things -- the ever-growing web of connected gadgetry -- is bringing further big changes to the field. Japanese companies Kubota and NTT group have allied to develop automated agricultural machinery that taps big data. They envision a system that analyzes crop conditions and issues the machines instructions, be it to harvest vegetables or spray pesticides.

Singaporean startup Garuda Robotics is using drones to help Southeast Asian farmers increase yields.

The company's fully autonomous drone features a powerful built-in camera along with advanced sensors for detecting biomass and measuring temperatures. When it zooms over an oil palm plantation, it generates data including aerial maps and 3-D land contour models. This data is fed through an artificial intelligence system, which generates a report on tree health and land optimization.

This way, farmers can allocate fertilizer and other resources to the areas that need the most care, reducing costs and waste.

"It is difficult to use traditional methods, like getting people to count the number of trees, and get accurate data," said Mark Yong, Garuda Robotics' founder and CEO. "A 100,000 hectare [plantation] could have about 1 million trees."

Precision, he stressed, makes all the difference. "The problem with agriculture is variation such as weather, rainfall, soil quality and fertilizer. So there is a need to capture accurate data and find out what is happening on the plantation."

The Philippines has a new tool of its own for keeping tabs on farms -- a microsatellite. The launch of the craft in March marked not only the country's first foray into space but also a big upgrade for its relatively underdeveloped agricultural sector.

The government is using the satellite, the Diwata-1, to survey farmland and vegetation. Data and images are delivered daily to a ground station called the Philippine Earth Data Resources and Observation Center. With this and other information, experts at the center can advise farmers on the prevalence of pests and estimate rice yields. This can help the government decide whether to import rice or source it locally.

Researchers at the University of the Philippines are also using the data in studies on "smart agriculture." The satellite is expected to orbit for 18-20 months before its twin, the Diwata-2, is launched. The government has earmarked a total of 840 million pesos ($16.88 million) for the two satellites and the ground station.

From a consumer's perspective, of course, crop yields are not the only concern. Asia's rising middle class is wary of residual pesticides or other contaminants on vegetables grown in China and elsewhere. People want to know the food they are eating is safe, and to an extent, they are willing to pay more for that peace of mind.

It should not be surprising, then, that organic farming is booming across the region. And as it turns out, organic techniques may have some advantages when it comes to growing tasty veggies capable of withstanding harsh weather.

SCIENCE OVER INTUITION This brings us back to Japan. In August, some 20 farmers from around the country gathered in the city of Chiba, near Tokyo, for a workshop. The classroom was a vinyl greenhouse. "I'm going to teach you scientific techniques for organic farming," said the lecturer, consultant Masaaki Koiwai, who crisscrosses the country touting organic agriculture as a way to improve yields and quality.

There is a tendency to assume that farmers -- particularly organic farmers -- rely on intuition developed over years of experience. But Koiwai assured his students it does not have to be that way. He talked about spinach farmers who had taken his advice. The spinach they produced had higher sugar content than a melon. How was this possible? They sprinkled a little something extra on the field: powdered bamboo, which happens to be full of carbohydrates.

Koiwai's approach centers on the idea of "complementing photosynthesis." The conventional wisdom used to be that plants absorb only inorganic substances, but recent studies have shown they can also take in organic ones with much larger molecular structures. Based on this, Koiwai argues that effective use of organic fertilizers can pay dividends. Even if extreme weather slows carbohydrate production, for instance, plants can continue to grow steadily if they can soak up the nutrients through their roots.

A company that analyzes vegetables found that Koiwai-taught farmers tended to produce crops with much more sugar and vitamin C than average. There was no significant difference, however, between vegetables from other organic farmers and ones grown with chemical fertilizers. This suggests organic farming is only as good as the science behind it.

Over in Indonesia, a startup called iGrow is giving even city dwellers the opportunity to get into organic farming. The company pitches its concept as "playing FarmVille in real life," referring to a popular online game. The service allows customers to invest in small organic farms, choosing what they want to grow and where they want to grow it.

As of August, iGrow said it had partnered with 2,000 farmers and 7,000 small-scale investors, who invest anywhere from $110 to $1,100 each. The operation is cultivating more than 1,000 hectares of land, a third of which has already produced harvests. The founders said they are exploring expansion outside Indonesia, and mentioned Turkey and Japan as possibilities.

There is no denying that Asia faces huge agricultural challenges. But there is reason for optimism, too.

Big companies outside the region also see opportunity in meeting Asia's agricultural needs. Bayer, the German chemical and pharmaceutical maker, is developing new agrochemicals for rice and is looking to create tailored products for Asia, such as flood-resistant rice strains.

A mix of cooperation and competition between governments, corporations, startups and investors may just be a recipe for agricultural sustainability.

Nikkei staff writers Justina Lee in Singapore, Erwida Maulia in Jakarta, Kim Dung Tong in Ho Chi Minh City and Cliff Venzon in Manila contributed to this article.

Minneapolis Kids Rap About Urban Agriculture — And We’re Into It

Minneapolis Kids Rap About Urban Agriculture — And We’re Into It

By Dan Nosowitz on December 7, 2016

via Appetite for Change

Remember that "Hot Cheetos & Takis" video featuring those cute Minneapolis kids from back in 2012, which got more than 14 million views on YouTube? From that same studio comes something a bit more grown up.

Appetite For Change, a Minneapolis-based nonprofit dedicated to using food as a means for economic and social growth, recently released a new video with a slightly different message—but some familiar faces.

The nonprofit teamed up with Beats & Rhymes, a program also based in Minneapolis that allows kids to write and produce music in a professional setting, to create a the song and video for “Grow Food.” Using the same familiar touchstones—808 beats, Atlanta-style spooky bass lines, an array Grantland described as “a banger”—Beats & Rhymes has come up with a song that’s somehow both a plea to fight against food deserts and also pretty…good. Here’s the video.

“Grow Food” rails against the proliferation of processed food, unhealthy school lunches, and bad eating habits while promoting gardening, urban farming, and eating your veggies. A sample line: “I get the C from the oranges, I get the B from the broccoli, I get the A from the milk, I get my vitamins properly. My food be packed with them minerals, I hope you taking this literal!”

You can learn more about Appetite For Change over at their website.

The BCFN Foundation Presents The Food Sustainability Index in Brussels

The BCFN Foundation Presents The Food Sustainability Index in Brussels

This afternoon the BCFN Foundation will be at the seat of the European Parliament in Brussels to present the Food Sustainability Index, developed in conjunction with the Economist Intelligence Unit.

The Food Sustainability Index examines data relating to 25 countries and 16 cities, by means of a white paper, a city monitor, a series of infographics and a digital hub.

The aim is to promote better information on the global food paradoxes, in relation to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals. An opportunity to discuss food waste, sustainable agriculture and nutrition challenges while highlighting best practices and concrete solutions which can help to reset the relationship between food, people and the planet.

Contributors

Luca Virginio - Vice Chairman, BCFN Foundation
Irene Mia - Economist Intelligence Unit
Angelo Riccaboni - Member of the Leadership Council of the UN SDSN, Coordinator of SDSN Mediterranean and BCFN Advisory Board member
Sirpa Pietikäinen - European People’s Party (EPP), Finland
Francesca Allievi – BCFN researcher and President of BCFN Alumni Association

Jacques Vandenschrik - European Federation of Food Banks
Angélique Delahaye - EPP, France

Matthias Meissner - WWF, Germany
Katarzyna Dembska - BCFN Researcher
Roberto Bertollini - Robert Bosch Academy

Grant Awarded To Study Sustainable Practices For Urban Agriculture

Grant Awarded To Study Sustainable Practices For Urban Agriculture

By Melissa De Witte, UC Santa CruzThursday, December 1, 2016

Credit: UC Santa Cruz

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) awarded Stacy Philpott, associate professor in environmental studies and holder of the Ruth and Alfred Heller Chair in Agroecology at UC Santa Cruz, a $439,676 grant to research sustainable agricultural practices in urban environments.

“As the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Subcommittee overseeing USDA’s budget, I’m really pleased to support this research and help bring this grant home for UCSC,” said U.S. Rep. Sam Farr (D-Carmel) about the award. “Not only is the Central Coast a leading producer of fresh produce for tables across the nation and abroad, we’re also leaders in agriculture research.”

Thanks to support from the USDA and Rep. Farr, Philpott will be able to help urban farmers and gardeners better understand the relationships between vegetation management, landscape composition, sociocultural diversity and biodiversity. She will study 25 urban gardens on the California central coast, including spaces in San Jose, Sunnyvale, Santa Cruz, Watsonville, Salinas and Monterey.

Over recent years, American urban areas have experienced a boost in small-scale, local food production. Urban farms and gardens have provided residents — especially those living in underserved communities — with the fresh produce and nutrition lacking in these areas.

“Many urban gardeners lack regionally appropriate agricultural knowledge regarding pest control, pollination, water storage and garden sustainability,” says Philpott. She has been studying insect biodiversity in urban gardens to better understand the ecological roles that natural enemies of pests and pollinators provide in these green spaces.

“This missing knowledge is especially concerning given increasing food demands, increased climate-induced ecosystem stress and the increasing importance of urban agriculture for providing for food security, especially in communities where food access is quite limited.”

As Philpott points out, ecosystem services like pest control and pollination are a necessary function of biodiversity and a critical factor to a successful crop yield.

“Despite the known importance of ecosystem services for crop yields in urban farms, there is a gap in our understanding of ecosystem services for urban agriculture,” Philpott says.

Philpott and her research team will look at what production practices are essential to promoting pest control, pollination, and water conservation in urban gardens—essential to providing food for urban gardeners.

Throughout his tenure in political office, Rep. Farr has advocated for organic agriculture for California and the country.

“During my 40-plus years in elected office, I’ve been a champion for increasing access to fresh fruits and vegetables and for improving sustainable agriculture practices,” he says.

Rep. Farr also has been a strong supporter of the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems, UC Santa Cruz’s farm and garden program. In 2012 he presented a $665,000 USDA grant to the school for its organic farming training program.

The Future of The Future Farmers of America

With more than 650,000 members, FFA is teaching a new generation dedicated to feeding the world’s growing population.

The Future of The Future Farmers of America

With more than 650,000 members, FFA is teaching a new generation dedicated to feeding the world’s growing population.

Nov 28, 2016

Sarah Baird is a writer and editor based in New Orleans.

• Bio

As long as I can remember, I’ve coveted a jacket.

Nothing that you’d find on any runway in Milan, though, or draped over the shoulders of a peacocking Kardashian. Instead, from the time I was a preteen, the piece of outerwear that has made my Kentucky-raised heart skip a beat is the signature jacket of the Future Farmers of America.

Equal parts structured and supple, rugged and genteel, the midnight blue showpiece always seemed to encapsulate what I cherished about growing up in a farming community—though I was never particularly adept at fixing tractors or birthing calves.

For years I pined after one, even tinkering with the idea of taking enough floriculture classes to maybe, just maybe, pass off getting my name looped in perfect cursive onto a jacket of my own.

But that level of scheming just never felt right. See, FFA jackets aren’t just handed out willy-nilly: They have to be earned. An FFA jacket carries with it a level of agricultural know-how and more important, pride in the work accomplished by American farmers day in and day out. The jacket, and what it means to wear one, cannot be bought.

Or so I thought.

Last year, while wandering around an antiques store in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, I poked my head around a corner to find a couple of French tourists cooing over a style of coat that was, well, quite familiar. As the girl slid her arm into one of my beloved blue-corduroy sleeves, my eyes bulged. There was no way she’d ever been within shouting distance of a shovel.

Evidently an FFA jacket can be bought—to the tune of $500.

“Oh God, she can’t wear that!” I screamed inside my head, resisting the urge to flip over a table covered with art deco ashtrays, Incredible Hulk style. Despite my own indignant nostalgia, I was struck by a difficult question: Is farming alive and well in America?

Farmland is rapidly losing out to urban sprawl, and the debate over genetically modified crops (and the sprawl of big ag) has grown more contentious than ever. Our nation’s farmers are graying, with few protégés following in their wake. This is even before we get to the financial hurdles upstart farmers face, hurdles that mount each year, with little sign of slowing.

So what do the Future Farmers of America look like today? Who are the teenagers in Indiana or Arkansas wearing the jackets I love so dearly, and what are they worried about? What kind of future do they see for themselves?

George Strait soundtrack prepped, I hit the road to find out.

•••

Nine billion.

That’s the number you’ll encounter over and over, repeated like a mantra, when talking with FFA members. It is the molten core of what drives FFA today, the organizational touchstone that motivates and centers the masses.

It’s estimated that the earth’s population will hit 9 billion by 2050. In most conversations, this fact is followed without fail by the quasi-rhetorical question: How are we going to feed all of those humans?

The statistic is so deeply engrained in the FFA psyche that it’s almost alarming not to hear a member rattle it off during conversation. Some people utter it with race-against-the-clock anxiety. For others—mostly students—the number “9 billion” is spelled out in a word bubble above their heads, the zeros floating away like an airplane contrail. It’s a quantity almost too big to fathom.

The solution to the problem, too, seems to always appear just out of reach.

“I believe in the future of agriculture, with a faith born not of words but of deeds…in the promise of better days through better ways,” the FFA creed begins. What that future looks like now, though, is perhaps more complex than ever.

Since its founding in 1928, FFA has seen tens of millions of students flow through its ranks, and over the decades, has become a primary example of both a youth organization with influence (it does a good deal of lobbying) and phenomenal staying power.

Larry Case, who served as national FFA advisor between 1984 and 2010, believes that two turning points significantly altered the makeup and spurred the growth of the organization.

The first was when membership was opened up to women. “They opened up membership to girls in 1969, and thank goodness they did that,” he said. Today about half of all FFA members are female, including all but one member of the 2015–16 national leadership team. What’s more, at almost every FFA school I visited, women were some of the most vocal supporters of agricultural education.

The second critical juncture came in the late 1980s, when Case and his team began pushing teachers to expand and diversify the FFA curriculum—adding a focus on agri-science and biotechnology—to attract students who weren’t from traditional farming backgrounds.

“This broadened curriculum is the main thing that I believe attracts a larger base of students,” Case said.

The approach worked better than anyone could’ve imagined. Over the past 10 years, FFA numbers have ballooned to almost 650,000 members ages 12 to 21 nationwide. There are now 7,859 chapters in all 50 states, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, and FFA students earn $4 billion annually through their hands-on work experience.

The shift led to another stat that, like “9 billion,” regularly works its way into conversation with FFA members: 210, which is the number of career pathways FFA supports. Many would-be future farmers see the old standby ag careers—rancher, commodity crop grower, family-farm inheritor—as less desirable, or realistic, choices.

“A huge misconception is that if you're in FFA, you're going to graduate and go be a farmer,” said 2015–16 National FFA Secretary Nick Baker. “While that is certainly an extraordinarily admirable profession, there’s also agricultural mechanics, agricultural technology, genetic engineering, and the veterinary field. I mean, the list of job options really goes on and on.”

FFA has also gobbled up the remnants of what used to be called vocational education; welding, carpentry, electrical work, and mechanics all fall under the FFA banner, more or less, not to mention futuristic-sounding gigs like flavor technologist and biosecurity monitor.

From an organizational perspective, this hand-over-fist growth means ensuring fund-raising efforts are kept at an equal clip.

FFA is a nonprofit and looks not only to alumni and individual givers as a means of monetary support but to corporations such as John Deere and Monsanto. (Although FFA received a federal charter in 1950, it receives no federal funding.) A cursory glance at the money trail shows that it’s pretty much impossible to divorce FFA from big ag and big pharma. For starters, Monsanto and Zoetis (the billion-dollar animal pharmaceutical company) both donate upwards—way upwards—of a million dollars a year in both general giving and individual scholarships.

And the ties go beyond financial support. In 2014, Brett Begemann, the president of Monsanto, was the keynote speaker at the National FFA Convention. When FFA decided to move and expand its national office in 1998, the land for the new building was given to them by Dow Chemical. The headquarters are smack-dab behind a shopping center built on what is assuredly former farmland.

Overall, corporate giving makes up 94 percent of FFA’s annual budget.

•••

David Tucker is what most people would believe to be the dictionary definition of an FFA student, the kind of kid for whom wearing the blue-and-gold jacket is nothing short of a birthright.

A towheaded, good-natured 16-year-old with a small stature and a lopsided smile, Tucker is a sixth-generation cattle farmer and president of the FFA chapter at Locust Trace AgriScience Center in Lexington, Kentucky. He has always known cattle farming would be his future.

“I learned to count using calves that was just born,” Tucker said, laughing and toying with his faded ball cap bearing the logo of a local stockyard. “’Two cows plus two cows equals four cows.’ That’s how I counted. It took them forever to teach me I didn’t need to say cows after the number.”

Located next to a penitentiary on the outskirts of town, Locust Trace is a five-year-old, 82-acre public vocational high school, complete with two barns, state-of-the-art greenhouses, a food science kitchen, a veterinary lab, and six-and-a-half acres devoted solely to gardening. At the school of 315 kids—most of whom split their days between here and their regular schools—it’s not hard to notice how Locust Trace weaves sustainability into all facets of its campus. The school prides itself on net-zero energy consumption, using industrial-size fans as a main source of cooling throughout its building as well as photovoltaic solar panels. It collects rainwater for irrigation and even has fashioned an underground cistern to hold the collected rainwater in case of drought.

When I arrived, principal Ann Stewart DeMott, a fifth-generation farmer, was shooing away a couple of barn cats that live in her office. (Bella and Spirit serve as “therapy felines” for kids with anxiety.) The school is full of students from all different backgrounds, she told me, most of whom have little—if any—farming experience. No matter: They get the hang of things quickly. In an era when kids are helicopter-parented ad nauseam, these ag students are retooling antique tractors by hand and mucking out stalls for school credit by the time their first semester is up.

“My dad works for Toyota, and my mom is a teacher. I hadn’t been closer than 40 feet to a horse before I came here,” said Dion Compton, 17, as we walked past the campus stables. Dion, one of several African American students at Locust Trace, has a twang that makes it seem like he’s been around farms forever. “I mean, I’d been to SeaWorld and knew I liked animals, but didn’t think that’s something I could do.” Now, when he graduates, he’ll be attending an equine technical school to make horses his career.

There’s a lot of pride to go around at Locust Trace, especially when it comes to hands-on experience. A visit to the veterinary lab found students in scrubs, learning all about how to properly measure an animal’s weight, height, and body temperature. A couple years ago, students took the bones from a recently deceased horse and reconstructed them for use as a learning tool. They nicknamed the skeletal horse Persephone. No one is squeamish.

In the equine barn, Amanda Berry—a student with a frizzy shock of dishwater blond hair—talked to me about how expensive it is to take care of farm animals, all while a horse named Taco rattled his feed bucket behind her. Will Bischoff hoisted a baby goat on his chest as he explained how a new Harry Potter–themed game he has created for the school has helped him to learn leadership skills. When we made it to the livestock barn, Tucker trotted out an orphaned calf named Sassy, showing her off like a pro.

The challenges that farmers will face in the future are never far from the minds of students at Locust Trace, especially when it comes to loss of local farmland. “The towns are growing into the farmland around here, and that’s a big issue,” Tucker said. “Also, a lot of these kids have no clue where their food comes from. They think it just magically appears at Kroger. We will have to teach them that it comes straight from the field, where we’ve had to take care of it and raise it. It’s had a life”—he paused reverently—“so it can help keep us healthy and keep us fed.”

•••

A pinprick of a destination nestled in the heart of Kentucky’s former tobacco country, Robertson County feels about as anticorporate as a place can be.

Meet the farmers working to solve the problems of tomorrow, today.

We’re fortunate here. We have a really supportive community and a supportive administration for our ag program,” said Frank Gifford, the FFA advisor. In the next room over, his first-year students were in the middle of a canning lab, chopping up and cooking down tomatoes to make salsa from scratch.

Despite its size, Robertson County is perhaps the most quietly entrepreneurial chapter I visited. Among a range of projects—from selling bobwhite quail to making vinyl signage—the FFA chapter started beekeeping two years ago and during the last harvest, bottled and sold 200 pounds of honey from 10 hives. (I happily accepted a jar of my very own.)

“We try to generate at least enough money to put it back into the projects and make them stronger. If we make a profit above and beyond, we use that money to start something else. From the greenhouse sales to livestock sales to honey sales to ag mechanics projects, our ag program is financially self-sufficient,” Gifford said.

One of the Robertson County students’ biggest concerns echoes an issue Kentucky FFA Executive Secretary Matt Chaliff has identified: How do farmers in remote areas get their products to a larger market, and more important, how do they compete—in terms of price, quantity, and more—once they get there?

“If you think about a student [farmer] in far eastern Kentucky, like Perry County, if they’re growing some kind of vegetable, they need to have that [produce] ready at just the right time,” Chaliff said. “Then, they’re two hours away from a large city market. And if you think about a fresh product, like sweet corn, making sure that they have an actual market before they grow it is a critical component.”

That’s before they’re even in front of a consumer.

•••

While rural schools like Robertson County are still FFA’s bread and butter, urban and suburban chapters seem to be gaining the most steam, and attention, on a national level.

City- and suburb-based programs comprise 27 percent of the FFA membership today, but with the momentum that’s building, it’s clear the number is only going to tick upward. There are already FFA chapters in 19 of the 20 largest U.S. cities.

At Seneca High School in Louisville, Kentucky, the agriculture curriculum all but fizzled out before Kristan Wright took over the program a little more than six years ago. Now, two classrooms are bursting at the seams with students, creatures, and colorful craft projects: skeletal models made out of dried pasta, FFA seals constructed from paper plates, illustrations of animal digestive systems.

The students at Seneca talked about agriculture like they had something to prove. Many expressed that because they live in an urban environment, they have become makeshift evangelists proclaiming the importance of farming to their city-dwelling peers.

“There’s such a huge divide between rural and urban life,” said Lexie Hughes, her hands moving emphatically. The daughter of a hairdresser and a truck driver, she is perhaps the most vocal of her peers. “Urbanizing everything in agriculture is the future. Rural agriculture is going away. It’s gone.”

Aaliyah Moss—who cites Food, Inc. (a Participant Media film) as her favorite movie and wants to be a biotechnologist—felt similarly. “Agricultural literacy is so important. Something we do really well at Seneca is take the urban aspect and the rural aspect, and we put them together for people to understand,” Moss said.

“And if I could add something?” Hughes interrupted. “It’s the youth that are redirecting the future of agriculture. I feel like we’re such an outspoken generation. We want to know everything about everything. We’re such curious people, and we’re going to educate ourselves about all the different kinds of agriculture rather than just seeing it as cows, sows, and plows.”

In Beech Grove, Indiana—a bedroom community outside of Indianapolis that feels like a Midwestern Mayberry—FFA advisor Chris Kaufman agrees.

“When we started the program here at Beech Grove five years ago, the idea was to get urban students who have no experience with agriculture more in the pipeline to get jobs at [places like] Eli Lily,” Kaufman said. Indianapolis is a hotbed for big drug companies, and their influence on the surrounding communities is difficult to miss. “One of the issues is that we’re three or four generations away from the farm, so even common farm practices, kids just have no idea. Being so far removed, you forget that you need to be a part of it.”

A former traveling agricultural education specialist for the state of Indiana, Kaufman also feels students in urban settings are often fed what he calls misinformation about organic versus conventional farming.

“Since we’re so far removed from the farm, people start hearing these buzzwords like ‘organic’ and ‘GMO-free’ and get excited about it. In reality, those are more marketing schemes than anything. If you go out in the country and ask a kid if he cares about GMOs, he’s going to say no. But in the city, if you tell a kid that something’s GMO-free, they’re going to be like, ‘I’ll pay more for it!’ We’re just tricking people into thinking these things are better for them, when they’ve not been proven to be better or more beneficial.”

And so the debate begins.

•••

How to talk to students about organic farming is a controversial topic within FFA.

“We present all the information we can and let the students make an informed decision,” said Sheila Fowler, vice principal at the Chicago High School for Agricultural Sciences. An hour later, I saw an example of this in the plant science classroom, where students were comparing and contrasting the merits of guerrilla gardening versus conventional farming versus GMOs. It felt refreshing.

But this kind of democratic approach seems to be more the exception than the rule. When I asked Nick Baker how frequently he encountered teachers offering up information about organic farming, it was clear that it was still fairly unusual.

“Organic farming isn't quite as prominent as your conventional agricultural practices, but I will say this: I have been very impressed with the open-mindedness of agriculture teachers this year to teaching about organic farming,” Baker said in a measured tone. “A lot of times in the ag community, you're conventional or you're organic, but you're not both. Really, when it comes to this industry, in my opinion, it needs to be a ‘both and’ kind of situation.”

When it comes to GMOs and the rise of large-scale, newfangled farming technologies, such as drones and no-till farming, opinions get even more complicated. “GMOs are good for you, and they’ve been made to feed the entire world,” said Ayden Paulson, a junior from Seneca who likes to score points in FFA debate events by riling the other team about PETA. “When you hear ‘genetically modified,’ you automatically think that it’s bad. But GMOs make sure our food is safe, and we’re trying to make it better for everyone.”

Not everyone in his chapter agrees. “A problem is everything is becoming more industrialized. Bringing different technologies to farms, it means less work for the people, and the less we work, the less we learn. Technology is making things easier but causing things to be worse at the same time,” chapter mate Moss said with a shudder.

“Plus, that’s where the pink slime comes from.”

“Sustainability” is a complicated term and one with a strangely malleable meaning within FFA circles. There’s environmental sustainability, sure, and there’s protecting public health and animal welfare, but most FFA members are far more concerned about the sustainability of the human population. (There’s that 9 billion stressor again.) In most cases, this means embracing any and all new technologies, chemicals, and agri-science solutions that allow for more food to be grown on smaller plots of land—whether or not it tinkers with plant DNA or pushes small farmers out of business.

If you need confirmation that large-scale agriculture is attempting to co-opt the word “sustainable,” simply visit the Monsanto website, where the conglomerate bills itself as “a sustainable agriculture company.” If nothing else, the company recognizes the importance of reshaping words for its own benefit.

Of the hundreds of scholarship competitions FFA offers at the national level (with sponsors such as Monsanto, DuPont, and CSX), only one focuses on or rewards innovative student ideas for organic production.

•••

If Locust Trace teased out the notion that ag-specific schools might be the key to the future of farming, then the Chicago High School for Agriculture Sciences strongly seconded the motion.

The last working farm in the city of Chicago, located on the South Side, CHSAS is the national gold standard for agricultural high schools—rural and urban alike—and the envy of many an FFA advisor. From Indiana to Louisiana, its reputation precedes it.

Founded in 1985, the school prides itself on being a part of the national effort to “broaden the scope of teaching in and about agriculture, beginning at the kindergarten level and extending through adulthood.” It’s an ambitious goal but one that has been embraced with vigor. Boasting more than 70 acres of cooking labs, tractor barns, and mechanic garages, the school is a role model in every possible way.

“Don’t forget to take her to the barn!” Fowler reminded my student tour guides, one of whom was wearing a sweatshirt with a photo of her dog printed on it. They assured her that everything was under control, then went back to explaining all about the new agriculture “pathway” (essentially, a career prep trajectory) in biotechnology. It will fall in line with six other categories—including horticulture and food science—that CHSAS students use as a vocational and curriculum guide throughout high school.

Along the way to the barn (which was pretty special in its own right), we passed some phenomenal scenes, the likes of which were completely foreign to my notion of a classroom. We strolled through a garage where students were power drilling high up on a platform while below, others sorted pumpkins they’d grown, then harvested from the field with a tractor. We visited the CHSAS farm stand, an after-school shop on school grounds that’s open to the community and sells products, like zucchini bread, grown and hand-crafted by the students. I heard about the fully functional tiny house students constructed two years ago for the Chicago Flower and Garden Show, and how each pathway contributed something unique to the process. (It’s still for sale, if you’re interested.)

CHSAS farm stand on campus in Chicago sells various seasonal vegetables picked by the students. (Photo: Scott Thompson)

Even though you can see strip malls off in the distance, CHSAS feels like its own world. There are cornfields, cabbage plots, and a freshly planted apple orchard. Somewhere beyond a baseball field, cattle graze. The students laugh as they tell me about how the cows sometimes escape, roaming into the middle of a busy road and the lot of a nearby Ford dealership.

“I can’t imagine someone driving down the middle of 115th Street, then being like, ‘What is this cow doing here?’ ” Nicole Stallard, one of my tour guides, said, doubling over with the giggles.

•••

“Family” is a popular word in FFA circles.

Ask anyone—and I mean anyone—in an FFA chapter if he or she feels kinship with fellow members, and the student will likely explode with praise for his or her ag-loving brothers and sisters. Heck, even without asking, I came to expect that chapter members would tell me within seconds of meeting just how much affection there is to go around. There’s a sort of tenderness about FFA students that comes perhaps from working closer with the earth—tending to sick animals, nurturing fledgling plants. Unlike the majority of their teenage peers, they seem to have a larger purpose, understanding, and respect for their place in the world.

What’s more, the FFA chapters I visited were not only more racially and socioeconomically diverse than I expected but also incredibly welcoming of students with learning or developmental disabilities. Inclusion, it seems, is a point of pride among many FFA chapters.

Nathan French from Seneca says the impact FFA has had on his life is extraordinary.

“Everyone in FFA is like family to me. Freshman year I was mostly sick, so I didn’t do anything, but sophomore year I finally found a talent for impromptu speeches, thanks to two fantastic teachers,” French said, grinning. Not only did he win first place at the Kentucky FFA regional competition last year for speaking about beef, but he took home the top prize in the talent competition for a dance he choreographed to a Black Eyed Peas song.

As one might imagine, building a familial culture starts with supportive teachers, and FFA advisors are nothing if not beloved. The recent swell in agriculture programs across the country means that ag teachers are also in high demand, especially in places that traditionally haven’t been hotbeds of FFA action.

“I’ve been at the school...forever?” JaMonica Marion, FFA advisor at CHSAS, said, laughing. A 2001 graduate, she officially returned to teach in 2006. “The majority of the teachers in our ag department are now alumni, so we get to provide the students with firsthand knowledge. We can actually relate to them because we were in their seats.”

At times, the intimacy found at the chapter level feels in stark juxtaposition to the highly formal national structure of the organization, embodied most readily by the national FFA officers. A group of six peer-elected students, the officers serve as the face and fearless leaders of the organization, even taking a year off from schooling to devote themselves to 365 days of FFA-related lobbying, fund-raising, and general hype.

Grooming for national FFA office begins early, with state FFA officers whisked away each year on a (corporate-sponsored) international trip to learn about agricultural production in such countries as Japan and South Africa. They’re also sent to several forms of leadership boot camp, the biggest of all being the one for national officers at Tyson Farms.

Tyson CEO Donny Smith is a proud FFA alum and a huge role model for Nick Baker, who hopes to be an agricultural lobbyist after serving in the Marines.

“[Smith] usually spends about two or three hours every year with the national officer team talking about leadership. He compares [leadership] to a peach tree,” Baker said. “We [as national officers] are the roots; we are supplying the FFA members with what they need in order to be successful. Then they can go be the peaches that people see and admire about this tree that is our organization.” He paused.

“It's always interesting to get to visit with Mr. Smith.”

Whatever leadership training they’re doing, it’s working. The interpersonal and public speaking skills the national officers possess are impressive, and their fervor can border on proselytizing at times. For the most part, they stay on message better than most elected officials I’ve met and are both personable and persuasive in their arguments. It’s not difficult to see why hundreds of thousands of young people have faith in them.

Today, FFA has grown to such staggering heights nationally that it seems to more closely resemble a political party than any sort of school club. The sheer number of members alone is a little baffling, and the power that could be wielded by 650,000 young people rallying around a single cause is a sensational, or terrifying, thing to think about. It has revolutionary potential.

If anyone knows this, it’s the students (and, uh, maybe some corporations).

•••

For all the momentum behind the youth agriculture movement, one thing still strikes me as kind of odd: Since 1988, FFA isn’t even the Future Farmers of America anymore—at least, not technically. Just like Kentucky Fried Chicken is now just an acronym, KFC, FFA’s official name is simply the National FFA Organization.

We’re so much more than farming and ranching these days. It’s a good thing! National advisors and officers will argue. To some degree, that’s true. But I can’t help feeling a twinge of sadness that farming has been lost, in name, from its very own organization.

So what will the exalted FFA heroes of tomorrow look like, if not traditional farmers?

In 2014, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History ran a campaign in search of five exemplary FFA members “whose lives and careers have been shaped by agricultural education.” The honor was, undoubtedly, pretty grand. After ascending to national glory, the personal FFA jackets of these handpicked ag titans were to become part of an exhibit at the museum celebrating agricultural innovation and heritage.

President Jimmy Carter's FFA Jacket, which is displayed in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in Washington DC. (Photo: Courtesy the Smithsonian)

After a months-long search, the selected winners were announced, and they clearly represented the diversity of FFA’s membership. Among others, there was Corey Flournoy, the first African American national president, and Karlene Lindow Krueger, a pioneering Wisconsin hog farmer. Former President Jimmy Carter was the cherry on top, “Plains, Georgia” emblazoned on the back of his blue-and-gold jacket.

So when they do an all call 50 years from now for the next round of distinguished alumni, will the chosen few be organic rabbit breeders or scientists who grow meat in labs? Compost revolutionaries or mechanics who work on no-till farming? Ag-drone scientists? Or all of the above?

While the paths of our future agricultural leaders remains to be seen, it’s safe to say that today, FFA students hold a respect for the land and an optimism about building a better world that is unmatched. The kids I spoke to are not only hopeful but purposeful and ready to take up their larger mission on the planet to do what they believe is best.

“Knowing that the first job on this earth was a farmer and the last job will be a farmer,” Taylor McNeel, 2015–16 national FFA president, explained, taking a long, deep pause. “It’s pretty cool to be a part of that.”

Urban Agriculture: A New Way to Look At Green

Urban Agriculture: A New Way to Look At Green

The exit from Interstate 280 South onto the Guadalupe Parkway is not a bad-looking off-ramp, as freeway exits go. Still, the last thing a driver might expect to see adjacent to it is a one-acre farm featuring tidy rows of corn, eggplant, okra and squash with the added zest of chickens and bees. Welcome to San Jose’s Taylor Street Farm, a colorful corner amidst the concrete that exemplifies a hot new California trend called Urban Agriculture Incentive Zones.

Though the name is unwieldy—Urban Agriculture Incentive Zone is often shortened to the acronym UAIZ—the purpose is foodie- friendly. As outlined in the Urban Agriculture Incentive Zone Act of 2013—California Assembly Bill 551—the law gives tax breaks to property owners who transform empty lots, for at least five years, into working gardens or farms.

“It has the potential to give residents access to affordable, fresh produce in their own neighborhoods,” says Santa Clara County Supervisor Ken Yeager, a fitness buff who bikes to work and who shepherded the measure to county approval in 2015. Eligible counties and cities must opt in to the legislation in order to gain its benefits. San Francisco became the first jurisdiction to do so in 2014.

Historically, growers did not need extra incentives to cultivate the rich soil south and west of San Francisco Bay. Thanks to mild winters, spectacular summers and easy access to transportation, Santa Clara County—to cite one example in the region—was home to more than 25,000 farms and orchards during the middle of the 20th century. But after World War II, the county’s population began to double every decade. By 1964, the number of farms had decreased by 90%. “The growth of cities,” say experts Paul Starrs and Peter Goin, “pushes away profitable agriculture at the urban fringe.”

This has proven true in the Bay Area. The region lost 200,000 acres of agricultural land to development, just between 1984 and 2011. The study that ploughed up those numbers was completed five years ago, before the latest boom created more multimillion-dollar motivation for growers to sell.

Which is where UAIZs come in. The concept accepts the reality of lofty land values and accelerating assessments and uses tax savings as a motivator. New taxes on UAIZ plots are calculated to reflect, not soaring residential rates, but the average value of California cropland.

“When I look around San Jose I see a city peppered with vacant lots ripe with potential for new urban gardens near our homes,” says Zach Lewis of Garden to Table, the non-profit that operates the Taylor Street Farm. His research uncovered 585 parcels of land in urban San Jose totalling 371 acres. It is worth noting that this is a tiny amount of land in a state that produces two-thirds of the nation’s fruits and cultivates 800,000 acres of almond trees alone. Still, many of the small parcels in urban areas are in neighbourhoods, and that’s important, says San Jose City Councilmember Raul Percales, a former police officer. “This program not only helps decrease crime and blight on that land, but it can turn it into vibrant green space.”

Barry Swenson Builder is on board. The company owns the Taylor Street property and had no immediate plans for it when Lewis approached them four years ago with his urban farm idea. “Why let vacant land sit idle and pay to maintain it when it can be productive space for growing food?” says company executive Case Swenson.

Growers like Andy Mariani, proprietor of Andy’s Orchard, remain skeptical. He has found it increasingly complicated to continue producing his acclaimed stone fruits on his once-rural land in Morgan Hill. His acreage is gradually being surrounded by homes: farm tractors, dust and spraying don’t always please the neighbors. “Agriculture and urban uses are inherently incompatible,” he says.

But behind the new idea is a vision of change in the way food systems operate. “Yes, it may be challenging,” says Deborah Olson, a friend of Andy’s, who sells his produce at her family’s historic farm stand on busy El Camino Real in Sunnyvale. “But it might be a way we can continue to buy fresh and buy local. Isn’t that really our goal?”

When advocates like Zach Lewis look out on the region, they celebrate its ability to embrace new concepts of green. “I see a growing city,” he says, “with endless potential to improve the local food system and the lives of everyone in it.”

New York City Feeds Itself Tonight!

New York City Feeds Itself Tonight!

10/15/2015 04:45 pm ET | Updated Oct 15, 201

Karin Kloosterman flux founder

It’s the middle of NYC AgTech Week.

. Tonight there will be a fish taco dinner prepared with fish raised on a roof in the city; the rest of the food was grown in urban farms in locations throughout the Big Apple. Dining starts tonight at Farm on Kent, pictured below, in Brooklyn.

A host of tours from 12 noon to 4 tomorrow Friday will show of off the city’s coolest urban farming technologies and I’ll be there giving a demo on how my hydroponics technology flux works.

Leading a global trend to grow hyper-local food close to home, New York entrepreneurs have innovated their food well beyond tomorrow using bold applications from the world of high-tech.

Tonight Manhattan Agriculture chefs will do the chopping and cooking and at the event meet 21 of New York’s leading urban agtech companies planting roots for a vision that New York will produce up to 40% of its food locally.

Sample pesticide-free food or see how food is grown on “water” or hydroponically — one of the most sustainable ways to grow fresh, tasty food in cities.

The event is hosted by the New York City Agriculture Collective (www.farming.nyc).

Henry Gordon-Smith, from Blue Planet Consulting, one of the city’s leading consultants on urban farm projects using technologies like hydroponics says: “I am getting calls on a daily basis from Real Estate developers wanting to know how they can make use of rooftops to grow both food and a new source of income.

“On the flipside I am seeing nothing short of a revolution driven by young entrepreneurs across the globe. Farming in the city has become the next big career: Post-degree, college students from various disciplines are asking me how they can switch careers and they are moving to NYC to make it happen. They want to quit everything and start growing food in their cities. This week will give answers to everyone who is curious about the industry,” he says.

The crunchiest carrots, the coolest connected cucumbers

And just like each New York neighborhood has its own flavor, the same is true for urban farms in the city. Urban farming can mean growing fish for families on a roof in Brooklyn, using hydroponic greenhouses in the Bronx to grow greens in the winter, or using connected sensors and software to optimize yield in the smallest of space — even if you live in a small rental in Soho.

It’s no surprise that when a movement to “grow local” sweeps across the nation that New York City picks it up and takes a firm stance and a bold leaf, ahem, lead in urban farming.

Meet the breadth of New York City’s agriculture leaders in industry and products for the connected garden at New York’s first AgTech Week where investors will connect to educators, backyard farmers, large-scale commercial growers, community activists, and city officials.

The full program is found here. Or email hello@farming.nyc for more.

Follow Karin Kloosterman on Twitter: www.twitter.com/karin_flux

Urban Aquaponic Farmer and Chef Redefines Local Food in Orange County, CA

Urban Aquaponic Farmer and Chef Redefines Local Food in Orange County, CA 

AJ Hughes

In a county named for its former abundance of orange groves, chef and farmer Adam Navidi is on the forefront of redefining local food and agriculture through his restaurant, farm, and catering business.

Navidi is executive chef of Oceans & Earth restaurant in Yorba Linda, runs Chef Adam Navidi Catering and operates Future Foods Farms in Brea, an organic aquaponic farm that comprises 25 acres and several greenhouses.

Navidi’s road to farming was shaped by one of his mentors, the late legendary chef Jean-Louis Palladin.

“Palladin said chefs would be known for their relationships with farmers,” Navidi says.

He still remembers his teacher’s words, and now as a farmer himself, supplies produce and other ingredients to a variety of clients as well as his restaurant and catering company.

Navidi’s journey toward aquaponics began when he was at the pinnacle of his catering business, serving multi-course meals to discerning diners in Orange County. Their high standards for food matched his own.

“My clients wanted the best produce they could get,” he says. “They didn’t want lettuce that came in a box.”

So after experimenting with growing lettuce in his backyard, he ventured into hydroponics. Later, he learned of aquaponics. Now, aquaponics is one of the primary ways Navidi grows food. As part of this system he raises Tilapia, which is served at his restaurant and by his catering enterprise.

Just like aquaponics helps farmers in cold-weather climes grow their produce year-round, the reverse is true for growers in arid, hot and drought-prone southern California.

“Nobody grows lettuce in the summer when it’s 110 degrees,” Navidi says.

But thanks to aquaponics, Navidi does.

Navidi also puts other growing methods to use at Future Foods Farms. He grows San Marzano tomatoes in a greenhouse bed containing volcanic rock (this premier variety was first grown in volcanic soil near Mount Vesuvius in Italy). Additionally, he utilizes vertical growing methods.

For Navidi, nutrient density is paramount—to this end, he takes a scientific approach in measuring the nutrition content of his produce. In the past, he and his staff used a refractometer, but now rely on a more precise tool—a Raman spectrometer. This instrument uses a laser that interacts with molecules, identifying nutritional value on a molecular level.

With a Raman spectrometer, Navidi measured the sugar content of three tomatoes—one from a grocery store, one from a high-end market, and one that he grew aquaponically. Respectively, measurements read 2.5, 4.0 and 8.5.

Navidi wants his customers to know about these nutritional differences, so he educates his Oceans & Earth diners through its menu and website. Future Foods Farms also offers internship opportunities to students from California State University, Fullerton. Interns conduct research and learn about cutting-edge ways to grow food.

Navidi believes aquaponics and other innovative growing methods can lead to a more robust local food system in Orange County. But he also sees some of southern California’s undervalued resources—namely, common weeds such as dandelion and wild mustard—helping the region become a major local foods player.

“We need more research on nutrients in weeds,” he says. “Dandelions and mustard are power weeds, and need little water.”

While these wild plants are important, they’re no substitute for policy. Navidi would like to see farmers in the county pay lower rates for water, and believes that a revised zoning code is needed for a county that is urban and becoming more so.

“Now, urban farming is happening all over,” he says. “We need changes to our zoning laws—politicians realize that.”

New zoning rules could help others in Orange County venture into aquaponics, something Navidi feels is necessary not only for the county, but for the country.

“For America to be sustainable, it needs aquaponics,” he says.

Ultimately, Navidi’s goal is to provide the best product possible, with an eye toward simplicity, health and wholesomeness.

“Any fine-dining chef is concerned with the quality of their product,” he says. “There’s nothing better than real food. I try to grow the most nutrient-dense tomato possible. Just add sea salt and black pepper—that’s all you need.”

Landmark 20-Year Study Finds Pesticides Linked to Depression In Farmers

Landmark 20-Year Study Finds Pesticides Linked to Depression In Farmers

By Dan Nosowitz on November 7, 2014

A landmark study indicates that seven pesticides, some widely used, may be causing clinical depression in farmers. Will the government step in and start regulating these chemical tools?

Earlier this fall, researchers from the National Institute of Health finished up a landmark 20-year study, a study that hasn’t received the amount of coverage it deserves. About 84,000 farmers and spouses of farmers were interviewed since the mid-1990s to investigate the connection between pesticides and depression, a connection that had been suggested through anecdotal evidence for far longer. We called up Dr. Freya Kamel, the lead researcher on the study, to find out what the team learned and what it all means. Spoiler: nothing good.

“There had been scattered reports in the literature that pesticides were associated with depression,” says Kamel. “We wanted to do a new study because we had more detailed data than most people have access to.” That excessive amount of data includes tens of thousands of farmers, with specific information about which pesticides they were using and whether they had sought treatment for a variety of health problems, from pesticide poisoning to depression. Farmers were surveyed multiple times throughout the 20-year period, which gives the researchers an insight into their health over time that no other study has.

“I don’t think there’s anything surprising about the fact that pesticides would affect neurologic function.”

Because the data is so excessive, the researchers have mined it three times so far, the most recent time in a study published just this fall. The first one was concerned with suicide, the second with depression amongst the spouses of farmers (Kamel says “pesticide applicators,” but most of the people applying pesticides are farmers), and the most recent with depression amongst the farmers themselves.

There’s a significant correlation between pesticide use and depression, that much is very clear, but not all pesticides. The two types that Kamel says reliably moved the needle on depression are organochlorine insecticides and fumigants, which increase the farmer’s risk of depression by a whopping 90% and 80%, respectively. The study lays out the seven specific pesticides, falling generally into one of those two categories, that demonstrated a categorically reliable correlation to increased risk of depression.

These types aren’t necessarily uncommon, either; one, called malathion, was used by 67% of the tens of thousands of farmers surveyed. Malathion is banned in Europe, for what that’s worth.

I asked whether farmers were likely to simply have higher levels of depression than the norm, given the difficulties of the job — long hours, low wages, a lack of power due to government interference, that kind of thing — and, according to Kamel, that wasn’t a problem at all. “We didn’t have to deal with overreporting [of depression] because we weren’t seeing that,” she says. In fact, only 8% of farmers surveyed sought treatment for depression, lower than the norm, which is somewhere around 10% in this country. That doesn’t mean farmers are less likely to suffer from depression, only that they’re less likely to seek treatment for it, and that makes the findings, if anything, even stronger.

The study doesn’t really deal with exactly how the pesticides are affecting the farmers. Insecticides are designed to disrupt the way nerves work, sometimes inhibiting specific enzymes or the way nerve membranes work, that kind of thing. It’s pretty complicated, and nobody’s quite sure where depression fits in. “How this ultimately leads to depression, I don’t know that anyone can really fill in the dots there,” says Kamel. But essentially, the pesticides are designed to mess with the nerves of insects, and in certain aspects, our own nervous systems are similar enough to those of insects that we could be affected, too. “I don’t think there’s anything surprising about the fact that pesticides would affect neurologic function,” says Kamel, flatly.

Kamel speaks slowly and precisely, and though her voice is naturally a little quavery, she answered questions confidently and at one point made fun of me a little for a mischaracterization I’d made in a question. The one time she hesitated was when I asked what she thought the result of the study should be; it’s a huge deal, finding out that commonly used pesticides, pesticides approved for use by our own government, are wreaking havoc on the neurological systems of farmers. Kamel doesn’t recommend policy; she’s a scientist and would only go so far as to suggest that we should cut down on the use of pesticides in general.

Others are going further. Melanie Forti, of a farmer advocacy group based in DC, told Vice, “There should be more regulations on the type of pesticides being used.” With any luck, this study will lead to a thorough reexamination of the chemical weapons allowed by farmers.

This Special Produce Was Grown 100 Feet Underground, Beneath The Feet Of Clueless Pedestrians

This Special Produce Was Grown 100 Feet Underground, Beneath The Feet Of Clueless Pedestrian

01/31/2014 11:33 am ET | Updated Jan 31, 2014

Radishes, red lion mustard and pea shoots, among other edibles, are being raised in a long-abandoned bomb shelter built for World War II. The brainchild of Richard Ballarf and Steven Dring, Zero Carbon Food hopes to grow underground food that’s sustainable — and also tasty.

“Zero Carbon Food utilizes redundant underground spaces in London, producing leafy greens, herbs and micro greens using LED lights and hydroponics, producing fresh ingredients with a minimal carbon footprint,” the company notes on crowdfunding site Crowdcube.

Skeptical? Join the club, Dring told The Guardian. But eventually, he added, “they say, ‘OK, let’s make this work.’”

Years in the making, the 2.5-acre farm will start up full time in March. Its first products should hit restaurants and markets by the summer of this year, according to a Zero Carbon press release. The first subterranean produce will include broccoli, garlic chives, red vein sorrel, mustard, coriander and Thai basil, according to the release. Larger produce such as mushrooms and tomatoes are planned for later.

Three-layer growing platforms, a water-cycling system and LED bulbs helps to keep the underground environment temperate and moisture levels optimized for plant growth.

As much as hydroponics sounds technical, it’s actually very low-tech,” Dring told The Guardian. “It’s flooding a bench full of seeds, like growing watercress as a child. The water then ebbs back to the tanks before flooding again hours later, and so on. It’s not at all energy demanding. … The constant temperature down here is a reason not to do it under glass, on the surface.”

And Zero Carbon Food has ambitious expansion goals. The company is looking to raise close to $500,000 through crowdfunding. So far it has raised around $64,400.

In an effort to give these underground greens some foodie cred, the project has partnered with internationally acclaimed Michel Roux Jr., a two-star Michelin chef at London restaurant Le Gavroche.

“When I first met these guys I thought they were absolutely crazy,” Roux Jr said in the press release. “But when I visited the tunnels and sampled the delicious produce they are already growing down there I was blown away. The market for this produce is huge.”

The veggies also got high marks from Independent food critic Samuel Muston, who remarked that the pea shoots, micro radish and mustard red leaf appeared “plum and meaty” with a flavor that tasted “vivid and vital.”

“Buy the same in a supermarket, even a posh one, and you are likely to encounter a taste pitched somewhere between dust and brown paper envelopes,” he wrote. “Here, surprisingly, they taste of the fields.”