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Seeds&Chips
“We believe that technological innovation can create a better, safer, and more resilient food system to fight hunger for everyone”
ITALY
Marco Gualtieri is an Italian businessman who has used his entrepreneurial skills to put together a coalition of private-sector partners and others focused on innovation in the global food chain.
Gualtieri’s innovative company, Seeds&Chips, concerns itself with a wide variety of issues surrounding the challenges of sustainable food system. Seeds&Chips in fact works with people who are dedicated to transforming the food chain towards a more meaningful future in the belief that the key to sustainability lies in connecting the dots, creating partnerships and fostering collaborations that bring new ideas to life.
“But we can’t do it alone. Collaboration is at the heart of our mission,” Gualtieri says.
Through their Global Food Innovation Summit and other activities, participants look at new ways to improve their roles in food production, processing, distribution, communication and consumption.
In fact, Seeds&Chips has built one of the largest food and ag tech ecosystems in the world, and through this network they engage innovators, investors, companies, institutions and policy makers from every point of the global food chain, and provide a platform for them to connect and work together for a more sustainable future.
They are applying their expertise in agriculture, food distribution, technology, economics, socio-economic development, and other areas to address issues as varied as the promotion of local food crops for better nutrition, improving financing, training and markets for smallholder farmers, reducing the environmental footprint of irrigation, food transportation and packaging, and reducing food loss and waste along the entire supply chain.
Tesco’s CEO Calls On Food Industry To Tackle Food Waste
Every year, a third of the world’s food goes to waste.
Posted By: Martin White on: September 25, 2018
Tesco CEO Dave Lewis will today call on the global food industry to be more transparent and publish their food waste data, to ensure that no food goes to waste across the global food chain.
Lewis will announce his call for action at the Champions 12.3 conference in New York today, and a statement from the retailer said that 27 of Tesco’s major suppliers such as Müller Milk & Ingredients, Kerry and Arla will soon publish their food waste data for the first time.
The statement also claimed that major branded Tesco suppliers such as Mars, General Mills and Unilever will commit to measure and publish their food waste data within the next year.
Tesco published food waste figures for its Republic of Ireland and Central European operations for the first time last year, and the retailer claims that it is “70% of the way towards its target that no food, safe for human consumption, goes to waste.”
According to the statement, Lewis will say: “Every year, a third of the world’s food goes to waste. That’s the equivalent of 1.3 billion tonnes of food being thrown away and we think that’s simply not right.
“We hope every country, major city and company involved in the food supply chain publishes their own food waste data, so that together we can take targeted action to reduce waste.
“We believe that what gets measured gets managed. Ultimately, the only way to tackle food waste is to understand the challenge – to know where in the supply chain food is wasted.”
Champions 12.3 is a coalition of executives from governments, businesses and international organisations which aims to halve global food waste at the retail and consumer levels by 2030.
Study Shows How Badly Smog Can Cripple Solar Farms
New research finds that severe air pollution can eliminate all profits from solar panel installations.
Aug 30, 2018
A lot can keep solar panels from generating electricity, from cloud cover blocking the sun to simply being nighttime. But according to recent research, one of the biggest obstacles facing solar farms is smog and haze from air pollution.
It’s not surprising that air pollution can make solar panels less effective since it can cut down on visibility and reduce the amount of sunlight reaching the ground. In the past, researchers have found that air pollution can lead to dust buildup on solar panels that can dramatically reduce their effectiveness.
This new research, from scientists at MIT and Singapore, calculates how much solar energy is lost due to smog in many of the world’s biggest cities. In the city of Delhi, one of the world’s most polluted cities, electricity generation is reduced by more than 10 percent the study finds, which translates to a cost of more than $20 million.
The problem is more than just inefficiency. A loss of this size could spell doom for many urban solar farms by seriously inhibiting their ability to turn a profit. Pollution can turn a money-making solar farm into a money sink.
Even worse, the lack of a solar alternative naturally just increases reliance on smog-generating fossil fuels and could serve to lock entire regions into a vicious cycle. This gives us another reason to keep our air clean, just in case we didn’t have enough.
Source: Energy and Environmental Science
What Humanity Can Learn From Plants
On trees, moss, and feeling at a distance
Recently, on a plane, I remembered the moment when the plane began to descend beneath the clouds. One moment, I could see the brightly lit and expanding city unfolding out below me, a brilliant landscape of lights and systemized movement.
Then the plane began to dip below the clouds, and in that stretched-out moment of time, it felt as if everything slowed down and expanded around me, crushing me with the expanded density, the suffocating largeness of it all, the claustrophobic realization of space and height and my place on that plane, with all the other people sitting in their seats around me.
My eyes locked only with the dismal and thick, thick white outside the window, looming and full; the momentary lapse in sight that was, in its own way, a kind of opening of vision, a revelation. When the apocalyptic moment passed and the city burst forth again beneath the clouds and the familiar brightness reminded me that no time had passed at all, not really, but also knowing that I had lived an eternal purgatory in that moment, as if alone and shivering and quivering in the corner of a tiled shower, the water pouring down and myself a body that could only shake and absorb the water through the skin as the tears rolled out my eyes. And when my feet were finally on the ground again, I thought only of the immensity and magnificence of the sky.
In these strange and sensitive moments when my anxiety flaunts itself as a determined and reverential haunting of sorts, I remember what it was that I really learned from my mother, what I really know through her, because of her, and after her.
I think about a particular individual, perhaps a rare bird, one who has been exiled for documenting facts and archiving flight patterns and creating maps and observing different species of trees, this bird who sees value in concretizing memory to outlast one’s own life and trajectory. This bird is also capable of being homesick, of longing for a home that exists or could one day exist, because language, diagrammed and phantomized and stricken, is also capable of forging a threshold between this world and the dream world, and so that in-betweenness might be construed as a concrete space, and there might be new language vociferated to articulate all that does not yet fit into the confines of the current restrictions of what is known.
That is, there are so many different types of knowing, and we have so many words to describe all these forms of knowing that privilege certainty and fact and truth, so that everything else becomes relegated to the dismal categories of feeling or intuition, as if there is a hierarchy predicated on certainty, though we know of course that certainty is an illusion and a framework for control, for cutting down trees, for carving out swaths of land to be territorialized on maps as evidence, for allowing some categories of living beings to have hope and for others to never glimpse the possibility of future beyond tomorrow.
When I was a little girl, my mother taught me the the Korean concept ofnunchi (눈치). When I was older, I came across more official definitions that defined nunchi (a combination of the Korean words for “eye” and “measure”) as an unspoken social intuition, an awareness of the feelings of those around you, or the ability to sense another person’s mood. Growing up, though, I feltthis concept more eminently. It is about survival, my mother would repeat to me. That friend of yours, 눈치 없다. (She doesn’t have nunchi.) Without a dictionary definition of the word, I inherited a feeling of this concept and its importance through the way my mother would use it to describe other people and in the ways she forced me to pay attention to invisible gestures, details, resonances, feelings. Essentially, she taught me to feel at a distance.
This, of course, is the definition of telepathy. Coined by Frederick W.H. Myers in 1882, telepathy essentially means “feeling at a distance.” In English, we only have words for “intuition” and “feeling” to describe all the kinds of knowing that aren’t grounded in logic, rationale, fact, or certainty. And we tend to dismiss telepathy as an interesting but unprovable concept. For many reasons, our culture has privileged scientific types of knowledge and deemed feelings and emotions as unreliable, uncertain, unpredictable. The thing is when we think of humans and other animals, much of the genetic code for what we’ve labeled “feelings” or “instinct” is some of the oldest code that is shared between humans and other lineages of living species. Evolution has modified and built off more primitive versions of “instinct” or “feeling,” but not only are feelings not unique to humans, I’d also like to consider them one of our most ancient (and therefore reliable) ways of knowing. (For example, there are studies showing how our brains often make decisions instinctually several seconds before we are aware of them, and then we actually spend the remainder of our time rationalizing and justifying the decision that our unconscious has already made for us.)
I have often felt imperceptible shifts in the environment around me, different resonances that resound on frequencies that don’t seem to be visible to a rational frame of mind. Is it so terrible to be irrational?
Life is a series of breaths: to see a perspective only when the seer and the seen are perfectly aligned. That is, to be in a position to be able to see and to want to see. For example, a lunar eclipse occurs only when the sun, earth, and moon are aligned in syzygy, our home planet’s shadow creeping across the moon until the moon appears red because our atmosphere acts as a filter for the sun’s light.
How often we forget the scale of the universe: That is, as Carl Sagan famously declared, we are only a pale blue dot in the vast landscape of space.
How often we forget to look: That is, to look past the mundanities of rational and privileged life and see the worlds exploding between our feet and inside weathered cracks.
How often we forget about the arrogance of finality: That is, with cultural concepts like the apocalypse, we lean toward narratives with grand endings, ones that promise linear time, resolution, and redemption and therefore attempt to secure our role as a worthwhile species in the overall scheme of things.
How often we forget about the constructedness of language: That is, though we articulate what we know using the limits of language, the limits of language are not the same as the limits of knowing.
How often we forget that position and perception are related: That is, we study the gravitational effects of, on, and between planetary bodies but often forget that human bodies, animal bodies, bodies of water are also affected by these same forces and that we are not uniquely immune to any of them.
How often we forget that our future stopped existing a long time ago: That is, our ability to speculate on a future beyond the constraints of the present involves a larger and different vantage point than the one we have limited ourselves to; that because the past and future intersect in the present moment, it is in this present moment that we must learn to see differently.
Witnessing the apocalyptic (not final, but catastrophic; not singular, but simultaneous; not biblical, but unseen) devastation that seems to have become a static reality, and sitting here, feeling the invisible embers of cosmic tremors, it’s hard not to see how we’ve simply deferred the future so many times that we can no longer see where the present ends and where the future begins. For me, this is a question of hope. To be blunt, shit is fucked up on a very large scale, and I think there is little left to be learned from humans’ forms of knowing. And so I have turned to the trees, the moss, the birds, all the other and synchronous forms of knowledge that we have largely ignored or buried.
Let’s consider trees. Standing in an immense forest still induces feelings of awe. This isn’t just about sheer size or power, but how a forest, a community of towering trees, affects our perception of interconnectivity and intimacy and breath by reminding us of the forces of life, the impossibility of presence, and the obviousness of influence.
The oldest trees in the world are thousands of years old. These trees have seen the births and deaths of nations, the migration of human populations, the evolution and extinction of life. How could we not benefit tremendously from the knowledge of trees? How could we not listen?
I first learned truly about the generosity of trees from my friend N.R., who reminded me, as I pressed my palm against the trunk of a huge oak tree, how trees absorb so much for us, not just carbon dioxide and other harmful gasses, but also our pain, anxiety, suffering; how trees gladly extend their wisdom if you only might ask. Always leave an offering, she reminded me. Always remember to express your gratitude to the tree. I lifted my hand away and obeyed her instructions by pouring out the remainder of my water bottle over the tree’s massive roots.
I want to change the way you think about forests. You see, underground there is this other world, a world of infinite biological pathways that connect trees and allow them to communicate and allow the forest to behave as though it’s a single organism. It might remind you of a sort of intelligence. —Suzanne Simard, “How Trees Talk to Each Other”
[T]ree songs emerge from relationship. Although tree trunks seemingly stand as detached individuals, their lives subvert this atomistic view. We’re all trees — trees, humans, insects, birds, bacteria — pluralities. Life is embodied network…Our ethic must therefore be one of belonging, an imperative made all the more urgent by the many ways that human actions are fraying, rewiring, and severing biological networks worldwide. To listen to trees, nature’s great connectors, is therefore to learn how to inhabit the relationships that give life its source, substance, and beauty. —David George Haskell, The Songs of Trees
Apart from humans, maybe, trees are the best form of life on this planet. Trees remain in one place, but reach elsewhere always. They stretch down into the ground, and they constantly strain toward the sun. They are the embodiment of our shared presence on a rocky planet that orbits a star. Hedgehogs and helminths may be interesting, but they don’t constantly remind us, simply by existing, that we are in a solar system. —Rebecca Boyle, “Make Like a Tree and Get Outta Here”
Trees can teach us about interconnectedness and intimacy and communication. We are, after all, more interconnected than we perceive, and the invisible communicatory gestures between all living things are just as significant as the visible ones. Trees can teach us about time and slowness and patience. Trees are slow; they don’t operate on the level of seconds, moments, even hours, nor do they think so constantly of immediate futures. Trees take years, real time. They live and die each year, and yet their lifetimes encompass centuries. Trees can teach us about cycles and circularity. Seasons, cycles of the planet, and patterns both local and beyond are perceived by trees. Time is not linear, trees remind us. Trees can teach us about the long breath, about breathing, about presence. We could learn so much from just looking more closely at the process that involves constant and steady breath, sunlight, growth, water. We could learn more about balance and collaboration, about the merging of body and mind that is unique in every individual but intertwined with the network of other living, breathing beings. Trees can teach us about movement and scale. (Did you know that trees migrate?) Growth patterns and migration patterns of trees exist, just on a different scale than our own. We might learn to see past our own context, past the importance of a single species.
Then, trees can teach us to listen differently, to see differently, to perceive differently, to feel differently, to live differently.
What is important is that seeing trees—not only as trees, but as collaborators, neighbors, givers — allows us to view our own communities and ourselves in a different light. Telepathy is about feeling at a distance, and this is what is required when we attempt to communicate with and listen to anyone who is not your own self. To go further, perhaps it isn’t just telepathy that is required, but clairvoyance. Clairvoyance (“clear vision”) isn’t just about the ability to perceive events in the future. Because the past and future collide so loudly in the present, clairvoyance, in this moment of the speculative present, is also the ability to perceive events that are happening right in front of you, the invisible and spectral gestures of the present, all that is imperceptible or “unknowable.” Do we ever stop conjuring ghosts? Even still, why don’t we listen?
Because I don’t yet fully understand the extent of the telepathy between plants, I water the small patch of moss I am growing on a stone in my bathroom according to the weather patterns outside. On rainy days, I generously drench it with water. On sunny days, just a spritz to mimic the morning dew. When I am traveling, I ask my sister to water the moss while I am gone, just as I also ask her and my father to take care of my dogs while I am gone. If the moss can perceive what is happening outside, or if it is able to communicate with its comrades just on the other side of the window, I want it to feel in synchronicity with its community. So far, it seems to be thriving and is already growing new shoots.
There are many things to say about moss, but perhaps I could just point you to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s wonderful book, Gathering Moss, in which I learned about, through moss, adaptation, in-between states, resiliency, compassion, learning to see, and giving thanks.
Among other characteristics, moss (and the creatures that live among the moss like birds among trees: water bears, or tardigrades, and rotifers) blurs the distinctions between life and death. As Kimmerer writes, “All signs of life are extinguished when they are dry: no movement, no gas exchange, no metabolism. All enter a state known as anabiosis, or lack of life. And yet, as soon as water is returned, life suddenly is renewed. Their apparent death, followed by resuscitation, suggested that life might be stopped and then restarted.” Like with trees and the passage of seasons, we might learn to see past the simple narrative of birth and death and understand the importance of cycles, perhaps also learning to not constantly flee the face of death and instead embrace those processes that affect all those around us, widening one’s own consciousness to encompass so many others.
I also learn, from moss, the importance of language. Many mosses don’t have common names, just their scientific ones, because they aren’t normally attended to by the public in the same way as other plants (trees, flowers, edible vegetables). And yet the vocabulary Kimmerer teaches her students (gametophytes, sporophytes, acrocarps, pleurocarps, etc.) helps the students see the moss more closely, more intimately: “With words at your disposal, you can see more clearly. Finding the words is another step in learning to see.”
It is true that as I learned the words to describe different parts of a moss and different species, I started examining the different mosses that grow in my front yard, in my neighborhood, and in nearby forests, saying their species out loud, calling them by name, pointing at their sporophytes and attempting to bridge the chasm between our seemingly distant species.
Beyond the dignity that might be bestowed living beings by naming, even the grammar with which we use to describe plants greatly affects our entire worldview. For example, in English, we set aside special pronouns (he, she) for human subjects, relegating all nonhumans, objects, trees, mosses, even animals to the category of “it.” Why do we put so much stake in personhood? Kimmerer reminds us that in Potawatomi (as well as other indigenous languages), there is no “it” for nature or beings that exist as part of nature. She writes in an essay, “Living beings are referred to as subjects, never as objects, and personhood is extended to all who breathe and some who don’t.”
Kimmerer continues:
Because we speak and live with this language every day, our minds have also been colonized by this notion that the nonhuman living world and the world of inanimate objects have equal status.
Bulldozers, buttons, berries, and butterflies are all referred to as it, as things, whether they are inanimate industrial products or living beings…[W]e need words that heal that relationship, that invite us into an inclusive worldview of personhood for all beings.
Because we provide such preferential treatment for humans in our everyday use of grammar and language, it becomes easy for us to create a hierarchy, supported linguistically, that privileges humans over all other objects and animal species. With this subject/object dichotomy built into our use of language, and with a linguistic hierarchy that holds humans above all other species, it becomes all too easy to create a similar hierarchy within our own species. That is, we are already accustomed to privileging subjects via linguistic differentiation, and so we can start to see categories of humans as being “better than” or “less than.” We’ve already seen the consequences of such thinking, and continue to see them: false differentiations of race, color, gender and other characteristics as having caused significant damage to our collective consciousness.
Tomorrow, you will go up the mountain. Tomorrow you will sleep and you will dream. Tomorrow, you will kneel down before a tree and realize what it has given you, what you have taken, what you have received. And you will eventually hear the language of the birds and the language of the trees, and you will remember what it was like before home was stripped away from you, and then, on your knees, you will remember how to stand tall like the trees, eyes unfixed and seeing in all directions, especially down, because this is where things happen too, below you, and though gravity asks bodies to fall down, hope asks bodies to rise up.
I return to knowing and the core of it all, the breath, the long and sustained breath that connects us all together. In a time when it seems that people are wanting to feel less and think more, I wonder about the benefits of us all learning to feel more, at a distance. How might our vision of the future change when we can learn to receive more in the present? How might an understanding of telepathy make us more compassionate with trees, with those around us? And how might an understanding of the resilience of moss change our understanding and perception of the future? If only, for a moment. Just remember to breathe.
Here’s How America Uses Its Land
What can be harder to decipher is how Americans use their land to create wealth.
There are many statistical measures that show how productive the U.S. is. Its economy is the largest in the world and grew at a rate of 4.1 percent last quarter, its fastest pace since 2014. The unemployment rate is near the lowest mark in a half century.
What can be harder to decipher is how Americans use their land to create wealth. The 48 contiguous states alone are a 1.9 billion-acre jigsaw puzzle of cities, farms, forests and pastures that Americans use to feed themselves, power their economy and extract value for business and pleasure.
Methodology Land use classifications are based on data published in 2017 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service in a report called the Major Uses of Land in the United States (MLU). Data from the report provide total land-use acreage estimates for each state across six broad categories. Those totals are displayed per 250,000 acres.
Data from Alaska and Hawaii are excluded from the analysis. Special-use land and forestland make up the biggest land types in those states.
Bloomberg referenced the USDA data against estimates from the National Land Cover Database to generally locate these categories within each state.
Miscellaneous uses are defined as wetlands, rural residential lands, non-harvestable forests, desert, tundra and barren land of low economic value. Unlike all other land-use categories in the USDA data, a component breakdown for miscellaneous uses by state is not provided in the MLU.
To locate miscellaneous areas, Bloomberg referred to the National Land Cover Database to generally calculate and locate acreage by miscellaneous uses. “Rural residential lands” in the USDA data make up most of the 69 million-acre miscellaneous-use category. This category does not equally correlate to data in the National Land Cover Database, so Bloomberg subtracted the total of the other miscellaneous components to arrive at a rough estimate of “rural residential lands”—about 50 million acres.
Total pasture/range areas are proportionally divided by animal group based on National Agricultural Statistics Service livestock counts.
Data showing the 100 largest landowning families are based on descriptions of acreage and land type in The Land Reportmagazine. Representative amounts of acreage were subtracted from private timber and cropland/range to show this category, which is not a part of the USDA data.
Sources: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service: Major Uses of Land in the United States, 2012; U.S. Department of the Interior, National Land Cover Database, 2011; U.S. Census Bureau; State governments; stateparks.org; American Farmland Trust; Golf Course Superintendents Association of America; USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service; USDA Census of Agriculture; U.S. Bureau of Land Management; U.S. Forest Service; Weyerhaeuser Co.; The Land Report magazine
"Universal Paper Provides Fragile Roots Excellent Protection"
At this year's IPM in Essen, Ellepot introduced their new Universal paper. Ellepot are stocking up on their newly developed paper, after many customers report that the paper is doing well when it comes to root development and protection of fragile root tips.
The new product is characterized by a special “diamond” pattern so that the paper on one side has fine tiny small holes, and, on the other side, a fine netting ensuring that soil and dirt does not escape the paper.
“The Universal Paper has one of the best air flows of the papers we produce. We’ve made the pattern clearer, opening up the paper to allow them a significantly larger amount of air to pass through the pot. The result is that Ellepot Universal provides fragile roots an excellent protection and let roots grow perfectly through after transplanting minimizing transplant shock”, CEO Lars Steen Pedersen explains.
Perfect for plant out cultures
The new product is based on all-natural and environmental friendly wood fibres, sourced from responsibly harvested FSC certified forests. This means that the Universal paper is certified according to multiple industry standards such as RainForest Alliance, FSC and Veriflora. Combined with a relative short decomposing time of 6-9 months makes Ellepot Universal ideal for almost all types of crops and very useful for frequent plant out cultures.
Highlights and benefits of Ellepot Universal:
Special “diamond” pattern
Perfect root development and excellent protection
Roots grow perfectly through after transplanting
Short decomposing time of 6-9 months
Comes in brown color
You can experience the Universal Paper at Ellepot USA's booth 3018 & 3025 at the Cultivate Ohio this weekend.
For more information:
Ellepot
info@ellepot.dk
www.ellepot.com
Publication date: 7/13/2018
Starting An Outdoor Hydroponic Garden
Indoor gardening can get expensive if you’re constantly running air conditioners and dehumidifiers. Why not take advantage of free sunlight and start an outdoor hydroponic garden?
Source: Pixbox77 / Dreamstime.com
Takeaway: Indoor gardening can get expensive if you’re constantly running air conditioners and dehumidifiers. Why not take advantage of free sunlight and start an outdoor hydroponic garden?
Indoor gardening can get expensive in the heat of the summer, especially if you’re constantly running air conditioners and dehumidifiers. Why not take advantage of all the free sunlight nature has to offer and start an outdoor hydroponic garden?
Outdoor hydroponics still provides the perfect balance of water and nutrients, and your plants will grow much faster than in soil. Plus, there’s no weeding!
Choose a Sunny Location for Your Hydroponic Garden
There is no substitute for full-spectrum summer sunlight, and best of all, it’s free! Even a 1,000W lamp, placed a foot from your plants, can’t compare with a sunny day in mid-July. So when setting up an outdoor hydroponic garden, pick a sheltered area with a good southern exposure if you can.
I’ve grown prolific amounts of basil in a nutrient film technique system in a parking lot, towers of aeroponic herbs and strawberries on my back porch, and a huge row of tomatoes in stonewool in front of my garage.
The vines grew so dramatically that strangers driving by would stop their cars, knock on my door and ask me how I was making the tomatoes grow so fast!
They were amazed when I showed them my hydroponic systems. By the end of the summer, the vines were growing up to the roof and I had a wall of gourmet-quality tomatoes.
Keep the Water Reservoir Cool
Plants will transpire a lot more water in the outdoor heat than when they are grown indoors, so make sure you top off the reservoir with cool water from your garden hose often. It’s also a good idea to keep the reservoir in the shade whenever possible.
In an ebb and flow system, it’s easy because the nutrient reservoir is underneath the flood table anyway. But if the reservoir is somewhat exposed, I like to at least partially bury it if I can. The earth acts as a natural heat sink to pull some of the excess heat out of the reservoir.
On the hottest days of the summer, adding a little ice to the reservoir can help. Keep a couple of two-liter bottles of water in the freezer, and drop one into the reservoir occasionally.
If you walk by later in the sweltering afternoon and you notice the ice has melted, put the bottle back in the freezer and drop in another. Luckily, the worst heat waves usually don’t last more than a few days, so such emergency measures are rarely needed.
Lower the Electrical Conductivity (EC)
In hot weather, it’s best to lower the electrical conductivity of the nutrient solution. For example, if I normally keep the EC for my lettuce-growing system at 1.2, I’ll lower it to 1 in the summer. Plants are thirstier in the summer, so doing everything possible to make it easier for them to take up water is a good thing.
Low-to-medium EC stimulates vegetative growth by making the nutrient solution less salty, while medium-to-high EC restricts vegetative growth. During the heavy fruiting and flowering stage, a little salt stress is good but watch your plants carefully. At the first sign of browning at the edges of the leaves, lower the EC a little more.
The worst thing that can happen to an outdoor hydroponic garden is to let the reservoir run dry. Plants won’t last long in the summer sun without water. It might be a good idea to add a float valve to your reservoir as an insurance policy.
If the water level gets too low, the float valve will open automatically and top off the tank with fresh water. Plants can go a few extra days without fertilizer, but they will only last a few hours without water. Plan ahead so you can enjoy a few days away at the beach when you want to.
Boost the Heat Tolerance of Plants
The best time to condition your plants against stressful situations is before the stress happens. In the earlier part of the summer, try adding a combination of humic acid and kelp extracts to your nutrient solution.
A 10-year study at Virginia Tech showed that humic acids combined with seaweed extracts work 50% better than either product alone. A 5:2 ratio of humic acid to kelp works best to greatly stimulate lateral root growth and improve overall root mass. When the summer heat comes, the more roots the better for taking up the extra water they need.
The humic acid/kelp combo also encourages the plant to make extra plant-protection agents. Under ideal conditions, plants have no trouble protecting themselves from cell damage, but when plants are under too much stress, they can’t keep up with the constant barrage of damaging free radicals.
Free radicals break down cell membranes such as chloroplast and mitochondrial membranes, which is why plants go from green to yellow to brown under excessive heat and UV light.
If you condition your plants against stress with a combination of humic acids and kelp, plants will produce 50% more of the protective molecules that sponge free radicals, and plants will stay green longer when the summer heat arrives.
Remember to condition the plants before it gets hot—if the plants are already suffering in the middle of the summer, the bio-stimulants won’t have enough time to help.
Ensure Air Movement
Air movement is important, especially in the summer. One of the advantages of outdoor hydroponics is the breeze. The air movement helps cool the plant and keep the stomata open.
Stomata are the pores in the leaves that take in carbon dioxide and transpire water vapor and oxygen. As the breeze takes away the water vapor from the leaves, it has a cooling effect on the plant.
Too much wind has the opposite effect—plants close their stomata to conserve water so they don’t dry out too fast. Outdoors, we don’t have much control over the wind, so try to grow in a spot that has good air movement but also provides a protective windbreak.
Planting along a fence row with southern exposure is a good choice. Also, think ahead about what you will do if a major storm approaches. I’ve learned the hard way how important it is to properly stake and trellis my plants and provide a little extra emergency protection.
Protect Against Pests
One downside to growing outdoors is that you often have to share your crops with animals and other pests. The simplest advice is to fence in your garden or grow a few extra plants and hope the critters don’t get too greedy.
If you’re not willing to share, there are other deterrents available at your hydro store such as wolf and coyote urine (I’m serious!) that help keep rabbits and other invaders away. There are also some good natural sprays such as neem oil and insecticidal soaps that help fight bugs and act as natural insect repellents.
But the best defense against pests, particularly sucking insects, is to grow healthy plants. Use full-spectrum, all-purpose fertilizers, and keep the potassium-to-nitrogen ratio high. Too much nitrate nitrogen produces large cells with thin cell walls, making them an easy target for sucking insects and fungi, so don’t over-fertilize.
For even healthier plants, try using a bio-hydroponic fertilizer that combines minerals with organic bio-stimulants. For example, amino acids stimulate the uptake of calcium.
Due to the extra calcium intake, plants grown with amino acids have thicker cell walls and a higher resistance to temperature extremes. The plants will also have a stronger vascular system, allowing them to take up water and minerals more efficiently. (Read more about pests in Maximum Yield's pest control article archives)
It all adds up to nutrient-dense, high-brix plants that have an increased resistance to pests and diseases. If all goes well, sucking insects won’t even recognize the plants as food.
Just wait until you taste what a well-managed outdoor hydroponic garden can produce. Healthier plants mean tasty, nutrient-dense food high in vitamins and minerals.
Colors and aromas are also much richer, and you can literally see the difference in growth from day to day. It’s hard to imagine just how productive an outdoor hydroponic garden can be until you try one for yourself!
US: The EPA’s Latest News on Asbestos Has A Lot of People Nervous
Asbestos is arguably one of the most well-known cancer-causing agents, and one that the Environmental Protection Agency has been trying to regulate on and off for decades.
The Carcinogen Is Banned In 55 Countries, But Not Here.
By Jennifer Lu August 9, 2018
The potent carcinogen is banned in 55 countries. DepositPhotos
Asbestos is arguably one of the most well-known cancer-causing agents, and one that the Environmental Protection Agency has been trying to regulate on and off for decades. The toxic construction material, banned in other 55 other countries, made the news earlier this week amidst fears that the EPA is easing the way for an uptick in asbestos manufacturing.
In fact, asbestos never left the U.S. market, though there are certain restrictions limiting its uses. Instead, the EPA plans to track asbestos imports for review every time a manufacturer wants to use them for a new purpose, as is required by the law. But since the current EPA has eyed more lenient regulations on everything from pesticides to air pollution from cars and coal-fired power plants, environmental groups fear that the “new uses” review could signal an uptick in asbestos manufacturing, despite its dangers to public health, rather than a move toward the total ban the EPA sought under the Obama administration.
Congress enacted the Toxic Substances Control Act in 1976 to "comprehensively regulate chemicals and toxic substances that we come into contact with in the everyday," starting with asbestos, says Melanie Benesh, a legislative attorney at the Environmental Working Group. "Because it's one of the toxic substances that everyone has heard of and knows is bad, it's become a poster child for this law and why it is broken."
Asbestos is an umbrella term for six naturally-occurring fibrous minerals that contain some amount of silicon and oxygen. Greek for "unquenchable," asbestos doesn't evaporate, dissolve, burn, or react readily with most chemicals, making it an ideal insulation and fireproofing material. Asbestos can be found in attic and wall insulations, vinyl floor tiles and roof shingles, around hot water and steam pipes, and in automobile brakes.
Because the filamentous material is easily friable, or crumbled to a powder when handled, asbestos is easily inhaled into the lungs, where it can cause mesothelioma, a rare and aggressive cancer that grows in the tissue lining around the organs.
Between 1999 and 2015, the Center for Disease Control counted 45,221 deaths from malignant mesothelioma in the United States. Though most deaths occurred in people 85 or older, the fact that people younger than 55 were also dying from mesothelioma suggests that occupational and environmental asbestos exposure was still a problem. Asbestos is also associated with lung cancer and other lung diseases. In light of its toxicity, the Environmental Protection Agency banned most asbestos products in 1989, only to have the rule overturned in court. As a result, certain asbestos products are restricted in the U.S., but asbestos is still allowed in other productions.
In 2016, Congress updated the Toxic Substances Control Act in an attempt to strengthen it, and asbestos was put back on EPA's roster as one of the first ten chemicals for review.
The agency released a framework in June 2017 for how it would evaluate exposure risks from asbestos being produced now or in the foreseeable future. The guidelines allow EPA to exclude legacy sources of exposure from consideration—for example, asbestos installed into the frames of schools and older buildings using outdated production methods.
“They're only going to look at a very narrow use for asbestos and ignore that people might be exposed to it from older cases,” says Rena Steinzor, a professor of environmental law at the University of Maryland. But failure to account for pre-existing routes of asbestos exposure could downplay the overall risk and lead to a less protective evaluation.
The material easily crumbles when handled, and inhaling the dust can cause health problems.DepositPhotos
Separately, to stay on top of future uses, the EPA is requiring manufacturers to give them at least 90 days notice before importing asbestos to make new asbestos products the EPA doesn’t currently know about. The rule also forbids companies from making new asbestos products until the EPA has review each new use, which include certain types of adhesives, sealants, roof coatings, gaskets, pipeline wrap, sealant tape, and vinyl floor tile, to name a few.
On the one hand, the rule makes sense because the EPA needs some time to decide whether the new uses are okay, Steinzor says.
“But why not just ban them when we know asbestos are not safe,” Benesh points out.
The market seems ready to take advantage of the EPA’s mixed signals.
A Russian asbestos mining company, perhaps sensing an opportunity, posted photos of its products stamped with a seal bearing Donald Trump's face on Facebook. The social media caption read, "Donald is on our side!"
President Trump, who made his businesses in the real estate sector, has expressed support for asbestos as a maligned construction material in the past. In 2012, he tweeted that the World Trade Center would not have burned down if it had been fire-proofed with asbestos.
Meanwhile, asbestos imports to the U.S., which have declined overall and in the last few years, rose 45 percent between 2015 to 2016 to 700 metric tons. Ninety-five percent of the asbestos entering the U.S. in 2016 came from Brazil, with Russia supplementing the rest. However, Brazil banned asbestos mining, use and commercialization in November of 2017.
"Maybe five or ten years ago, you wouldn’t think anyone would be reintroducing asbestos to the marketplace," says Steinzor. "It's a sign of the times that this is happening.”
tags: construction asbestos carcinogens environmental protection agency
No, Vertical Farms Won’t Feed the World
While they are well-intentioned, new indoor “farms” won’t help feed the world or reduce the environmental impacts of agriculture. We would be better to focus our efforts elsewhere.
Lettuce grown in my garden. Photograph © 2016 Jonathan Foley
August 1, 2018
While they are well-intentioned, new indoor “farms” won’t help feed the world or reduce the environmental impacts of agriculture. We would be better to focus our efforts elsewhere.
We’re beginning to see a new fad in agriculture — so-called “vertical farms” that grow food indoors with energy-intensive, artificial life support systems.
In the last few years, a number of tech companies have designed “farms” that utilize artificial lights, heaters, water pumps, and computer controls to grow crops inside. These systems glow with a fantastic magenta light — from LEDs that are specially tuned to provide optimal light for photosynthesis — often with stacked trays of plants, one on top of the other. Some of this technology is new, especially the LEDs, although pot growers have used tools like this for years.
Some of the more notable efforts to build indoor “farms” include Freight Farms in Boston. And there is a group at MIT that is trying to create new high-tech platforms for growing food inside, including “food computers”. These folks are very smart and have done a lot to perfect the technology.
At first blush, these “farms” sound great. Why not completely eliminate food miles, and grow food right next to restaurants, cafeterias, or supermarkets? And why not grow crops inside closed systems, where water can be recycled, and pests can (in theory) be managed without chemicals.
It sounds great, doesn’t it? But there are many challenges.
First, Vertical Farms Cost a Fortune
But there are costs to these farms. Huge costs.
First, these systems are really expensive to build. The shipping container systems developed by Freight Farms, for example, cost between $82,000 and $85,000 per container — an astonishing sum for a box that just grows greens and herbs. Just one container costs as much as 10 entire acres of prime American farmland — which is a far better investment, both in terms of food production and future economic value. Just remember: farmland has the benefit of generally appreciating in value over time, whereas a big metal box is likely to only decrease in value.
Second, food produced this way is very expensive. For example, the Wall Street Journal reports that mini-lettuces grown by Green Line Growers costs more than twice as much as organic lettuce available in most stores. And this is typical for other indoor growers around the country: it’s very, very expensive, even compared to organic food. Instead of making food more available, especially to poorer families on limited budgets, these indoor crops are only available to the affluent. It might be fine for gourmet lettuce, or fancy greens for expensive restaurants, but regular folks may find it out of reach.
Finally, indoor farms use a lot of energy and materials to operate. The container farms from Freight Farms, for example, use about 80 kilowatt-hours of electricity a day to power the lights and pumps. That’s nearly 2–3 times as much electricity as a typical (and still very inefficient) American home, or about 8 times the electricity used by an average San Francisco apartment. And on the average American electrical grid, this translates to emitting 44,000 pounds of CO2 per container per year, from electricity alone, not counting any additional heating costs. This is vastly more than the emissions it would take to ship the food from someplace else.
And none of it is necessary.
But, Wait, Can’t Indoor Farms Use Renewable Energy?
Proponents of indoor techno-farms often say that they can offset the enormous sums of electricity they use, by powering them with renewable energy —, especially solar panels — to make the whole thing carbon neutral.
But just stop and think about this for a second.
These indoor “farms” would use solar panels to harvest naturally occurring sunlight, and convert it into electricity so that they can power…artificial sunlight? In other words, they’re trying to use the sun to replace the sun.
But we don’t need to replace the sun. Of all of the things we should worry about in agriculture, the availability of free sunlight is not one of them. Any system that seeks to replace the sun to grow food is probably a bad idea.
Besides, “Food Miles” Aren’t a Big Climate Problem
Sometimes we hear that vertical farms help the environment by reducing “food miles” — the distance food items travel from farm to table — and thereby reduce fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.
This sounds logical, but it turns out to be a red herring.
Strange as it might seem, local food typically uses about the same amount of energy — per pound — to transport as food grown far away. Why? Short answer: volume and method of transport. A larger food operator can ship food more efficiently — even if it travels longer distances — because of the gigantic volumes they work in. Plus, ships, trains, and even large trucks driving on Interstate highways use less fuel, per pound per mile, than small trucks driving around town.
Plus it turns out that “food miles” aren’t a very big source of CO2 emissions anyway, whether they’re local or not. In fact, they pale in comparison to emissions from deforestation, methane from cattle and rice fields, and nitrous oxide from over-fertilized fields. And local food systems — especially organic farms that use fewer fertilizers, and grass-fed beef that sequesters carbon in the soil — can reduce these more critical emissions. At the end of the day, local food systems are generally better for the environment, including greenhouse gas emissions. Just don’t worry about emissions from food miles too much.
And These Vertical “Farms” Can’t Grow Much
A further problem with indoor farms is that a lot of crops could never develop properly in these artificial conditions. While LED lights provide the light needed for photosynthesis to occur, they don’t provide the proper mix of light and heat to trigger plant development stages — like those that tell plants when to put on fruit or seed. Moreover, a lot of crops need a bit of wind to develop tall, strong stalks, needed later when they are carrying heavy loads before harvest. As a result, indoor farms are severely limited and have a hard time growing things besides simple greens.
Indoor farms might be able to provide some garnish and salads to the world but forget about them as a means of growing much other food.
A Better Way?
I’m not the only critic of indoor, high-tech, energy-intensive agriculture. Other authors are starting to point out the problems with these systems too (read very good critiques here, here, here, and here).
While I appreciate the enthusiasm and innovation put into developing indoor farms, I think these efforts are, at the end of the day, counterproductive.
Instead, I think we should use the same investment of dollars, incredible technology, and amazing brains to solve other agricultural problems — like developing new methods for drip irrigation, better grazing systems that lock up soil carbon, and ways of recycling on-farm nutrients. Organic farming and high-precision agriculture are doing promising things, and need more help. We also need innovation and capital to help other parts of the food system, especially in tackling food waste and getting people to shift their diets towards more sustainable directions.
An interconnected network of good farms —real farms that provide nutritious food, with social and environmental benefits to their communities — is the kind of innovation we really need.
Dr. Jonathan Foley (@GlobalEcoGuy) is a global environmental scientist, sustainability advisor, author, and public speaker. These views are his own.
© 2018 by Jonathan Foley. All rights reserved.
NOTE: parts of this piece were adapted from an earlier blog article of mine called “Local Food is Great, But Can It Go Too Far?”
Foreign Beef Can Legally be Labeled “Product of U.S.A.” It’s Killing America’s Grass-Fed Industry.
How rampant mislabeling puts America's grass-based cattle producers out of business.
How rampant mislabeling puts America's grass-based cattle producers out of business.
July 16th, 2018
by Joe Fassler
CULTURE ENVIRONMENT FARM POLICY SYSTEMS
Last month, in a petition formally filed with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), two advocacy groups made a stunning claim: Your American grass-fed beef might actually come from overseas, even if it’s labeled “Product of U.S.A.”
Those two groups—the American Grassfed Association (AGA), which offers the country’s leading “grass-fed” certification, and the Organization for Competitive Markets, a watchdog group that fights corporate consolidation in the food industry—point out that a massive regulatory loophole allows companies to falsely, and yet legally, claim their imported beef comes from our pastures.
The trouble began in 2015, when the Obama administration’s USDA rolled back Country of Origin Labeling (COOL) for beef and pork products, allowing meat to be sold without disclosing its home country on the label. But that decision, which angered many American ranchers, has further muddied the waters in a way no one quite anticipated. Under the current rules, beef and pork products that are shipped to the United States and processed further here, can be labeled “product of U.S.A.,” even if the animal was raised a continent away. That means a steer slaughtered in Uruguay and broken down into steaks at a meatpacking plant in Colorado is technically American meat—even if it isn’t.
Photograph by simarik (iStock), graphic by NFE
That’s a huge issue for American grass-fed producers, who are now finding themselves undercut by foreign competition. Allen Williams, a 6th-generation rancher and founding partner of Grass Fed Insights, a leading consulting group on grass-fed beef, says U.S. producers owned more than 60 percent of the domestic grass-fed market in 2014. Then came COOL repeal. By 2017, American ranchers’ share had plunged to just 20 to 25 percent, according to an industry analysis by the Stone Barns Center for Agriculture. Today, Williams, who consulted on the Stone Barns report, says American producers claim only about 15 percent of the grass-fed market—and that share is rapidly shrinking.
Ranchers attribute the decline directly to COOL repeal. The fact that foreign companies can pass their imported beef off as American, they say, has made fair competition impossible.
“The very idea of labeling beef in a grocery store ‘product of U.S.A.,’ when the animal never drew a breath of air on this continent, is just horrible,” says Will Harris, owner of White Oak Pastures, which produces its branded line of grass-fed beef in Bluffton, Georgia. (Harris is also on AGA’s board of directors.) “I don’t begrudge importers or producers from other countries selling to knowing consumers that want to buy that imported product. But I’m appalled at what the deception has done to the economies of our membership. It has moved the needle from grass-fed beef producers being profitable, to being a very break-even—or, if you’re not careful, a losing—proposition.”
But though pastured beef often isn’t as American as it looks, a question remains: How much does it actually matter? I found myself wondering how much we mean to prioritize domestic purchasing when we spend a little more to buy grass-fed, and whether the product’s country of origin makes a meaningful difference. Are grass-fed steaks from Australia all that different from those raised on a ranch outside Austin, Texas? I wanted to know whether we we should stop handwringing about geography—or if misleading labels somehow betray the grass-fed ethos, and amount to a profound abuse of consumer trust.
Grazed and confused
If Williams is right that only 15 percent of the grass-fed beef is raised domestically, you wouldn’t necessarily know it just by strolling through the grocery store. On a recent trip to Trader Joe’s, I inspected a package of “100 percent grass-fed organic ground beef,” looking for clues about its origins. The casual observer could be forgiven for mistaking that product for American meat. The splashy consumer-facing label features a USDA organic seal, a USDA inspection sticker, and, in smaller print, the phrase “processed in USA” alongside Trader Joe’s corporate address in Monrovia, California. Of course, foreign beef can still be certified USDA organic and all imported meat goes through USDA inspection. But this product features not one but four allusions to the U.S. on its label. The average shopper wouldn’t be crazy to assume it’s coming from here.
Flip the package over, though—to the side few people read up close—and the label tells a different story. In small, no-frills font, below the freeze-by date and above the safe handling instructions, are the words “Product of USA, Australia, and Uruguay.” That phrasing would seem to suggest that Trader Joe’s ground beef is a blend of beef from American, Australian, and Uruguayan cows—an arrangement that might surprise some customers, given what the front of the package says. But even thatreasonable assumption may not be accurate. Trader Joe’s may only be buying Australian and Uruguayan meat that’s then ground at a facility in the U.S.—enough to qualify as American in the eyes of regulators. It isn’t really possible to tell.
Joe Fassler
If Trader Joe’s and other grocery brands were really selling meat from cows raised in this country, you’d think they’d make a bigger deal of it.
Trader Joe’s organic grass-fed ribeye steak also prominently features USDA’s organic and inspection seals on the front—as well as the phrase “Product of USA” in small font on the back, by the nutrition facts. But are the company’s grass-fed ribeyes really produced here? Or are they just processed here? It’s impossible to tell from the label alone, and Trader Joe’s had not responded to my requests for clarification by press time.
The Trader Joe’s scenario is a good example of how products can follow the letter of the labeling law and still be misleading. But other brands have done more to take advantage of this legal ambiguity—and some are downright deceptive.
Bubba Burger
Bubba Foods’ marketing would suggest that its beef is born and raised in the U.S. A look at its affidavit to the USDA suggest otherwise
Bubba Foods, a Jacksonville, Florida-based company whose products are sold by major retailers like Walmart, Kroger, and Wegman’s, puts its American-made claims front and center. The label on the company’s grass-fed ground beef displays a prominent “Product of USA” banner, complete with an American flag—and, if that wasn’t enough, the proud phrase “Born & Raised in the USA.” But paperwork filed with USDA, obtained by the American Grassfed Association and shared with me, suggests the product may not be American at all—at least, not in the conventional sense most shoppers would understand.
Any producer who wants to sell a commercial grass-fed beef product has to file an affidavit with USDA’s Food Standards Inspection Service (FSIS), laying out the agricultural practices it will use and submitting an example of their product label. Bubba’s affidavit includes several details that caught my attention, considering the aggressive nationalism of its label. A nutritional analysis describes the product as “import grass-fed” beef. It also includes an import record from Australia, noting that an “Australian National Vendor Declaration” will certify the product’s grass-feeding regime. The final 20 pages of the document lay out the specifics of Australia’s Pasture-Fed Cattle Assurance Standard, a program that isn’t available in other countries.
Bubba Foods initially assured me the company would answer my questions about the discrepancy, but did not provide more information after multiple follow-ups. At this point, the opacity only furthers my suspicion that the company is passing off its Australian grass-fed beef as a “born and raised” U.S. product—with the U.S. government’s blessing. (Bubba’s affidavit also contains a copy of its product label, which regulators presumably viewed in all its chest-thumping patriotism.) No wonder eaters are confused.
By now, it should be obvious that misleading—and, in some cases, overtly deceptive—labels are out there. But we still haven’t established whether any of this is a meaningful deception, materially speaking. Does anyone really care if their grass-fed beef comes from America or Australia—and, if not, should they?
Eating American
In his work as a consultant, Allen Williams and his clients have spent millions of dollars trying to pin down exactly what compels shoppers to buy grass-fed beef. His findings suggest that (relative) locality is a huge selling point: A desire to support America’s rural economies is one major reason people spend more to buy grass-fed. The preference is so clear that Williams believes virtually all of the products with fine-print “Product of USA” claims are really imported. If Trader Joe’s and other grocery brands were really making the effort to buy meat from cows raised in this country, you’d think they’d make a much bigger deal of it.
Charlie Bradbury runs Grass Run Farms, an American-raised, grass-fed beef brand owned by JBS, the world’s largest multinational meatpacker. He tells me that JBS—which has long sold grass-fed products from Australia and elsewhere, and marketed them as such—acquired Grass Run Farms because so many customers asked for specifically domestic grass-fed beef.
“The fact that the cattle are born and processed in the U.S. is an important reason people buy this product,” he says. “These cattle generally do come from smaller, family-farm operations. They [shoppers] believe the animal welfare is improved [in that context] and so, since our job is to sell beef, we’re trying to produce a system that fits in with those concepts.”
Will Harris offers some insight into why demand for American grass-fed is so strong. Over the years, he’s learned that customers buy White Oaks beef for three primary reasons: environmental sustainability, animal welfare, and to support rural economies, in that order. (Health considerations are a factor, too, but not in the top three.)
Each of these main drivers has a strong local emphasis, he tells me. If someone wants to help improve the environment, they’re likely to want to do so in their own backyard first. Those worried about animal welfare are more likely to feel assured by local products, with a farmer they know by name and a ranch they can visit, than by a product from a continent away. Finally, anyone buying grass-fed to support the local farm economy is certainly going to privilege domestic product. In Harris’s view, it couldn’t be any clearer—when buying grass-fed, Americans explicitly prefer that it be American.
But say you’re the kind of ethically minded meat eater who just wants to do what’s best for the planet in general. Does it really matter whether your burger comes from your local farmers’ market versus a ranch in Australia or Uruguay?
That’s harder to say.
Photograph by dustypixel (iStock), graphic by NFE
“If we are comfortable with the assumption that grass-fed beef is indeed more environmentally friendly than CAFO beef—and this depends quite a bit on your method for calculating environmental costs—then the real environmental impacts of grass-fed beef products have much more to do with how they are produced than where they are shipped from,” Caitlin Peterson, a PhD student in ecology at the University of California, Davis, told me by email. That’s because shipping beef across the ocean in a storage container is an incredibly cheap and efficient transportation method that doesn’t require much energy use or generate much pollution, even if it does rack up so-called “food miles.” Agricultural methods, she says, matter far more in general than transportation distances.
The trouble is that it’s very hard to get information about a given grass-fed producer’s practices. No government I could find legally defines a “grass-fed” standard. (The U.S. did, beginning in 2007—but ultimately revoked its standard in 2016, citing USDA’s inability to properly enforce it.) Though a few respected third-party certifications exist—the American Grassfed Association’s “Certified Grassfed” label is considered the gold standard by producers—ranchers can claim their product is grass-fed without independent verification. To use the term on products sold in the U.S., meat companies must only file an affidavit with USDA explaining how their grass-feeding program will operate. They can use an existing certification, or define their own protocols. As a result, practices vary widely, and quality control is difficult.
“Grass-fed is all over the map,” says Rick Machen, a professor and livestock specialist with Texas A&M University. “It could be a 700-pound calf right off the cow up to a 14-year-old cow that’s lived out its productive life. And within those there are all kinds—some are supplemented, some are 100-percent grass-finished. There’s a wide, wide, wide array of pre-harvest production systems, and technically they’re all within the bounds of what can technically qualify as grass-fed.”
Considering that, it’s hard to compare the environmental impact of domestic versus imported grass-fed beef in general. But if sustainability concerns are a wash, the domestic product really does fare better by one all-important metric: economics.
The price of grass
There’s a reason that imported grass-fed beef has come to dominate the American marketplace. It’s not because it’s a better product, necessarily. It’s simply cheaper.
Take Australia, for instance—the country that by far exports the most grass-fed beef to the U.S.—where virtually all beef production is pasture-based. Since cattle can graze year-round on the country’s naturally lush pastures, it makes far less sense to fatten them on grain. That makes the cost of bringing a steer to weight a much cheaper proposition—especially compares to many regions of the U.S., where grassland must be irrigated, or where cattle must be fed dried forage during the winter.
Though severe drought in Australia has complicated this picture in recent years, bringing the price of imported grass-fed beef closer to its domestic competition, the country has built-in advantages that have allowed it to undercut U.S. producers on price.
But Australia has an additional, and perhaps more significant, advantage. Grass finishing has been the standard for so long that it’s big business, and has been for decades. Cargill and JBS, two of the biggest meatpackers in the world, process a combined 49 percent of the country’s grass-fed beef.
A company like Greeley, Colorado-based JBS, which owns farms, slaughterhouses, and transportation infrastructure on multiple continents, and has accounts with major retailers and foodservice providers, benefits from economies of scale unheard of in U.S. grass-fed beef production. In the U.S., where grass-fed claims just 1.5 percent of the overall market, it’s mostly small producers working with small, independent processors and marketing their products themselves. More than half of America’s grass-fed producers sell twenty or fewer cattle a year, according to the Stone Barns report, and most of them are too small to access the country’s hyperproductive slaughterhouses.
This distinction marks perhaps the fundamental difference between U.S. and imported grass-fed beef. In America, grass-based production is an alternative vision supported by individual innovators and rooted in local economies. In Australia, New Zealand, Uruguay, and other countries, it’s an established industry controlled by powerful global players.
“It’s a commodity product,” says Williams, speaking of imported grass-fed beef. “It’s produced off many different ranches, then harvested by the big packers. They’re the same guys that are the big packers over here in the U.S. It’s all aggregated together and shipped over here.”
If Americans are buying grass-fed as a way to support local foodways and bring dollars back to rural communities—and many of them seem to want to—that’s not happening when they’re fooled into buying imported beef.
For U.S. ranchers, switching to grass-fed can completely transform the economics of production. Williams says that the average American cattle rancher, someone who sells live animals to the big meatpackers churning out commodity beef, makes only about 14 cents of the retail dollar. “That way,” he tells me, “you’re working on razor-thin margins and any little economic hit can take you out of the game.”
Photo by gerenme (iStock), graphic by NFE
.But grass-fed producers selling directly via farmers’ markets can keep up to 85 percent of the retail dollar, according to Williams. And ranchers who run branded programs—paying a smaller, custom packer to process their animals, then selling that signature line of beef with the help of various retail partners—can reach thousands of customers while still keeping 25 to 50 percent of the retail dollar.
There are challenges, of course. Greenmarkets are a low-volume business—it’s hard to reach that many customers, even if the margins are significantly higher. And branded programs are a more expensive way to do business, with added costs related to marketing, distribution, and slaughter. Still, the margins improve enough to double or triple the income earned on every animal—giving ranchers a chance to make up for the increased costs of grass-fed production, mitigate their risk, and earn a sustainable living.
But now that the market’s been flooded with cheap imports, America’s grass-based ranchers aren’t thriving the way they’d hoped to. Though retail sales of grass-fed beef have soared—from $17 million in 2012 to more than 16 times that, $272 million, in 2016—American ranchers aren’t the ones reaping the benefit of all that increased demand. Harris and other ranchers attribute this directly to consumer confusion over labels. If we can’t tell the difference between Australian and American grass-fed beef—if both are labeled “Product of USA”—even a locally minded shopper is more likely to go with the cheaper product. The result, for ranchers who have spent heavily to transition or grow their herds, may be economic devastation.
Let’s go back to the petition that the American Grassfed Association filed with USDA for a moment. The organization believes that, if labeling law can be changed, ensuring that only truly American-raised beef is labeled that way, shoppers will start buying domestic grass-fed again, even if it costs more. If the choice between domestic and imported is made more apparent, grass-fed proponents like Carrie Balkcom and Will Harris think American grass-fed beef will have a fightning chance—that our rural communities will finally see the economic benefits of the standard they helped to build.
The fact that USDA is taking public comments on the issue suggests that the agency may be reconsidering things. And that could be a sign that significant change is on the horizon.
“As a U.S. grass-fed beef producer, I believe it is imperative that honest, transparent labeling is required for grass-fed beef sold in America,” writes Kay Allen, a Texas rancher, one of many producers who has commented publicly on the petition. “Not only does honest labeling protect American beef producers economically, it insures that WE, American citizens, control our own food supply.”
For those who want to see rural economies revitalized, the stakes are high. Labeled grass-fed beef is only about a $1 billion market in the U.S., tiny compared to the nation’s $105-billion conventional beef industry. But Williams points out that if the U.S. producers took back only 50 percent of the market—still down from more than 60 percent market share they enjoyed in 2014—it could send hundreds of millions of dollars into local communities each year. That would be a major departure from the current system, where profits from grain-finished domestic and grass-fed imported cattle flow primarily to large corporations.
“Instead of requiring just a handful of mega-feedlots to finish all this beef, we would need tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of smaller farmers and ranchers,” Williams says. “So instead of having one mega business, one major corporation, we’d be allowing thousands of small businesses, vibrant small businesses, to thrive. It would be a major boon not just to ranchers, but to local processors, and cold storage, and everyone who has a finger in this pie. Why would we not want to do that?”
The USDA is currently asking itself that same question. The agency will take public comments until August 17.
From Farm to Fork: The Regulatory Status of Non-GMO Plant Innovations Under Current EU Law
A new article on the latest plant breeding methods will be published on the next issue of BIO-SCIENCE LAW REVIEW.
The existing EU regulatory framework, when considered holistically, provides efficient guarantees that every stage of the agri-food supply chain, from lab to fork, is subject to constraints and obligations dictated by harmonized legislation, each providing various degrees of scrutiny, risk management and control, sanctions and remedial action.
Comparisons between the existing non-GMO legal framework with the GMO legislation or with any other authorization regime based on a full pre-market risk assessment are, by definition, of little practical relevance, since such regimes aim to address potentially serious risks, which, as the SAM Note clarifies, have not been identified in the case of Non-GMO NBT Products.
In the absence of any such concrete, identifiable risk induced by (the use of NBTs for) Non-GMO NBT Products and in view of their non-distinguishability from CBT products, the protection of human/animal/plant health and the environment should thus be considered to be adequately ensured and Non-GMO NBT Products should not be treated differently from products resulting from CBT.
The opposite conclusion would not only raise serious concerns under the SPS Agreement but would essentially also mean that all non-GMO plant products on the market today must be considered inadequately regulated. Just as Advocate-General Bobek concluded in his Opinion in Case C–528/16,133 with regard to mutagenesis, that ‘one could hardly assume that a reasonable legislator could ever wish to state, en bloc and for the future, that something is safe to such a degree that it does not need regulating at all’, one can neither assume that all NBT-products should en bloc be considered to only yield products suspect of causing unacceptable risks.
Against that backdrop, it is submitted that both the precautionary principle and the specific safeguard clauses in horizontal and sectoral legislation can justify and sufficiently guarantee the adoption of stricter risk management measures if a previously unidentified risk arises.”
The Chemical Industry Scores A Big Win At the E.P.A.
The E.P.A., after heavy lobbying by the chemical industry, narrowed how it will conduct safety checks on toxic substances — like perchloroethylene, used in dry cleaning.CreditJustin Sullivan/Getty Images
By Eric Lipton
- June 7, 2018
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration, after heavy lobbying by the chemical industry, is scaling back the way the federal government determines health and safety risks associated with the most dangerous chemicals on the market, documents from the Environmental Protection Agency show.
Under a law passed by Congress during the final year of the Obama administration, the E.P.A. was required for the first time to evaluate hundreds of potentially toxic chemicals and determine if they should face new restrictions, or even be removed from the market. The chemicals include many in everyday use, such as dry-cleaning solvents, paint strippers and substances used in health and beauty products like shampoos and cosmetics.
But as it moves forward reviewing the first batch of 10 chemicals, the E.P.A. has in most cases decided to exclude from its calculations any potential exposure caused by the substances’ presence in the air, the ground or water, according to more than 1,500 pages of documents released last week by the agency.
Instead, the agency will focus on possible harm caused by direct contact with a chemical in the workplace or elsewhere. The approach means that the improper disposal of chemicals — leading to the contamination of drinking water, for instance — will often not be a factor in deciding whether to restrict or ban them.
The approach is a big victory for the chemical industry, which has repeatedly pressed the E.P.A. to narrow the scope of its risk evaluations. Nancy B. Beck, the Trump administration’s appointee to help oversee the E.P.A.’s toxic chemical unit, previously worked as an executive at the American Chemistry Council, one of the industry’s main lobbying groups.
A spokesman for the E.P.A. said that the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and other laws already provided the agency with the authority to regulate chemicals found in the air, rivers and drinking water, so there was no need to revisit them under the 2016 law, which updated the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976.
The agency can “better protect human health and the environment by focusing on those pathways that are likely to represent the greatest areas of concern to E.P.A.,” said the spokesman, Jahan Wilcox.
Nancy B. Beck, who oversees the E.P.A.’s toxic chemical unit, previously worked at one of the industry’s main lobbying groups.CreditU.S. Senate Committee Channel
But three former agency officials, including a former supervisor of the toxic chemical program, said that the E.P.A.’s approach would result in a flawed analysis of the threat presented by chemicals.
“It is ridiculous,” said Wendy Cleland-Hamnett, who retired last year after nearly four decades at the E.P.A., where she ran the toxic chemical unit during her last year. “You can’t determine if there is an unreasonable risk without doing a comprehensive risk evaluation.”
Senator Tom Udall, Democrat of New Mexico, and Representative Frank Pallone Jr., Democrat of New Jersey, who played leading roles in passing the 2016 law, said the E.P.A. was ignoring its directive for a comprehensive analysis of risks.
“Congress worked hard in bipartisan fashion to reform our nation’s broken chemical safety laws, but Pruitt’s E.P.A. is failing to put the new law to use as intended,” Mr. Udall said in a statement referring to Scott Pruitt, the E.P.A. administrator.
A spokesman for Senator John Barrasso, Republican of Wyoming, who is chairman of the Senate committee that oversees the agency, declined to comment.
Cumulatively, the approach being taken for the 10 chemicals means the E.P.A.’s risk analysis will not take into account an estimated 68 million pounds a year of emissions, according to an analysis by the Environmental Defense Fund, based on agency data.
Dr. Beck declined requests for comment. She had pushed the E.P.A. during the Obama administration to narrow the scope of the risk evaluations, in a fashion similar to the approach under her watch.
Also helping oversee the risk evaluation effort is Erik Baptist, a former senior lawyer at the American Petroleum Institute, another big player in the chemical industry.
The American Chemistry Council said in a statement last week that the E.P.A.’s approach met “the requirements of the law,” adding that it wanted the risk assessments to be “protective and practical.”
Scott Pruitt, the E.P.A. administrator, signing new rules related to the Toxic Substances Control Act last year. CreditEnvironmental Protection Agency
Under the approach, the E.P.A. will examine what harm can be caused, for example, to anyone directly exposed to perchloroethylene — a dry-cleaning solvent and metal degreaser designated by the E.P.A. as a likely carcinogen— during manufacturing or when using it in dry cleaning, carpet cleaning or handling certain ink-removal products.
But the agency will not focus on exposures that occur from traces of the chemical found in drinking water in 44 states as a result of improper disposal over decades, the E.P.A. documents say. The decision conflicts with a risk assessment plan detailed by the agency a year ago, which included drinking water. And the change came after the American Chemistry Council argued in February last year that “the E.P.A. has discretion to select the conditions of use that it will consider.”
The agency will also not consider the hazards of perchloroethylene discharged into streams or lakes, landfills or the air from dry-cleaning stores or manufacturing or processing plants, the documents say.
The documents contain similar conclusions about nine of the 10 chemicals under review. One of these is 1,4-dioxane, which can be found in small amounts in antifreeze, deodorants, shampoos, and cosmetics and is considered “likely to be carcinogenic to humans.” Another is trichloroethylene, which is used to make a refrigerant chemical and remove grease from metal parts and is associated with cancers of the liver, kidneys, and blood.
Other changes identified in the E.P.A. documents narrow the definitions of certain chemicals, including asbestos. Some asbestos-like fibers will not be included in the risk assessments, one agency staff member said, nor will the 8.8 million pounds a year of asbestos deposited in hazardous landfills or the 13.1 million pounds discarded in routine dump sites.
The most likely outcome of the changes will be that the agency finds lower levels of risks associated with many chemicals, and as a result, imposes fewer new restrictions or prohibitions, several current and former agency officials said.
“They don’t want to open Pandora’s box by looking comprehensively at the risk, as they may prove to be significant and then they have to deal with it,” said Robert M. Sussman, a former chemical industry lawyer and E.P.A. official who now works as a consultant to Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families, an advocacy group.
Despite the changes, the E.P.A. is still expected to ban the use of methylene chloride as a paint stripper soon — an action first proposed at the end of the Obama administration. The chemical, one of the 10 under review, is a popular ingredient used in dozens of products sold at home improvement stores nationwide and has been blamed in dozens of deaths.
A collection of more than a dozen groups — representing environmental, public health and labor organizations — are suing the E.P.A. to challenge earlier changes in the toxic chemical evaluation program. The case is before the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco.
A version of this article appears in print on June 7, 2018, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: E.P.A. Eases Way It Evaluates Risk From Chemicals.
Can Florida’s Toxic Algae Be Stopped?
Toxic blue-green algae has bloomed again in Lake Okeechobee, Florida’s largest lake, an outbreak so severe that Governor Rick Scott has declared a state of emergency in seven counties.
Can Florida’s Toxic Algae Be Stopped?
JUL 18, 2018
The algae blooms pose risks to humans and marine animals—and to Florida’s tourism-dependent economy.
Toxic blue-green algae have bloomed again in Lake Okeechobee, Florida’s largest lake, an outbreak so severe that Governor Rick Scott has declared a state of emergency in seven counties. While the term “algae bloom” might not sound dangerous, it is an outbreak of cyanobacteria that presents a significant risk to public health.
In early July, the bloom was reported to cover more than 90 percent of Lake Okeechobee’s surface. The green sludge has crept outward from the lake and filled waterways with a putrid sludge that locals say smells like mold. News reports are warning residents to keep children and animals away from contaminated water. According to the CDC, ingesting it—including through consumption of marine animals like oysters—is the most dangerous type of exposure. Effects can include skin, nose, eye, and throat irritation, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and abdominal pain.
What’s causing the bloom?
Pollution and warm water fuel the algae’s growth. Research from the U.S. EPA suggests that fertilizer runoff is introducing phosphorous and nitrogen to waterways, essentially fertilizing the algae.
Another factor is water flow. The Everglades, a wetland ecosystem, naturally flows from Lake Okeechobee south to Florida Bay. But since 1910, a series of more and more robust dikes have been built to contain that flow. The current dike system, called the Herbert Hoover Dike, is made up of about 143 miles of levees. Additional canals divert the flow to the east and west coasts.
With the natural flow of the Everglades staunched, water builds up when it rains. Then the algae blooms again, and like clockwork, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers tries to relieve Lake Okeechobee’s water levels by discharging more water along the canals. This increases the concentration of fresh water in the estuary, giving the cyanobacteria even more opportunity to thrive.
Lake Okeechobee in 2016. (Wilfredo Lee/AP)
“The Army Corps has been releasing a lot of water from Lake Okeechobee, and, in combination with the rain runoff from the basin, it’s compressed the estuary so that it’s mostly fresh [water] now—which is what cyanobacteria like,” said John Cassani of Calusa Waterkeeper, a nonprofit that’s part of the Waterkeeper Alliance. “So cutting back on those fresh-water inflows would increase the salinity of the estuary, and hopefully discourage the continued growth of this cyanobacteria.”
When the Army Corps discharges water from Lake Okeechobee, it increases the concentration of fresh water in the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie estuaries, giving the cyanobacteria even more opportunity to thrive there—while interrupting the Everglades’ natural southward flow.
Others point to the role of agriculture, especially Florida’s massive sugar industry. Peter Girard, a spokesperson from the environmental group Bull Sugar, said, “Sugarcane needs water when Florida is dry, and it needs drainage when Florida is wet. The industry has secured policy and practice from both state and federal authorities to give them that at the expense of everyone else in Florida.”
For years, Florida environmentalists have complained that agricultural runoff from and water mismanagement by “Big Sugar” cause damage to Lake Okeechobee and the Everglades. Grassroots pushes for the state to buy back land from sugar companies go back two decades. Many contracts and pieces of legislation have been signed and then nixed.
Buying back land could help
Still, organizations including the Everglades Trust and the Sierra Club have joined with a long list of companies, such as Yeti and Costa, to champion SB10, the latest iteration of the state’s land buyback scheme (also known as the Now or Neverglades Declaration).
SB10 was introduced into the Florida State Senate in January 2017 and approved by Governor Scott by that May. The bill calls for the creation of a reservoir south of Lake Okeechobee, in the region called the Everglades Agricultural Area. If the construction of the reservoir is executed as planned, freshwater will be able to flow southward rather than in forced discharges to the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee estuaries. The new southward flow would alleviate the toxic algae blooms and help save the state’s fragile ecosystems. Last week, the White House’s Office of Management and Budget approved the reservoir project.
Legislators have suggested other ways to solve the algae-bloom problem, like increasing salinity in areas plagued with blooms. But Chris Wittman, co-founder and program director of the nonprofit Captains for Clear Water, said these measures would amount to treating the symptoms of a disease instead of its root cause.
“The reason we’re in this [mess] this year is manmade manipulation of a natural system,” Wittman said. “So the idea is not to manipulate it farther. The idea is to get that system back to functioning with delivery and timing as close to the natural cycle as possible.”
Meanwhile, another type of algae bloom, red tide, has been killing fish in the Gulf of Mexico. The two blooms are sending tremors through businesses in a state that is known for its natural beauty and depends on tourism. In 2013, a year that was plagued by algae blooms and the deaths of hundreds of manatees, more than 90 percent of hotels in Fort Myers Beach reported cancellations related to water conditions.
About the Author
Rebecca Renner is a freelance writer and editor living in Boynton Beach, Florida.
Citizen-Scientists in Minnesota and Wisconsin Demand Action After finding E. coli in Their Water
But don't blame farmers. Pressured to expand, they're in an unenviable bind: Scale and risk polluting local waterways—or resist and risk their livelihoods.
Citizen-Scientists in Minnesota and Wisconsin Demand Action After finding E. coli in Their Water
Flickr / Waterkeeper Alliance Inc.
But don't blame farmers. Pressured to expand, they're in an unenviable bind: Scale and risk polluting local waterways—or resist and risk their livelihoods.
June 14th, 2018
by H. Claire Brown
Last summer and fall, citizen-scientists in orange vests descended on waterways across southern Minnesota. They gathered water samples in stainless steel buckets from the Cedar River and its tributaries, smeared them onto Petri dishes coated with growth medium, and heated them in incubators stashed in their garages. Forty-eight hours later, the Petri dishes would reveal crucial details about the health of the waterways the samples were drawn from Blue splotches emerged from the clear water to indicate the presence of E. coli, a bacteria that lives in the intestines of livestock but can be highly pathogenic in people. One splotch meant a healthy waterway; more than one would surpass the threshold considered safe for swimming.
All told, 40 volunteers collected nearly 500 samples from 83 sites across the Cedar River watershed, which starts in Dodge County, Minnesota and feeds into the city of Austin. And 70 percent of those samples contained more E. coli than is considered healthy for bodies of water in which people swim and play.
“The sad part about being in a region like ours that has had contamination is that it has become normal.”
That’s problematic because one of the Cedar’s tributaries feeds into a nature reserve where children play in the water. A little further downstream lies a reservoir with a beach where people swim and canoe. E. coli bacteria—which comes from fecal matter that leaks into the water from residential septic systems or via runoff from farms—can be particularly dangerous for young children and the elderly.
In a packed hearing in Austin last week, community members asked the Mower County Board of Commissioners to ramp up enforcement of water quality standards. “Our grandchildren, they can’t help but be drawn to the creek,” resident Nancy Dolphin said in tears, according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune. “But the water that flows by our house is not safe for them. I’m a grandma. What do I do?”
At that meeting, the commissioners agreed to look at ways to encourage homeowners with outdated septic tanks to upgrade their systems. Don Arnosti, state conservation director for the Izaak Walton League, a national environmental organization, and the organizer of the E. coli testing, says an estimated 1,700 homes in Mower County may be leaking waste into the water.
40 volunteers collected nearly 500 samples from 83 sites across the Cedar River watershed. The samples were then spread onto Petri dishes, like the ones photographed here, which can indicate the presence of E. coli
But human waste is only one part of the equation. DNA samples from the testing sites revealed that the E. coli found in the river also came from cows and pigs. The area surrounding the Cedar River watershed is home to a few small pastured cow operations and several large-scale hog farms, most of which sell to the Hormel Foods plant in Austin. Arnosti says the DNA samples did not indicate how much of the waste comes from the pig farms compared to the cows and the septic tanks. But consider this: As of 2017, nearby Dodge County was home to 237 feedlots—in a total area of 440 square miles.
That’s why Arnosti is hoping to involve Hormel in water quality improvement efforts. As the buyer of many of the hogs being produced in the area, the company has the power to hold its producers to a higher standard. Hog manure is typically sprayed onto fields, and Arnosti says the highest E. coli levels were evident after big storms. That could mean the manure is running off the fields and into the water. According to Hormel, 90 percent of its producers’ manure is sprayed according to best management practices.
Organized and engaged citizens are key to holding regulators and companies accountable.
“I said, ‘well, what about the other 10 percent?’” Arnosti says. “We don’t know if 10 percent of the manure not being handled in a manner that protects our waterways is sufficient to indicate the pollution we’re finding.”
Arnosti says he’s asked Hormel to co-sponsor a workshop on practices that restore soil health and to be proactive in building a greener supply chain. So far, the company hasn’t committed to anything. “We’ve had pleasant murmurings from them, but we have not heard a substantive yes to any of our requests,” he says.
The hold-up, of course, is money. Updating a home septic system costs more than keeping an old one—and county commissioners are loathed to ask their constituents to spend hard-earned dollars making updates to systems they can’t even see. And if Hormel wanted its producers to be more careful when disposing of thousands of gallons of waste, it might have to pay them enough money to make that change economically feasible. (Or not, but if it imposed a lot of new rules and didn’t raise prices, the company would have a lot of angry hog farmers on its hands.)
Still, Arnosti says he’s hopeful the high-level interest among community members in improving the watershed will make a difference at the county level. He says he thinks organized and engaged citizens are key to holding regulators and companies accountable.
New Food Economy
Wisconsin’s dairy farmers, much like Minnesota’s pork farmers, face an impossible decision: Respond to pressure to expand or resist expansion and potentially lose the farm
Three hundred miles east in Kewaunee, Wisconsin, Lynn and Nancy Utesch have been down this road before. Their county is home to several large-scale dairy farms, and they say cattle operations have caused issues similar to those surfacing in Minnesota.
The couple founded Kewaunee Citizens Advocating Responsible Environmental Stewardship (CARES) in 2011, then started testing their water in 2012 and continued until 2015. They funded the whole project with the help of friends, and Nancy estimates they spent at least $3,000 a year on the tests. “Our wage scales here are not that high,” Lynn adds. “If you made $30,000 in Kewaunee county, you’re doing good.”
Nancy says E. coli in the water has sickened Kewaunee children twice before: Once in 2004, when an infant bathed in well water that had been contaminated, and again in 2014 when a baby drank formula that had been mixed with tainted tap water. I wrote about Kewaunee County in 2017 when a nearby confined cattle operation was fined $50,000 for polluting its neighbors’ well water. Around the same time, Lynn Utesch, who is a U.S. Navy veteran, delivered a statement to the House Subcommittee on the Environment and Commerce, in which he said, “For over 13 years now, our community has had at least one infant admitted to the ICU poisoned with E. Coli, entire families including the family dog becoming poisoned after manure applications, and longtime residents moving to the city just so they can have clean water for their children.”
“I think at the end of the day we have regulations, but they’re not followed through with oversight and enforcement.”
Nancy concurs: “The sad part about being in a region like ours that has had contamination for a considerable period of time is that in a lot of ways it has become normal. What I mean by that is, you know, you’ll have people who are 65 years old in our community and they’ll say things like, ‘oh, well when I was a kid I had to go to the school to shower, and none of this is new,’” Nancy says.
The biggest manure pit in Kewaunee County can hold as much as 76 million gallons of cattle waste, equivalent in size to several football fields. To make matters worse, the region is covered in thin soil and limestone and is prone to sinkholes and small streams which develop out of nowhere and run into the groundwater. “We have reached a tipping point where there is total recognition that what we are doing is poisoning the people here. It’s poisoning our aquifers. It’s poisoning the great lake here at Lake Michigan.”
Yet the Utesch’s cries for watershed improvement have largely fallen on deaf ears. Their county continues to allow farms to add new animals, even as advocates insist the surrounding land and water can’t absorb more waste. “I think at the end of the day we have regulations, but they’re not followed through with oversight and enforcement,” Nancy says.
Overproduction makes cheap milk and happy industry leaders, but it means low prices and environmental externalities.
Their farmer neighbors are in an unenviable bind: They’ve been pressured and incentivized to expand at all costs, and as a result, the number of dairy farmers has dropped from 14,265 to 9,230 over the past ten years, according to a June op-ed by dairy farmer Jim Goodman in The Capital Times. “Wisconsin is open for business—specifically the CAFO dairy business. By doing all they can to support the growth of dairy CAFOs, by gutting the DNR’s [Department of Natural Resource’s] enforcement capabilities through staff and budget cuts, and by appointing a DNR secretary who says she has ‘brought customer-friendly private-sector principles to the agency,’ the governor and state Legislature have encouraged large dairies to locate and expand in Wisconsin and produce as much milk as they can,” Goodman wrote.
Wisconsin’s dairy farmers, much like Minnesota’s pork farmers, face an impossible decision: Respond to pressure to expand, a decision which can lead to environmental degradation and angry neighbors—not to mention public health issues—or resist expansion and potentially lose the farm. Overproduction makes cheap milk and happy industry leaders, but it means low prices and environmental externalities for farmers and their neighbors.
As Goodman said in his op-ed, he learned in April that his milk buyer would no longer purchase his product. The information was delivered in a letter, also sent to 75 other Wisconsin farmers, and with that, his income had been yanked out from under him. He sums up the system’s externalities: “Farmers have been duped into producing too much milk. Their profitability is gone and as they are suffering, so is the quality of Wisconsin’s environment.”
Can A Whiskey Save Washington’s Only Native Tree Species?
Can A Whiskey Save Washington’s Only Native Tree Species?
The future of the Garry oak tree is on the rocks. But a Seattle distillery has a neat plan to save it—with oak aging barrels.
June 14th, 2018
by Stephen Mathis
Matt Hofmann strides through the knee-high grass in heavy-soled boots and a blue flannel shirt. With his burly frame and bushy red beard, he looks every bit the part of a lumberjack. We’re headed toward a pair of trees with sprawling branches that are dominating the middle of a small savanna. In his role as master distiller at Westland Distillery in Seattle, Washington, Hofmann is constantly on the lookout for wood of the sort this tree could provide. But today, we’re visiting a nature preserve near Tacoma to view Garry oak, also known as Oregon white oak or Quercus garryana, in its most endangered habitat. Hofmann and his team have helped the local land trust Forterra plant 600 Garry oak saplings here over the last two years.
The first thing you notice about Garry oaks is how twisted they are: their branches and even their trunks tend to bend and turn at odd angles. In the wintertime, their silhouettes form wild vein patterns against the pale sky. Here, in mid-May, they’re lush but not exactly full, with thick moss adorning many of the branches.
Hofmann points to one tree with a particularly straight trunk. “That’s a six-barrel tree right there,” he jokes.
Photo by Wikicommons / Collage by NFE
Without regular fires, Douglas firs and other species overtake them and deprive them of the direct sunlight they need to survive
Two years ago, like a lot of Americans, I had never heard of Garry oak. But then I tasted a whiskey that Hofmann had matured in barrels made from this wood native to the Pacific Northwest. Consider that over the more than 800 years humans have been making whiskey, producers have matured their spirits almost exclusively in just three types of oak. Garry oak hasn’t been one of them. While producers have experimented with other types of oak, none have yielded reliably good whiskey—and many have yielded reliably awful whiskey. I say this from experience. As a whiskey writer, I’ve tried a great many of them. But Westland’s Garryana whiskey is different. Aside from the fact that it offers a complex and unique flavor profile, it’s also just really damn good.
But the plight of the Garry oak is also distinctive, even if it could be seen as the story of negative human impact on the environment in a microcosm. For thousands of years, Native Americans burned the grass in the open parts of oak savannas for a variety of reasons, including to clear them for planting and to make it easier to hunt. But the Garry oak bark is so thick, it was able to withstand those low-grade fires and even some wildfires, too, which cleared out competitor species like the Douglas fir. With European settlers to the Pacific Northwest came different uses for the land and increased fire suppression. This was bad news for the Garry oaks. These trees grow slowly, taking around 150 years to reach maturity. Without regular fires, Douglas firs and other species overtake them and deprive them of the direct sunlight they need to survive. Today, forestry experts estimate that Garry oak habitat is only 5 percent of what it was before the settlers arrived.
While a typical American white oak barrel, the sort that’s used for aging bourbon, runs around $200, a Garry oak barrel costs more than $1,000.
Hofmann wants his Garryana whiskey to be a vehicle for telling that story and maintains that Westland’s restoration efforts are key to doing that. “Planting these trees helps us appreciate what it took to live here and manage these natural resources,” he says. “To fully express the story of the oak is the only way to properly do it justice. And that makes a product that’s more compelling.”
One problem Hofmann faces is that, as hardwoods go, Garry oak is not particularly sought after. That might seem like a plus, since lower demand tends to mean lower cost. But demand is low in part because Garry oak is notoriously hard to work with. All of its twists and turns make it difficult to turn into usable boards. And even when it does yield straight boards, they have a bad habit of warping and buckling over time. As a result, most Garry oak ends up as flooring or firewood.
The other reason there is little demand for Garry oak has to do, oddly enough, with its relative scarcity. Given the loss of its habitat, how slowly Garry oaks mature, and the fact that they are protected by many municipalities in which they grow, there is very little Garry lumber available. Most lumber mills see so little Garry oak, it isn’t worthwhile for them to deal with it at all.
“If it doesn’t taste good, it’s not economically viable.”
So despite the relative lack of demand, Hofmann and his team have to spend a lot of time hunting for stocks of it. They also have to hire experts to help them select and dry those stocks before they can be used for barrels. Then they need specialized coopers who can construct the barrels, heat (toast), and burn (char) them. Each of these steps adds appreciably to the cost of producing a Garry oak barrel. While a typical American white oak barrel, the sort that’s used for aging bourbon, runs around $200, a Garry oak barrel costs more than $1,000. But for Westland, and its parent company, Rémy Cointreau, the Garryana whiskey project presents a different sort of value proposition.
Garry oak is Washington’s only native tree species, so as an “ingredient,” it is about as local as Westland can get. And that feeds directly into Westland’s larger aim to produce “whiskey with a sense of place.” Part of that is about terroir, but it goes well beyond trying to produce an authentically local product. Citing chef Dan Barber’s work on sustainably grown local ingredients as a major influence, Westland’s guiding philosophy extends to worrying about all aspects of production, including the social and environmental. For the Garryana project, that means sourcing new lumber from fallen trees or trees deemed “hazard wood” (often, compromised trees that are at risk of falling on a house or power lines). It also means planting new Garry oaks and preserving habitats.
Stephen Mathis
Garry oak is Washington’s only native tree species, so as an “ingredient,” it is about as local as Westland Distillery in Seattle can get
But, as is true in Barber’s approach to food, taste is always of primary importance in whiskey production. As Hofmann likes to say, “If it doesn’t taste good, it’s not economically viable.” And a lot goes into making the whiskey taste good. On the Garryana project, for example, Hofmann and his team had to work with barrel experts to figure out how much to toast and char them to achieve a flavor profile that works well with the Westland house style of spirit. Hofmann has also had to blend each Garryana whiskey carefully to balance out the strong tannic flavors the Garry oak barrels impart.
All of these inputs make the product more expensive, but Westland embraces that fact as part of its business model. “All of the work that we’re doing depends on consumers having a different set of values besides just price,” Hofmann says. “Because if those people don’t exist, then this model doesn’t exist.”
Of course, those people do exist, and Rémy Cointreau, which acquired Westland in early 2017, is betting that more drinkers will move in that direction over time. “Rémy Cointreau sees this as the future. There is a variety of things that consumers will put into their equations of value,” Hofmann says. “More and more, the concepts of authenticity and ‘doing right’ and sustainability all become as much a part of the equation as the flavor and the price, and that’s where we operate.”
These conservation efforts are less about stocking the Garry oak pipeline and more about “doing right.”
But not every company can afford to operate in that space. The Garryana project, for example, requires significant long-term investments of the sort Westland could not manage on its own. Rémy Cointreau’s resources have allowed the distillery to buy up as much cut Garry oak as it can find. Garry boards need to air dry—or “season”—for 24 to 36 months (and sometimes longer) before they can be fashioned into barrel staves, so establishing a Garry oak “pipeline” was crucial to preventing production gaps in future years. “We started to dip our toes in [before the Rémy Cointreau acquisition], doing Garryana things and finding wood here and there,” says Steve Hawley, Westland’s communications director, “but now we’re able to consider building those economies in a whole different way because we have the resources, the backing, and the support behind us.”
Westland also now has the resources to engage in conservation and restoration efforts. The company has teamed up with Forterra to plant saplings on protected land in an attempt to re-establish some small part of the Garry oak habitat that has been lost. Since it will take two whole lifetimes before those saplings can provide usable lumber, these conservation efforts are less about stocking the Garry oak pipeline and more about “doing right.”
Now, it’s easy to be cynical about a company that says it’s “doing right” when the company then promotes that activity in its branding for a product, as Westland does with the Garryana whiskey. Nevertheless, Westland’s environmental efforts do line up with and serve its business interests. Quercus garryana is a unique and threatened species, and the more spirit drinkers know about it, the more likely they are to get excited about the whiskey Hofmann has made using it. And even when doing the right thing offers no direct benefit to the company, those efforts identify Westland’s brand with certain values, which matter to the drinkers they hope to win over.
Photo by Westland Distillery / Collage by NFE
Hofmann has had to blend each Garryana whiskey carefully to balance out the strong tannic flavors the Garry oak barrels impart
Perhaps more important, though, is the fact that Hofmann and his team are very invested in having Garry oaks around in the future, even if it is in part to use them for making whiskey barrels. For Stuart Watson, lands manager at Forterra, Westland’s restoration efforts represent an exciting new approach to environmental activism. “I think it’s really fantastic, so much so that at Forterra we have tried to replicate this model with other entities where the restoration fits in with their for-profit business models.”
The key here is that Westland’s environmental efforts go beyond photo opportunities or making donations for public relations. The kind of partnership Forterra has with Westland offers many new possibilities to local environmental activists. “Tree-hugging environmentalists—which I could be classified as—are often resistant to the corporate, for-profit world,” Watson says. “But if we embrace it in this way, it can bring so many resources to the extremely resource-constrained industry of environmental conservation and restoration. There’s never enough funding, there’s never enough time or resources or volunteer labor to do all the work that we need to do, and a model like this just totally opens up the door to a whole new level of restoration projects that we can accomplish.”
Growing numbers of local breweries are also interested in aging their beer in barrels made from the native species.
While Forterra sees this model as a major positive for its conservation and restoration efforts, Kristiina Vogt, a professor of ecosystem management and founder of the Forest Systems and Bioenergy Program at the University of Washington, is a bit more circumspect about the model’s possibilities. She argues that other players, especially farm and land owners who might have usable Garry oak on their land, need to be more involved to make the model viable long term. “When you have people that come in and set up land trusts, they have a mandate, they want certain things, and that’s what they’re going to focus on,” Vogt says. “You need to think about what’s happening outside that particular piece of land that impacts what you’re doing, so you need people who have that perspective. Many of the owners have been there for three generations, so they understand those impacts.”
While Westland does work with some individuals who have Garry oaks on their properties, Vogt suggests that working directly with broad associations of land owners in a collaborative way might afford Westland a better chance of locking up future stocks. That would be key to fending off competitors, especially those who might not be as scrupulous in their pursuit of this resource now that Westland has helped raise its profile and value. And competitors are already out there. Garry oak barrels have long been used in winemaking. And several Oregon distillers use Garry—or, as they call it, “Oregon oak”—either for barrels or in the form of “adjuncts,” blocks or shavings that they put into the barrel to impart flavor. There are also growing numbers of local breweries interested in aging their beer in barrels made from the native species.
Todd Dollinger, owner of reWine Barrels, which sources Garry oak for Westland, says that people in other parts of the country are starting to clamor for those barrels as well. On Westland’s chances of keeping the Garry oak barrel program going into the future, he says, “Depends on how popular it gets. You could hurt it because people want what they can’t have.” But for now, at current prices, the program is sustainable, provided it stays relatively small. “We’ll be able to do 200 to 400 barrels for them a year on a regular basis. Are we ever going to be able to spool it up to 2000? No way,” Dollinger says.
Westland’s model offers is a chance to transform the way people look at corporate environmental activism.
Vogt sees the smaller scale of the Garryana project as a positive when it comes to tapping into the value propositions Westland plans to make. “The future is in the decentralized, small-scale, and that’s how we’re really going to start making an impact and change things,” Vogt says. “If it’s at the larger scale, then it always becomes about price, and then it’s very hard to bring in some of those other factors you want to include.”
However, Vogt says she thinks that the most interesting possibility Westland’s model offers is a chance to transform the way people look at corporate environmental activism. As it is, many people see corporations as doing little more than paying lip service to environmental concerns, and the relationship between environmentalists and many natural resource producers is often tense and adversarial. If a corporation could bring together environmentalists and producers—and get the stamp of approval from both—it could change the way the public views those projects. “The most critical thing is that people trust the process,” Vogt says. “What could be really interesting with the whiskey is if they could develop a model where there’s trust in that.”
Of course, Westland’s efforts alone cannot save Quercus garryana. No small company can remedy hundreds of years of habitat loss all by itself. But its efforts could inspire others to help protect Garry Oaks. A taste of whiskey can offer the drinker an intimate connection to the wood that standing in the tree’s shade cannot. And that may be as good a source of inspiration as a distillery can produce.
Ninety-Nine Percent of America’s Farms Are Family-Owned. But Only Half Are Family-Farmed.
As land is passed on to kids and grandkids, millions of acres across the country end up being owned by people who are no longer farmers, and increasingly, never were.
The photograph above was taken on an Iowa family farm. The farmhouse has since been replaced and the land sold. Flickr / Don Graham
Ninety-Nine Percent of America’s Farms Are Family-Owned. But Only Half Are Family-Farmed.
As land is passed on to kids and grandkids, millions of acres across the country end up being owned by people who are no longer farmers, and increasingly, never were.
May 24th, 2018
by Beth Hoffman
“My parents were farmers, both of my grandparents were farmers. Probably as far back as ever we were farmers,” says 77-year-old Shirley Gray. We are sitting in the wood-paneled dining room of her family’s farm in south-central Iowa. “My husband’s parents were farmers, his grandparents were farmers. So we have always been farmers.”
Always, that is, until 2009, when Gray and her late husband decided they would stop farming and rent out their land instead. Gray’s kids and grandkids had all moved away from the farm and taken jobs in cities and towns throughout the region, ending the family’s 156-year farming tradition.
“The way it is set up, it will just keep right on being rented out,” Gray tells me when I ask what will happen to the farm when she is no longer alive to make decisions about it. “But we will keep the farm in the family, hopefully.”
Beth Hoffman
Most American farmland will be passed on to the next generation via wills, trusts, or sale to other family members, much as Shirley Gray’s farm is set up
Today, 99 percent of American farms are still “family farms” owned by families, according to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). But like Shirley Gray’s, increasingly, many of them are not actually family-farmed.
Roughly 355 million acres nationally—almost 40 percent of all farmland—are rented out by non-farming landlords to other farm operators. In Iowa, that number is much higher. More than half of all farmland in the state is farmed by renters, generating rental revenue of $3.7 billion (the second-highest rental revenue in the country, after Illinois).
And although more than 60 percent of America’s farmland is owned by people aged 65 and older, most of this farmland is not expected to come up for sale when owners die. In fact, only about 2 percent of farmland in the country will be sold to people other than family members in the coming years. Instead, most land will be passed on to the next generation via wills, trusts, or sale to other family members, much like the way Shirley Gray’s farm is set up. In other words, it will be kept in and owned by the family—even if the family never farms it.
The double whammy
Part of what is driving this trend in the Midwest and around the nation, is the exorbitant cost of both land and machinery. One piece of new farm equipment—a John Deere combine for harvesting corn, for example—can cost as much as $500,000. Even if farmers buy only good quality used equipment, they are still looking at an estimated initial investment of at least $600,000 to get started.
In Iowa, as in much of the country, land is equally unaffordable. With the average price topping $7,000 an acre, a 300-acre farm in the state is worth a hefty $2.1 million. (The average size of an Iowa farm is 330 acres.) That’s an investment not easily borne by a new farmer, especially since the price of corn and soybeans has essentially flatlined for the last five years.
“A quarter of the land in Iowa is owned by the same owner for the last 40 years; half has been owned for over 20 years. So owners are after long-term returns.”
But most Iowa landowners are not new. “You don’t own land for one or three years,” says Wendong Zhang, an extension economist at Iowa State University (ISU). “A quarter of the land in Iowa is owned by the same owner for the last 40 years; half has been owned for over 20 years. So owners are after long-term returns.”
This pattern of long-term ownership means not only that there is very little land available for sale in Iowa (which drives prices even higher), but also that most of the state’s farmland was purchased back when that land was far less expensive. Shirley Gray and her husband bought their farm in 1958 for $55 an acre, which made the total cost for their 500 acres $27,500—the equivalent of about $238,000 today. That same land in 2018 costs around $4000 an acre, or more than $2 million for a farm similar in size to the one the Grays purchased 60 years ago.
And here’s one other result of the long-term land ownership trend: As much as 80 percent of the land in Iowa is owned free and clear of debt. So as long as the rent pays the taxes, retired farmers and their families can make money on their land even if no one in the family is farming.
When city folk own the farm
As land is passed on to kids and grandkids, millions of acres across the country end up being owned by people who are no longer farmers, and increasingly, never were. Currently, 40 percent of all rented farmland in Iowa is owned by people who have never farmed, and in more and more cases have never lived on the land they now own.
Beth Hoffman
If the only purpose of land ownership is to provide income for both parties, then the level of toxicity from chemicals sprayed, the health of the ecosystem as a whole, and the lasting fertility of the soil become far less important
“I’ve seen an increase in 50- and 60-year-olds who are inheriting the farm from the farmers who have passed away in their 70s and 80s,” says David Baker, a farm transition specialist with ISU’s Beginning Farmer Center. “They have been off the farm for the last 30 or 40 years while their parents farmed. They are now inheriting these farms and need to decide what to do with it.”
But deciding to rent the land out may have its drawbacks. As any of us who’ve rented an apartment or a car will attest, renters don’t often treat things with as much care as they would if they were the actual owner. The same could arguably be said about landowners, who are sometimes less attentive to the land because they are not actually on it. If the only purpose of land ownership is to provide income for both parties, then the level of toxicity from chemicals sprayed, the health of the ecosystem as a whole, and the lasting fertility of the soil become far less important.
“When you have farm owners looking for the top dollar for rental, that often will come at a cost,” says Ann M. Johanns, an extension program specialist at ISU. “That cost might be the long-term conservation or long-term productivity of that land because the tenant is paying the highest dollar. They might not take care of it as if it were their own. They might not put nutrients back into the soil like they should, and so they leave that land worse than they found it.”
How a potential tenant plans to take care of the land is an essential question for owners in search of renters.
Baker agrees. “Those looking for the highest price in cash rent for their farms will search for those who will pay the highest price, regardless of what they will do to the farm,” he says. “And once you sign a lease, you have given up control of that farm to that tenant. Unless you have stipulations in that lease requiring him to farm it in a certain way, you’ve in effect said, ‘I’ve got my $250-an-acre cash rent, it is in the bank, I’m good. Do what you want to with the farm.’”
A new kind of landowner?
But increasingly, says Baker, he is fielding calls from a new kind of landowner—many of whom have college degrees and have lived in cities for years—who remember how their grandparents took care of the land and are interested in bringing ecological values with them to their farm ownership.
“I get calls every day asking questions,” Baker says. “’How do I take care of the farm?’ ‘How do I make improvements to the land, to the water?’” I want them to maximize the income they can receive but also to share some of values that the community has. What does it mean to the state of Iowa instead of just thinking about it as investment.”
How a potential tenant plans to take care of the land is an essential question for owners in search of renters. A 2012 survey on farmland ownership conducted by ISU found that 93 percent of landowners said “good land stewardship” was by far the most important tenant attribute, well above knowing the farmer (52 percent) or even renting to a family member (25 percent).
Long-term ownership not only means there is very little land available for sale in Iowa but also that most of the state’s farmland was purchased back when that land was far less expensive. Pictured above: Knoxville, Iowa | Beth Hoffman
Additionally, farmland owned solely by a woman—sometimes the result of land inherited after a spouse has died—now accounts for a quarter of all farms. And while many of them have never had to make farm decisions alone, they have a “strong conservation ethic,” says the Women’s Food and Agriculture Network, adding that female landowners often struggle to find advisors and tenants whose business plans align with their ecological values.
Baker says this increasing interest in doing things differently has resulted in more requests for information about niche markets—like organic. “There is a strong effort in the 40-50 age groups saying, ‘We own this small farm and we want to know what to do with it. We’ve heard of others raising local products and we want to get involved in that.’” Baker also works with many hopeful beginning farmers who are looking to pursue small-scale production or retail agriculture on their land.
Opportunity Abounds
In Iowa, there’s something of an untapped opportunity to be found in matching new landowners with new farmers—both for conventional farmers and those interested in growing crops outside of the corn and soybean norm. Because land rental is so much more affordable than owning land outright, renting gives those who are new to the trade the ability to make money farming without diving deeply into debt.
“A lot of rental agreements include more than just farming the land.”
Landowners can also encourage “good stewardship” on their land by allowing multi-year leases, which better guarantee that the time and money tenants invest in a farm—to transition to organic or even to use cover crops—is worth it. Not charging top dollar can also take the pressure off farmers to make as much money as possible and can encourage them not to grow “fence row to fence row,” ensuring the sustainability of the farm over the long term. (Proposed cuts to the Conservation Reserve Program, or CRP, that were included in the most recent iteration of the farm bill—which the House voted down last week—would have threatened the ability of both tenants and landlords to put aside land susceptible to erosion or other environmental degradation.)
The particular type of lease a renter and owner agree on can also have a big impact on farm sustainability and the overall economic viability of farming for tenants. While “cash rent” leases can mean even more debt for farmers if crops fail in the case of bad weather or disease, “flexible leases” allow tenants and landowners to share in the costs and profits of the farm, mitigating risk for both. With flexible leases, farm payments like insurance and other government programs are also split between tenants and landlords.
But new tenants also need to understand that taking the time to build a relationship with the landowner is an important part of leasing a farm.
“A lot of rental agreements include more than just farming the land,” says Johanns. “There is a relationship between the tenant and landowner where a tenant may be taking care of scooping the driveway, for example. Stopping in and discussing what is happening on the farm, and having coffee. Little things you can’t put a dollar value on.”
In other words, human stewardship is every bit as important to a successful tenant-landowner relationship as land stewardship is.
Beth Hoffman has reported on food and agriculture for more than twenty years, airing on NPR, The World, Latino USA, Living on Earth in addition to writing for many publications. She has a Masters from UC Berkeley's School of Journalism and has completed several documentary projects, including a year cooking with immigrant women in their homes and telling their stories. She also spends summers on her husband's family farm in Iowa and currently is an Assistant Professor in Media Studies at the University of San Francisco.
Who Really Owns American Farmland?
Claire
Who Really Owns American Farmland?
The answer, increasingly, is not American farmers.
July 31st, 2017
by Katy Keiffer
We’re used to thinking of escalating rents as an urban problem, something suffered mostly by the citizens of booming cities. So when city people look out over a farm—whether they see corn stalks, or long rows of fruit bushes, or cattle herds roving across wild grasses—the price of real estate is probably the last thing that’s going to come to mind. But the soil under farmers’ feet has become much more valuable in the past decade. While urban commercial real estate has skyrocketed in places like New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., powerful investors have also sought to turn a profit by investing in the most valuable rural real estate: farmland. It’s a trend that’s driving up costs up for the people who grow our food, and—slowly—it’s started to change the economics of American agriculture.
Today, USDA estimates that at least 30 percent of American farmland is owned by non-operators who lease it out to farmers.
Think of it this way: If you wanted to buy Iowa farmland in 1970, the average going price was $419 per acre, according to the Iowa State University Farmland Value Survey. By 2016, the price per acre was $7,183—a drop from the 2013 peak of $8,716, but still a colossal increase of 1,600 percent. For comparison, in the same period, the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose less than half as fast, from $2,633 to $21,476. Farmland, the Economist announced in 2014, had outperformed most asset classes for the previous 20 years, delivering average U.S. returns of 12 percent a year with low volatility.
That boom has resulted in more people and companies bidding on American farmland. And not just farmers. Financial investors, too. Institutional investors have long balanced their portfolios by putting part of their money in natural resources—goldmines and coal fields and forests. But farmland, which was largely held by small property owners and difficult for the financial industry to access, was largely off the table. That changed around 2007. In the wake of the stock market collapse, institutional investors were eager to find new places to park money that might prove more robust than the complex financial instruments that collapsed when the housing bubble burst. What they found was a market ready for change. The owners of farms were aging, and many were looking for a way to get cash out of the enterprises they’d built.
Are we looking at a bubble that will burst?
And so the real estate investment trusts, pension funds, and investment banks made their move. Today, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimates that at least 30 percent of American farmland is owned by non-operators who lease it out to farmers. And with a median age for the American farmer of about 55, it is anticipated that in the next five years, some 92,000,000 acres will change hands, with much of it passing to investors rather than traditional farmers.
But what about the people—often tenant farmers—who actually work the land being acquired? During the same period that farmland prices started gaining steam, many crop prices have stagnated or fallen. After hitting highs above $8 a bushel in 2012, corn prices today have fallen back to less than $4 a bushel—about what they were ten years ago, in 2007, when farmland prices first started to soar.
It’s a tenuous predicament, growing low-cost food, feed, and fuel (corn-based ethanol) on ever-more-expensive land, and it raises a host of questions. Is this a sustainable situation? What happens to small farmers? And are we looking at a bubble that will burst?
Three big factors have contributed to the rapid increase in the prices paid for farmland—which is usually defined to include grazing land and forests—according to Wendong Zhang, an assistant professor of economics at Iowa State University. (Zhang tracks farmland prices, especially Iowa farmland prices, which are among the best documented in the country.)
First, interest rates, since the financial crash of 2007–2008, have been at historic lows, which tends to drive asset prices up. There has been “phenomenal growth” in the ethanol market, Zhang says, linked to increasing interest in sustainable fuels. Indeed, if you graph ethanol production over the past 20 years, it shows exactly the same explosive growth as land prices. And as exports to China and elsewhere have increased, farm income has risen. “Farm income is the variable to track” in analyzing land prices, Zhang explains.
“Some act as landlords by buying land and leasing it out. Others buy plots of low-value land, such as pastures, and upgrade them to higher-yielding orchards.”
But there’s an additional factor: well-heeled investors are snapping up farmland, driving prices up. Here’s how the Economist explained it: “Institutional investors such as pension funds see farmland as fertile ground to plough, either doing their own deals or farming them out to specialist funds. Some act as landlords by buying land and leasing it out. Others buy plots of low-value land, such as pastures, and upgrade them to higher-yielding orchards.”
And, says Craig Dobbins, a professor of agricultural economics at Purdue University, “Farmland and other real estate investments are good investments to balance the risk of investments in stocks and bonds. These buyers are sensitive to the expected rate of return that will be received from the purchase of such an investment. If farmland values rise to levels that it does not appear the investment will provide the threshold rate of return, they will not purchase. The location preferences of these buyers are much more flexible than an individual farmer.”
Institutional investors can and do buy land in every region and of every type: cropland in the Corn Belt, rangeland in cattle country, or fruits and nuts in California. Among the big players are TIAA-Cref, BlackDirt, Hancock Agricultural Investment Group, American Farmland Company, AgIS Capital, and Gladstone Land Corporation. There are other institutional investors as well, showing a cross-section of financial interests in the relatively stable investment that land represents over time. According to RD Schrader, a real estate broker of farmland based in Colorado, “The number of investors is growing, and because of that, it occurs more often and makes the marketplace more fluid. With the downturn in values now, the institutional investors help keep the land values more stable.”
“We have no plan B for this type of eventuality.”
That sounds great if you want to sell land, as many American farmers, approaching retirement age do. But from the viewpoint of sustainability, there are many disadvantages to consolidating farmland in the hands of financially oriented landlords.
Chief among them: The investment entities that own the land can control what’s grown on it and how. A quick look at farmland investment company websites makes it clear that they are very particular about assessing the fertility, the access to water and distribution, and other criteria of the land they are buying. And they favor conventional agriculture—the kind that uses the agro-chemicals, mono-cropping, and extensive tilling that continue to degrade American farmland. For financial investors, commodity crops are king, and it’s hard to imagine that they will change their minds anytime soon. As Don Buckloh of the American Farmland Trust put it, “When it comes to crop diversification it is nearly impossible to shift a commodity operation to something less monolithic. For example, the infrastructure for dealing with products other than corn or soy in Iowa, simply doesn’t exist. So farmers are stuck with having to grow the same crops ad infinitum. It’s a scary proposition because should the ethanol program be dissolved, what will corn farmers do with all that extra corn? Already the prices are so low that farm incomes are projected to be half what they were six or seven years ago. We have no plan B for this type of eventuality.”
Access to secure, affordable land is the biggest challenge young farmers and ranchers face in this country.
Could investment companies become a force for a more ecological approach to agriculture? In theory, yes. BlackDirt Capital, a Connecticut-based firm that specializes in property in the northeastern part of the country, claims to be wholly based on agroecological principles. But that approach is rare and likely to remain so.
In practice, our best hope of true stewardship of the land will come from enlightened, committed owner-farmers. But the trend toward treating farmland as a financial investment, and the high prices that have come with it, make it harder and harder for new young farmers to enter the field. Lindsey Schute, Director of the National Young Farmers Coalition points out, “Access to secure, affordable land is the biggest challenge young farmers and ranchers face in this country. With two-thirds of our nation’s farmland set to change hands in the next few decades, we cannot afford to see the price of farmland driven up beyond what a working farmer can compete with.”
In these examples, ownership of the land becomes corporate, but it remains in U.S. hands. In another variant of land investing that’s become increasingly significant over the past few years, ownership—and control over the land and the food it produces—goes overseas.
We’re all familiar with the concept—though going the other way, with multinational corporations from the United States, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, Egypt, China, or some other developed nation buying from sellers in developing nations. Investment in farmland is a key strategy for governments anxious to stabilize their food supply and their food prices. By buying land in other countries and farming it, foreign buyers are able to support their domestic food supply and other markets that depend on agriculture without having to compete for essential products on the global market. Foreign investors will buy several hundred thousand acres, say in Africa, to produce palm oil, rubber, or a biofuel. The deals are typically accompanied by promises of jobs, infrastructure, resource development, or just a jolt for the national economy, but all too often, those promises come to nothing. The local population reaps no benefit, they lose their farming rights, access to water, even their homes. Quite often, civil unrest will ensue. Ethiopia at this very moment provides a prime example of this phenomenon.
China now controls more than 400 American farms.
The new target for farmland investment: The United States. Themost recent figures from USDA, dating from 2011, show that roughly 25 million acres, about 2 percent of our national total of 930,000,000 acres, are in foreign hands. And the pace of investment seems to be picking up. In the period since USDA’s 2011 report, foreign investors have gone on shopping sprees in the heartland and beyond. Saudi Arabia and the UAE alone have acquired more than 15,000 acres in Arizona and Southern California to grow fodder for dairy cattle. Italian buyers are reported to have purchased 102,000 acres in Missouri, and New Zealand some 18,000.
The most memorable deal—though most coverage treated it as a corporate acquisition rather than a resource grab—was the 2013 acquisition of America’s largest producer of pork, the Smithfield Company, by a Chinese company called Shuanghui—which subsequently changed its name to the WH Group. The company is an independent entity, but it has received substantial funding from the Chinese government. It’s probably not overstating much to say that the government of China now controls more than 400 American farms consisting of a hundred thousand acres of farmland, with at least 50,000 in Missouri alone, plus CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations), 33 processing plants, the distribution system—and one out of every four American hogs.
Smithfield is a “vertically integrated” company, meaning that it owns everything right down to the feed supply and all the way up the food chain to the many brands of processed and packaged foods distributed throughout the United States and the world. However, one could make the argument that the most important assets within this $4.72 billion sale are the farmland and the water.
States like Iowa have banned the sale of farmland to foreign buyers and others have laws that limit the number of acres that can legally be sold, but it can be quite tricky to tell who is doing the buying.
One thing that is clear is the lack of a universal national policy governing water rights and water use. In states that are water insecure in the Southwest, there is a dizzying and arcane array of regulations that are barely equal now to the challenges of current domestic use, much less answering the needs of foreign agriculture. It seems the barest common sense that there should be some federal entity protecting citizens’ rights to water against anonymous industrial agribusiness. As yet that has not happened. And while California and the Southwest would seem the most obvious areas that will face serious water challenges in the future, we have already seen similar drought conditions playing out in other states, such as Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma. Eventually we may find that dry states must be supplied in some measure by wet states. Logic would dictate that laws regarding water use and access should be firmly in place before selling off resources to another nation.
States like Iowa have banned the sale of farmland to foreign buyers and others have laws that limit the number of acres that can legally be sold, but it can be quite tricky to tell who is doing the buying. Foreign buyers can hide their identity by creating an American corporation, or buying through a U.S. majority-owned subsidiary.
So just how much of our farmland are we willing to sell? And who decides? Most proposed deals must go through the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). Established under the Ford Administration in 1975, it has broad powers to accept or deny requests for foreign acquisitions of American companies and land. After September 11, additional criteria were included under the jurisdiction of the CFIUS, including food, water, and agriculture. The committee is made up of representatives from 16 government agencies, and chaired by the Secretary of the Treasury. It includes members from the Department of Defense, Homeland Security, the State Department, and the Departments of Commerce, Energy, and Justice, as well as the offices of the U.S. Trade Representative and Science and Technology Policy. Its reviews and deliberations are closed to the public, and decisions are handed down with virtually no transparency.
The dangers of high land prices are obvious—especially for younger farmers who are trying to get established and farmers who want to steer away from Big Ag approaches. The dangers of ownership by large corporations and foreign buyers are equally clear. But there is another danger to high, rapidly rising land prices—one that brings to mind the great real estate bust of 2007: a bubble. Bubbles can be devastating, leaving small landowners underwater on their mortgages and depriving them of the crucial collateral they need to get loans on operating expenses.
“I don’t think it’s a bubble.”
Could the current rise in farm prices be a bubble? Certainly, if you read some headlines in Midwestern newspapers, you might get the impression not only that there’s a bubble but that it is in the process of bursting. Though farmland prices are still high, they peaked somewhere around 2013 and have fallen for three years in a row—the first time that’s happened.
“I don’t think it’s a bubble,” says Zhang. “In a bubble, you’ll see dissociation between prices and the value of the underlying assets. This time, when crop prices went down—with corn dropping from six or seven dollars a bushel in 2013 to about half that price today—the land prices dropped with them. And farmers still have some money.”
Don’t get too optimistic—or too pessimistic—just yet, though. Interest rates are creeping up. Farm income, the key factor in determining land prices, has been falling for the past three years from record highs, and USDA is predicting a fourth year of decline. On the other hand, operating costs seem to be going down. And prices in Iowa seem to have ticked up slightly, though that may be just because farmers are holding on to their property, waiting for better prices to return; farmland for sale is in short supply in Iowa. (These insights come courtesy of Professor Zhang. For much, much more, visit the invaluable Iowa Land Portal.)
Zhang himself takes a temperate view: “Despite the deteriorating agricultural financial conditions and continued decline in farm income, the current farm downturn is more likely a liquidity and working capital problem, as opposed to a solvency and balance sheet problem for the entire agricultural sector,” he writes .”Rather than an abrupt farm crisis, we are likely to [see] a gradual, drawn-out downward adjustment to the historical normal return levels for the agricultural economy. The U.S. farmland market [is] likely headed towards stabilization and potentially slightly more modest downward adjustments before bouncing back in the near future.”
If it pans out that way, Zhang’s prediction is probably good news for the economy. Is it good news for a sustainable approach to agriculture rooted in small, independent farms, enlightened farming practices, and short supply chains? That’s less obvious. At the very least, it’s going to require the progressive wing of farming to rethink its economics and its go-to-market strategies and possibly make big changes.
But that is a story for another day.
Katy Keiffer has been in the food industry for over 30 years as a cook, butcher, publicist, and food writer. She is the author of What's The Matter With Meat?, an expose of the meat industry, and is the host and producer of the weekly podcast “What Doesn't Kill You: Food Industry Insights” on HeritageRadioNetwork.org.
This 'Carbon Farm' Grows Plants Using CO2 Harvested From People Inside The Building Below
This 'Carbon Farm' Grows Plants Using CO2 Harvested From People Inside The Building Below
May 15, 2018 By Bruce Gellerman
The fifth-floor stairwell at Boston University's College of Arts and Sciences opens up to the sky.
Here, amid heating and air conditioning vents and ducts, an unusual crop is being collected, says Nathan Phillips, professor of earth and environment.
"We're growing food on the rooftop at BU and we're harvesting the carbon that comes out of the breath of all of the people inside of the building," he says. "And we're breathing it out every day at 40,000 parts per million in our breath."
In the atmosphere, CO2 — now at record levels, the highest in recorded history— is a powerful heat-trapping gas responsible for the rapidly changing climate. But carbon dioxide is also a critical factor in growing plants.
About a decade ago, Phillips got the idea of putting the high levels of CO2 that build up in classrooms to good use.
The carbon farm with spinach plants ready for harvesting (Bruce Gellerman/WBUR)
"We supercharge the photosynthetic process when we breathe on our plants," he says.
High concentrations of CO2 can make you sleepy, even kill you, but green plants love the stuff. In fact, it's essential for photosynthesis. That's the process by which plants use sunlight to convert carbon dioxide, minerals and water into the food they need — and produce life-sustaining oxygen for us.
The BU rooftop is dotted with metal mushroom air vents.
"The vents in many buildings, they have to exhaust the air, so they're blowing it out anyway," Phillips says. "We're just capturing it."
"I don't know of anyone else who's doing this," says Sarabeth Buckley, Phillips' grad student. "We're calling it the carbon farm at the moment."
The carbon farm is Buckley's Ph.D. research project, and she's collecting data.
Mechanical engineering students from BU laid coiled conduit from building vents. They carry carbon dioxide-rich classroom air. They also built ambient collectors that act as experimental controls. At the end of the pipes are spinach plants set in milk buckets at different distances.
"We're still working out the best physical system to move the air to the plants," Buckley says. "But at least in terms of the pilot study that I did, where I kept the plants closer to the vent, I did get some positive results from that. So the plants grew larger next to the vent, versus away from the vent."
The largest plants are at the end of eight coiled conduits. They look like octopus arms, carrying a strong and steady flow of waste CO2 from the academic hot air vents to leaves.
The possibilities of carbon dioxide-fed plants are literally breath-taking.
Urban greenhouse gardens are becoming increasingly popular. Hospitals, restaurants, even supermarkets are turning empty acres of space atop buildings into food-producing farms. But roofs are stressful environments. Hit with direct sun, they're hot, dry and windy, and rain can run off quickly.
But Buckley's yields in earlier tests have shown substantial improvements over typical rooftop crops. The possibilities of carbon dioxide-fed plants are literally breath-taking.
"For our initial pilot study there was around a 50 percent increase in growth," she says. So: faster, cheaper, better.
Buckley will harvest the plants, carefully count and weigh them, and put them in an oven to dehydrate, and weigh them again two more times.
"You also need the dry weight because that's what's most commonly reported in science," she says, "so we'll just have to dry them and then they'll become little crispy spinach plants, and that's not very tasty."
So while Buckley may be able to enjoy the fruits of her Ph.D. labors from her carbon farm experiment, she won't be eating these veggies.
This segment aired on May 15, 2018.
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Bruce Gellerman Reporter
Bruce Gellerman is an award-winning journalist and senior correspondent, frequently covering science, business, technology and the environment.
The Great Nutrient Collapse
The Great Nutrient Collapse
Geoff Johnson for POLITICO
The atmosphere is literally changing the food we eat, for the worse. And almost nobody is paying attention.
09/13/2017
Irakli Loladze is a mathematician by training, but he was in a biology lab when he encountered the puzzle that would change his life. It was in 1998, and Loladze was studying for his Ph.D. at Arizona State University. Against a backdrop of glass containers glowing with bright green algae, a biologist told Loladze and a half-dozen other graduate students that scientists had discovered something mysterious about zooplankton.
Zooplankton are microscopic animals that float in the world’s oceans and lakes, and for food they rely on algae, which are essentially tiny plants. Scientists found that they could make algae grow faster by shining more light onto them—increasing the food supply for the zooplankton, which should have flourished. But it didn’t work out that way. When the researchers shined more light on the algae, the algae grew faster, and the tiny animals had lots and lots to eat—but at a certain point they started struggling to survive. This was a paradox. More food should lead to more growth. How could more algae be a problem?
Loladze was technically in the math department, but he loved biology and couldn’t stop thinking about this. The biologists had an idea of what was going on: The increased light was making the algae grow faster, but they ended up containing fewer of the nutrients the zooplankton needed to thrive. By speeding up their growth, the researchers had essentially turned the algae into junk food. The zooplankton had plenty to eat, but their food was less nutritious, and so they were starving.
Loladze used his math training to help measure and explain the algae-zooplankton dynamic. He and his colleagues devised a model that captured the relationship between a food source and a grazer that depends on the food. They published that first paper in 2000. But Loladze was also captivated by a much larger question raised by the experiment: Just how far this problem might extend.
“What struck me is that its application is wider,” Loladze recalled in an interview. Could the same problem affect grass and cows? What about rice and people? “It was kind of a watershed moment for me when I started thinking about human nutrition,” he said.
In the outside world, the problem isn’t that plants are suddenly getting more light: It’s that for years, they’ve been getting more carbon dioxide. Plants rely on both light and carbon dioxide to grow. If shining more light results in faster-growing, less nutritious algae—junk-food algae whose ratio of sugar to nutrients was out of whack—then it seemed logical to assume that ramping up carbon dioxide might do the same. And it could also be playing out in plants all over the planet. What might that mean for the plants that people eat?
What Loladze found is that scientists simply didn’t know. It was already well documented that CO2levels were rising in the atmosphere, but he was astonished at how little research had been done on how it affected the quality of the plants we eat. For the next 17 years, as he pursued his math career, Loladze scoured the scientific literature for any studies and data he could find. The results, as he collected them, all seemed to point in the same direction: The junk-food effect he had learned about in that Arizona lab also appeared to be occurring in fields and forests around the world. “Every leaf and every grass blade on earth makes more and more sugars as CO2 levels keep rising,” Loladze said. “We are witnessing the greatest injection of carbohydrates into the biosphere in human history―[an] injection that dilutes other nutrients in our food supply.”
He published those findings just a few years ago, adding to the concerns of a small but increasingly worried group of researchers who are raising unsettling questions about the future of our food supply. Could carbon dioxide have an effect on human health we haven’t accounted for yet? The answer appears to be yes—and along the way, it has steered Loladze and other scientists, directly into some of the thorniest questions in their profession, including just how hard it is to do research in a field that doesn’t quite exist yet.
IN AGRICULTURAL RESEARCH, it’s been understood for some time that many of our most important foods have been getting less nutritious. Measurements of fruits and vegetables show that their minerals, vitamin and protein content has measurably dropped over the past 50 to 70 years. Researchers have generally assumed the reason is fairly straightforward: We’ve been breeding and choosing crops for higher yields, rather than nutrition, and higher-yielding crops—whether broccoli, tomatoes, or wheat—tend to be less nutrient-packed.
In 2004, a landmark study of fruits and vegetables found that everything from protein to calcium, iron and vitamin C had declined significantly across most garden crops since 1950. The researchers concluded this could mostly be explained by the varieties we were choosing to grow.
Loladze and a handful of other scientists have come to suspect that’s not the whole story and that the atmosphere itself may be changing the food we eat. Plants need carbon dioxide to live like humans need oxygen. And in the increasingly polarized debate about climate science, one thing that isn’t up for debate is that the level of CO2 in the atmosphere is rising. Before the industrial revolution, the earth’s atmosphere had about 280 parts per million of carbon dioxide. Last year, the planet crossed over the 400 parts per million threshold; scientists predict we will likely reach 550 parts per million within the next half-century—essentially twice the amount that was in the air when Americans started farming with tractors.
If you’re someone who thinks about plant growth, this seems like a good thing. It has also been useful ammunition for politicians looking for reasons to worry less about the implications of climate change. Rep. Lamar Smith, a Republican who chairs the House Committee on Science, recently argued that people shouldn’t be so worried about rising CO2 levels because it’s good for plants, and what’s good for plants is good for us.
“A higher concentration of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere would aid photosynthesis, which in turn contributes to increased plant growth,” the Texas Republican wrote. “This correlates to a greater volume of food production and better quality food.”
But as the zooplankton experiment showed, greater volume and better quality might not go hand-in-hand. In fact, they might be inversely linked. As best scientists can tell, this is what happens: Rising CO2 revs up photosynthesis, the process that helps plants transform sunlight to food. This makes plants grow, but it also leads them to pack in more carbohydrates like glucose at the expense of other nutrients that we depend on, like protein, iron and zinc.
In 2002, while a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University, Loladze published a seminal research paper in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, a leading journal,arguing that rising CO2 and human nutrition were inextricably linked through a global shift in the quality of plants. In the paper, Loladze complained about the dearth of data: Among thousands of publications he had reviewed on plants and rising CO2, he found only one that looked specifically at how it affected the balance of nutrients in rice, a crop that billions of people rely on. (The paper, published in 1997, found a drop in zinc and iron.)
Increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is reducing the protein in staple crops like rice, wheat, barley and potatoes, raising unknown risks to human health in the future. | Getty Images
Loladze’s paper was first to tie the impact of CO2 on plant quality to human nutrition. But he also raised more questions than he answered, arguing that there were fundamental holes in the research. If these nutritional shifts were happening up and down the food chain, the phenomenon needed to be measured and understood.
Part of the problem, Loladze was finding, lay in the research world itself. Answering the question required an understanding of plant physiology, agriculture and nutrition―as well as a healthy dollop of math. He could do the math, but he was a young academic trying to establish himself, and math departments weren't especially interested in solving problems in farming and human health. Loladze struggled to get funding to generate new data and continued to obsessively collect published data from researchers across the globe. He headed to the heartland to take an assistant professor position at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. It was a major agricultural school, which seemed like a good sign, but Loladze was still a math professor. He was told he could pursue his research interests as long as he brought in funding, but he struggled. Biology grant makers said his proposals were too math-heavy; math grant makers said his proposals contained too much biology.
“It was year after year, rejection after rejection,” he said. “It was so frustrating. I don’t think people grasp the scale of this.”
It’s not just in the fields of math and biology that this issue has fallen through the cracks. To say that it’s little known that key crops are getting less nutritious due to rising CO2 is an understatement. It is simply not discussed in the agriculture, public health or nutrition communities. At all.
When POLITICO contacted top nutrition experts about the growing body of research on the topic, they were almost universally perplexed and asked to see the research. One leading nutrition scientist at Johns Hopkins University said it was interesting, but admitted he didn’t know anything about it. He referred me to another expert. She said they didn’t know about the subject, either. The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, an association representing an army of nutrition experts across the country, connected me with Robin Foroutan, an integrative medicine nutritionist who was also not familiar with the research.
“It’s really interesting, and you’re right, it’s not on many people’s radar,” wrote Foroutan, in an email, after being sent some papers on the topic. Foroutan said she would like to see a whole lot more data, particularly on how a subtle shift toward more carbohydrates in plants could affect public health.
"We don't know what a minor shift in the carbohydrate ratio in the diet is ultimately going to do,” she said, noting that the overall trend toward more starch and carbohydrate consumption has been associated with an increase in diet-related disease like obesity and diabetes. "To what degree would a shift in the food system contribute to that? We can't really say.”
Asked to comment for this story, Marion Nestle, a nutrition policy professor at New York University who’s one of the best-known nutrition experts in the country, initially expressed skepticism about the whole concept but offered to dig into a file she keeps on climate issues.
After reviewing the evidence, she changed her tune. “I’m convinced,” she said, in an email, while also urging caution: It wasn’t clear whether CO2-driven nutrient depletion would have a meaningful impact on public health. We need to know a whole lot more, she said.
Kristie Ebi, a researcher at the University of Washington who’s studied the intersection of climate change and global health for two decades, is one of a handful of scientists in the U.S. who is keyed into the potentially sweeping consequences of the CO2-nutrition dynamic, and brings it up in every talk she gives.
"It's a hidden issue,” Ebi said. “The fact that my bread doesn't have the micronutrients it did 20 years ago―how would you know?"
As Ebi sees it, the CO2-nutrition link has been slow to break through, much as it took the academic community a long time to start seriously looking at the intersection of climate and human health in general. “This is before the change,” she said. “This is what it looks like before the change."
Soybeans growing in a field outside Lincoln, Nebraska, one of many crops whose nutrient content is shifting as a result of rising carbon dioxide levels. | Geoff Johnson for POLITICO
LOLADZE'S EARLY PAPER raised some big questions that are difficult, but not impossible, to answer. How does rising atmospheric CO2 change how plants grow? How much of the long-term nutrient drop is caused by the atmosphere, and how much by other factors, like breeding?
It’s also difficult, but not impossible, to run farm-scale experiments on how CO2affects plants. Researchers use a technique that essentially turns an entire field into a lab. The current gold standard for this type of research is called a FACE experiment (for “free-air carbon dioxide enrichment”), in which researchers create large open-air structures that blow CO2 onto the plants in a given area. Small sensors keep track of the CO2 levels. When too much CO2 escapes the perimeter, the contraption puffs more into the air to keep the levels stable. Scientists can then compare those plants directly to others growing in normal air nearby.
These experiments and others like them have shown scientists that plants change in important ways when they’re grown at elevated CO2 levels. Within the category of plants known as “C3”―which includes approximately 95 percent of plant species on earth, including ones we eat like wheat, rice, barley and potatoes―elevated CO2has been shown to drive down important minerals like calcium, potassium, zinc and iron. The data we have, which look at how plants would respond to the kind of CO2 concentrations we may see in our lifetimes, show these important minerals drop by 8 percent, on average. The same conditions have been shown to drive down the protein content of C3 crops, in some cases significantly, with wheat and rice dropping 6 percent and 8 percent, respectively.
Earlier this summer, a group of researchers published the first studies attempting to estimate what these shifts could mean for the global population. Plants are a crucial source of protein for people in the developing world, and by 2050, they estimate, 150 million people could be put at risk of protein deficiency, particularly in countries like India and Bangladesh. Researchers found a loss of zinc, which is particularly essential for maternal and infant health, could put 138 million people at risk. They also estimated that more than 1 billion mothers and 354 million children live in countries where dietary iron is projected to drop significantly, which could exacerbate the already widespread public health problem of anemia.
There aren’t any projections for the United States, where we for the most part enjoy a diverse diet with no shortage of protein, but some researchers look at the growing proportion of sugars in plants and hypothesize that a systemic shift in plants could further contribute to our already alarming rates of obesity and cardiovascular disease.
Another new and important strain of research on CO2 and plant nutrition is now coming out of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Lewis Ziska, a plant physiologist at the Agricultural Research Service headquarters in Beltsville, Maryland, is drilling down on some of the questions that Loladze first raised 15 years ago with a number of new studies that focus on nutrition.
Lewis Ziska, a plant physiologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, examines rice growing in his laboratory in Beltsville, Md. Ziska and his colleagues are conducting experiments to find out how rising carbon dioxide levels affect the nutrient profile of plants. Plant physiologist Julie Wolf harvests peppers to study changes in vitamin C, lower right. | M. Scott Mahaskey/POLITICO
Ziska devised an experiment that eliminated the complicating factor of plant breeding: He decided to look at bee food.
Goldenrod, a wildflower many consider a weed, is extremely important to bees. It flowers late in the season, and its pollen provides an important source of protein for bees as they head into the harshness of winter. Since goldenrod is wild and humans haven’t bred it into new strains, it hasn’t changed over time as much as, say, corn or wheat. And the Smithsonian Institution also happens to have hundreds of samples of goldenrod, dating back to 1842, in its massive historical archive—which gave Ziska and his colleagues a chance to figure out how one plant has changed over time.
They found that the protein content of goldenrod pollen has declined by a third since the industrial revolution—and the change closely tracks with the rise in CO2. Scientists have been trying to figure out why bee populations around the world have been in decline, which threatens many crops that rely on bees for pollination. Ziska’s paper suggested that a decline in protein prior to winter could be an additional factor making it hard for bees to survive other stressors.
Ziska worries we’re not studying all the ways CO2 affects the plants we depend on with enough urgency, especially considering the fact that retooling crops takes a long time.
“We’re falling behind in our ability to intercede and begin to use the traditional agricultural tools, like breeding, to compensate,” he said. “Right now it can take 15 to 20 years before we get from the laboratory to the field.”
AS LOLADZE AND others have found, tackling globe-spanning new questions that cross the boundaries of scientific fields can be difficult. There are plenty of plant physiologists researching crops, but most are dedicated to studying factors like yield and pest resistance—qualities that have nothing to do with nutrition. Math departments, as Loladze discovered, don’t exactly prioritize food research. And studying living things can be costly and slow: It takes several years and huge sums of money to get a FACE experiment to generate enough data to draw any conclusions.
Despite these challenges, researchers are increasingly studying these questions, which means we may have more answers in the coming years. Ziska and Loladze, who now teaches math at Bryan College of Health Sciences in Lincoln, Nebraska, are collaborating with a coalition of researchers in China, Japan, Australia and elsewhere in the U.S. on a large study looking at rising CO2 and the nutritional profile of rice, one of humankind’s most important crops. Their study also includes vitamins, an important nutritional component, that to date has almost not been studied at all.
USDA researchers also recently dug up varieties of rice, wheat and soy that USDA had saved from the 1950s and 1960s and planted them in plots around the U.S. where previous researchers had grown the same cultivars decades ago, with the aim of better understanding how today’s higher levels of CO2 affect them.
Mathematician Irakli Loladze tosses sugar over vegetables outside his home in Lincoln Nebraska, to illustrate how the sugar content of the plants we eat is increasing as a result of rising carbon dioxide levels. Loladze was the first scientist to publish research connecting rising CO2 and changes in plant quality to human nutrition. | Geoff Johnson for POLITICO
In a USDA research field in Maryland, researchers are running experiments on bell peppers to measure how vitamin C changes under elevated CO2. They’re also looking at coffee to see whether caffeine declines. “There are lots of questions,” Ziska said as he showed me around his research campus in Beltsville. “We’re just putting our toe in the water.”
Ziska is part of a small band of researchers now trying to measure these changes and figure out what it means for humans. Another key figure studying this nexus is Samuel Myers, a doctor turned climate researcher at Harvard University who leads the Planetary Health Alliance, a new global effort to connect the dots between climate science and human health.
Myers is also concerned that the research community is not more focused on understanding the CO2-nutrition dynamic, since it’s a crucial piece of a much larger picture of how such changes might ripple through ecosystems. "This is the tip of the iceberg," said Myers. "It's been hard for us to get people to understand how many questions they should have."
In 2014, Myers and a team of other scientists published a large, data-rich study in the journal Nature that looked at key crops grown at several sites in Japan, Australia and the United States that also found rising CO2 led to a drop in protein, iron and zinc. It was the first time the issue had attracted any real media attention.
“The public health implications of global climate change are difficult to predict, and we expect many surprises,” the researchers wrote. “The finding that raising atmospheric CO2 lowers the nutritional value of C3 crops is one such surprise that we can now better predict and prepare for.”
The same year―in fact, on the same day―Loladze, then teaching math at the The Catholic University of Daegu in South Korea, published his own paper, the result of more than 15 years of gathering data on the same subject. It was the largest study in the world on rising CO2 and its impact on plant nutrients. Loladze likes to describe plant science as “noisy”―research-speak for cluttered with complicating data, through which it can be difficult to detect the signal you’re looking for. His new data set was finally big enough to see the signal through the noise, to detect the “hidden shift,” as he put it.
PHOTOS: How to measure a plant
What he found is that his 2002 theory—or, rather, the strong suspicion he had articulated back then—appeared to be borne out. Across nearly 130 varieties of plants and more than 15,000 samples collected from experiments over the past three decades, the overall concentration of minerals like calcium, magnesium, potassium, zinc and iron had dropped by 8 percent on average. The ratio of carbohydrates to minerals was going up. The plants, like the algae, were becoming junk food.
What that means for humans―whose main food intake is plants―is only just starting to be investigated. Researchers who dive into it will have to surmount obstacles like its low profile and slow pace, and a political environment where the word “climate” is enough to derail a funding conversation. It will also require entirely new bridges to be built in the world of science―a problem that Loladze himself wryly acknowledges in his own research. When his paper was finally published in 2014, Loladze listed his grant rejections in the acknowledgements.
Helena Bottemiller Evich is a senior food and agriculture reporter for POLITICO Pro.
New Jersey: Governor Murphy's Team Wants to Put The Garden Back in Garden State
MURPHY’S TEAM WANTS TO PUT THE GARDEN BACK IN GARDEN STATE
CARLY SITRIN | JANUARY 30, 2018
Governor’s advisory committee wants more state support for agri-tourism, a revived Jersey Fresh program, and to get more people involved in farming
Agriculture has always been a keystone of the state’s economy; if no longer dominant in dollars, it certainly still plays a significant role in the Garden State’s image. The Department of Agriculture’s transition report underscores that fact, with its advisory committee hoping to enhance New Jersey’s public image by supporting agritourism efforts and bringing back the sidelined and underfunded Jersey Fresh program.
The new Murphy administration appointed a transition committee for each of the state’s cabinet-level departments, seeking advice and information on what the departments’ stakeholders — experts, analysts, business leaders, officials of non-profits, etc. — view as priorities for the administration. The report on agriculture was among a number that were released publicly last week: These are just advisory reports — Murphy has no obligation to follow their advice.
Make New Jersey Fresh Again
One of the recurring themes throughout the report is the need for strong state branding — starting with the Jersey Fresh program.
The report takes former governors to task for drastic funding cuts over the last decade that have reduced the marketing program's budget from a peak of $1 million down to $50,000, an amount they say barely covers the cost of the inspection and grading efforts.
The advisory committee calls for Murphy not only to revive the program, but also to permit farmers to sell home-baked goods, farm beer and cider, and industrial hemp. As it stands, New Jersey is the only state where selling home-baked goods is prevented by law.
Another rebranding effort would focus on the 2.25 million acres of wineries in the southern counties of Atlantic, Burlington, Camden, Cape May, Cumberland, Gloucester, Ocean, Monmouth and Salem which the report targets as a growing tourist space.
The report calls for the creation of road signs and other promotional materials dubbing that region the "Coastal Plains Wine Corridor” which they believe could become the "Napa Valley of the East." The advisory committee recommends putting the Economic Development Authority and Rutgers Agricultural Experiment Station program (NJAES) in charge of this effort, giving interested wineries access to EDA loans for winery expansion, vineyard establishment, and necessary equipment.
More Farmers
The report also emphasizes the need to get young people interested in farming again. According to the report, New Jersey farms are facing a decline, with the average age of a New Jersey farmer at 60. What's more, because the state resources set aside to preserve farmland come with the exception that the land should remain in farming, that creates a need for a new generation of farmers.
To combat this issue, the advisory committee recommends pouring more resources and budgetary support into the research efforts at the NJAES, which is the main source of technical support for farmers, ranchers, and other agricultural professionals in the state. The report also seeks to get young people involved though Future Farmers of America (FFA), 4H, and vocational tech programs.
The report also recommends making changes to encourage urban, niche, and beginner farmers by extending tax benefits to farms under five acres and removing barriers to urban farming such as the department of health regulation that prohibits small farms from accepting food stamp benefits like Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and WIC.
The issue of food deserts in some New Jersey cities is also targeted in the report, which advises directing the department of agriculture to work with education programs and establish EDA loan programs to get beginner farmers the equipment and information they need to start urban farms.
Food Security
According to the report, the number one priority for the Murphy team should be immediately restoring the “heat and eat" benefits that would make it easier for those participating in the SNAP program, which is overseen by the federal Department of Agriculture, to also receive help paying heating bills. While in office, Gov. Chris Christie repeatedly vetoed budget language that would have restored the program and according to recent Benefits Data Trust research, some 160,000 Garden State residents have seen their SNAP benefits dip by about $90 a month due to Christie's actions.
It also recommends streamlining food insecurity programs like SNAP, WIC, school breakfast and lunch, adult-care food programs and food assistance for disaster relief into two departments (Agriculture, and either Human Services or Health) and making them easier to apply to.
Deer and Insects
The report also touches on some issues that are more difficult to categorize like deer-hunting permit changes and funding for an insect laboratory.
Deer in the state are largely overpopulated and have been negatively impacting farmers by contributing to annual crop losses of up to 40 percent, according to the report. In response, the committee recommends a “strategic deer management plan” that would “develop target population numbers for a sustainable herd” — all of which really means more deer hunting. Some of the proposed regulations include allowing bow hunting during summer months and creating an all-season, all-zone, “Earn-A-Buck” program similar to ones in states like Indiana and Virginia where more does and antlerless deer can be taken per buck until the population “has reached a scientifically acceptable level.” This would be a change from the current law which restricts doe counts in some zones and in some seasons unless a hunter is in possession of an unlimited doe tag.
The committee also supports repairing and funding the Phillip Alampi Beneficial Insect Rearing Laboratory, a facility constructed in the mid 1980's for research related to raising and releasing insects like weevils and beetles to control invasive species in New Jersey.