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What The 2018 Farm Bill Means For Urban, Suburban And Rural America
Soybean crop on a family farm near Humboldt, Iowa, 2017. USDA/Preston Keres
What The 2018 Farm Bill Means For Urban, Suburban And Rural America
January 16, 2018
Author
Special Advisor, Colorado State University
Disclosure statement
Tom Vilsack served as Governor of Iowa from 1999-2007 and U.S. Secretary of Agriculture from 2009-2017. He is president and CEO of the U.S. Dairy Export Council (USDEC); a Strategic Advisor of Food & Water Initiatives at the National Western Center as part of the Colorado State University System team; and Global Chair for the International Board of Counselors on Food & Water Initiatives. He serves on the board of Feeding America, GenYouth and Working American Education Fund and the World Food Prize Foundation Board of Advisors.
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Since the turn of the year, Congress and the Trump administration have been haggling over legislative priorities for 2018. Many issues are on the agenda, from health care to infrastructure, but there has been little mention of a key priority: The 2018 farm bill.
This comprehensive food and agriculture legislation is typically enacted every four or five years. When I became U.S. secretary of agriculture in January 2009, I learned quickly that the bill covers much more than farms and farmers. In fact, every farm bill also affects conservation, trade, nutrition, jobs and infrastructure, agricultural research, forestry and energy.
Drafting the farm bill challenges Congress to meet broad needs with limited resources. The new farm bill will be especially constrained by passage of the GOP tax plan, which sharply reduces taxes on the wealthy and large companies, and by concerns about the size of the federal budget deficit. Farm bill proponents will have to work even harder now than in the past to underscore the magnitude and impact of this legislation, and the ways in which it affects everyone living in the United States.
Nutrition programs, mainly SNAP, account for more than three-quarters of spending under the most recent farm bill.
Helping farmers compete
Of course, the farm bill helps farmers, ranchers, and producers. It provides credit for beginning farmers to get started. It protects against farm losses due to natural disasters through disaster assistance and crop insurance. It provides a cushion for the individual farmer if he or she suffers a poor yield or low prices, through a series of farm payment programs tied to specific commodities.
Agricultural trade is critically important to the bottom line for U.S. farmers, ranchers, and producers. More than 20 percent of all U.S. agricultural production is exported. Agricultural exports are projected to account for one-third of farm income in 2017.
The farm bill authorizes market access promotion and export credit guarantee programs that are key for promoting exports and generating farm income from exports. These programs provide resources to exporting businesses to aggressively market American agricultural products overseas and to enable exporters to price our products more competitively on the world market.
Then-Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack speaks with Provincial Agriculture Deputy Julio Martinez during a visit to a local farmers market in Havana, Cuba, Nov. 13, 2015. USDA/Lydia Barraza.
Making healthy food available and affordable
All of these provide a stable and secure supply of food for the nation. Along with efficient supply chains, they also allow us to enjoy relatively inexpensive food. On average, Americans spend less than 10 percent of their income on food.
The farm bill is also a nutrition bill. It funds the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program(SNAP), our country’s major program that helps low-income individuals and families afford a healthy diet. In 2016 SNAP served more than 44 million Americans.
Two issues are likely to arise during the farm bill discussion. First, there will be an effort to impose work requirements for able-bodied adults without dependents. Today, those individuals are required to be in school or working a minimum of 20 hours a week, or their benefits are limited to three months every 36 months.
Second, there will be efforts to limit what people can buy with SNAP benefits – for example, barring their use to purchase soda or other foods that are considered unhealthy. Implementing such restrictions might prove more difficult and costly than policymakers may expect.
Other nutrition provisions in the bill help senior citizens buy goods at farmers’ markets andmake fresh fruits and vegetables more readily available to millions of school children. It is easy to see why farm and nutrition advocates historically have worked together to support passage of the farm bill in an alliance that joins rural and urban interests.
Food insecurity means that access to adequate food for active, healthy living is limited by lack of money and other resources. Very low food security occurs when food intake for one or more household members is reduced and normal eating patterns are disrupted.
Boosting rural economic development
Only 15 percent of America’s population lives in rural areas, but as the bumper sticker reminds us, “No farms, no food.” The farm bill helps make it possible for people who want to farm to stay on the land by funding supporting jobs that provide a second income. It also provides resources to improve the quality of life in rural places.
Since 2009, programs authorized through the farm bill have helped over 1.2 million families obtain home loans; provided six million rural residents with access to improved broadband service; enabled 791,000 workers to find jobs; and improved drinking water systems that serve 19.5 million Americans.
The farm bill also supports our national system of land grant universities, which was proposed by President Lincoln and created by Congress in 1862. Lincoln envisioned a system of colleges and universities that would expand the knowledge base of rural America by improving agricultural productivity.
Through the farm bill, Congress provides grants for research at land grant universities in fields ranging from animal health to organic crop production and biotechnology. Lincoln would be pleased to know that these programs mirror his vision of increasing agricultural productivity through targeted research shared with farmers and ranchers.
Protecting natural resources and producing energy
Farmers, with the assistance of the farm bill, can improve soil quality and preserve habitat for wildlife. The farm bill funds voluntary conservation programs that currently are helping more than 500,000 farmers and ranchers conserve soil and improve air and water quality – actions that benefit all Americans.
For example, the Conservation Reserve Program pays farmers to take environmentally sensitive land out of agricultural production and conserve it for other purposes, such as wetland habitat for birds. The Environmental Quality Incentives Program and the Conservation Stewardship Program pay farmers to adopt conservation practices, such as conservation tilling and fencing livestock out of streams.
Producing renewable energy is an important tool for expanding economic opportunity in rural areas. USDA’s Renewable Energy for America Program authorizes investments in small- and large-scale projects including wind, solar, renewable biomass and anaerobic digesters, which farmers can use to produce biogas energy by breaking down manure and other organic wastes. Since 2009 the Renewable Energy for America Program has helped finance over 12,000 renewable energy projects.
Investing in food and farmers
In discussion of any legislation that affects so many different constituencies, a key challenge is to recognize that multiple interests are at stake and try to avoid pitting groups against one another unnecessarily. If differences become too divisive, the risk of not passing a farm bill grows.
Many programs in the farm bill are authorized only for specific periods of time. This means the ultimate consequence of not getting a bill passed could be that some policies would revert back to outdated “permanent” (nonexpiring) laws enacted more than 50 years ago. This would cause major disruptions to the nation’s food system and skyrocketing food costs.
Unfortunately, most people are unaware of the farm bill’s importance because they think it impacts only farmers. Over the next few months, debate and discussion about the farm bill will grow, and hopefully will lead to broader understanding of the bill’s importance. I hope this awareness will encourage Congress and the president to provide the level of investment that is needed to maximize the positive impacts that the farm bill can have for all Americans.
New Brunswick, Canada Hydroponic Lettuce Farmer Thriving in Face of National E. coli Outbreak
New Brunswick, Canada Hydroponic Lettuce Farmer Thriving in Face of National E. coli Outbreak
Some chain restaurants pulling romaine lettuce from the menu, while others continue to serve it up
By Tori Weldon, CBC News Posted: Jan 05, 2018 6:00 AM AT Last Updated: Jan 05, 2018 10:54 AM AT
Julian Howatt weight romaine lettuce he grows hydroponically at his Moncton indoor farm, Local by Atta. He said he's been getting calls about romaine lettuce since Health Canada issued a warning in December. (Tori Weldon/CBC)
Tori Weldon | Reporter
Tori Weldon is a reporter based in Moncton. She's been working for the CBC since 2008.
Related Stories
- National E. coli outbreak has some Island businesses taking extra precautions
- Everything you need to know about the E. coli risk from romaine lettuce
- Romaine lettuce temporarily pulled from major restaurant chains
Many restaurants across the province are choosing to pull salads with romaine lettuce from their menus, in light of a E. coli outbreak linked to the leafy greens, but one Moncton bistro isn't worried about its Caesar salad.
The Public Health Agency of Canada said there have been five cases of E. coli infections in New Brunswick when it announced a national outbreak in mid-December.
Health Canada has confirmed 41 E. coli infections across the country, and the agency has linked the illness to romaine lettuce, but it still hasn't found the specific supplier as the source of the outbreak.
At Tony's Bistro, head chef Jordan Holden said he's aware of the public health warning about romaine lettuce. While he said his bistro serves about 36 kilograms of lettuce a week, he isn't concerned.
Jordan Holden, the head chef at Tony's Bistro, said he's aware of the E. coli infections in Eastern Canada but isn't concerned. The lettuce he serves is grown nearby at Local by Atta. (Tori Weldon/CBC)
"Since we're getting it locally grown, it's not really a big deal for us," said Holden.
"I've been to the plant where it comes from … I was never worried about it."
Holden buys from Local by Atta, a hydroponic, indoor farm in the Moncton Industrial Park. He tried the greens at a local farmer's market about a year ago and liked them so much he decided to serve them at his restaurant.
On Thursday, with a winter storm raging outside, Julian Howatt was warm and basking in a pink light inside his hydroponic farm. "Farm hands" wearing hair and beard nets carried trays of leafy greens up and down the stairs of the multi-level operation.
"We grow leafy greens, primarily lettuce, but also kale, microgreens, basil — that kind of stuff," Howatt said.
Holden, putting the final touches on a caesar salad at Tony's Bistro, said he might not serve romaine lettuce if it wasn't coming from :down the street. (Pierre Fournier/CBC)
He's noticed an increased interest in his product since romaine lettuce and E. coli became synonymous in the news over the last few weeks.
"We have had people ask us about romaine lettuce … more traffic on our Facebook page, people asking us questions, either about that or where they can get our products."
According to Health Canada, a common source of E. coli illness are raw fruits and vegetables that have come in contact with the feces of infected animals.
And Howatt said at his plant, "growing indoors, hydroponically like this, the risks are very low."
Chain restaurants, including Swiss Chalet, Montana's Cookhouse, Kelsey's, East Side Mario's and Boston Pizza, are pulling romaine lettuce from their menus.
In Greater Moncton, locally owned restaurants such as Vito's and the Homestead continue to serve romaine lettuce, while others, including Hynes Restaurant, have opted to temporarily remove it from the menu.
Chef Holden said he would most likely opt out of serving the lettuce if he wasn't so confident in the greens he's getting.
"I think it's a little riskier if you get it from a big supplier."
And Julian Howatt said that's the kind of confidence that comes from being able to speak with a supplier directly.
Specialty Food Association Brings Seeds&Chips to 2018 Winter Fancy Food Show
Specialty Food Association Brings Seeds&Chips to 2018 Winter Fancy Food Show
Milan, Italy - January 9, 2018
The Specialty Food Association has entered into a new relationship with the Milan-based Seeds&Chips, an organization known for providing a forum for food innovators and startups to connect and collaborate. The organization produces the annual Global Food Innovation Summit, which draws thousands of speakers, exhibitors and visitors to Milan from around the world. Seeds&Chips has also partnered with hundreds of startups to further a range of products and concepts.
As part of this relationship, Seeds&Chips will participate in the Specialty Food Association’s 2018 Winter Fancy Food Show in San Francisco. They will present a seminar titled ‘Disrupting the Food System: Innovation from Farm to Fork,’ on Tuesday, January 23rd at 11:30 am, and will sponsor two shorter presentations as part of the show’s Excite Talk sessions, also on the 23rd. Seeds&Chips will also connect attendees to food solutions in a featured area on the exhibit floor, bringing their unique 360° perspective to highlight challenges, discuss trends, and explore investments.
”Seeds&Chips addresses global issues impacting the food chain such as the increasing world population, climate change, scarcity of resources, and changes in the processes of choice and purchase. These are important issues to SFA’s constituents,” says SFA President Phil Kafarakis. “Having Seeds&Chips help us extend the value of the Winter Fancy Food Show is a first step in our collaboration. As we develop the relationship further, we plan to reach more innovators and entrepreneurs through Seeds&Chipsnetworks and to offer more content to SFA members.”
As Marco Gualtieri, Founder and Chairman of Seeds&Chips explains, “Startups, companies, accelerators and incubators from around the world bring their ideas and solutions to the table at Seeds&Chips, all linked by the thread of innovation as key to defining a food universe that is sustainable and accessible to everyone.”
The Winter Fancy Food Show is a trade-only show held in San Francisco from January 21-23. For more information or to register for the show, please visit specialtyfood.com.
About the Specialty Food Association
The Specialty Food Association is a thriving community of food artisans, importers and entrepreneurs. Established in 1952 in New York, the not-for-profit trade association provides its 3,600 members in the U.S. and abroad with resources, knowledge and connections to champion and nurture their companies in an always-evolving marketplace. The Association owns and produces the Winter and Summer Fancy Food Shows, and presents the sofi™ Awards honoring excellence in specialty food. Learn more at specialtyfood.com.
About Seeds&Chips, The Global Food Innovation Summit
Seeds&Chips, The Global Food Innovation Summit, founded by entrepreneur, Marco Gualtieri, is the world-leading flagship event in the Food Innovation field. A showcase of excellence entirely dedicated to the promotion of solutions and the latest state-of-the-art technological talents from worldwide. An exhibit as well as a conference with over 30 sessions to present and discuss themes, trends and innovations that are changing the way food is produced, processed, distributed, consumed and communicated. In its III edition, Seeds&Chips, The Global Food Innovation Summit, hosted President Barack H. Obama as a keynote speaker. The event featured over 300 speakers from across the world, over 240 exhibitors, 15,800 visitors and 131 million social media hits in 4 days. The IV edition of the Seeds&Chips Global Food Innovation Summit will take place atMICo, Milano Congressi, from May 7 - 10 2018, and participants will include, among others, Ex-US Secretary of State, John Kerry.
Specialty Food Association Media Contact:
PR Department, (646) 878-0306, press@specialtyfood.com
Press Office Seeds&Chips, The Global Food Innovation Summit
Close to Media – Tel +39 02.70006237
Davide di Battista, Francesca Pollio
davide.dibattista@closetomedia.it; francesca.pollio@closetomedia.it
Facebook: facebook.com/craftcarejoy
Twitter: twitter.com/Specialty_Food
LinkedIn: Specialty Food Industry Group
Pinterest: pinterest.com/craftcarejoy
Instagram: specialtyfoodassociation
How France Became A Global Leader In Curbing Food Waste
n February 2016, France became the first country in the world to prohibit supermarkets from throwing away unused food through unanimously passed legislation.
How France Became A Global Leader In Curbing Food Waste
PROGRESS WATCH
France isn't an obvious frontrunner in food recovery, but new legislation has helped catapult the nation to the top of the 2017 Food Sustainability Index.
Philippe Wojazer/Reuters
Story Hinckley | @storyhinckley
JANUARY 3, 2018 —France is a culinary leader – both at the table and, more recently, in the trash can.
In February 2016, France became the first country in the world to prohibit supermarkets from throwing away unused food through unanimously passed legislation. Now, supermarkets of a certain size must donate unused food or face a fine. Other policies require schools to teach students about food sustainability, companies to report food waste statistics in environmental reports, and restaurants to make take-out bags available.
These laws “make it the norm to reduce waste,” says Marie Mourad, a PhD student in sociology at Sciences Po in Paris who has authored several reports on French food waste. “France is not the country that wastes the least food, but they have become the most proactive because they want to be the exemplary country in Europe.”
France’s efforts have not gone unnoticed. The country earned top ranking in the 2017 Food Sustainability Index, a survey of 25 countries across Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and the Americas conducted by the Economist and Barilla Center for Food and Nutrition Foundation (BCFN).
The people of France wasted 234 pounds of food per person annually, according to the BCFN report, which is drastically better than France’s international counterparts, compared to about 430 pounds per capita thrown away year in the United States.
Small scraps make big impact
Food waste, or unused, edible food, is a global issue. Each year, some 1.3 billion metric tons, or one-third of all the food produced, is thrown away, according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization. Recovering just 25 percent of that wasted food could feed 870 million hungry people – effectively ending world hunger.
Not only does food waste fritter away valuable resources like water, arable land, and money, but it also fills up landfills, which emit methane. If food waste were a country, it would be the third largest greenhouse gas emitter behind the United States and China.
“Food waste is so urgent because where and how we produce food has the biggest impact on the planet of any human activity,” says Jason Clay, senior vice president of food and markets at the World Wildlife Fund.
“In the US, we don't have champions in government who are thinking much about food, nevertheless food waste,” says Mr. Clay. “That has separated us from France: they have people who took up this issue politically.”
French National Assembly member Guillaume Garot helped frame the legislation with his previous experience as the former junior minister for the food industry – a position that in and of itself proves France’s dedication to the issue, say experts.
However, France is not an obvious frontrunner in this field.
Over the past decade, Britain has demonstrated far more statistical success, says Craig Hanson, global director of food, forests, and water at the World Resources Institute, and Denmark has made news with new projects like ugly produce grocery stores. Comparatively, France’s law is new, and as the Guardian reported after it was passed, only 11 percent of France’s 7.1 million metric tons of wasted food comes from supermarkets.
But to Clay, Ms. Mourad, and other food recovery advocates, the law is important symbolically. Neither the United States, nor Britain or Denmark, have comparable government legislation.
“Making it illegal for supermarkets to throw away food is massive,” says Jonathan Bloom, author of the book “American Wasteland.” “That legislative step has impacted all levels of the French food chain.”
Before the 2016 law, French supermarkets typically donated 35,000 metric tons of food annually, roughly one-third of food banks’ total supply, Jacques Bailet, president of the food bank network Banques Alimentaires, told the Guardian in 2016. If supermarkets can increase their food bank donations by only 15 percent this could mean 10 million more meals for needy French each year.
This law improves not only the quantity of donated food, say experts, but also the quality. Food banks typically are supplied with canned goods, rather than nutritionally valuable foods like meat, vegetables, and fruit.
“The fight against food waste should become a major national cause, like road safety, that mobilizes everybody,” said Mr. Garot in a press release. “That implies that every authority, at every level, plays its part.”
The Great Nutrient Collapse
Geoff Johnson for POLITICO | The Agenda | AGENDA 2020
The Great Nutrient Collapse
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 CO2 levels 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
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, theyestimate, 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.
Author:
Helena Bottemiller Evich is a senior food and agriculture reporter for POLITICO Pro.
France Takes Top Spot in 2017 Food Sustainability Index
France ranks number one in the 2017 Food Sustainability Index (FSI), which grades 34 countries according to their food system sustainability.
France Takes Top Spot in 2017 Food Sustainability Index
France ranks number one in the 2017 Food Sustainability Index (FSI), which grades 34 countries according to their food system sustainability. Developed by the Economist Intelligence Unit and the Barilla Center for Food & Nutrition Foundation (BCFN), the FSI evaluates food sustainability issues across three pillars—food loss and waste, sustainable agriculture, and nutritional challenges.
Other top-scoring countries include Japan, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Portugal, Italy, South Korea, and Hungary. These countries typically demonstrate strong and effectively implemented government policy that address the three main pillars. Scores on lifestyle, such as physical activity and diet composition, as well as social and climate-related indicators, such as the participation rate of women in farming and monthly freshwater scarcity, are also important factors in the overall ranking.
The top performer in the food loss and waste pillar is France, followed by Germany, Spain, and Italy. In 2016, the French government passed legislation that prohibits supermarkets from throwing away food approaching its sell-by-date, requiring them to donate it to charities or food banks. Other measures have reduced food wastage in schools and prompted companies to report on food waste data.
The top performer in the sustainable agriculture pillar is Italy, followed closely by South Korea, France, and Colombia. Italy has pioneered new techniques to reduce water loss in agriculture and has implemented sustainable agricultural techniques for climate change mitigation and adaptation nationwide.
Japan scores the highest in the nutritional challenges pillar, ranking first in the life expectancy at birth—84 years—and the healthy life expectancy indicators. South Korea, Hungary, France, and Portugal also scored highly.
According to the index, high-income countries tend to have a higher level of food sustainability, however, there are several outliers. The wealthiest nation in the index, the United Arab Emirates, ranks last, while the United States ranks twenty-first. Ethiopia, the poorest country FSI researchers evaluated, ranks twelfth. Other factors such as high levels of human development, smaller populations, and slower rates of urbanization also correlate with higher food sustainability.
An interactive online database providing country ranking and profiles, case studies, and infographics is available on the FSI website.
Industrial/Organic Raises $1.3 Million to Ferment Your Food Waste Into Sellable Stuff
The latest is Industrial/Organic, a Brooklyn and soon-to-be Newark-based company which just raised a seed round of $1.3 million led by hometown venture firm Brooklyn Bridge Ventures.
Industrial/Organic Raises $1.3 Million to Ferment Your Food Waste Into Sellable Stuff
The Brooklyn startup's raise is backed by hometown VC Brooklyn Bridge Ventures.
By Tyler Woods / REPORTER
Urban farming. (Image via Smart Cities NYC)
Nature, man. It’s a powerful force.
We don’t get too much contact with it here in Brooklyn, but that hasn’t stopped a host of city startups from trying to rethink our relationship with the soil.
The latest is Industrial/Organic, a Brooklyn and soon-to-be Newark-based company which just raised a seed round of $1.3 million led by hometown venture firm Brooklyn Bridge Ventures.
“When I funded the company, it was little more than a science project in a garage in Brooklyn and soon, they’ll open up a waste processing facility in Newark—one that didn’t require tens of millions of dollars to setup and also won’t pollute the local neighborhood with odor,” wrote Brooklyn Bridge Ventures founder Charlie O’Donnell in a post last week. “It won’t throw off dangerous gases, and yes, the process will make a profit.”
According to O’Donnell, the company’s main products will be organic fertilizers and cleaning products.
Industrial/Organic works by a process of rapid fermentation of food waste, the stuff you scrape off your plate before washing it or the eggshells you toss in the trash can.
“Food waste is 75% moisture, which we draw out in a multi-step process following a rapid biological digestion that sterilizes and preserves organic matter,” according to the company. “This byproduct is first used for energy generation and then cleaned for reuse. We see a future where this reclaimed water is substituted for agricultural and industrial use. The leftover solids are processed into an organic fertilizer that is microbially active, providing nutrients, probiotics and organic matter to soils.”
Pretty neat.
U of M Secures $2.5 Million Grant to Improve Quality of Life in Cities
U of M Secures $2.5 Million Grant to Improve Quality of Life in Cities
October 12, 2017
The National Science Foundation (NSF) announced today that it has awarded a $2.5 million grant to a multi-disciplinary team of researchers led by the University of Minnesota for a new project to advance access, wellbeing, health, and sustainability in cities. The project will focus on multiple “smart” infrastructure sectors—water, energy, food, shelter, transportation, waste management—that converge in cities.
The grant is part of the NSF’s Smart and Connected Communities initiative, which is investing $19.5 million nationwide to develop interdisciplinary and community-engaged research to revolutionize the nation’s cities and communities with more responsive and adaptive infrastructures, technologies and services.
The research effort will be co-directed by lead investigator Professor Shashi Shekhar, a computer science and engineering professor in the University of Minnesota’s College of Science and Engineering, and co-investigator Professor Anu Ramaswami, a professor in the University of Minnesota Humphrey School of Public Affairs. The project spans four academic institutions and includes co-investigators Florida State University Professor Rick Feiock, University of Washington Professor Julian Marshall, and Purdue University Professor Venkatesh Merwade.
With transformative new infrastructures coming on the horizon—such as autonomous vehicles, smart and distributed energy systems, novel green infrastructure, and urban farms—the physical fabric of our future cities will be very different from what exists today. The research team will provide new insight on how the future spatial deployment of these new infrastructures in cities will shape access, wellbeing, health, and environmental sustainability in different neighborhoods in the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minn., as well as Tallahassee, Fla.
The new project will advance basic research in multiple disciplines including environmental and civil engineering, computer science, urban planning and public policy. It will create a unique public database, establish citizen science protocols, and advance the science of smart sustainable urban systems through knowledge co-production with cities engaged in infrastructure planning.
“Infrastructure is one of the pillars of our economy—and sustainable, smart infrastructure systems allow our cities, towns, and communities to thrive as 21st century hubs of innovation and prosperity,” Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) said in a news release about the NSF grant.
He was joined by other members of Minnesota’s congressional delegation, including Senator Amy Klobuchar and Representatives Keith Ellison and Betty McCollum, in adding their political support behind the goals of the initiative.
The research team will also engage K-12 students, university researchers, and citizen scientists to develop the first comprehensive public database on infrastructure, environment, health, and wellbeing at the neighborhood level in cities. They will use innovative techniques such as crowdsourcing campaigns using low-cost sensors to characterize air pollution and flooding risks, K-12 engagement in mapping well-being and infrastructure satisfaction at the neighborhood level, and the development of related cyber-infrastructure.
The rich database then will be analyzed to identify novel, interesting, and useful spatial patterns and to develop urban models. Researchers will work with city partners to help better plan future cities considering emerging smart grid, smart mobility, and smart food system transitions.
The project’s educational activities will also connect graduate students from the fields of engineering, urban planning, policy, and sustainability with K-12 teachers and students, with particular attention to underserved populations. Research insights will be broadly disseminated to U.S. cities through partnerships with ICLEI-USA, the National League of Cities, and the MetroLab Network, a city-university collaborative, and through the National Science Foundation’s Sustainable Healthy Cities Network.
“Minnesota leads the nation in STEAM education that integrates the creativity of the arts with science, technology, engineering and math to address our critical infrastructure needs,” Rep. McCollum said. “This grant reflects the excellence of the University of Minnesota in educating the next generation to meet these challenges.”
Additional collaborators at the University of Minnesota include professor Julie Brown of the College of Education and Human Development, Diana Dalbotten of the College of Science and Engineering’s St. Anthony Falls Laboratory, Len Kne of U-Spatial, along with professor Jason Cao and senior fellows Frank Douma and Robert Johns of the Humphrey School of Public Affairs.
NSF’s Smart and Connected Communities initiative is part of a multipronged strategy for investing in foundational research and education on smart and connected communities. For more information about NSF’s Smart and Connected Communities, visit the NSF website.
'An Overwhelming Case For Action' - Expert Panel Identifies Unacceptable Toll of Food and Farming Systems On Human Health
09.10.2017
NEW REPORT: 'An overwhelming case for action' - expert panel identifies unacceptable toll of food and farming systems on human health
(9th October - Rome) Industrial food and farming systems are making people sick in a variety of ways, and are generating staggering human and economic costs - according to a major new report from the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food).
Decisive action can be taken on the basis of what we know, the Panel found, but is held back by the unequal power of food system actors to set the terms of debate and to influence policy.
Lead author Cecilia Rocha said: “Food systems are making us sick. Unhealthy diets are the most obvious link, but are only one of many pathways through which food and farming systems affect human health.”
“This means that there are multiple entry points for building healthier food systems. We must urgently address these impacts wherever they occur, and in parallel we must address the root causes of inequitable, unsustainable and unhealthy practices in food systems.”
Launched today at the UN Committee on World Food Security in Rome, the report places the debilitating health impacts of inadequate diets side by side with environmental health risks (e.g. nitrate-contaminated drinking water and the spread antimicrobial resistance) and the endemic occupational hazards facing food and farmworkers.
IPES-Food found that many of the severest health conditions afflicting populations around the world - from respiratory diseases to a range of cancers and systematic livelihood stresses- are linked to industrial food and farming practices, i.e. chemical-intensive agriculture, concentrated livestock production, the mass production and marketing of ultra-processed foods, and deregulated global supply chains.
The economic costs of these impacts are huge and likely to grow. Malnutrition costs the world $3.5 trillion per year, while obesity alone is estimated to cost $760 billion by 2025. Meanwhile, combined EU and US losses from exposure to endocrine disrupting chemicals amount to $557 billion per year, while anti-microbrial resistant infections are already thought to be incurring $20-34 billion of annual costs in the US.
IPES-Food co-chair Olivia Yambi said: “What is troubling is how systematically these risks are generated - at different nodes of the chain and in different parts of the world.”
Fellow co-chair Olivier De Schutter, former UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food, added: “When all of these health impacts are considered collectively, the grounds for reform are compelling. And when health impacts are placed alongside social and environmental impacts, and the mounting costs they generate, the case for action is overwhelming. It is now clearer than ever that healthy people and a healthy planet are co-dependent.”
The report found that those without power or voice are often exposed to the greatest health risks in food systems, meaning that these impacts often go unseen, undocumented and unaddressed. "Here as elsewhere," De Schutter said, "political disempowerment and marginalization goes hand in hand with risks to lives and livelihoods."
Furthermore, the health impacts of food systems are interconnected, self-reinforcing, and complex. They are caused by many agents, and exacerbated by climate change, unsanitary conditions, and poverty – factors which are shaped by food and farming systems.
Rocha said: “The industrial food and farming model that systematically generates negative health impacts also generates highly unequal power relations. Powerful actors are therefore able to shape our understanding of food-health linkages, promoting solutions that leave the root causes of ill health unaddressed.”
“The complexity of health impacts in food systems is real and challenging, but should not be an excuse for inaction. Urgent steps can and must be taken to reform food system practices, and to transform the ways in which knowledge is gathered and transmitted, understandings are forged, and priorities are set.”
IPES-Food identified five key leverage points for building healthier food systems: i) promoting food systems thinking at all levels; ii) reasserting scientific integrity and research as a public good; iii) bringing the positive impacts of alternative food systems to light; iv) adopting the precautionary principle; and, v) building integrated food policies under participatory governance.
The report, commissioned by the Global Alliance for the Future of Food, builds on IPES-Food’s first thematic report, ‘From Uniformity to Diversity’ (2016), which identified factors locking in the industrial food and farming model, and called for a paradigm shift towards diversified agroecological systems.
Read the Full Report: Unravelling the Food–Health Nexus: Addressing practices, political economy, and power relations to build healthier food systems
Read the Executive Summary.
School and Hospital Menus Add More Plant-Based Options to Meet Growing Demand
School and Hospital Menus Add More Plant-Based Options to Meet Growing Demand
CHARLOTTE, NC (September 7, 2017) – Chartwells Higher Education, Morrison Healthcare and The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) announced today a national partnership on veg-centric menus. As more Americans seek meat-free meals, plant-based foods are increasingly moving to the center of the plate. Millennials show the greatest interest with 60 percent of diners age 21-34 consuming plant-based meats, according to 210 Analytics.
Through an intensive program, the groups’ “Forward Food Culinary Experience” full-day trainings inspire chefs to create delicious meals without meat, eggs or dairy, while teaching the benefits of plant-based eating. These in-the-kitchen classes and train-the-trainers program will influence approximately 3200 chefs and registered dieticians across the country in 2018 who will learn to create nutritious plant-based breakfasts, lunches, dinners and snacks like carrot osso bucco, mushroom street tacos, cauliflower fried rice, biscuits and gravy, and tofu scramble.
“To me, these classes are about breaking that meat-and-two-sides mindset, stepping out of your comfort zone and creating exciting dishes that appeal to vegans and meat eaters alike,” said Vice President of Wellness and Sustainability for Chartwells, Laura Lapp.
The hands-on training is led by HSUS chefs and nutritionists at host accounts nationwide. It started in Chartwells’ Higher Ed locations in June to meet student demand and will roll out at Morrison Healthcare locations in the fall of 2017. Both are part of Compass Group, the world’s largest foodservice provider. Ninety percent of Chartwells Higher Ed schools already incorporate recipes from Compass’s Rooted…In Good Taste plant-based concept and this education will advance the understanding, preparation and implementation of these dishes. With this partnership, Chartwells will continue to shift 20% of its offers to plant-based by 2020 – emphasizing fruits, vegetables, legumes, whole grains, and other plant-proteins.
Morrison Healthcare is conducting 21-day plant-based challenges at select hospital locations nationwide. Staff and visitors are encouraged to eliminate or limit consumption of animal products and increase whole plant foods in their diets. Host locations offer culinary demonstrations, lunch and learns, and offer an increased variety of plant-based foods in cafeterias.
“Focusing on flavor is part of our philosophy at Morrison Healthcare,” said Vice President of Culinary for Morrison, Cary Neff. “With a focus on healthful recipes that are delicious, elegant and easy to prepare, this partnership will help expand our repertoire and get guests and staff excited about food that’s good for them and the planet.”
“Serving more plant-based meals is a great way to improve health, take a bite out of carbon emissions, and reduce consumption of industrially-produced animal products,” said HSUS President and CEO, Wayne Pacelle. “Compass is doing something important and noteworthy in offering its culinary leaders this opportunity.”
The “Forward Food Culinary Experience” will roll out Compass-wide starting this fall.
For additional information, visit www.forwardfood.org.
Chartwells Higher Education Dining Services is the recognized leader in contract foodservice management, hospitality and award-winning guest service within 290 college and university dining environments throughout academic institutions across the U.S. Chartwells’ new brand mantra, “Where Hungry Minds Gather,” signifies its commitment to reinventing the dining experience for the next generation of students and beyond. Our nutritious cuisine not only satisfies the unique appetites, lifestyles and dietary needs of every guest dining on campus, but it also brings people together to promote the high-intensity relationships that will prepare students for the future. www.ChartwellsHigherEd.com
Morrison Healthcare
Morrison Healthcare is part of Compass Group USA, and a leading national food and nutrition services company, proudly serving 750 hospitals and healthcare systems. Morrison Healthcare together with Crothall Healthcare form Compass One Healthcare – providing specialized patient experiences in food, nutrition and support services in more than 1,600 locations with a combined 90 years of healthcare experience. www.morrisonhealthcare.com
This High-Tech Vertical Farm Promises Whole Foods Quality at Walmart Prices
Before stepping into Plenty Inc.’s indoor farm on the banks of the San Francisco Bay, make sure you’re wearing pants and closed-toe shoes. Heels aren’t allowed. If you have long hair, you should probably tie it back.
Working in the Map Room, one of Plenty’s R&D rooms in South San Francisco.
PHOTOGRAPHER: JUSTIN KANEPS FOR BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK
This High-Tech Vertical Farm Promises Whole Foods Quality at Walmart Prices
SoftBank-backed Plenty is out to build massive indoor farms on the outskirts of every major city on Earth.
By Selina Wang | September 6, 2017
Before stepping into Plenty Inc.’s indoor farm on the banks of the San Francisco Bay, make sure you’re wearing pants and closed-toe shoes. Heels aren’t allowed. If you have long hair, you should probably tie it back.
Your first stop is the cleaning room. Open the door and air will whoosh behind you, removing stray dust and contaminants as the door slams shut. Slide into a white bodysuit, pull on disposable shoe covers, and don a pair of glasses with colored lenses. Wash your hands in the sink before slipping on food-safety gloves. Step into a shallow pool of clear, sterilized liquid, then open the door to what the company calls its indoor growing room, where another air bath eliminates any stray particles that collected in the cleaning room.
The growing room looks like a strange forest, with pink and purple LEDs illuminating 20-foot-tall towers of leafy vegetables that stretch as far as you can see. It smells like a forest, too, but there’s no damp earth or moss. The plants are growing sideways out of the columns, which bloom with Celtic crunch lettuce, red oak kale, sweet summer basil, and 15 other heirloom munchables. The 50,000-square-foot room, a little more than an acre, can produce some 2 million pounds of lettuce a year.
Step closer to the veggie columns, and you’ll spot one of the roughly 7,500 infrared cameras or 35,000 sensors hidden among the leaves. The sensors monitor the room’s temperature, humidity, and level of carbon dioxide, while the cameras record the plants’ growing phases. The data stream to Plenty’s botanists and artificial intelligence experts, who regularly tweak the environment to increase the farm’s productivity and enhance the food’s taste. Step even closer to the produce, and you may see a ladybug or two. They’re there to eat any pests that somehow make it past the cleaning room. “They work for free so we don’t have to eat pesticides,” says Matt Barnard, Plenty’s chief executive officer.
Barnard, 44, grew up on a 160-acre apple and cherry orchard in bucolic Door County, Wis., a place that attracts a steady stream of fruit-picking tourists. Now he and his four-year-old startup aim to radically change how we grow and eat produce. The world’s supply of fruits and vegetables falls 22 percent short of global nutritional needs, according to public-health researchers at Emory University, and that shortfall is expected to worsen. While the field is littered with the remains of companies that tried to narrow the gap over the past few years, Plenty seems the most promising of any so far, for two reasons. First is its technology, which vastly increases its farming efficiency—and, early tasters say, the quality of its food—relative to traditional farms and its venture-backed rivals. Second, but not least, is the $200 million it collected in July from Japanese telecom giant SoftBank Group, the largest agriculture technology investment in history.
Anthony Secviar, chef and member of Plenty’s culinary council.
PHOTOGRAPHER: JUSTIN KANEPS FOR BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK
With the backing of SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, Plenty has the capital and connections to accelerate its endgame: building massive indoor farms on the outskirts of every major city on Earth, some 500 in all. In that world, food could go from farm to table in hours rather than days or weeks. Barnard says he’s been meeting with officials from some 15 governments on four continents, as well as executives from Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Amazon.com Inc., while he plans his expansion. (Bezos Expeditions, the Amazon CEO’s personal venture fund, has also invested.) He intends to open farms abroad next year; this first one, in the Bay Area, is on track to begin making deliveries to San Francisco grocers by the end of 2017. “We’re giving people food that tastes better and is better for them,” Barnard says. He says that a lot.
Plenty acknowledges that its model is only part of the solution to the global nutrition gap, that other novel methods and conventional farming will still be needed. Barnard is careful not to frame his crusade in opposition to anyone, including the industrial farms and complex supply chain he’s trying to circumvent. He’s focused on proving that growing rooms such as the one in South San Francisco can reliably deliver Whole Foods quality at Walmart prices. Even with $200 million in hand, it won’t be easy. “You’re talking about seriously scaling,” says Sonny Ramaswamy, director of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, the investment arm of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. “The question then becomes, are things going to fall apart? Are you going to be able to maintain quality control?”
The idea of growing food indoors in unlikely places such as warehouses and rooftops has been hyped for decades. It presents a compelling solution to a series of intractable problems, including water shortages, the scarcity of arable land, and a farming population that’s graying as young people eschew the agriculture industry in greater numbers. It also promises to reduce the absurd waste built into international grocery routes. The U.S. imports some 35 percent of fruits and vegetables, according to Bain & Co., and even leafy greens, most of which are produced in California or Arizona, travel an average of 2,000 miles before reaching a retailer. In other words, vegetables that are going to be appealing and edible for two weeks or less spend an awful lot of that time in transit.
So far, though, vertical farms haven’t been able to break through. Over the past few years, early leaders in the field, including PodPonics in Atlanta, FarmedHere in Chicago, and Local Garden in Vancouver have shut down. Some had design issues, while others started too early, when hardware costs were much higher. Gotham Greens in Brooklyn, N.Y., and AeroFarms in Newark, N.J., look promising, but they haven’t raised comparable cash hoards or outlined similarly ambitious plans.
While more than one of these companies was felled by a lack of expertise in either farming or finance, Barnard’s unusual path to his Bay Area warehouse makes him especially suited for the project. He chose a different life than the orchard, frustrated with the degree to which his life could be upended by an unexpected freeze or a broken-down tractor-trailer. Eventually he became a telecommunications executive, then a partner at a private equity firm. In 2007, two decades into his white-collar life, he started his own company, one that concentrated on investing in technologies to treat and conserve water. After an investor suggested he consider putting money into vertical farming, Barnard began to research the subject and quickly found himself obsessed with shortages of food and arable land. “The length of the supply chain, the time and distance it takes,” he says, meant “we were throwing away half of the calories we grow.” He spent months chatting with farmers, distributors, grocers, and, eventually, Nate Storey.
Plenty co-founders Matt Barnard, chief executive officer, and Nate Storey, chief science officer.
PHOTOGRAPHER: JUSTIN KANEPS FOR BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK
The grandson of Montana ranchers, 36-year-old Storey spent much of his childhood planting and tending gardens with his six siblings. Their Air Force dad, who eventually retired as a lieutenant colonel, moved them to another base every few years, and the family gardened to save money on groceries. “I was always interested in ranching and family legacy but frustrated on how to do it,” Storey says. “If you’re an 18-year-old kid and you want to farm or ranch, most can’t raise $3 million to buy a farm or a ranch.”
A decade ago, as a student at the University of Wyoming, he learned about the same industry-level inefficiencies Barnard observed. He began experimenting with vertical farming for his doctoral dissertation in agronomy and crop science, and in 2009 patented a growing tower that would pack the plants more densely than other designs. He spent $13,000, then a sizable chunk of his life savings, to buy materials for the towers and started building them in a nearby garage. By the time he met Barnard in 2013, he’d sold a few thousand to hobbyist farmers and the odd commercial grower.
Storey became Barnard’s co-founder and Plenty’s chief science officer, splitting his time between Wyoming and San Francisco. Together they made Storey’s designs bigger, more efficient, and more readily automated. By 2014 they were ready to start building the farm.
Most vertical farms grow plants on horizontal shelves stacked like a tall dresser. Plenty uses tall poles from which the plants jut out horizontally. The poles are lined up about 4 inches from one another, allowing crops to grow so densely they look like a solid wall. Plenty’s setups don’t use any soil. Instead, nutrients and water are fed into the top of the poles, and gravity does much of the rest of the work. Without horizontal shelves, excess heat from the grow lights rises naturally to vents in the ceiling. “Because we work with physics, not against it, we save a lot of money,” Barnard says.
Water, too. Excess drips to the bottom of the plant towers and collects in a recyclable indoor stream, and a dehumidifier system captures the condensation produced from the cooling hardware, along with moisture released into the air by plants as they grow. All that accumulated H₂O is filtered and fed back into the farm. All told, Plenty says, its technology can yield as much as 350 times more produce in a given area as conventional farms, with 1 percent of the water. (The next-highest claim, from AeroFarms, is as much as 130 times the land efficiency of traditional models.)
Based on readings from the tens of thousands of wireless cameras and sensors, and depending on which crop it’s dealing with, Plenty’s system adjusts the LED lights, air composition, humidity, and nutrition. Along with that hardware, the company is using software to predict when plants should get certain resources. If a plant is wilting or dehydrated, for example, the software should be able to alter its lighting or water regimen to help.
Barnard, tall and lanky with a smile that crinkles his entire face, becomes giddy when he recounts the first time Plenty built an entire growing room. “It had gone from pretty sparse to a forest in about a week,” he says. “I had never seen anything like that before.”
The $200 million investment will help Plenty put a farm in every world metro area with more than 1 million residents, about 500 in all
When he and Storey started collaborating, their plan was to sell their equipment to small growers across the country. But to make a dent in the produce gap, they realized they’d need to reproduce their model farm with consistency and speed. “If it takes you two or three years to build a facility, forget about it,” Storey says. “That’s just not a pace that’s going to have any impact.” That meant they’d have to engineer the farms themselves. And that meant two things: They’d need more than their 40 staffers, and they’d need way more money.
It wasn’t easy for Barnard to get his first meeting with Son, in March. One of Plenty’s early investors had to beg the SoftBank CEO, who allotted Barnard 15 minutes. He and the investor, David Chao of DCM Ventures, jammed one of the 20-foot grow towers into Chao’s Mercedes sedan and took off for Son’s mansion in Woodside, Calif., some 30 miles from San Francisco. Son looked bewildered as they unloaded the tower, but the meeting stretched to 45 minutes, and two weeks later they flew to Tokyo for a more official discussion in SoftBank’s boardroom. The $200 million investment, announced in late July, will help Plenty put a farm in every major metro area with more than 1 million residents, according to Barnard. He says each will have a grow room of about 100,000 square feet, twice the size of the Bay Area model, and can be constructed in under 30 days.
Cutting rainbow chard.
PHOTOGRAPHER: JUSTIN KANEPS FOR BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK
Chao says SoftBank wants “to help Plenty expand very quickly, particularly in China, Japan, and the Middle East,” which all struggle with a lack of arable land. Other places on the near-term list include Canada, Denmark, and Ireland. Plenty is also in talks with insurers and institutional investors such as pension funds to bankroll its farm-building with debt. Barnard says the farms would be able to pay off investors in three to five years, vs. 20 to 40 years for traditional farms. Think of it more like a utility, he says.
Plenty, of course, isn’t as sure a bet as Consolidated Edison Inc. or Italy’s Enel SpA. The higher costs of urban real estate, and the electricity needed to run all of the company’s equipment, cut into its efficiency gains. While it’s adapting its technology for foods including strawberries and cucumbers, the complications of tree-borne fruits and rooting crops likewise neutralize the value of its technology. And Plenty has to contend with commercial farms that have spent decades building their relationships with grocers and suppliers and a system that already offers many people extremely low prices for a much wider variety of goods. “What I haven’t seen so far in vertical farm technologies is these entities getting very far beyond greens,” says Michael Hamm, a professor of sustainable agriculture at Michigan State University. “People only eat so many greens.”
Barnard says he’s saving way more on truck fuel and other logistical costs, which account for more than one-third of the retail price of produce, than he’s spending on warehousing or power. He’s also promising that the company’s farms will require long-term labor from skilled, full-time workers with benefits. About 30 people can run the South San Francisco warehouse; future models, which will be about two to five times its size, may require several hundred apiece, he says. While robots can handle some of the harvesting, planting, and logistics, experts will oversee the crop development and grocer relationships on-site.
Entering one of Plenty’s R&D rooms in South San Francisc.
PHOTOGRAPHER: JUSTIN KANEPS FOR BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK
Retailers shouldn’t need much convincing, says Mikey Vu, a partner at Bain who studies the grocery business. “Grocers would love to get another four to five days of shelf life for leafy greens,” he says. “I think it’s an attractive proposition.”
Gourmets like Plenty’s results, too. Anthony Secviar, a former sous-chef at French Laundry, a Michelin-starred restaurant in the Napa town of Yountville, says he wasn’t expecting much when he received a box of Plenty’s produce at his home in Mountain View, Calif. The deep green of the basil and chives hit him first. Each was equally lush, crisp, flavorful, and blemish-free. “I’ve never had anything of this quality,” says Secviar, who while at French Laundry cooked with vegetables grown across the street from the restaurant. He’s now on Plenty’s culinary council and is basing his next restaurant’s menu around the startup’s heirloom vegetables. “It checks every box from a chef’s perspective: quality, appearance, texture, flavor, sustainability, price,” he says.
At the South San Francisco farm—recently certified organic—the greens are fragrant and sweet, the kale is free of store-bought bitterness, and the purple rose lettuce carries a strong kick. There’s enough spice and crunch that the veggies won’t need a ton of dressing. Although Plenty bears little resemblance to a quaint family farm, the tastes bring me back to the tiny vegetable patch my grandparents planted in my childhood backyard. It’s tough to believe these spicy mustard greens and fragrant chives have been re-created in a sterile room, without soil or sun.
How Does the Hamptons Garden Grow? With a Lot of Paid Help
The hardest-worked muscles may be in the hand writing the checks: These lavish, made-to-order gardens can cost as much as $100,000, said Alec Gunn, a Manhattan landscape architect whose firm designs high-end residential, commercial and public-works projects throughout the country.
How Does the Hamptons Garden Grow? With a Lot of Paid Help
The vegetable garden of Alexandra Munroe and her husband, Robert Rosenkranz, in East Hampton, N.Y., is sheltered from the ocean winds by dunes covered with Rosa rugosa.
DANIEL GONZALEZ FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
By STACEY STOWE
SEPTEMBER 5, 2017
EAST HAMPTON, N.Y. — The rigors of vegetable gardening, for most people, are humble and gritty: planting, weeding, dirtying knees, working up a sweat and maybe straining a back muscle or two.
But here on the gilded acres of Long Island’s East End, a different skill set often applies: hiring a landscape architect to design the garden, a gardener and crew to plant and pamper the beds, and sometimes even a chef to figure out what to do with the bushels of fresh produce. All that’s left is to pick the vegetables — though employees frequently do that, too.
The hardest-worked muscles may be in the hand writing the checks: These lavish, made-to-order gardens can cost as much as $100,000, said Alec Gunn, a Manhattan landscape architect whose firm designs high-end residential, commercial and public-works projects throughout the country.
The gardens that the chef Kevin Penner manages for a three-home compound in Bridgehampton, have a formal parterre design with gravel paths separating geometric planting beds, lined with trimmed boxwoods and filled with vegetables, flowers and herbs.
DANIEL GONZALEZ FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
“And it is not the plants that are driving the cost,” Mr. Gunn said. One 2015 project of his in Southampton with a six-figure price tag includes an underground irrigation system, a potting shed, an orchard and a meadow for a cutting garden. Many gardens require expensive hedges or other barriers to protect them from ocean winds and the ubiquitous deer.
The bespoke vegetable garden, these days almost always organic, has become a particular object of desire in the Hamptons. More clients have commissioned elaborate gardens this summer than ever before, say members of the support staffs who toil on them.
“I put in 10 by July,” said Charles R. Dayton, the owner of an East Hampton landscaping company whose ancestors have owned and worked land here since 1640. “I get a kick out of it.”
About 500 farms remain on the fertile East End, even as more mansions crop up each summer on former potato fields. And the kitchen garden has been a tradition on Long Island estates since the 19th century. But today, growing your own produce is a much different enterprise on what has become some of the world’s most expensive real estate.
Two landscape architects said clients this summer had asked that their vegetables be picked, packaged and put on the Hampton Jitney for use in city kitchens. (The cost, $25 to $50 a parcel, is often more than for a passenger.) One gardener, Charlene Babinski, said she had installed a “juicing garden” for her client’s favorite liquid diets.
Then there are the hostess gifts and holiday honey for guests. “One client asked me to make 27 baskets of vegetables to give to her friends,” said Paul Hamilton, a Montauk farmer who plants and maintains seven luxe gardens.
Preserved vegetables from the garden of Carole Olshan and her husband, Morton, in East Hampton.
DANIEL GONZALEZ FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
What’s driving the gardening bug among the affluent, gardeners say, is their clients’ focus on “self-care” — a curious phrase for a pursuit that requires so much help. Mr. Gunn said the impulse includes a “moral component.”
“There’s so much wealth,” he said. “It’s ‘Let’s take something I’ve been fortunate to have and put it back into the environment. I want to do something to reduce what I’m taking.’ ”
Christopher LaGuardia, a landscape architect based in Water Mill who designs raised beds with black locust wood for vegetables and herbs, said his clients were interested in reducing their carbon footprint by producing vegetables that don’t need to be trucked in. “Plus, they are contributing to biodiversity, pollinators,” he said. “We discourage the big lawn.”
Cabbage growing in a garden designed and tended by Paul Hamilton in East Hampton.
DANIEL GONZALEZ FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
But others liken the professionally tended garden to a vintage car or a Hinckley yacht — yet another means of flaunting wealth.
“I think people have just run out of status symbols,” said Steven Gaines, whose 1998 book, “Philistines at the Hedgerow: Passion and Property in the Hamptons,”tracked the peregrinations of its richest and most colorful residents. In the years since the book was published, said Mr. Gaines, who lives in Wainscott, in East Hampton, “it’s all gotten more intense — the competition has taken over in all sorts of peculiar ways.”
“God has given you too much money when you have someone else tend your vegetable garden,” he said.
FOR ALEXANDRA MUNROE, the senior curator of Asian art at the Guggenheim Museum, the roughly 5,000-square-foot vegetable garden — she calls it the Farm — just outside the 1928 neo-Palladian home she shares with her husband, Robert Rosenkranz, is “the center of the meal.”
“We feast here,” Ms. Munroe said, gesturing toward the flower-fringed vegetable garden nestled on a rise overlooking Georgica Jetty, on West End Road in East Hampton. In addition to a pool and tennis court, the property includes a billiards terrace and croquet green; a hedge of Rosa rugosa protects the garden from winds.
Mr. Hamilton plants, weeds, hand-waters and harvests the vegetable garden, while four other gardeners work on the remainder of the five-acre property, which has perennial beds, a meadow and woodland gardens designed by Ms. Munroe, who hosts self-guided tours.
Broccoli in Ms. Munroe’s East Hampton garden.
DANIEL GONZALEZ FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
She is known to get her hands dirty. But when she arrives at the house for the weekend, there is often a basket brimming with the garden’s harvest, arranged by Mr. Hamilton or the estate manager, Robert Deets.
“There is no greater thing than eating produce that’s still warm from the sun that has never seen a refrigerator,” Ms. Munroe said.
Iris Keitel, a retired music industry executive who lives in Manhattan and on Meadow Lane in Westhampton Beach, tore up her Har-Tru tennis court two years ago and hired the organic gardener Suzanne P. Ruggles to plant alliums, Green Zebra tomatoes and a cornucopia of vegetables. Ms. Ruggles does most of the work, but Ms. Keitel picks her own vegetables.
“My friends and I come here to play,” Ms. Keitel said, standing next to a patch of blooming cardoons that resembled a Dr. Seuss creation. Ms. Keitel, who had a bat house and a bee pollinator installed near the former center court, cooks recipes like cucumber gazpacho, rainbow radishes with butter, and zucchini fritters with those friends.
At the home of Carole Olshan and her husband, Morton, trumpet vines form an arch over a bench in kitchen garden of their private chef, John Hamilton.
DANIEL GONZALEZ FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
At the ivy-draped Further Lane home of Carole Olshan and her husband, Morton, Ms. Olshan said friends like to tour the vegetable garden designed and maintained by Mr. Hamilton and set off by a picket fence on meticulously landscaped grounds.
She said Mr. Hamilton had expanded her botanical knowledge. “We can’t call them weeds,” she said with a chuckle. “They’re native plants.”
The family chef, John Hamilton (no relation to Paul), creates meals around the seasonal offerings that Paul Hamilton brings in from the garden. A recent lunch included golden and Chioggia beets, sliced cucumbers and wasabi caviar. “I told Paul to cut the kale — so sick of it,” Ms. Olshan said.
A multicolored carpet of baby salad greens in the kitchen garden of the chef John Hamilton, at the Olshans’ home.
DANIEL GONZALEZ FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Kevin Penner, a personal chef who headed the kitchens at Cittanuova and the 1770 House in East Hampton, manages 36 raised-bed gardens and berry bushes at a contemporary, three-home compound on Meadowlark Lane in Bridgehampton. The variety of heirloom vegetables and exotic herbs — from the buckler leaf sorrel he includes in salmon dishes to the La Ratte potatoes he uses to replicate Joël Robuchon’s potato purée — reflects Mr. Penner’s childhood on an Iowa farm and three decades as a professional cook.
“I have control over the quality of the product with this garden,” he said. “You can get lots of heirloom products, but, if you put it on a rail car the week before you get it, it’s not the same.”
Squash growing in geometric planting beds bordered by trimmed boxwood hedges in this vegetable garden in Bridgehampton.
DANIEL GONZALEZ FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
At his waterfront estate on Oregon Road in Cutchogue, on the North Fork, a hedge fund manager stocks a cold cellar and freezer with fingerling potatoes or sauces of Brandywine tomatoes from a large vegetable garden.
The manager, who asked that his name not be used because his fund forbids employees to speak to the news media, buys his stock from Sang Lee Farms in Peconic. He plants and harvests his crop himself and with William Lee, an owner of Sang Lee; other gardeners weed.
“I came out this morning, grabbed some shishito peppers and an onion for an omelet,” the manager said. “So convenient.”
Blackberries in a caged berry garden in Bridgehampton.
DANIEL GONZALEZ FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
One thing it is not is cost effective. “It’s a bad trade,” he said, chuckling, referring to his vegetable garden and orchard, designed by the landscape architect Stacy Paetzel, who recommended South Bay quartzite for the steps leading to the knoll-top garden and installed galvanized hardware cloth for the cedar fencing. A potting shed will include a soapstone sink and Moroccan tiles, and a raw concrete dining table will sit under a black cherry tree.
AT LEAST ONE VEGETABLE GARDEN of a high-profile Hampton resident is modest. The TV journalist Katie Couric grows a few plants each of tomatoes, peppers, eggplant and potatoes in a 10-by-20-foot area facing the tennis court at her East Hampton home. She plants and harvests the patch herself, with the help of her landscaper.
At her East Hampton home, the TV journalist Katie Couric has a modest vegetable garden where, with some help, she grows tomatoes, eggplant, zucchini, lettuces and herbs for use in her kitchen.
DANIEL GONZALEZ FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Cooking the vegetables for her daughters and sharing the bounty with friends, she said, is “a real treat for me.”
“Sometimes I bring produce to friends because I hate the idea of it not being used,” she said, adding with a laugh, “but I don’t do canning — that’s not my jam.”
If there is a gardener with star quality here, it may well be Paul Hamilton. The seven vegetable gardens he plants and maintains help supplement his other pursuits: playing guitar in a gypsy jazz band, surfing, and farming two acres that supply his clients and a stand in the Springs section of East Hampton, not far from Jackson Pollock’s former home.
The garden consultant Paul Hamilton and his son Walker with a day’s bounty, including squash, beets, carrots, kale, peppers and broccoli, all harvested from Ms. Munroe’s oceanside vegetable garden.
DANIEL GONZALEZ FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Mr. Hamilton, 57, who looks a little like James Taylor, is something of a guru for his wealthy clients, but he has a low-key style. He works barefoot, sometimes in an unbuttoned, well-worn shirt, sometimes with the help of his two sons and stepdaughter. There’s a palpable difference between his bohemian bearing and his bejeweled clients. But he accepts it pragmatically.
“Look, this is the economy out here,” he said. “These projects, these houses, are how most of us make a living.” With the blessing of those who hire him, he delivers surplus produce from their gardens to the East Hampton Senior Center.
Teaching the next generation to appreciate growing one’s own food is important for Ms. Babinski, a professional gardener whose family began operating a farm stand in Water Mill in the early 1970s.
“When a child pulls up a carrot from under the ground for the first time, you can’t beat that smile,” she said.
But Ms. Babinski said she had seen the initial excitement of a vegetable garden fade for some clients.
“They lose interest, though, after they’re planted,” she said. “It’s the same thing with the chickens. They say, ‘I have to have chickens, so I can tell my friends,’ but they end up giving the eggs to the help.”
Farm Aid Festival Will Only Serve Food from Sustainable Family Farms
Farm Aid Festival Will Only Serve Food from Sustainable Family Farms
Farm Aid recently announced that it is partnering with Legends Hospitality to serve family farm food at Farm Aid’s annual concert on Saturday, September 16, 2017, in Burgettstown, Pennsylvania. Legends will adhere to Farm Aid’s HOMEGROWN Concessions® criteria for food and beverages, including that all ingredients are sustainably produced by family farmers using ecological practices and that farmers receive a fair price for their products.
“Our chefs have worked diligently with the Farm Aid team to curate a fantastic spread of food and beverage offerings, developed to reflect an authentic representation of Western Pennsylvania’s food culture,” said Bill Wilson, Vice President of Legends Hospitality.
Legends is a service provider in the sports and entertainment industry. They are working with Farm Aid’s Culinary Director Sonya Dagovitz, who is supervising the sourcing of all ingredients. The partnership is applying expertise in natural and organic food supply chains and using Farm Aid’s network of family farms and farmer organizations.
Farm Aid raises money to build a vibrant, family farm-centered system of agriculture. Since 1985, they have raised more than US$50 million to support farming programs, promote the Good Food Movement, and advocate for changes in our food system. Its board members, and concert headliners, include Willie Nelson, Neil Young, John Mellencamp, and Dave Matthews.
“Farm Aid’s mission is to strengthen family farm agriculture and connect farmers and eaters,” said Farm Aid Associate Director Glenda Yoder.
Tickets for the Farm Aid festival are sold out, but a webcast featuring behind-the-scenes looks and the organization’s work to strengthen family farming agriculture will begin at 3 pm EST on September 16. AXS TV will broadcast the concert live beginning at 7 pm EST.
This Brilliant Floating Farm Actually Heals The World’s Oceans
Founded by commercial fisherman Bren Smith and Emily Stengal, an expert in sustainable food systems, the revolutionary GreenWave vertical farming system cultivates an underwater ecosystemcomprised of seaweed and shellfish.
This Brilliant Floating Farm Actually Heals The World’s Oceans
85% of the world’s fisheries have been pushed beyond their limits – and the future of ocean life looks grim. Fortunately, GreenWavehas developed a revolutionary floating farm that actually regenerates our oceans while providing jobs and a sustainable source of food. The vertical aquaculture farm yields bountiful crops of shellfish and seaweed – species specifically selected to absorb greenhouse gas and filter out harmful chemicals.
Founded by commercial fisherman Bren Smith and Emily Stengal, an expert in sustainable food systems, the revolutionary GreenWave vertical farming system cultivates an underwater ecosystemcomprised of seaweed and shellfish. The farm requires zero input, and it actually restores ocean ecosystems by sequestering carbonand fixing excess nitrogen (which leads to algae blooms and oceanic dead zones).
The open-source farming system enables anyone with a boat and around $20,000 to set up their own restorative ocean farm within a year. The Greenwave system won the Fuller Challenge in 2015 and it was recently honored with the 2017 INDEX: Award, which recognizes innovative designs that improve life.
Hot and Hungry Cities: The Future of Urban Food Wars
When people think about food insecurity, they often associate it with the impact of climate change on rural areas. Make no mistake, drought and conflict, as well as an enduring lack of infrastructure that limits farmers from selling what they produce, continues to devastate sub-Saharan Africa. But these factors also push people to migrate to cities. By 2030, urban areas will triple in size and will have a significant impact on productivity of agriculture in farmlands that were once used to supply food to these megacities.
Hot and Hungry Cities: The Future of Urban Food Wars
SEPTEMBER 6, 2017 | JOHANNA MENDELSON FORMAN
JOHANNA MENDELSON FORMAN
DISTINGUISHED FELLOW, MANAGING ACROSS BOUNDARIES, STIMSON CENTER
This century will be defined by two trends: how we manage climate change and how we manage the rise of megacities. Over the next 20 years, the global urban population will grow from 3.5 to 5 billion people. The strain on resources and the environmental stresses that accompany the growth of cities – especially in brimming urban centers like Dhaka, Bangladesh; Lagos, Nigeria; and Mexico City – will create even more challenges as access to food and clean water become increasingly limited. It is no wonder that in 2015 the National Intelligence Council determined that food security is a national security matter. Countries facing severe shortages of food or affected by climate change are also the most vulnerable to destabilizing conflicts that affect U.S. interests around the globe.
Yet it is only recently that food security practitioners, traditionally focused on rural areas, have begun to turn their attention to megacities. In the world’s massive urban centers, migration from rural areas – often the result of vulnerable populations fleeing conflict or environmental degradation – has created new challenges to ending global poverty and hunger.
Many of these urban migrants will be forced out of the countryside by the ongoing impact of droughts, conflict, and the lack of opportunities for employment in rural areas. But consider this: roughly 60 percent of the world’s cropland lies just on the outskirts of cities. China is expected to lose one-quarter of the global cropland because of the expansion of cities into peri-urban areas that once were the source of local farming and food supplies. The disappearance of productive land near urban centers will impact the availability of staple crops like maize, rice, soy, and wheat – the basis of global food security. This is especially true in countries like Nigeria or China, where projections for crop loss due to urbanization means that the states will have to import more food.
When people think about food insecurity, they often associate it with the impact of climate change on rural areas. Make no mistake, drought and conflict, as well as an enduring lack of infrastructure that limits farmers from selling what they produce, continues to devastate sub-Saharan Africa. But these factors also push people to migrate to cities. By 2030, urban areas will triple in size and will have a significant impact on productivity of agriculture in farmlands that were once used to supply food to these megacities.
More than other challenges we face in this century, food security is complex precisely because to ensure access and availability of food requires that many other factors align, such as good governance and the resilience of infrastructure. It requires more changes in behavior, the development of new farming technologies, and a radically different approach to land use.
Most important to a country’s ability to feed its citizens is the quality of its governance. Weak or failing states are incapable or lack the political will to support the needs of their citizens to obtain food or to gain technical assistance from NGOs and foreign governments to enable them to grow more crops, have better access to technology, or even basic information about weather. Many countries are unable to enforce land rights because adequate legal protections are not in place. Especially in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, conflicts will continue to drain state resources and extend this cycle. Conflicts that show no signs of ending send a troubling signal to private sector investors who are essential partners in many programs geared toward expanding a nation’s capacity to grow and market food – and make it more widely accessible to vulnerable populations.
Mobile phone companies and software producers are among the business interests most able to help conditions in Asia and Africa, which happen to be the two fastest growing markets for these technologies. By 2025, there will be more than 360 million smartphones in Africa. With small farmers producing 80 percent of the food in developing countries, integrated agricultural data apps are playing a powerful role in helping farmers set prices for their goods. M-Farm, a messaging application, is doing this for more than 7,000 users. These apps also help women in urban market settings with information about competitive pricing of crops. Syngenta, and agriculture biotechnology company, created a text-driven app, Kilimo Salama, that is providing up-to-the-minute information to farmers in Kenya. These same applications also play a significant role in protecting crops by alerting growers of adverse weather events.
In the near-term, food security assistance must address the immediate needs of those moving into cities. This challenge will only grow as the world’s population continues to urbanize.
Technological advances in urban farming are now beyond mere experiments. They are becoming disrupters of more traditional approaches to agriculture. Vertical farms both afford crops and provide employment for many people who reside in cities.
Food security requires complex, multi-system approaches that still seem out of reach to most of the countries slated to be megacities by 2030. Plans for addressing these needs must consider how food production and consumption can be transformed to be both carbon neutral, abundant, and available to the world’s growing appetite. Failure to address these challenges in the short run will create conditions that are ripe for more conflicts and more climate migrants. We could be looking at new era of urban food wars if we do not address the issues of how to feed 9 billion people by mid-century.
THE AUTHOR IS JOHANNA MENDELSON FORMAN
Johanna Mendelson Forman is a Distinguished Fellow at the Stimson Center’s Managing Across Boundaries Program in Washington, D.C. and an Adjunct Professor at the School of International Service at American University. She is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Her work has been informed by field experience in Haiti, Guatemala, Colombia, Iraq, and throughout Sub-Saharan Africa as a senior official at the U.S. Agency for International Development, the United Nations Foundation,... Read More
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Safe Water Sources For Hydroponic Food Production
Safe Water Sources For Hydroponic Food Production
Whether using municipal or well water, monitoring and testing are important to ensure successful production of greenhouse hydroponic lettuce and leafy greens.
An increasing number of ornamental plant growers are looking to take advantage of the growing interest in local food sales by expanding their production with seasonal crops of lettuce, leafy greens and herbs. Unlike ornamental plants, growers of edible crops have the added concerns of food safety.
“If growers are using municipal water for growing ornamental crops and then add lettuces and leafy greens, there should be no concerns related to water quality from the standpoint of human pathogens that might be associated with surface water,” said horticulture professor Sarah White at Clemson University. “There are pH issues associated with municipal water because most municipal water is neutral or alkaline to prevent the corrosion of pipes. Ornamental growers would likely need to acidify their water if the pH is above 7.5, especially for leafy greens and lettuces. These growers may already be acidifying their water for the ornamental plants they are producing.
“For new growers who are planning on using municipal water, they need to know what the water pH is. Because the pH is likely to shift during the year, growers need to be cognizant of the shifting pH and how injecting acid needs to be responsive to these changes. Some bedding plant crops may require more or less acid injection than lettuces and leafy greens.”
White said most municipal water sources are drawn from surface water reservoirs, which can cause some seasonal variation in water pH.
“Usually during the winter the water source quality is consistent,” she said. “If growers are producing during the winter and carrying production into spring there might be some changes in the water source that can affect the pH.
Ornamental plant growers using municipal water who add lettuces and leafy greens should not be concerned with water quality from the standpoint of human pathogens.
Photo courtesy of Tyler Baras, Hort Americas
“Regardless of whether growers are producing lettuce and leafy greens in nutrient film technique (NFT) or deep water raft systems, they need to actively monitor pH year round. There are Bluetooth pH meters that can be stuck into a water source that will log pH. It’s easy to do. Growers should monitor and track their pH and know what they have to do to adjust it.”
White said for ornamental growers looking to add lettuces and leafy greens, it isn’t going to matter what type of acid is used to lower the water pH.
“Growers should be able to use the same acid for both ornamental and edible crops,” she said. “Usually they pick an acid based on the cost. If they are going to adjust the water pH they should inject fertilizers after the water pH has been adjusted.”
White said municipal water usually has a pH of 7.5 to 8. Most plants grow best at a pH of 6 to 6.5.
“Nutrient availability changes with different pH,” she said. “That is why the pH needs to be adjusted in order for the nutrients in the water to be available to the plants.”
White recommends if growers have never produced lettuces and leafy greens that they monitor the water pH more often.
“If growers don’t know how sensitive these new crops are to pH, they might try doing some trials with lettuces, leafy greens or herbs,” she said. “This will enable growers to determine the best pH for producing these new crops before they invest in filling a whole greenhouse.”
Adjusting water alkalinity
White said depending on where growing operations are located in the country, municipal water sources can have different alkalinities.
“In some western states and coastal regions of the United States, alkalinity issues are more likely,” she said. “In locations with higher alkalinity, more acid is required to get the water pH to the desired range for crop production. A lot of plants don’t do well with high alkalinity vs. low alkalinity. If the pH is being adjusted by injecting acid this coincidentally manages the alkalinity level as well. It typically requires more acid to accomplish the same pH change in water with higher alkalinity. Water that has high alkalinity will also have a high pH.
“If growers have a water source that is highly alkaline in a certain region of the country, chances are it won’t matter what source growers pull from because there are going to be alkalinity issues. The only thing they could do differently is if they capture rain water, filter it, and then blend it with their other water source.”
A rapid sand filter removes organic matter and other debris that might get into recycled irrigation water. This filter might remove some disease organisms, but it’s not 100 percent.
Photo courtesy of Sarah White, Clemson Univ.
Well water
White said well water is the most common water source used by growers.
“We have done two surveys in the last 10 years and about 65 percent of all growers indicated they use well water,” she said. “The reason is because it is a clean water source and there are not usually any issues with plant diseases. The contaminants that most growers might encounter are salinity and iron. If growers have a lot of salts in their water, how it is managed becomes very critical. Many Southwestern growers deal with this issue.”
White said water with a high salt level can be caused by a mix of elements and it is regionally specific.
“Sodium, chloride, calcium and magnesium are the biggest contributors to high salinity water sources,” she said. “If growers are having high salt issues, it’s probably caused by chlorine or sodium. Growers can manage fertilizers to help balance the high salts.”
White said the other contaminant growers might find in well water is iron depending on the region of the country where they are located.
“There are typically problems with iron and iron-oxidizing bacteria associated with well water use. If there is iron in the water, growers should aerate it before they use it. Aerating the water oxidizes the iron so that it precipitates out. The aeration should be done before the water goes into the fertilizer tank and before growers start adding salts. Once fertilizers begin to be added it might be more difficult to remove the iron.”
White said the pH for well water is usually in a good range for growing plants. She said growers should still test the pH of their water.
“If growers are drawing from a salty water source, chances are they are going to have alkalinity and pH issues. If growers are using salty water sources on ornamental plants and decide to try growing lettuces, leafy greens and herbs, whether they can use that water and how it is being treated will depend on the type of ornamental plants being grown. Some ornamental plants tolerate salts more than others. Growers may not have to do much to bring the salts to an acceptable level for lettuces, leafy greens and herbs.”
White said most growers won’t put in a reverse osmosis system to remove high salts because of the high cost associated with the equipment and having to manage it along with the waste water it produces.
“Growers are more likely to manage high salts by blending water sources, by heavily irrigating the crops or by their choice of which plants to grow,” she said. “Growers may want to use a municipal water source to blend with well water so that salts are at a manageable level for the plants. I highly recommend that growers get water quality analyses done periodically. They should also have an inline monitoring system if they chemically treat the water so that they know the real-time pH and salinity (electric conductivity is a proxy) levels of their water.”
Growers concerned with plant diseases can pair a rapid sand filter with a sanitizer such as a chlorination system like Accu-Tab.
Photo courtesy of Sarah White, Clemson Univ.
Water filtration
White said there really isn’t a need to filter municipal or well water unless growers are recirculating the water.
“A rapid sand filter, which is cheap and fast, will remove organic matter and other debris that might get into the water,” she said. “This filter might remove some disease organisms, but it’s not 100 percent. If growers are concerned with plant diseases, they are going to need to add a sanitizer like chlorine, ultraviolet light or ozone. A rapid sand filter is easy to pair with a chlorination system like Accu-Tab.
“Growers could also use a slow sand filter. This is a biologically-based system, but it just takes longer to filter the water. The slow sand filter removes both particulate and plant disease propagules. Depending on what a grower’s goal is, a slow sand filter would accomplish the same thing as a sanitizer.”
White said a lot of ornamental plant growers who use well water route it into an open containment pond.
“Most growers have a pond that they pump the well water into before irrigating their crops,” she said. “These growers might have an issue with using that water to irrigate edible crops. They would need to use a sanitizer, which would take care of plant pathogens as well as potential human pathogens such as Salmonella and E. coli. Those are the main pathogens growers would have to be worried about.”
For more: Sarah White, Clemson University, Plant and Environmental Sciences Department, (864) 656-7433; swhite4@clemson.edu; http://www.clemson.edu/cafls/faculty_staff/profiles/swhite4; http://cleanwater3.org.
David Kuack is a freelance technical writer in Fort Worth, Texas; dkuack@gmail.com.
Iowa Grocery Grows 10-15 lbs of Produce On Outdoor Vertical Garden – Every Week
Basil, lettuce, and mint flourish on the outdoor Grow Walls at Hy-Vee, installed by FFM in May this year. There’s no soil needed here: the plants are suspended in a growing medium made from recycled plastic bottles and grow in the sunlight.
Iowa Grocery Grows 10-15 lbs of Produce On Outdoor Vertical Garden – Every Week
under Agriculture, Eat & Drink, Features, Gardening and Plants, News
by Lacy Cooke
It doesn’t get much more local than this. In Davenport, Iowa, Hy-Veegrocery store commissioned Friday’s Fresh Market (FFM) to install and maintain two eight-tower Grow Walls, or hydroponic vertical gardens, on the outside of their store – which they then sell inside. Owner Andrew Freitag told Inhabitat they can obtain between 10 and 15 pounds of fresh produce every week, depending on the crop.
Basil, lettuce, and mint flourish on the outdoor Grow Walls at Hy-Vee, installed by FFM in May this year. There’s no soil needed here: the plants are suspended in a growing medium made from recycled plastic bottles and grow in the sunlight. FFM also installed a smaller Grow Wall inside the grocery store in the produce section. They maintain both systems, germinating seeds, transplanting, supplying nutrients and water, harvesting, and packaging the produce for sale in the store.
Related: Berlin grocery with vertical micro-farm reimagines the future of produce departments
FFM manager Chen Freitag told Inhabitat, “We see this disruptive technology becoming more and more popular in our future farming industry. It will help to improve the fresh food desert situation here in the Midwest tremendously and stimulate the local economy.”
The Grow Walls aren’t the only aspect of FFM’s business. They also cultivate indoor farms in shipping containers, using the same towers and irrigation system as a Grow Wall. Freitag said these farms consume around 90 percent less water than traditional methods, and since FFM can control the environment, produce grown inside the shipping container farms is more colorful and flavorful, with a higher nutrient content. She said FFM started pursuing hydroponics as a more efficient, sustainable way to grow fresh food, no matter the weather outside.
“Our goal is to improve the quality of life in our local communities,” Freitag told Inhabitat. “People here deserve to eat better, live better. We believe we are capable of being self-sufficient when it comes to fresh, local food year-round.”
One small Iowa company may not be able to change the entire agriculture industry right away; instead, Freitag said they focus on changing people’s daily lives with better food, and hope the industry evolves from there. “The earth is the resource account we cannot afford to overdraw,” she told Inhabitat. “We need to think about future generations: what we leave them to live with.”
Images via Lacy Cooke for Inhabitat
What is AgriFood Tech?
As with all industries, technology plays a key role in the operation of the agrifood sector, but the pace of innovation has not kept up with other industries. Agriculture is the least digitized of all major industries, according to the McKinsey Global Institute’s Digitization Index.
What is AgriFood Tech?
AUGUST 15, 2017 LOUISA BURWOOD-TAYLOR
Agrifood tech is the small but growing segment of the startup and venture capital universe that’s aiming to improve or disrupt the global food and agriculture industry.
Globally, food and agriculture (agrifood) is a $7.8 trillion industry, responsible for feeding the planet and hiring well over 40% of it. It is also responsible for a large portion of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions; agriculture alone contributes to around one of third of all carbon emissions, without counting the contribution of supply chain processes before it reaches the consumer, such as food processing, transportation, and retail.
As with all industries, technology plays a key role in the operation of the agrifood sector, but the pace of innovation has not kept up with other industries. Agriculture is the least digitized of all major industries, according to the McKinsey Global Institute’s Digitization Index.
The industrial agrifood sector of today is largely inefficient with an increasing number of demands and constraints being placed on it, making the need for agrifood tech and innovation ever more important. These pressures include:
a growing global population set to reach 9 billion in 2050
climate change and global warming
changing consumer demands including increased demand for meat protein in emerging markets and less processed food in the western world
limited natural resources, particularly land and water
food waste: in the US, 40% of food that’s grown is wasted and food loss and waste account for 8% of greenhouse gas emissions. In developing countries, that figure can be even higher, with particular challenges around logistics and refrigeration
consumer health issues and chronic disease; more than one-third of US adults are obese and 17% of children and adolescents aged 2–19 years, with similar statistics in the UK.
Agrifood is a complex industry, which makes change challenging as it includes a wide range of processes, operations, and roles as food travels from the farm to the fork. However, this creates lots of opportunities for entrepreneurs and technologists to disrupt the industry and create new efficiencies with agrifood tech at various points in the chain.
These processes and roles include:
Agriculture and aquaculture: raising crops, livestock, and seafood
Manufacturing agricultural inputs: agrichemicals, farm machinery, seeds, livestock pharmaceuticals, and other supplies
Food processing: the preparation of fresh products, manufacture of prepared food products and ingredients
Non-food processing: extraction of bioenergy and biomaterials from agricultural crops and products
Marketing, wholesale and distribution, logistics, transportation, and warehousing
Retail and foodservice: grocery, farmers’ markets, restaurants, and other retailing
Consumer cooking and food discovery
Regulation: food quality, food security, and food safety
Research and development
Financial services
Separation anxiety
Food and agriculture are often viewed as separate industries meaning that the above roles are often segmented in the minds of entrepreneurs, investors, and business. But at AgFunder, we believe the interconnectedness of the supply chain increasingly demands a more holistic view of our food and agriculture system.
Today’s consumer is no longer content with a black box food system; they are increasingly sensitive about how our food is grown and how it’s processed, with growing awareness and concern about agriculture’s social and environmental footprint. The impact of food on our health is also in focus more than ever before.
At the same time, we have an inflexible and staid supply chain that makes change very difficult to effect; it will take McDonald’s eight years to transition to all cage-free eggs for example. And that supply chain is used to operating in an opaque environment with few checks and balances, which causes the many food scandals and crises that still beset large food companies, such as Chipotle, which had failed to invest in food safety & traceability resulting in incidences of food poisoning at several of its chain restaurants.
This lack of transparency and communication with consumers has created a backlash from consumers as they continue to educate themselves about how their food is grown. There’s no better example of this failure of food companies to communicate with their consumers than the success of the anti-GMO lobby, where in many cases consumers are choosing to ignore regulators’ stance on these foods, instead coming to their own assumptions about the safety of food containing GMO ingredients.
Agrifood tech solution
Agrifood tech can help to mend many of these bridges, make the agrifood industry more sustainable, transparent, agile, and able to respond more quickly to changing consumer demands. Issues such as food waste, which occurs across the food chain, can be better solved with a more holistic view of the industry, for example. Viewing agrifood as a single industry that spans the value chain from farm to fork can also help engage consumers early with technologies that go into food production to avoid backlash, and raise awareness of issues on the farm such as soil health and environmental impact.
On the consumer side, companies as diverse as Blue Apron, Heinz, and Costco, are now working directly with growers to address various challenges and opportunities in their own supply chain. On the agriculture side, farming cooperatives like Land O’ Lakes are building powerful food brands, while companies like Soufflet in France have built a portfolio that spans ag retail, grain trading, food processing, consumer packaged goods (CPG) and catering. Similarly, Rabobank started as a farmer’s cooperative but has become the world’s largest food and agriculture focused bank. We’re also seeing the convergence of agriculture and food in venture capital where VC funds like Avrio Capital and S2G Ventures invest seamlessly across the agrifood value chain.
There are many ways to categorize agrifood tech startups — again coming back to the complexity of the agrifood industry, it’s not easy — but we’ve thought hard about it and these are the categories we will be using in our new agrifood investing report due next month.
Ag Biotechnology
This agrifood tech category includes most agricultural inputs including seed, fertilizer, pesticides, and animal pharmaceuticals. The large agribusinesses have been innovating in biotech for many decades to increase crop yields with synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and genetically-modified seeds, and have created multibillion dollar businesses out of it. But agrifood tech startup companies are now adopting, embracing, and developing new capabilities in plant breeding, gene editing, biologicals, microbiome research and more to create new, more sustainable input products to disrupt the status quo in ag biotech. On the livestock side, consumer backlash against antibiotic use is pushing startups to create alternatives.
Bioenergy & Biomaterials
Agricultural products have been used for non-food applications for decades, particularly bioethanol, and technologies are being developed around feedstocks, extraction, processing, and byproduct use, although the low price of oil in the US has tempered much of this innovation in recent years. This category also encompasses the use of cannabis-related inputs for pharmaceutical and non-food products.
eGrocery
As consumers lives get busier, they have less time for grocery shopping while at the same time they want to know where their food comes from, and have access to new, innovative products from across the globe. This category includes on-demand e-grocers selling third party brand goods like Instacart as well as online farmers markets like FreshDirect. It also includes specialty and niche food & beverage providers that only sell their products online, such as alcohol, spice, or tea delivery services.
Farm Management Software, Sensing & IoT
This category arguably sparked the interest of the first agrifood technology investors after Monsanto acquired The Climate Corporation, a weather data and analytics software company, for nearly $1 billion in 2013. It’s the capture and analysis of big data using technologies that have been rolled out across other industries. It encompasses sensors and satellite imagery, online enterprise resource planning tools, decision support software, data analytics algorithms, machine learning, and Internet-of-Things (IoT) connectivity technology used across agricultural production systems.
Farm Robotics, Mechanization, & Equipment
Mechanization defined the British agricultural revolution in the 1700s and is now on the verge of another revolution with the advent of robotics & automation. While this category encompasses all on-farm machinery innovation, most startups here are working on automating many tasks farmers conduct with their existing machinery using artificial intelligence and automation. This will become crucial as labor shortages persist and the need for precision increases. This category includes startups across agricultural sectors and farming systems.
Home & Cooking Tech
As consumers spend more of their time thinking about and researching the food they are going to eat, many want to maintain more control by cooking at home more frequently. To help them do that and make it easier, agrifood tech startups are cropping up with new technologies to disrupt, and hopefully improve, consumers’ relationships with home cooking. This category includes smart kitchen appliances, automated baking technologies, nutrition technologies, and food testing devices.
Innovative Food
Consumer demands are changing at a faster pace than ever as our understanding of nutrition evolves. Protein-rich foods are in particular demand, but with the meat industry responsible for 18% of greenhouse gas emissions, innovators are finding alternative ways to give consumers what they want, including plant-based burgers and cricket bars. This product-focused category also includes novel ingredients and supplements such as algae.
In-Store Retail & Restaurant Tech
Technologies are transforming how food service businesses operate in-store with quality control, inventory management, HR, and food waste just some of the challenges they face. New technology is also impacting how these businesses interact with their consumers in the store. Technologies in this category range from automated shelf-stacking robots and 3D food printers to point-of-sale systems and food waste monitoring IoT systems.
Novel Farming Systems
As the world scrutinizes the agrifood industry more than ever, particularly with regards to its carbon footprint, innovators are finding new ways to produce food and ingredients with the hope of doing so more sustainably, using fewer natural resources. This category includes indoor farms — growing produce in high-tech greenhouses and automated vertical farms; insect farms — producing protein alternatives to replace animal and aquaculture feed, and for human food; and the production of new living ingredients such as algae and microbes for use in food as well as other industries and applications.
Online Restaurants & Meal Kits
Consumers want more control over what they eat, but also want to be adventurous with their meal choices at home. Online restaurants, where the startup prepares, cooks and delivers meals to customers, are opening access to new types of foods for consumers to enjoy, often with a particular angle or theme like a special diet or vegan menu. In the same category, we include meal kit companies that prepare pre-portioned ingredients for consumers to cook at home.
Restaurant Marketplaces
As part of the same trend as e-grocery and online restaurants, take-out is being revolutionized with online restaurant marketplaces. These are online tech platforms delivering food from a wide range of vendors in the shortest amount of time possible. In Europe, many consumers are already using DeliveryHero, while in the US Seamless is one of the most popular in this category. There is also a range of services across Asia.
Supply Chain Technologies
Increasing consumer demand for transparency, traceability and clean, safe food drives much of the innovation taking place along the supply chain — after food leaves the farm and before it reaches the consumer. Agrifood tech startups in this category span several technology-types including food testing devices, logistics tracking software, food freshness sensors, shelf life enhancement technology, and food processing tech.
Amy Keister: Food Is Precious
Amy Keister, Vice President of Consumer Engagement for Compass Group North America, will be speaking at the inaugural New York City Food Tank Summit, “Focusing on Food Loss and Food Waste,” which will be held in partnership with Rethink Food Waste Through Economics and Data (ReFED) and with support from The Rockefeller Foundation and The Fink Family Foundation on September 13, 2017.
Amy Keister: Food Is Precious
Amy Keister, Vice President of Consumer Engagement for Compass Group North America, will be speaking at the inaugural New York City Food Tank Summit, “Focusing on Food Loss and Food Waste,” which will be held in partnership with Rethink Food Waste Through Economics and Data (ReFED) and with support from The Rockefeller Foundation and The Fink Family Foundation on September 13, 2017.
Keister holds a Bachelor’s degree in Marketing from James Madison University and a Master of Business Administration degree from the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. She joined Compass Group in 2004 and has since managed a number of enterprise-wide initiatives in the areas of technology, finance, purchasing, and distribution.
Amy Keister, Vice President of Consumer Engagement for Compass Group North America, will be speaking at Food Tank’s NYC Summit on September 13, 2017.
As VP of Consumer Engagement, Keister is responsible for driving sales as well as spearheading Compass Group North America’s sustainability efforts. Her mission is to create a great customer experience while ensuring a mindful business strategy that takes customers, clients, and the environment into consideration and has implemented best practices for beverages, queuing, and analytics. Keister personally declared April 28 as her Stop Food Waste Day holiday, helping Compass’s sustainability program reach their goals around sustainable purchasing, transparency, and food waste reduction. Keister also serves as a board member of Loaves and Fishes, a nonprofit that seeks to match a week’s worth of healthy groceries with underprivileged families.
Food Tank spoke with Keister about the issues which have inspired her to shift her behaviors and attitudes towards food.
Food Tank (FT): What originally inspired you to get involved in your work?
Amy Keister (AK): My grandparents never wasted anything. Food was precious to them, not something that was taken for granted or thrown away.
FT: What makes you continue to want to be involved in this kind of work?
AK: First and foremost my two children. I want to help change our behaviors and attitudes toward food so that they have a better relationship with both food and waste. I’m also extremely inspired by the results we have achieved to date on reducing food waste and am humbled by the task still at hand.
FT: Who inspired you as a kid?
AK: My parents really inspired me while growing up in a rural town in Connecticut. It wasn’t a farm, just an acre or so, but my parents acted as if it was. We grew all of our veggies, had fruit trees, and we canned everything that we didn’t use right away. We had chickens, pigs, and a pet cow named hamburger…Nothing went to waste. Ever.
FT: What do you see as the biggest opportunity to fix the food system?
AK: Awareness that 40 percent of food in America is wasted, that sell-by dates are misleading, communicating how easy it is for everyone make a little change, and how all of these little changes add up to tremendous change.
FT: Can you share a story about a food hero who inspired you?
AK: Tom Colicchio. Not only is Tom a fantastic chef, he is a true humanitarian. Chef Tom founded Food Policy Action in 2012 to hold legislators accountable on votes that have an effect on food and farming. He has been an outspoken voice on issues like improving school meals, the use of antibiotics in food sources, and better anti-hunger policies in America. I was honored to have Tom Colicchio partner with us on Stop Food Waste Day to bring about the change that is needed in our world to combat food waste.
FT: What’s the most pressing issue in food and agriculture that you’d like to see solved?
AK: The overwhelming amount of food from going to farm to landfill. I want to see more food going from farm to table.
FT: What is one small change every person can make in their daily lives to make a big difference?
AK: Shop with a shopping list.
The NYC Food Tank Summit is now sold out. Register HERE to watch the livestream on Facebook. A few tickets remain for the Summit Dinner at Blue Hill Restaurant with a special menu from Chef Dan Barber. Apply to attend HERE. If you live in New York City, join us on September 14 for our FREE outdoor dance workout led by Broadway performers called Garjana featuring many great speakers raising awareness about food waste issues. Register HERE.
From Diane’s Desk: The New Food Movement
From Diane’s Desk: The New Food Movement
by Diane Hatz ~ July 17, 2017
(This is the first of several articles about the food movement – where it’s been, where it’s at, and where it’s going. Join the Change Food community so you don’t miss any of this exciting series.)
Over the past five years, huge changes have happened with food and the food system. What was once seen as an issue between the activist/advocate/granola-crunching hippie vs. the corporate/suited/industrial food system has radically changed. Lines are blurring, and this has the potential for an even bigger food revolution than was first imagined, but caution and a dose of skepticism is still prudent.
For more than 40 years, food advocates and activists have been leading a trend toward healthier, more wholesome food. In the 1970s, they were on the fringe; some were pot-smoking hippies on commune farms or renegade restaurant owners who grew ingredients for their dishes in their own vegetable garden. These people were outliers, and as the food industry moved toward more processed and more industrially-produced food, these idealistic activists were discounted and thought to be anything from irrelevant to crackpots.
Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser was published in 2001.
But through the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, an underground food revolution had quietly begun. A smattering of concerned citizens started raising their voices and undertook more concerted efforts to educate consumers about problems with food. Renegade groups like a team of farmers around the U.S. started helping rural towns (when invited by the residents) to hold factory farms that were breaking the law accountable and worked to keep out new industrial animal factories.
The food movement got its first big push in 2001 with the release of Eric Schlosser’s bestseller Fast Food Nation. The book explored the rise and influence of the fast food industry and our industrial food supply. The publication was followed in 2003 by the launch of The Meatrix, an online animation that brought the issue of industrial food — factory-farmed animals in this case — to the general consumer. The short film was released when email was mainstream; the movie was shared inbox to inbox, email by email, to tens of millions of individuals. (The Meatrix was released before YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and other social media existed.)
The tipping point for the food revolution was in 2006 with the publication of Michael Pollan’s book Omnivore’s Dilemma. Millions more individuals were brought to the food movement by Pollan’s excellent nonfiction book that asked the seemingly straightforward question: what should we have for dinner? It explored the industrialization of the U.S. food system and the impact of subsidized corn on the country.
Sealing the influence of the growing food movement was Robert Kenner’s 2009 movie Food, Inc. from Participant Media. The film exposed the control of the corporate food industry and how these companies put profit before farmers, safety, health, nutrition, water safety and the environment.
The Meatrix, the online flash animation about factory farming, was released in 2003.
The impact of these two books and two films, along with the hard work of a growing number of nonprofits and food advocates, contributed to what has become the largest shift in food since the industrialization of our food supply. And the exciting thing is that we’re still in the middle of this shift today.
Throughout the 2000s, consumers were beginning to understand the problems with food and began asking for – and buying – healthier, more wholesome, products. Farmers markets exploded. According the the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the number of U.S. farmers markets increased 123 percent — from 3,706 in 2004 to 8,268 in 2014. Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) became more popular. Farm to Table restaurants began to open around the country.
The biggest shift in food is still happening – and no one is sure exactly where it will lead us. But one thing is for certain – Millennials (born approximately 1982-2004) are having a huge impact on shaping our new food system. They grew up being exposed to the truth about the food supply and were educated by the work of the advocates before them, so they have local, healthy, delicious food in their veins. It’s not something they need to learn – it’s simply what they want. And as they are becoming a more powerful force in the marketplace, that desire is wreaking havoc with Big Food.
An often overlooked sector of this new food movement are the entrepreneurs — generally in their 20s and 30s, with some creeping into their 40s — who have learned the lessons taught by the food advocates before them. These forward thinkers are launching companies that not only include healthy, whole ingredients, they are also launching companies that believe in social good beyond just the food label. Mix in the collapse of the dot-com bubble around 2000-2001, prompting the need for investors and venture capitalists to find “the next big thing” for their money, and you have a real food revolution. For as idealistic as we would all like to be, the food revolution really started when money became the leading force for change, when business people began to see the potential profit and long-lasting change happening in the marketplace. And this change is not just for increased profit; there is a much bigger shift happening (which we will explore in a future article).
Since around 2012, venture capitalists started investing heavily in food technology and start up food companies. According to the AgTech Investing Report, over $4.6 billion was invested in food and agriculture tech startups in 2015; that’s nearly double the amount invested in 2014.
In addition, major food brands have acknowledged the change in the marketplace.Their sales and profits have started to decrease because of the demand for healthier food and the fact that new companies are launching to fill that demand. They are now scrambling — as fast as a large corporation can — to reinvent themselves and their products. They have finally realized the downward trend in profits is not changing, and they know they are losing marketshare to much, much smaller, nimbler companies that are satisfying consumer desires.
Michael Pollan’s 2006 book Omnivore’s Dilemma was the tipping point for the food movement.
How are these larger food corporations handling this shift? Currently, they are starting their own venture funds and food accelerators to find new food startups, and they are buying up organic and smaller successful brands. They are also trying to reformulate their products to include healthier ingredients while keeping the same taste.
These large companies are also beginning to realize that their savvy marketing campaigns and misleading ads aren’t as convincing as they used to seem. More and more consumers are starting to understand that a 25 percent reduction in sugar could still be too much sugar in a product. High fructose corn syrup has essentially disappeared from the shelves. More and more consumers are looking for the Verified GMO Free label on their food. Companies are beginning to understand that the new food movement requires truth and transparency, not glossy, slick marketing campaigns that are more about money than the truth.
Misleading jargon and creative talking points no longer work; today, the truth does.
Where is this all taking us? No one knows for sure. Venture capitalists will tell you one thing; food startups will tell you another; big food companies will also have an opinion. And coming from the nonprofit consumer awareness side, we at Change Food have our own views about where things are and where things might be going. We will explore this in future articles in this series.
History is being made now, so there’s no better time to join the food revolution and have your voice heard!
Diane Hatz is the Founder & Executive Director of Change Food. She strives to create a healthy food system for all by developing programs, events and resources for individuals and groups changing food from the ground up. Become a Patron of food on Patreon and help Change Food help others.
Change Food is a grassroots movement creating a healthy, equitable food system. To learn more, visit ChangeFood.org. Follow and support us on Patreon.