Black Carrots Could Reduce Risk of Neurological Diseases

Including Alzheimer's Disease

New research suggests that eating black carrots on a regular basis could have positive benefits in reducing the risk of neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s.

Some components of black carrots -including its anti-inflammatory properties and anthocyanin- can play an important role in treating these conditions. The research is not yet conclusive but it's a big step towards understanding Alzheimer's as well as its potential natural treatments.

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Alzheimer's is one of the leading causes of death among seniors around the world. Despite billions of dollars dedicated to research, there hasn't been any definitive step forward yet in understanding what causes the ailment and how to treat it. Alzheimer's is a neurological disease that causes progressive loss of memory and cognitive abilities.

It's not easily detectable since most people suffering from it don't even know they have the symptoms. In most cases, it can take years before symptoms become clear and by then it's often too late. But recent studies suggest that eating black carrots could help reduce the risk and even the severity of Alzheimer.

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Source: digitaljournal.com

Publication date : 2/15/2019 

Here's Why Ultra-Processed Foods Are So Bad For Your Health

These packaged foods can increase overall risk of death.

By Nicole Wetsman February 15, 2019

Ultra-processed foods have higher amounts of ingredients that are known to be bad for your health.

Increasing the amount of ultra-processed foods that you eat also shortens your life, according to a new study. The research, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, tracked nearly 45,000 French men and women over eight years. It found that for every 10 percent increase in the amount of ultra-processed foods the participates ate, risk of death went up 1 percent.

Ultra-processed foods fall at the far end of the NOVA food classification system, which breaks what you eat down into four categories: unprocessed foods (edible parts of plants and animals); processed ingredients (like oils, flour, or sugar); processed foods (which involve cooking unprocessed foods with processed ingredients to make breads or canned vegetables); and ultra-processed foods (which don’t have any intact, unprocessed parts).

These ultra-processed foods are mostly made from substances derived from other foods, preservatives, and additives—designed to create convenient and long-lasting products. Both processed and ultra-processed foods can add excess sugars, oils, and fats to a diet, notes Claire Berryman, an assistant professor in the department of nutrition, food, and exercise sciences at Florida State University. Ultra-processed foods, though, take the amount to the next level—and also contain additives and other highly manufactured ingredients.

The JAMA Internal Medicine can’t say that these foods caused an earlier death, just that they’re associated with an early death. It’s not possible, therefore, to say what exactly in these foods contributes to the problems. However, the high amounts of bad-for-you ingredients are likely to play a role, Berryman says. “Anytime you’re getting an excess of sugar, fat, or salt, there can be problems.” Here’s what’s hiding in the packaging:

Lots of sugar

Ultra-processed foods have, on average, eight times more added sugars than processed foods. So, as people eat more ultra-processed foods, naturally their added sugar intake goes up along with it—which can have negative effects on health. Reports by the World Health Organization, the American Heart Association, and other groups show that eating more added sugars increases the risk for diabetes, hypertension, cancer, and stroke. Consuming added sugar also increases the risk of dying from cardiovascular disease.

Lots of salt

These foods also have higher amounts of sodium—in the JAMA internal medicine study, people who ate more processed foods also consumed more sodium. “We know that when you over consume salt you can contribute to increases in blood pressure [and] hypertension,” Berryman says. In addition, high salt intake is associated with a higher risk of dying from cardiovascular disease.

Fats and saturated fats

The more ultra-processed foods someone eats, the more likely they are to eat a diet that’s higher in saturated fats. “They’re often added to foods for flavor,” says Cristina Swartz, a clinical oncology dietitian at Northwestern Medicine Delnor Hospital. “Saturated fat is well-known risk factor for increasing LDL cholesterol, which can put you at risk for cardiovascular disease. It’s something that should be limited.”

Crowding out nutrients

Eating a diet high in ultra-processed foods is also associated with eating a diet lower in fiber, which decreases risk of death. The new study found that for every 10 percent increase in the amount of ultra-processed food someone ate, the amount of fiber they consumed dropped off significantly. “Excessive intake of these foods can displace the intake of nutrients like vitamins, minerals, and fiber from whole foods,” Swartz says.

Additives and preservatives

Trans fats, which used to be common in ultra-processed foods, were banned by the Food and Drug Administration because of their clear link to high cholesterol and heart disease. But trans fats are just one of the additives manufacturers add to foods. Some research has raised questions about the health effects of others, like high fructose corn syrup, says Berryman, but there isn’t conclusive evidence available to say for sure what they are.

“Sometimes these additives are derived from natural products, but we don’t know the chemical and physical affects the food has on our bodies,” she says. “There’s lots of research in our future, and some of additives might have a similar fate to trans fats.”

However, just because ultra-processed foods can increase overall risk of death doesn’t mean eating them is going to immediately kill someone—it’s still fine to have some ice cream. Living a healthy life means making sure most of your diet comes from minimally processed foods, Berryman says, but eating something high in sugar isn’t going to send you straight to the grave. “Everything in moderation,” Berryman says. “You don’t want to deprive yourself.”

Photo by: Deposit Photos

The Future of Farming Is Up In The Air

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David Thorpe | 14 February 2019

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Food that’s grown in the air instead of soil could soon appear on plates in Britain and other parts of the world.

A new investment deal worth $1.8 million to build indoor farms uses technologies developed by a company called LettUs Grow, a Bristol, UK-based startup that designs irrigation and control technology for vertical farms.

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The startup will partner with ECH Engineering, which manufactures controlled environment technology, traditionally in refrigeration, and urban agriculture experts from Grow Bristol. Bristol has made a name for itself as Britain’s greenest city.

The company is one of a number of startups in the fast-expanding area of indoor growing who are supplying farm management software, crop analysis and testing services, through to full indoor farm design and build.

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A glimpse of the pilot aeroponics project in Bristol showing a variety of produce being tested using the system.

Following earlier seed funding, if you’ll pardon the expression, it’s now scaling up operations to produce its aeroponic system, which suspends plants in the air and feeds the roots via a nutrient-dense mist. This technique results in faster growth rates than conventional hydroponics.

“The nutrients we use are made with mineral salts, not chemicals,” co-founder and managing director of LettUs Grow Charlie Guy told The Fifth Estate.

“They’re formulated for the vegetative stage of growth in hydroponics and aeroponic systems and precisely balanced and manufactured for great results.

“In our system we reclaim and recycle most of our water and any nutrients not absorbed by the plants.  Due to this recapture and reuse, we use about 95 per cent less water than traditional field-based agriculture and 30 per cent less than typical hydroponics with our unique aeroponic technology.”

Since the plants are indoors, pest control is possible without pesticides and fungicides, making the production process organic. Previous trials have seen crop yield increases of over 70 per cent compared to conventional techniques for leafy greens, salads and herbs.

Yields and crop cycle times vary from crop to crop. The shortest is just five days for certain microgreens, to just over 30 days for head lettuce from seed.

A pilot project involving Grow Bristol involved an indoor hydroponic vertical farm that produced 100 kilograms of nutrient dense leafy greens every month without the use of pesticides and with minimal environmental impact. It tested over 50 crop varieties and sold the products to over 60 customers.

Having tested over 40 different varieties LettUs Grow’s core crops are: coriander (micro), fennel (micro), leek (micro), kale, pea shoots, sunflower shoots, radish, red cabbage, lettuce (many varieties), coriander, watercress, basil, and pak choi. “They’re our main crops, but we’re also growing rooting and fruit crops too (strawberries, spring onions and carrots, for example),” Guy says.

“We are expanding this facility in 2019 by over 10 times, to allow the testing of more and more crops and to expand our work into strawberries and root crops,” he adds.

Government funding

The $718,810 government funding is derived from the UK’s innovation agency, Innovate UK, and will be matched by $157,918 from other sources and research grants.

The grants came hot on the heels of the disruptive startup’s most recent investment round, where they raised $835,179 from ClearlySo, Europe’s leading impact investment bank, which has an extensive network of high-net-worth individual and institutional investors.

“Our investors see the value, both in terms of financial and environmental/social returns from tackling this systemic global problem. That’s why they got involved in LettUs Grow. LettUs Grow provides the technological innovation piece to the vertical smart farming movement that is currently trending rapidly in the urban context,” investment manager at ClearlySo Matias Wibowo says.

The company has ambitions to supply a rapidly growing global market for efficient and sustainable farming technology.

By 2050, humanity has to increase food production by 70 per cent to feed over 9 billion people without breaking the planet’s life-support systems, which would happen if present agricultural and food industry logistics trends continue. Aeroponics can help to address the colossal degree of waste that presently exists throughout the supply chain.

“The global agri-tech industry is very exciting right now, all stemming from the necessity to improve the economic and environmental sustainability of food production. We are fielding enquiries from all around the world from food producers and farmers who want to experience the benefits of our technology across a growing range of crops,” Charlie Guy says.

The environmental footprint

The Fifth Estate asked Charlie Guy about the environmental footprint of the technology and the energy used in a given system, compared to a soil based or hydroponic system.

He says that it depends on a number of factors, including choice of crop, choice of technology, retail route, geography, climate and season. “One of the key benefits of indoor growing, over traditional methods, is the massively reduced supply chain length. This cuts the carbon footprint of produce substantially.”

LettUs Grow are working on integrating indoor and vertical growing with renewable energy technologies to further reduce energy costs and the carbon footprint.

“Indoor, vertical growing generally acts as a substitute for imported produce,” Guy says, quoting studies claiming that CO2 reductions of up to 90 per cent are achievable by growing produce at its point of consumption using hydroponics, compared to the carbon cost of importing the same product from Europe.

He also refers to independent, academic studies into the startup’s technology that have shown that its patent-pending aeroponic technology can reduce the carbon cost of production against traditional hydroponic vertical farms by between 60 and 90 per cent.

But can the operation scale up? “Scale of operation is one of these determining factors and the vertical growing industry is still some way off the scale currently reached in glasshouse growing,” Guy says.

“The productivity increases demonstrated by LettUs Grow’s aeroponic technology represent another step-change in economic viability of farms. This enables smaller farms to deliver a return on investment up to 50 per cent faster than traditional hydroponic indoor farms.

“Energy and labour are two of the greatest operational costs of running an indoor farm and LettUs Grow are working on solutions to bring these two costs down substantially. LED lighting continues to fall in price and increase in efficiency and advanced automation processes are reducing labour costs further still.”

However, Guy says his system is “lighting agnostic”. “Anyone can use our system with any lighting. In fact, you can use our aeroponic technology without any lights, such as in glasshouses.”

To reduce costs, the company is investigating automation, not dissimilar to that found in giant Amazon warehouses. “We have designed our own automated farm management system called Ostara. It is breaking down barriers to entry for indoor farming and aeroponics. Aeroponic technology has historically been seen as complex and difficult to implement. Ostara makes aeroponics easy.”

The company plans to license its technology in the future. Watch out for indoor farms springing up near you in the not too distant future.

David Thorpe is the author of the book The One Planet Life and the forthcoming book One Planet Cities.

Tags: energy, farming, food, technology

This Urban Pop-Up Farm is Powered by Coffee Grounds

By Audrey Bourget 
17 JAN 2019 - 1:20 PM  UPDATED 17 JAN 2019 - 1:56 PM

The pop-up farm on Cirrus Fine Coffee’s parking lot is a little green oasis in the industrial area of Port Melbourne.

“We have heritage varieties of tomatoes, corn, zucchini, pumpkin, spring onion, beetroot, rainbow chard, spinach, silverbeet, flowers to attract beneficial insects and also a range of herbs like chives, basil, oregano and coriander,” says Brendan Condon. And all of this only takes up two parking spaces.

Condon is the director of sister companies Cirrus Fine Coffee, Biofilta and Australian Ecosystems, which have collaborated to develop super-efficient compact pop-up farms. “We often think that we have overcrowded cities, but if you look at them from the lens of urban farming, we have huge amounts of space. We can flip cities into becoming super-efficient food growers,” he says.

These beans deliver more than a caffeine hit.

From landfill to compost

Each year, caffeine-loving Aussies produce around 75 000 tonnes of coffee waste, most of it ending up in landfill where it contributes to the production of methane, a greenhouse gas. But coffee grounds don’t have to end up there; they can be composted and used to produce food.

Cirrus Fine Coffee’s own pop-up garden uses a mix of composted coffee grounds (rich in minerals and nitrogen), husks from the roastery (a good source of carbon), food scraps and a small amount of manure, to help produce around 300 kilos of food per year. With the World Health Organisation recommending adults consume a minimum of 146 kilos of fresh fruits and veggies per year, it means that one of these pop-up farms could provide enough for two people for a whole year.

The Biofilta wicking (self-watering) garden beds are easy to install and low maintenance. The design holds enough liquid to water the garden for a week in summer and a month in winter.

“We want people to take advantage of the abundant resources for urban farming and to engage with it, so we improve nutrition and health, and divert waste from landfill,” says Condon.

Cirrus Fine Coffee is committed to sustainability in more ways than one. Its coffee beans are ethically sourced, the brand's packaging is biodegradable and its offices run on clean energy.

It's also partnered with Reground, an organisation that goes to cafes to pick up coffee grounds and transport them to community gardens and pop-up farms.

“We all need to work together,” says Ninna K. Larsen, founder of Reground. “We work at changing the system rather than just collecting coffee. Coffee is just a great conversation starter. It’s about getting people talking about what organic waste can do, instead of going to landfill. We can grow food with it.”

Condon would like to see cafes and people around Australia embrace urban farming. “If you have a cafe where you recycle coffee grounds to grow food, people will want to go there and support that business,” he says. “Hopefully, in a few years, it will be common practice.”

Greenhouse In An Auchan Hypermarket

In Italy, Auchan is testing the installation of a greenhouse in a hypermarket. Fresh herbs and salads grow directly on the shelves and customers do their own “harvesting”.

Agricooltur, a young company from the Turin region, is the originator of this scheme. The neighboring Auchan hypermarket placed the installation in its market area at the end of November; it is a spectacular complex of about thirty meters square. The plants are grown by aeroponics: the roots are hanging loose and are sprinkled with a nutrient solution.

Also in late November, Casino installed a showcase in which an assortment of fresh herbs were grown in its supermarket in La-Varenne-Saint-Hilaire, France.

Source: internationalsupermarketnews.com

Publication date : 1/17/2019 

Meet The People Running A Farm In The Middle Of Andheri – Herbivore Farms

By Mallika Dabke January 15, 2019  

The minds behind Herbivore Farms

There’s no doubt that the awareness of eating clean food is growing by the day, but for most of us, it’s an ongoing struggle to make that lifestyle shift. Most of us are grossly unaware about where our produce comes from, and the authenticity of organic products is often left as an unanswered question at the back of our minds. Bringing clarity to our kitchens, is Herbivore Farms, which is an actual farm in the middle of Andheri, set up by duo Sakina Rajkotwala and Joshua Lewis. The young guns from Mumbai set themselves up on a mission to directly provide the citizens with vegetables through their hyperlocal, hydroponic farm, a first for the city. I spoke to Sakina and Joshua to know more about them and their work, read on to see what we spoke about!

Give us a quick introduction to Herbivore Farms.

Herbivore Farms is Mumbai’s first hyper local farm located in Andheri East. We grow the super healthy varieties of leafy green veggies like Swiss Chard, Kale, Rocket and Lettuce using hydroponic methods of cultivation. 

Our produce is delivered to customer’s homes a few hours post-harvest, so it’s always at its peak of freshness, nutrition and flavour. Our indoor farm enables to grow in a clean, sterile environment and we use absolutely 0 pesticides so it’s 100% safe. We also use up to 80% less water to grow our produce using a recirculating irrigation system. 

Talk us through your story – what inspired you, how you started, and the journey so far. 

The journey that led us to start this project began in 2017 when we both quit our jobs – Sakina worked at an NGO called Magic Bus and Joshua was working with an ad company called Directi. While our jobs seemed to be working out well for us, we were missing a sense of purpose and were on a mission to find it. So, we decided to pack our bags and go live in Auroville for three months and work on a farm. We wanted to get our hands dirty and also reconnect with ourselves and nature. 

We worked as farm labor for three months at Solitude Farm. The farm also had a cafe where lunch was served and made from ingredients that were harvested fresh off the farm the same morning. We ate meals post work there every day and food had never tasted better. It was always basic and simple food but it changed everything for us in terms of our energy levels, our mood and in general, our overall health. We felt happy and well. 

This was the starting point of our inspiration. We wanted to create a way for people to enjoy fresh, healthy local produce. We also wanted people to revive their relationship with their food – understand where it comes from, who grows it, how it’s grown, why it’s good for you. We wanted people to be able to feel as good as we did. And that’s how Herbivore Farms was born. 

Through extensive research we discovered how we could build a farm within the city and grow indoors. Hydroponics appealed to us because it saves two of the most precious urban resources – space and water. After a year of trial and error and lots of research, we built our small indoor farm. The two of us handle everything right from the farm tasks (planting, monitoring, harvesting) to deliveries, sales and marketing. 

We believe that the food we eat is one of the most important factors in determining our health and more and more people are starting to realise it too. What we put in our bodies three times a day can impact just about everything in our lives and we are on a mission to get everyone to start valuing good food and make good choices. We also wanted to build a chain of supply that is completely transparent so people can trust what’s on their plate as opposed to the way our markets currently work. 

Give us an overview of the set up and functioning of Herbivore Farms. 

We have converted an old industrial warehouse in Andheri East into a climate controlled greenhouse. We’ve built vertical hydroponics systems that enable us to grow 10 times more in the same square footage. Our recirculating irrigation system also enables us to use 75% less water as compared to traditional agriculture. We’ve put in place processes that allow us to harvest on a daily basis, and each morning’s harvest is delivered to the customer’s homes a few hours later. 

Up until a month ago it was the two of us managing absolutely everything, we personally went to people’s doors to hand them their produce. It was exhausting but extremely rewarding, and the motive was to dive into the depth of every little detail to put into place effective farm processes which we have been able to do now, and we’re still learning every day. A few weeks ago, we hired our first employee. He is learning quickly and developing into the role of Primary Farm Manager. 

How has the feedback been? What are some of the things that customers are saying about you?

The response from customers who tried our free samples was phenomenal. About 90% of the people who took a sample home wrote back to us saying they loved how fresh and flavourful the leaves were and how they wanted to know how soon they can start buying. Some even said that we had changed their perception on leafy greens – what they previously associated with tasting “bitter” or “bland” and didn’t enjoy eating but would force themselves to, to try and be healthy. A lot of people we met at events told us were happy to finally have some transparency as to where their veggies are grown and where they come from, as they were skeptical of eating raw greens because of the fear of pesticides, unhygienic growing conditions, and not knowing who has handled the produce. 

How does one place an order at the farm and what all do you currently grow to offer?  

A Herbivore Harvest Box (Monthly Subscription) is INR 1500 (extra delivery charges for South Mumbai) for one month. One subscription = total four deliveries (one per week) on a fixed day depending on where the subscriber lives. Each week the subscriber will receive one box at their chosen address which will contain two to three varieties of leafy greens harvested that morning. 

Our range of leafy greens – seven types of lettuce (lollo rosso, oakleaf, French romaine, summercrisp, butterhead), three types of Swiss chard (red, yellow, mangold), two types of rocket (wild and cultivated) and we are working on four kale varieties that will be part of our box soon! 

Pick from a range of leafy greens!

Lastly, what’s next for Herbivore Farms? 

We can’t wait to upgrade to a much larger facility and cater to a larger population of our city. We want to be more than just a farm. We want to teach kids how to grow their own food “kindly”, for that is the most essential foundation of a community of the future. Herbivore Farms aims to create jobs with meaning, and bring people closer together.

Westland Promofilm 2019

Westland is a dynamic municipality. In this relatively small area of just 9 000 hectares, we come up with pioneering solutions to global challenges. We produce high quality food products, flowers and plants, sustainably and innovatively, to improve the well-being and welfare of people all over the world.

The Westland area is the world’s main greenhouse horticulture cluster. Over the last 120 years, Westland has become the international hotspot when it comes to growing indoor crops. As early as 1918, Westland growers started planting indoors to extend the growing season of their tomato crop. The development and exchange of knowledge make innovation possible.

An unparalleled cluster of greenhouse horticulture companies and related industries. Importers, exporters, packaging and repackaging companies, growers, breeders, R&D, suppliers, transporters and warehouses, and many more. A cluster like this concentrated in such a small area is found nowhere else in the world. With the opening of the World Horti Center, the region now has a campus where the business community, education and government can come together.

The international innovation hub is also the main innovation centre of the international greenhouse horticulture sector, where business, research, demonstration, teaching and education converge. It is also where local and international greenhouse companies innovate and do business. Westland’s geographical location is unique. Situated close to Schiphol and the Port of Rotterdam, our logistics hub can reach 500 million European customers within 24 hours.

Our mentality is our defining feature: we work hard and efficiently, while always looking for ways to create synergy through partnerships. Many companies have chosen to establish their business in Westland. www.westlandhortibusiness.com

It's Not Easy Being Green: Romaine Lettuce E. coli Outbreak Rattles Food, Grocery Industries

AUTHOR

Christopher Doering@cdoering

PUBLISHED

Dec. 10, 2018

When Scott Gottlieb asked retailers, restaurants and other commercial outlets to voluntarily pull from the market and destroy any romaine lettuce just two days before Thanksgiving, it marked an usual and poignant request from the head of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.  

"The quick and aggressive steps we’re taking today are aimed at making sure we get ahead of this emerging outbreak, to reduce risk to consumers, and to help people protect themselves and their families from this foodborne illness outbreak," Gottlieb​ said in a statement on Nov. 20. "This isn’t the first romaine outbreak we have seen in the recent past, and we will continue to take steps to identify the root causes of these events and take action to prevent future outbreaks."

The leafy green industry has struggled during the past year, with three outbreaks tied to E. coli.

Romaine from Arizona this spring sickened 210 people from 36 states, hospitalized 96 and was tied to five deaths. Contaminated water located near a cattle lot was most likely the source. Another hit the U.S. and Canada in 2017, and while investigators in the United States never identified which vegetable was responsible, Canadian officials said romaine was most often tied to illnesses.

The cause of the current romaine outbreak in California, responsible for sickening 52 people across 15 states, hasn't been identified.

David Acheson, the FDA's former food safety czar who now runs his own firm to help clients reduce the risk of an outbreak, said the agency's withdraw request — the first in produce since spinach in 2006 — was as much about protecting public health as it was "sending a strong message to the produce industry that they need to look at ways to make this better than it already is."

"It's very effective, but talk about taking a sledgehammer to crack a walnut," Acheson told Food Dive. "It's a big deal and that's why I think there is a bit more to this in terms of the political regulatory requirement, in that (these three outbreaks are) not acceptable."

In recent weeks, the FDA has participated in discussions with major producers and distributors of romaine lettuce, as well as trade groups representing the produce industry in an attempt to reduce the impact of future outbreaks. 

Gottlieb​ said last month that major growers agreed to voluntarily label romaine with the growing region and the date of harvest to help with market recalls and traceability. The new labeling could be expanded to other leafy greens and produce going forward, he added. 

United Fresh, whose members represent the entire produce industry supply chain, said in a statement the deal was negotiated by "a number of romaine grower-shipper-processors" who agreed to take part. Fresh Express, Taylor Farms, Dole Fresh Vegetables and Earthbound Farm are among the companies who said they would adopt the new labels.

Deverl Maserang, president and CEO of Earthbound Farm, said in an email to Food Dive that while none of the company's products were connected to the outbreak, the government's "broad advisory to avoid romaine is very disruptive." 

He was hopeful that the growing region and harvested data could assist investigators in narrowing the scope of any potential future advisories, and that the government would be more specific on what kind of product could be excluded, such as conventional versus organic or exempting baby romaine — which is grown and harvested differently than hearts and heads of romaine tied to the recent outbreak, and on different farms.

Romaine consumption getting sliced and diced

Consumption of fresh lettuce, as part of a broader consumer push to eat healthier and better-for-you foods, has been gradually trending upward. It averaged around 11.5 pounds to 12 pounds per person annually since about 2006, before spiking to 12.7 pounds and 12.5 pounds in 2016 and 2017, respectively, according to Statista.

But the outbreaks have pummeled romaine lettuce sales, according to data from Nielsen. Sales of the vegetable, typically the most widely consumed salad green, slumped 13% during the year ending Nov. 24 to $631 million, the analytics firm estimated. With less romaine lettuce available, USDA said prices of other lettuce varieties have surged, including Boston and iceberg lettuce — which saw a nearly 170% jump.

The removal of romaine lettuce was particularly damaging to the grocery industry because of the timing just before Thanksgiving, the large quantity of the product pulled and the expense to stores — including labor costs, lost sales and time spent dealing with the crisis, according to Hilary Thesmar, senior vice president of food safety for the Food Marketing Institute.

Thesmar​ said while the group and its 33,000 retail store members supported the removal of romaine lettuce in the interest of public health, the decision by federal regulators to request the voluntary removal of the item created uncertainty, such as what happens to the product next or how stores work with their suppliers — questions that are clearer during a recall.

In addition, she said, grocers were faced with the decision of what to do with products in inventory and whether they should discard them or hold them in the hopes that the FDA and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would quickly narrow the scope of the outbreak so they could sell products that weren't affected. (Most complied with the government's request and proactively tossed it.) ​FMI also faced inquiries from retailers over what to do with romaine supplied from local greenhouses or grown using hydroponics; both were included in the initial advisory.

Produce remains a major contributor to foodborne illness, according to a report from the Interagency Food Safety Analytics Collaboration  — a collaboration between the CDC, the FDA and the U.S. Agriculture Department.

Credit: Megan Poinski

The report, released last December, found that in 2013, produce accounted for 59% of listeria cases, 51% of E. coli O157 cases, 46% of salmonella cases, and 33% of campylobacter cases. A prominent source of the outbreaks for E. coli came from vegetable row crops, including leafy greens — more than any other food category, IFSAC found.

The Food Safety Modernization Act, signed into law in 2011, called for growers to test their irrigation water and take steps to prevent contaminated sources from being used on produce. But the FDA announced in September 2017 that implementation would be delayed until at least 2022, beginning with the largest farms, in order to allow the agency to “consider how we might further reduce the regulatory burden or increase flexibility.” 

An economic analysis by the FDA estimated the delay would save the industry $12 million annually, but lower the annual benefit to consumers by $108 million each year. The Center for Science in the Public Interest and Center for Food Safety said the postponement could lead to more than 730,000 additional cases of foodborne illness and "countless deaths."  

Food safety groups have pointed to the recent outbreaks as an impetus to fully implement the 2011 reforms rather than further reducing or delaying the regulatory requirements.

Scott Faber, vice president of governmental affairs at the Environmental Working Group, was hopeful that following the latest outbreak, FDA's Gottlieb would accelerate the implementation timeline for the water testing requirements or Congress would require more stringent testing by big growers — potentially as part of the upcoming spending bill on Capitol Hill.

"That's the tragedy of this. It was almost certain that in the absence of testing the irrigation water that people would get sick," Faber told Food Dive. "We've taken no steps to address the risk. It's not rocket science, it's food science."

Credit: Dan Gold

'We have to do better'

The produce industries in California and Arizona, where 95% of all lettuce is grown, have their own nearly identical food safety frameworks. Each state formed its own Leafy Green Marketing Agreement following a 2006 spinach outbreak that infected 200 people and cost growers millions of dollars. Earthbound Farm launched a test-and-hold program less than two weeks after the September recall, where it started checking all greens for pathogens when they are received and before they are shipped.

"We have to do everything in our power to keep pathogens, which exist in the environment, out of the food supply," Maserang said.

Today, leafy green growers and shippers who are members of the LGMA must have a traceback program showing where every product came from and where it went. They also are audited on average five times each year to make sure they are complying with all required food safety practices, including monthly water testing.

Scott Horsfall, CEO of the California Leafy Green Marketing Association, told Food Dive the water testing requirements in the Food Safety Modernization Act would test for contaminants using the same methodology and microbial standards as the LGMA standards, but conduct the tests less frequently. As a result, they likely wouldn't have made any difference in preventing the latest outbreaks. Still, he acknowledged that "there clearly is something there that we have to do better."

As FDA investigators and researchers look to uncover the cause of the latest outbreak, and determine whether there is something about the romaine plant or the way it grows that makes it more susceptible to contamination, Horsfall remains hopeful the industry will learn more about what happened — and whether there are any changes producers can make to their operations to avoid a future outbreak.

"Obviously, it hurts the reputation, the trust in the industry when you have episodes like this," Horsfall said. "I'm confident we'll rebound. It may take some time, but we'll get there." 

Acheson said the food supply chain and the process used by regulators to investigate an outbreak, while generally effective on their own, are not properly linked. This creates problems and inefficiencies that can make it difficult for a foodborne illness outbreak to be stopped or minimized before it gets worse.

He cited the lack of communication between local and state officials and delays on involving CDC that can hinder the ability to quickly link outbreaks over a wider area.

In addition, he said, regulators should be more open with industry when they discover a possible lead during an investigation. This way, growers and shippers can check when and where the batch of lettuce in question was shipped. And growers, processors, distributors, retailers and restaurants generally are hesitant to spend more money beyond what they are required if it doesn't generate an immediate payoff, Acheson noted, even if doing so may prevent a bigger problem like the recent voluntary lettuce withdrawal.

Acheson said while a practice like testing water for contaminants is effective, it's going to take more from everyone with a stake in produce to reduce the likelihood of another outbreak. 

"We will never get a leafy green that we can guarantee is 100% free of pathogens 100% of the time," Acheson said. "It will never happen because of the nature of the product, so we need to put in control systems that are as good as we can afford ... and to continue to push the likelihood down."

Cockroaches Are Becoming Big Business In China

Thomas Suen and Ryan Woo Reuters - Text

(Reuters) - In the near pitch-dark, you can hear them before you see them - millions of cockroaches scuttling and fluttering across stacks of wooden boards as they devour food scraps by the tonne in a novel form of urban waste disposal.

The air is warm and humid - just as cockroaches like it - to ensure the colonies keep their health and voracious appetites.

Expanding Chinese cities are generating more food waste than they can accommodate in landfills, and cockroaches could be a way to get rid of hills of food scraps, providing nutritious food for livestock when the bugs eventually die and, some say, cures for stomach illness and beauty treatments.

On the outskirts of Jinan, capital of eastern Shandong province, a billion cockroaches are being fed with 50 tonnes of kitchen waste a day - the equivalent in weight to seven adult elephants.

The waste arrives before daybreak at the plant run by Shandong Qiaobin Agricultural Technology Co, where it is fed through pipes to cockroaches in their cells.

Shandong Qiaobin plans to set up three more such plants next year, aiming to process a third of the kitchen waste produced by Jinan, home to about seven million people.

A nationwide ban on using food waste as pig feed due to African swine fever outbreaks is also spurring the growth of the cockroach industry.

“Cockroaches are a bio-technological pathway for the converting and processing of kitchen waste,” said Liu Yusheng, president of Shandong Insect Industry Association.

Cockroaches are also a good source of protein for pigs and other livestock.

“It’s like turning trash into resources,” said Shandong Qiaobin chairwoman Li Hongyi. “ESSENCE OF COCKROACH”

In a remote village in Sichuan, Li Bingcai, 47, has similar ideas. Li, formerly a mobile phone vendor, has invested a million yuan ($146,300) in cockroaches, which he sells to pig farms and fisheries as feed and to drug companies as medicinal ingredients.

His farm now has 3.4 million cockroaches.

“People think it’s strange that I do this kind of business,” Li said. “It has great economic value, and my goal is to lead other villagers to prosperity if they follow my lead.”

His village has two farms. Li’s goal is to create 20.

Elsewhere in Sichuan, a company called Gooddoctor is rearing six billion cockroaches.

“The essence of cockroach is good for curing oral and peptic ulcers, skin wounds and even stomach cancer,” said Wen Jianguo, manager of Gooddoctor’s cockroach facility.

Researchers are also looking into using cockroach extract in beauty masks, diet pills and even hair-loss treatments.

At Gooddoctor, when cockroaches reach the end of their lifespan of about six months, they are blasted by steam, washed and dried, before being sent to a huge nutrient extraction tank.

Asked about the chance of the cockroaches escaping, Wen said that would be worthy of a disaster movie but that he has taken precautions.

“We have a moat filled with water and fish,” he said. “If the cockroaches escape, they will fall into the moat and the fish will eat them all.” 

Leclerc Opens Second Marché Bio Store

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As announced a few weeks ago, Leclerc has been stepping up its efforts to promote biological products through a new brand of organic stores. After the opening of the first supermarket in Saintes at the end of October, a second one will open today in Erstein (Bas-Rhin), near Strasbourg.

The focus is on local and short-circuit supply, as much as possible, and also on bulk. But the main asset for Michel-Edouard Leclerc are the prices. “Our products are about 30% cheaper than in specialized stores, while enhancing the producers and the sector. In order to be accessible, taking a 60% margin is out of the question,” he explained during the opening of the store in Saintes.

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ZipGrow Helping To Transform Indoor Agriculture

December 13, 2018
By Bob Peters

Cornwall Ontario – A dedicated team of farming pioneers based in Cornwall are helping to bring local fresh food to the table in a growing number of communities.

ZipGrow manufactures vertical growing systems in Cornwall and works with farmers in external markets to install the technology and build economically viable indoor farms.

Essentially plants are grown from seeds in rows that are oriented vertically as opposed to on a traditional horizontal plane. Light, water and nutrients are supplied via a system that maximizes efficiency and crop yield.

“Our towers are designed by farmers for use by farmers,” says Eric Lang, President and Co-Founder of ZipGrow. “Going vertical allows you to grow crops in a relatively small physical area, which makes it ideal for indoor locations.”

The system is scaleable as well, which means that restaurants can grow their own greens, students can learn about agriculture and entrepreneurs can build commercial farm operations are that are climate-proof.

The ZipGrow method of farming is versatile and can accommodate different crops. Indoor farmers have had success with leafy greens such as lettuce, kale and arugula while herbs like basil, mint, and rosemary are perfect matches for growing vertically. With a little extra planning and preparation, you can also successfully grow fruiting plants such as strawberries, cucumbers, and bell peppers.

ZipGrow is located on Fourth Street West in the middle of Cornwall. Demand for their product has led to continuing increases in production, requiring the company to expand its physical footprint. The company now employs 15 people.

“We are selling ZipGrow systems in North, Central and South America and demand continues to increase quarter after quarter,” says Eric Lang. “Each sale paves the way for another as people become familiar and comfortable with the technology.”

Mr. Lang is partners with Eric Bergeron who first brought the concept of indoor farming to Cornwall with SmartGreens in 2014.

“Indoor farming offers solutions to problems that conventional agriculture struggles with – namely environmental impact, timely transportation of perishable goods to distant markets, climate change and more,” says Mr. Bergeron, Co-Founder and Chief Marketing Officer for ZipGrow. “We believe that with right knowledge and the right technology, individuals and communities can help bring farmers and consumers much closer together for the benefit of all.”

About ZipGrow

ZipGrow designs and builds vertical farming technology for installations around the world. Its team of proven leaders in the field educate, equip, and empower local farmers to grow better food for their communities and operate successful vertical indoor farms.

Web: ZipGrow.com

Uber CEO, Temasek Invest in Urban Farming Startup

THU, DEC 13, 2018 - 7:28 AM

The New York-based company plans to announce on Wednesday that it raised US$90 million from investors including Alphabet Inc's GV and Uber Chief Executive Officer Dara Khosrowshahi, said Bowery's co-founder and CEO, Irving Fain. The company declined to provide its valuation.

PHOTO: REUTERS

[SAN FRANCISCO] Bowery Farming Inc, a two-year-old startup that uses robotics to cultivate crops indoors, is on track for more growth. The New York-based company plans to announce on Wednesday that it raised US$90 million from investors including Alphabet Inc's GV and Uber Chief Executive Officer Dara Khosrowshahi, said Bowery's co-founder and CEO, Irving Fain. The company declined to provide its valuation.

Bowery is part of a new crop of agriculture technology startups growing leafy greens in controlled environments near cities. Last year, Plenty, a San Francisco-based vertical farming company, raised US$200 million from the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank Group Corp's Vision Fund.

Bowery grows its veggies in layers of sensor-rich trays that move and react to humidity, carbon dioxide and light. One square foot of Bowery's indoor farm is 100 times more productive than an equivalent plot of arable land, Bowery says. Plenty makes similar claims.

Part of the urgency of Bowery's business plan is the prospect of looming global food shortages. The United Nations says food production will need to double in the next three decades to feed the planet's swelling population. Bowery and its ilk see a business opportunity in building massive indoor farms in and on the outskirts of cities - a costly proposition, but one that could cut down on waste and ensure fresher produce.

"This round is solid validation for the scope of the problem and the opportunity," said Mr Fain. To date, Bowery has raised US$118 million from investors including First Round Capital and General Catalyst.

GV, formerly Google Ventures, led the most recent investment, which includes funding from Singapore's state investment firm, Temasek Holdings Pte.

Mr Fain said Uber's Khosrowshahi became an investor because of his interest in futuristic cities. "Uber is a big believer in cities and the importance of sustainable cities," said Mr Fain.

Bowery currently operates two indoor farms in Kearny, New Jersey. The facilities send greens like kale, bok choy and butterhead lettuce to Whole Foods and salad chain Sweetgreen. Mr Fain said the fresh funding will be used to open new farms in the US and internationally.

Bowery declined to disclose how many new farms are in the works or where they would be located. "There is no question that we intend to have our farms in cities across the world," Mr Fain said.

Andy Wheeler, a Bowery board member and partner at GV, echoed Mr Fain's global expansion ambitions. "The company is poised to have a significant impact on the global produce market," he said.

Bowery is planning to expand its headcount too, Mr Fain said. The company employs 65 people. Some of these employees could come from Amazon, Mr Fain suggested. Though competition for talent will likely be tough as the e-commerce giant ramps up hiring for its new office in New York.

This year, Bowery hired Brian Donato, a former senior operator of Amazon Fresh and Pantry food delivery services; Scott Horoho, a former senior Amazon engineering manager; and Jeff Raines, a former director of data center engineering for Amazon Web Services.

5 Lawsuits That Could Change The Food Industry

Lillianna Byington@lil_byington

Dec. 11, 2018

From unwanted ingredients and debatable labels to the spreading of salmonella and E. coli, food companies have been in the crosshairs of litigation this year with cases that can both change recipes and the way manufacturers do business.

Lawyers told Food Dive they have kept busy with issues ranging from food that caused outbreaks to lawsuits challenging label claims, nonfunctional slack fill and contamination with glyphosate. When it comes to lawsuits associated with foodborne illnesses, attorney Bill Marler — a leader in that space — can attest to the recent increase. 

"It's been a bad year for food safety and it's more than anecdotal," Marler told Food Dive. "I've had to hire three more lawyers and two more paralegals in the last six months. It's always a bad sign if Bill Marler is hiring more lawyers. That tells you that in the food system, there's something wrong."

But it hasn't just been foodborne illness lawsuits that have had an impact on the industry. There have also been many labeling lawsuits, challenging product claims including "natural," "healthy" and "nothing artificial."

Kevin Laukaitis, an attorney at Kohn, Swift and Graf who focuses on class action consumer litigation involving defective products, told Food Dive the healthy product trend has led to an increase in mislabeling cases. More companies have been advertising better-for-you claims to attract consumers, and that will likely lead to more lawsuits challenging the validity of those labels, he said.

This year alone, there have been many lawsuits filed and numerous resolved that could factor into future cases and help answer some of the big questions looming over the industry. What makes a valid label claim? Who is responsible for foodborne illness? How much empty space can be used in packaging? Here are five cases moving the industry toward answers.

1.) Is LaCroix "natural"?

Credit: Flickr user Tony Webster

What happened: LaCroix came under fire this year in a lawsuit that claimed it mislabels its water as "natural," though the actual ingredients are non-natural and synthetic compounds — not what its cult fan base wants to hear. The legal complaint, filed Oct. 1, says the product contains items including ethyl butanoate, limonene, linalool and linalool propionate. Linalool is used in cockroach insecticide. 

The class-action suit was filed in Cook County, Illinois against National Beverage Corp., the parent company of LaCroix. National Beverage Corp. denies the claims, saying all essences in LaCroix sparkling waters are 100% natural. But this case has already brought the company into a negative light for consumers. The case is ongoing and hasn't reached trial yet, but LaCroix plans to fight, writing on Twitter days later, "please stand with us as we defend our beloved LaCroix."

What it means: LaCroix has advertised its product as a "natural" alternative to soda, but it may be up to a jury to decide whether the compounds found in the sparkling drink indeed come from natural substances, as well as what should be considered "natural." The National Beverage Corporation has said that the ingredients in LaCroix are "derived from the natural essence oils from the named fruit used in each of the flavors" and certified to be "100% natural." The decision could mean that the company may need to change its labeling.

"It is a huge trend now in business where consumers are interested in natural products, and they want to have healthy products, and they might pay a little more for a product that is natural over a product that is not," Laukaitis said. "But when they come to find out that the product ... has synthetic ingredients or is just like all the other products out there, then that is going to anger the consumer and they are going to feel cheated."

Why it matters: There have been reportedly about 300 lawsuits over the use of the word "natural" on food products in the last three years, according to an analysis cited by CBS News. These types of claims about synthetic ingredients are becoming more common. Natural label claims are such a big issue since there's no industry standard for what the word means.  

"The 'natural' cases are going to be a continued trend because that is the new wave of marketing," Laukaitis said.

But any precedent this case sets could be overruled if the Food and Drug Administration comes out with a regulated definition. In 2015, the FDA opened public comments on the definition of "natural," and Commissioner Scott Gottlieb has said the agency will come out with one soon. 

2.) Impact of JBS' massive meat recall

Credit: Jon Sullivan

What happened: In October, JBS Tolleson, Inc. in Arizona recalled about 7 million pounds of raw beef products because of potential salmonella contamination. Then the company expanded the recall this month to more than 12 million pounds of raw beef. The first lawsuit was filed in Arizona Superior Court on Oct. 5 against JBS Tolleson on behalf of Dana Raab, who contracted a salmonella infection after eating ground beef from the company, experiencing severe dehydration, diarrhea, vomiting and abdominal pain. The case was dismissed last week without prejudice, meaning it could be tried again at a later date or that the case could have been settled out of court. Marler's firm, which was one of the firms handling that case, released a statement last week that they would evaluate any cases related to the recall — which means there could be more filed in the near future.  

What it means: When a massive outbreak like this occurs, manufacturers not only have to deal with the immediate clean up and recall of the products but also are open to further scrutiny when lawsuits are filed months later. The company's reputation will likely take a hit again because consumers are reminded of the incident — and the brand may also have to pay the affected consumers. A case like this also means similar manufacturers will closely watch how it unfolds, taking note of what happened and learning from it.

Why it matters: A recall on this scale can bring many lawsuits, especially since the recall was expanded to 12 million pounds. Marler said it's likely similar cases will be filed since many people could have consumed the product.

These cases could also impact what processors do to ensure food safety because the bad publicity and cost of a recall and lawsuit could force change. Contamination in meat seems to be occurring more this year than it has in the past, Marler said. 

"I'm worried that because there have been so few outbreaks and recalls linked to hamburger in the last decade, you wonder if perhaps companies were getting a little complacent and not paying attention as they should have," Marler said.

3.) Fewer slack-fill cases

Credit: Windell Oskay

What happened: A man in Missouri filed a federal lawsuit claiming that Hershey intentionally sold semi-full packages of candy like Whoppers and Reese's Pieces that contained too much nonfunctional slack fill. The consumer claimed that Hershey was "misleading, deceptive and unlawful." The lawsuit accused Hershey of only filling a $1-sized box of Whoppers about 59% full. His $5 million class action lawsuit moved forward in May 2017. But on Feb. 16, the case was thrown out. The final ruling said the "unjust enrichment claims" were dismissed and could not be brought up in another court. 

What it means: The U.S. district judge on this case ruled that the plaintiff wasn't harmed by partially full packages because he kept buying them. In fact, he purchased more than 600 packages of Hershey candy in a decade. Future rulings could follow this precedent — if consumers are able to see the package and continue to buy it regardless of how full it is, then the consumer can't claim harm. 

Why it matters: More courts are shutting down slack-fill cases like this one,according to Laukaitis. Companies have become more transparent about what is in their packages with serving size, product weight, volume or piece count printed on the outside of the product, so the consumer has a better idea of what he is getting. This specific dismissal also shows that there may be a higher burden of proof for the consumer to show he was harmed and/or misled. 

4.) A potential change in glyphosate litigation

Credit: Flikr

What happened: A California jury awarded a former school groundskeeper $289 million in August because glyphosate in Monsanto's Roundup weed killer likely caused his cancer. Just a few days later, a Florida woman sued General Mills for failing to reveal the presence of glyphosate in its Cheerios products. After the case was filed, a spokesman for General Mills told Food Navigator that the company's products are safe and meet regulatory safety levels. The suit was filed in the Southern District Court of Florida and most recently, General Mills filed a motion to stay the discovery period Monday in order to hear a resolution of its motion to dismiss. 

What it means: This plaintiff may not have a great shot at success given the way previous glyphosate cases in food have concluded. Companies generally prevail by arguing the amount of glyphosate in their products is extremely small and would have no health impact on consumers. But if this case sees a different outcome, it could reverse the trend. 

Why it matters: Regardless of how the ruling comes down, the negative publicity could have already done damage to the reputation of any products that contain residual glyphosate. If consumers don't trust products with ingredients that may have been exposed to glyphosate, then recipes and formulation might need to change no matter the legal decision. 

"Companies should not wait for a mandate from the federal government to do what's right for their consumers," the Environmental Working Group said in a statement after the Monsanto ruling. "People don’t like to eat pesticides. They don't like to drink pesticides. Despite the benefits they often have, pesticides have no place in people."

This is also not the first time General Mills has faced a lawsuit over glyphosate in its products. In August 2016, consumer groups sued the company for labeling Nature Valley granola bars as "natural" when they contained residues of the chemical. In that case, General Mills settled. A settlement shows the manufacturer is interested in making the case go away, and perhaps other manufacturers will want to go that route. Companies usually don't benefit from a long legal challenge, which can be pricey for them and tends to harm a brand, even if the case ends up being ruled in their favor. 

5. E. coli romaine outbreak litigation

Credit: Megan Poinski

What happened: An E. coli outbreak linked to romaine lettuce from Arizona sickened 149 people in 29 states earlier this year. The litigation phase has just begun for many victims who have filed suit from this outbreak. Marler has formally filed about a dozen lawsuits against various suppliers in the romaine supply chain, restaurants and retailers who sold the green. In total there are at least 31 cases tied to the romaine grown in Arizona, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control said. There are several different state and federal jurisdictions involved in these cases, which means there will likely be different rulings. In defense, some restaurants have revealed their suppliers' names to protect themselves and shift the blame and legal responsibility. 

What it means: These cases could end up costing those in the romaine business a lot of money in damages depending on the rulings in the various cases and how sick the greens made the individuals. 

What could help the plaintiffs even more is that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently warned consumers again to not eat romaine lettuce — the third time in recent years. With repeated outbreaks like this, consumers have claimed in lawsuits before that the product seems to be prone to contamination and nobody is protecting them. The Lange Law Firm already filed an E. coli lawsuit in federal court against a Florida restaurant in the the current outbreak after a patron got sick from eating a salad.

For the court cases, the repeated occurrence of these outbreaks only shows that this is a continuing issue with romaine and could put more fault on suppliers, grocery stores and restaurants for not finding a solution sooner.

Why it matters: The lettuce outbreaks have already sparked changes. Companies and retailers saw the need to implement better processes to limit food safety issues in the supply chain. Walmart asked lettuce suppliers to trace products using blockchain and an environmental assessment was released on how another outbreak like this could be prevented. Most recently, the FDA and the produce industry have introduced a new voluntary labeling plan for romaine lettuce to help clarify whether the product is contaminated. But even with this new plan, these court cases will continue to put a spotlight on the safety of romaine lettuce, and could bring more change, since the outcome could cost growers, shippers, retailers and restaurants big bucks.

Are Foodborne Illnesses On the Rise? (+ Answers To 5 Other Food Safety Questions)

Brian Barth

The food safety blog features such stomach-churning headlines nearly every day – their tagline is “breaking news for everyone’s consumption” – but stories about foodborne illness seem more and more of a staple in mainstream news outlets, as well (just ask Chiptole). But are we really having an increase in outbreaks? Or are we just talking about it more? Well, depends how you crunch the numbers.

I spent a lot of time this summer on foodsafetynews.com (which I don’t recommend before dinner, by the way) while researching a story on the Food Safety and Modernization Act for our fall issue (see: Navigating the FDA’s Food Safety Maze). Proponents of FSMA, which was first passed in 2011 and is only now being implemented, bill it as a once-in-century overhaul of our nation’s food safety system that will drastically reduce the incidence of foodborne illness over time – the FDA expects to avert 331,964 illnesses per year, to be exact. But it gives the FDA unprecedented power to police the food system, which is why its detractors see it as an example of egregious government overreach.

FSMA places particular emphasis on fresh produce, specifically, how a farmer’s cultivation practices affect its safety, an arena in which the FDA was rarely involved in the past, except in the case of an outbreak. In fact, a massive E. coli outbreak that was traced back to a small farm in San Benito County, California is often fingered as the event that set FSMA in motion, and created the political will to get it passed in Congress. But as I learned this summer, there is ample room for debate about whether FSMA will actually prevent outbreaks that originate on farms – and plenty of evidence that it will cause economic distress to small, diversified growers.

Since the article raises as many questions as it answers, here’s a helpful FAQ of sorts.

How common are foodborne illnesses?

While the number of food-related deaths and illnesses are much higher in less developed countries, such as India, most Americans are surprised to learn how common outbreaks are in our hygiene-obsessed society. According the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 48 million Americans, or about 1 in 6, get sick from foodborne pathogens each year. Of those, 128,000 are hospitalized and about 3,000 die.

What’s the difference between ordinary “food poisoning” and severe outbreaks that kill people?

Fifty-eight percent of foodborne illnesses are caused by norovirus – a pathogen responsible for the classic symptoms of food poisoning (debilitating, but short lived) – which often doesn’t spread beyond a single household. Extensive, multi-state outbreaks tend to be associated with more virulent pathogens, such as strains of E. coli, Salmonella, and Listeria. There are an average of two multi-state outbreaks each month, and while these are responsible for just 11 percent of all foodborne illnesses, they account for more the half of the deaths.

Which types of food are most associated with harmful pathogens?

Most people assume the answer is meat and dairy, which may be true when it comes to the 48 million total illnesses each year. But the CDC does not have the means to track every individual case of food poisoning and make a determination of whether it was the hamburger you ate or the salad. It does, however, try to determine the source for every major outbreak. When the agency analyzed data from the 4,600 outbreaks between 1998 and 2008, they found that 46 percent of illnesses were traced to produce, but that these rarely resulted in death. Meats are principal culprit in food-related deaths, with the largest number (19 percent) attributed to poultry.

Where do produce pathogens originate?

FSMA places an emphasis on policing produce at the farm level, but it’s unclear whether the bulk of blame lies with farmers or if we just need to make sure we wash our vegetables. The data is spotty, but there are a few clues. First, it must be noted that the CDC is able to determine exactly where in the food chain a pathogen originated only about 40 percent of the time. Between 1998 and 2008, the pathogen was found to originate on a farm about 5 percent of the time. Data from 2009 through 2012 show that number going down to around 1 percent. More detailed data is available for norovirus, which shows that 80 percent of outbreaks between 2001 and 2008 originated in places like restaurants and other commercial food facilities. Between 53 and 81 percent of norovirus outbreaks during this period were thought to stem from sick food service workers.

Are foodborne illnesses really on the rise?

Many headlines of late have suggested as much. The answer depends on exactly which types of illness you’re looking at; and the implications of the various datasets are often hard to parse. The CDC states that illnesses from six of the most common pathogens have declined by roughly one-quarter since the late nineties. But in terms of major outbreaks, the numbers seem to be on the rise. Lately they average about 24 per year, while in the early 2000s there were about 10 per year. When it comes to produce, the CDC claims that outbreaks have increased dramatically over the last several decades – 455 produce-related outbreaks were documented between 1998 and 2008, more than twice the total number for the preceding 25 years.

Why are they on the rise?

That’s the million-dollar question. No one really suggests that farmers have somehow become more negligent with their hygiene practices in recent years, even though the structure of FSMA would seem to imply that. A few theories have been proposed:

• Imported food is to blame. Indeed, we import more food than ever before, especially fresh produce, often from countries with less rigorous food safety rules, or at least fewer resources to enforce them. The CDC reports that outbreaks related to imported food have roughly tripled since the late nineties.
  

• Organic produce is unsanitary. It’s true that organic produce is typically grown with manure, a common vector of foodborne pathogens, as a fertilizer. But research has not revealed a correlation between organic produce and increased levels of foodborne illness.

• Excessive antibiotic use. In April 2015, 192 people were sickened by pork contaminated with an antibiotic-resistant strain of Salmonella, raising concerns that the overuse of antibiotics in livestock could make meat-related outbreaks more deadly.
  

• Centralized food systems. Critics of industrial-scale agriculture point to the consolidation of farms and food distribution networks as the cause. It’s certainly true that an outbreak on a small farm that supplies produce to 100 families poses a much smaller threat to public health than an outbreak at a distributor that supplies produce to grocery chains nationwide.

In other words, the answers are multi-faceted, and, at this point, unclear. You’d think advances in technology would be driving these numbers down over time, but, in some ways, technology may be what’s driving them up. The ability to collect data on foodborne illness, and to link outbreaks with specific causes, has improved drastically, which may have as much to do with the increase as anything else.

One concrete example is that in 1998, when the CDC switched to electronic reporting for its nationwide Foodborne Disease Outbreak Surveillance System, the total number of reported outbreaks nearly doubled in the following year. Before the switch, the numbers had remained relatively flat from year to year. Following the initial bump after electronic reporting was introduced, the numbers also remained fairly flat, albeit higher overall. Thus, the alleged increase in illnesses may only represent an increase in information.

How Sustainable Farming Stacks Up

Published:  December 04, 2018 14:38 Suparna Dutt D’ Cunha, Special to GN Focus

Emirates Flight Catering’s 130,000-sq-ft facility will harvest 2,700kg of herbicide- and pesticide-free leafy greens a day at full production.Image Credit: Supplied

In a country where it’s common to find apples from South Africa, potatoes from India and carrots from Australia — all marked at a price to cover the import costs — in supermarkets, some farming initiatives in recent years are bringing to reality a new breed of green agriculture that seeks to produce more crops in less space and water, and is efficient, easier and kinder on the natural environment.

It is hard not to be dazzled by the current pace of technological change in agriculture in the country. An ambitious manifestation of agricultural technology is coming to fruition next year. Emirates Flight Catering and US-based Crop One Holdings are building what they say will be the world’s largest vertical farm, producing 2,700kg of pesticide-free leafy greens daily, in Dubai.

The greens will be manufactured using hydroponics, a technique in which crops are grown in vertical stacks of plant beds, without soil, sunlight or pesticides. Above each bed of greens will be columns of LED lights, which when plants photosynthesise will convert light of certain wavelengths into chemical energy and store it for future use.

Proponents of new-age farming tout the potential of such technology to address the country’s largely hostile desert landscapes, its reliance on the global food trade, importing more than 80 per cent of its food needs, and food shortages as the population continues to grow.

“It is encouraging to see the initiatives that are underway, including some of the larger scale projects, using highly advanced technologies,” says Nicholas Lodge, Managing Partner at Abu Dhabi-based agriculture consultancy Clarity. “Developing sustainable farming with smart use of water will not only provide improved supplies for the local market but also potentially create viable businesses for export to neighbouring countries. Furthermore, technology and an ecological approach will contribute to food diversity and security as it will enhance crop production and lower its cost.”

For Omar Al Jundi, Founder and CEO of Badia Farms, the Middle East’s first commercial vertical farm in Dubai, sustainable farming is a solution for more pressing and concrete concerns such as land — less than 5 per cent of the total land area being arable in the UAE — and water shortages, meeting the demand for locally grown greens, and climate change. Growing and selling locally means emissions associated with transportation are reduced.

“The only solution is to grow smart. Sustainable farming is the future. It is time for the country and the region to become food producers rather than just consumers, since ensuring food security will be challenging in the future due to impacts of climate change.”

Using hydroponics technology on an 800-square-metre plot of land in Dubai, Badia Farms grows gourmet leafy greens for sale 365 days of the year.

Hydroponics brings some important benefits, explains Amjad Omar, Farm Manager at Emirates Hydroponics Farms (EHF). “Because crops are grown in a controlled environment there is no need for chemicals; it allows farming without soil. Most importantly, [hydroponics] uses 90 per cent less water than traditional open-field farming, although the tech uses water as a medium to grow plants, and the yield is six times more from the same amount of land.”

Situated halfway between Dubai and Abu Dhabi, EHF has adapted modern technology to grow lettuce and other herb crops year-round as well. The produce, which it sells both online and offline, is not only cheaper than imported goods but fresher too, adds Omar.

Meanwhile, to grow tomatoes, Abu Dhabi-based Pure Harvest Smart is using a fully climate-controlled high-tech, water-efficient greenhouse, which is yielding ten times more food per metre using one-seventh the water.

As the movement continues to evolve, some are experimenting with novel ways to make local agriculture an integral part of urban life. At this year’s World Future Energy Summit in Abu Dhabi, Maha Al Muhairi displayed her innovative energy-efficient automated system, FreshFridge, which lets you grow a wide range of herbs and microgreens in your kitchen. “The FreshFridge allows users to grow more than 50 varieties of microgreens in 10-15 days. People can grow whatever they want in any season,” says Al Muhairi.

Technology is fundamental to the future of agricultural production in the region, says Lodge. “Whether in the form of vertical farm, or through the research and development work of organisations such as the the International Centre for Biosaline Agriculture in Dubai. The region will not enjoy an increase in water availability in our lifetime, so we must use what we have carefully and intelligently.”

But growing crops sustainably isn’t always easy. “Steep costs of acquiring cutting-edge technologies and unavailability of raw materials locally for production are among the challenges,” says Omar.

While according to Al Jundi, the concept of vertical farming is still in its infancy in the region. “Governments and the private sector need to invest heavily to accelerate learning and development in this sector,” he says.

Although these new-age farming initiatives will not change the UAE’s reliance on food imports drastically, it certainly represents a better way of growing produce and a future of continually increasing food supplies in ever more sophisticated manipulation of agro-ecosystems.

NKDA Mulls Panel to Boost Urban Farming

Tarun Goswami Dec 2018 4:15 AM

Kolkata: New Town Kolkata Development Authority (NKDA) is considering a proposal to form an empanelled group to assist people, particularly senior citizens, to set up rooftop urban farming. The matter has been discussed in the board of NKDA and a decision in the matter will be soon taken. A notice will be given asking interested groups to respond. It may be mentioned that at Swapno Bhor, the state's first senior citizens' park, organic farming of vegetables has recently been started in collaboration with an NGO and senior citizens, who are members of the same, are overseeing it. Senior officials of the NKDA said many people have shown keen interest to start rooftop urban farming but could not start it because of lack of expertise. For many years, people have been growing flowers on their rooftop gardens. It may be mentioned that in the annual flower show organised by Alipore Agri Horticulture Society there is a section where flowers and cactus that are grown on rooftop gardens and displayed. The best flower grower is also awarded. Now, in addition to flowers, people have shown interest to start rooftop urban farming. But a majority of them lack expertise and knowledge. For example, on rooftop garden pots made of coconut fibres are used instead of earthen pots as they cause heavy damage to the roofs. Again, from where seeds of vegetables can be procured are not known. To address these issues, the empanelled groups will assist those whose are interested to start rooftop urban farming. The group will charge for providing assistance and the rate will be fixed by the NKDA. This will keep the senior citizens socially engaged, the officers felt. To keep the senior citizens engaged and occupied who will be buying accommodation at Snehodiya, an open terrace has been made in the proposed multi-storeyed building whose construction is going on. The senior citizens can utilise the terrace to coach children from economically-challenged families. This will keep them socially busy and also motivate the children to a great extent.

Fish Fraud 'Rampant' in New York, AG Report Finds

Dive Brief:

• A recent study released by the New York Attorney General’s office reported high levels of seafood mislabeling and fraud at New York supermarkets. The 42-page report found that more than one in four samples wasn't sold under a federally recognized market name.

• The office spent the last year conducting the nation's first major government investigation to address fraud in the seafood industry. The office bought seafood at 155 locations across 29 supermarket brands, with fish from nine categories including snapper, grouper, cod, wild salmon, halibut, sole, striped bass and white tuna. 

• The office sent the samples for testing to the Ocean Genome Legacy Center, a laboratory at Northeastern University. The DNA testing found widespread mislabeling of certain species, including 27.6% of samples sold as wild salmon, 67% of red snapper and 87.5% of lemon sole. 

​​Dive Insight:

As the market for fish expands, so does the opportunity for fraud. The U.S. imported more seafood last year than any other year — more than 6 billion pounds — which makes up about 90% of the fish Americans eat annually. With that much fish being imported, the seafood industry is one of the most vulnerable to food fraud, according to a report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations this year. 

On a more local level, this report found that two-thirds of the state's supermarket chains tested had at least one instance of fish mislabeling. There were five chains — Food Bazaar, Foodtown, Stew Leonard’s, Uncle Giuseppe’s and Western Beef — that had more than half of their fish mislabeled. That could mean grocery stores across the U.S. likely face the same issue, and this report could spark more states to conduct their own investigations. 

The substitutes for the labeled fish were typically cheaper and lower quality species, the report found. Suppliers can make more money off of mislabeled fish, but reports like this cause consumers to lose trust in the industry and supermarkets.

"It’s clear that seafood fraud isn't just a fluke — it’s rampant across New York," Attorney General Barbara Underwood said in a statement. "Supermarkets are the last line of defense before a phony fish ends up as family dinner, and they have a duty to do more. Yet our report makes clear that New Yorkers may too often be the victim of mislabeling."

This is far from the first time the fish industry has faced accusations of fraud. In 2013, nonprofit ocean protection group Oceana took samples of fish nationwide and found that 59% of what was labeled tuna sold at restaurants and grocery stores was not. The same group conducted one of the biggest seafood fraud investigations from 2010 to 2012 and found that 33% of the samples analyzed were mislabeled based on U.S. Food and Drug Administration guidelines.

Legislation has tried to tackle the problem, but has faced obstacles. The Seafood Traceability Rule — a law that requires seafood importers of species like tuna, grouper and swordfish to track fish species and origin — was challenged in court, but upheld last year. And fisheries are now looking to adopt the first-ever traceability program. If implemented across the industry, that could help the issue. 

But it's not just fish. Food fraud has been estimated to cost the industry $30 to 40 billion per year. From cheese and honey to seafood and spices, experts have said that the issue is widespread, but difficult to solve. 

"Addressing food fraud takes a worldwide coordinated effort between industry, consumer groups and governmental agencies," Peter Bracher, managing director of food safety management for NSF International Asia-Pacific, told Food Dive last year. 

As for fish fraud, this latest report from the New York Attorney General could encourage more retailers, suppliers and restaurants to be proactive in preventing it. The report says that solving the problem requires reform across the industry at different stages of the supply chain. A blockchain certification system recently launched to offer consumers a way to track fish's history, which could be one way to solve the problem. New technology and more methods could be coming soon as supermarkets and suppliers scramble in response to this report. 

Dollar Stores Are Taking Over the Grocery Business, and It’s Bad News for Public Health and Local Economies

BY CLAIRE KELLOWAY

Posted on: December 17, 2018  

Today, there are more dollar stores in the United States than all Walmarts and Starbucks combined. These low-priced “small-box” retailers, like Dollar General, offer little to no fresh food—yet they feed more Americans than either Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods, and are gaining on the country’s largest food retailers.

Detailing the explosion of dollar stores in rural and low-income areas, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) recently released a report that shows how these retailers exacerbate economic and public health disparities. The report makes the case that dollar stores undercut small rural grocers and hurt struggling urban neighborhoods by staving off full-service markets.

ILSR also argues that the proliferation of dollar stores is the latest outgrowth of an increasingly concentrated grocery sector, where the top four chains—Walmart, Kroger, Ahold-Delhaize, and Albertsons—sell 44 percent of all groceries, and Walmart alone commands a quarter of the market. These dominant chain stores have decimated independent retailers and divested from rural and low-income areas, as well as communities of color.

A Dollar General in Morgantown, West Virginia. (Photo credit: Taber Andrew Bain)

“Earlier trends in big box store [growth] are making this opening for dollar stores to enter,” says Marie Donahue, one of the report’s authors. “We’re seeing a widening gap of inequality that’s a result of wealth being extracted from communities and into corporate headquarters… Dollar stores are really concentrating in communities hit hardest by the consequences of economic concentration.”

“Before this report, I had no idea that dollar stores were proliferating in this way,” says Dr. Kristine Madsen, Faculty Director of the Berkeley Food Institute. But, she adds, “it doesn’t surprise me that these incredibly cheap stores may be the only choice for people [who] may be choosing between medicine and rent and food.”

Dollar General did not respond to a request to comment for this article.

Profiting Off Customers in “Food Deserts”

Two companies, Dollar Tree (which acquired Family Dollar in 2015) and Dollar General, have expanded their footprint from just under 20,000 stores in 2010 to nearly 30,000 stores in 2018, with plans to open yet another 20,000 stores in the near future. Dollar General alone opens roughly three stores a day.

Most of these new stores are in urban and rural neighborhoods where residents don’t often have access to fresh fruits and vegetables. In 2015, in fact, Dollar Tree and Dollar General represented two-thirds of all new stores in “food deserts,” defined by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) as low-income areas where a third or more of residents live far from a full-service grocery store. Dollar General predominantly targets rural areas, though it s beginning to compete with Family Dollar, which is ubiquitous in urban food deserts.

Profiting off these left-behind places is baked into dollar stores’ business plan. In 2016, low-income shoppers represented 21 percent of Dollar General’s customers but 43 percent of their sales. Dollar General executives publicly described households making under $35,000 and reliant on government assistance as their “Best Friends Forever.” When discussing growing rural-urban inequality, Dollar General’s CEO said “the economy is continuing to create more of our core customer,” i.e., more struggling rural families.

Undercutting Independent Grocery Stores

Some, including dollar-store executives themselves, argue that a low-cost retailer seeking to go where no one else will benefits underserved communities. But ILSR argues that dollar stores are not a true solution to hunger or food insecurity. Furthermore, the group says, they do nothing to promote food sovereignty, or people’s right to control the production and distribution of their own food.

Inside a Dollar General store in Eldred, Pennsylvania. (Photo credit: Random Retail)

“To the extent that dollar stores are filling, in some ways, a need in communities, I think that is true in the short term,” says Donahue. “But really our research is demonstrating … those foods aren’t as good quality as full-service grocers or independent local stores, which may be able to connect to local farmers and the larger food system.”

Dollar stores sell predominantly shelf-stable and packaged foods. Four-hundred-and-fifty Dollar General locations are experimenting with an expanded refrigerator section to respond to a demand for more fresh fruits and vegetables. But, to date, the fresh and frozen offerings that do exist in these stores consist of processed meats, dairy products, and frozen meals. In other words, customers don’t have the same wide selection as they do in a traditional full-service grocery store.

“Grocery stores have more variety and a higher quantity of healthy foods than do dollar stores,” says Dr. David Procter, director of the Rural Grocery Initiative, a program of Kansas State University’s Center for Engagement and Community Development.

Despite their reputation, dollar stores don’t provide the best deals either. They often sell products in smaller quantities to keep a low price tag and draw in cash-strapped buyers. But when comparing per-ounce prices to a traditional grocery store, dollar store customers tend to pay more. Reporting by The Guardian found that the prorated cost of dollar store milk cartons comes to $8 per gallon, for example.

Dollar store customers do, however, find genuine value in things like greeting cards, pasta, coat hangers, and other everyday home goods. But this very cost-cutting is what makes dollar stores uniquely brutal competitors for smaller independent grocers.

“There’s very little money made on all kinds of segments of the [independent] grocery store, but where [grocers] do make their most money … is in paper goods and dry goods,” explains Procter. “That is really the heart of Dollar General … and it’s cutting into the largest profit area of the grocery store, that’s the real challenge.”

By sucking away this source of revenue, dollar stores tend to drive out the few independent grocers that remain, especially in rural areas. ILSR’s report found that “it’s typical for sales [at local grocery stores] to drop by about 30 percent after a Dollar General opens.”

Additionally, a survey by the Rural Grocery Initiative found that competition from large chain stores is the single largest challenge facing independent rural grocers. In the ’90s, Walmart was their main challenger; now Dollar General is moving in where even Walmart wouldn’t go, pushing out more local businesses.

The Benefit of—and Fight for—Small, Local Stores

Residents lose more than fresh foods when their local grocery store disappears. They lose jobs, local investment, and a voice in their food choices.

According to federal data, small independent grocers employ nearly twice as many people per store when compared to dollar stores. “When you have a hometown grocer owned by people who are committed to that community, not only are all the decisions made locally, but all of the profits stay in that town,” says Procter. “Some of the money that’s being generated in Dollar General stores is going to their headquarters in Tennessee, and the decisions about whether or not that [store] stays open or what they offer is being made by out-of-state corporate decision makers.”

A Dollar Tree store in Cheshire, Conn. (Photo credit: Mike Mozart)

In addition to undercutting existing stores, the proliferation of dollar stores can shut out new entrants. This is a particular concern in low-income urban areas and communities of color. ILSR’s report features the case of Tulsa, Oklahoma, where there’s a 14-year life expectancy gap between residents in the predominantly Black north Tulsa neighborhood and residents in the predominantly white south Tulsa neighborhood. ILSR found that dollar stores have “concentrated in [Tulsa] census tracts with more African American residents,” and community members are not happy about it.

“I don’t think it’s an accident they proliferate in low socio-economic and African American communities,” Tulsa City Councilor Vanessa Hall-Harper told ILSR. “That proliferation makes it more difficult for the full-service, healthy stores to set up shop and operate successfully.”

However, Tulsa’s story also provides a glimpse of hope into what some communities can do to halt the invasion of dollar stores. Hall-Harper worked to pass zoning ordinances that would limit dollar store development and encourage full-service grocers to set up shop. She rallied residents to protest the opening of a new Dollar General and join city council meetings to show support for a temporary dollar store moratorium. City council passed the moratorium and the zoning changes seven months later. North Tulsa will soon have a new grocery store, operated by Honor Capital, a veteran-owned company that has a food-access mission. Rural communities in Kansas have similarly organized and leveraged city council to halt a proposed Dollar General.

“It’s great to see a community really fight for this ordinance and show up to public meetings and hearings and challenge those traditional systems that would have just approved development for more dollar stores in the area,” says Donahue.

Top photo: Outside a Dollar General in Fort Hancock, Texas. (Photo credit: Thomas Hawk)

Despite Small Wins, the New Farm Bill is a Failure of Imagination

BY DAN IMHOFF
Posted on: December 13, 2018  

The $867 billion 2018 Farm Bill the House and Senate passed this week is a hot mess. The Washington Post editorial board described it as “a bad outcome—that could have been worse.” And they’re right. Unfortunately, we’re all going to be affected by it.

Congress passes a farm bill around every five years. It’s an encyclopedic set of rules that doles out nearly a trillion dollars every 10 years for farm subsidies and crop insurance, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and on-farm conservation programs.

To be fair, the farm bill is a mirror of our political process. As such, it is a lopsided mix of some good policy and a lot of bad. I’ll get into the good (and mixed) news in more detail below, but for now let’s just say that progressives can be happy that programs to combat hunger, expand local and organic food production, train beginning farmers, and protect the land were all successfully championed this time around.

Still, the revised farm bill will ensure that citizens continue to pay for their food at least three times: 1) at the checkout stand; 2) in environmental cleanup and medical costs related to the consequences of industrial agriculture; and 3) as taxpayers who fund subsidies to a small group of commodity farmers deemed too big to fail.

Granted, many of those farmers are caught in a vicious cycle. Most live in areas where the only market and infrastructure support commodity crops, and yet those crops don’t support a resilient farm system. One-half of agricultural counties in the United States were designated as disaster areas from 2012 to 2016. Current subsidies are supposed to provide a safety net to even out the financial ups and downs of crop production and help farmers stay afloat in a competitive global economy.

Instead, over the last half century they’ve created an expensive and polluting engine of overproduction, which drives down prices, saturates markets, and shifts the burden of recouping costs to taxpayers who subsidize farmers’ insurance policies and other relief.

The 2018 Farm Bill will strengthen crop insurance subsidies that guarantee farm income even across swaths of the U.S. where soybean, corn and wheat growers will benefit from more generous terms on government loans. Small dairy farmers, who are regularly swamped by a flood of cheap milk from mega-dairies, will also gain protection.

Perhaps the biggest boon for commodity producers is the opening of eligibility loopholes. By blurring the definitions of what constitutes a “family farm,” the new bill will allow these farms to balloon in size and exponentially dip into the public trough. Current household limits for the two largest subsidy programs are set at $125,000 per year per operator and $250,000 for a married couple. (Household operations with an adjusted gross income under $900,000, and $1,800,000 for couples, are eligible.)

The revised law will now permit children and their spouses to also be seen as “actively engaged” in farming and therefore eligible for subsidies. It doesn’t end there. Nephews, nieces, cousins, and other extended family members can be daisy-chained to receive benefits as long as they can demonstrate participation in farm management even if they don’t set foot on the farm. This was justified in the name of supporting a new generation of family farmers. It seems more designed to help the big operations get bigger.

Swaddling struggling commodity farmers in a lavish safety net might be acceptable if we were also building a nationwide foundation of stewardship and vibrant local food production. But most of the nation’s ever-increasing harvests of corn (farmers grew a near-record 14.6 bushels in 2018) and soybeans (farmers grew a record 4.5 billion bushels in 2018) aren’t even eaten directly by humans. They’re fed to cattle, hogs, and poultry or transformed into processed food ingredients and biofuels.

More than 20 percent of our agricultural output is exported. The real winners are the grain traders, meat packers, ethanol distributors, agrochemical corporations, equipment manufacturers, financiers, and insurers whose lobbyists write the farm bills and who benefit from low commodity prices and capital-intensive farming methods. There is a waste crisis as well: 40 percent of the food produced never reaches an eater’s plate; much of it ends up in landfills.

It is important to note that these increases in farm supports are the product of a compromise reached through negotiation. The bills passed separately by the House and Senate earlier this year were so different that they went into a process known as conferencing, wherein majority and minority leaders in both Agriculture Committees attempt to make a deal.

The House Bill included much-discussed work and job training requirements for some SNAP recipients. In the name of promoting “independence” this would have placed additional hoops in the path of over a million underemployed Americans seeking hunger relief—for questionable budget savings. This issue may not be settled, however. U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Secretary Sonny Purdue has drafted a rule intended to crack down on recipients who currently have work requirement waivers. The House Bill also included riders that would have exempted pesticides from clean water violations and eased restrictions on logging in federal lands under the guise of reducing fuel loads. Democrats declared victory after these crucial elements were dropped in the conference process.

In the end, one wonders whether these were ever serious expectations or just part of a shrewd Republican strategy. More importantly, why did the Democrats not wait until January to conference the bill when the newly elected House may have offered an opportunity for much needed reforms?

There are a few gains to so-called “small but mighty” programs. Efforts to expand composting operations and reduce food waste in 10 states, along with the establishment of a food loss and waste reduction liaison were funded at $25 million per year through 2023. Industrial hemp will now be recognized by the USDA as a legitimate commodity crop, and may offer an additional cash crop to rotate in with commodity crops. (That may also provide some temporary relief in the form of hemp-derived, non-psychoactive cannabidiol, or CBD, for citizens frustrated by the lack of forward thinking in the bill otherwise.)

Permanent mandatory funding was also granted for local food initiatives, beginner farmer support, and organic research. Given the value that these programs generate and proven track records, however, their funding should have not only been guaranteed but increased ten-fold.

Conservation spending—which goes to help farmers use practices that reduce air and water pollution, improve the soil, and sequester carbon—was renewed at 2018 levels. There will be an increase of 3 million acres in the Conservation Reserve Program, which pays landowners not to farm on land and to protect on-farm habitat. CRP payments will be reduced to 80 percent of a county’s average rental acreage, however, making it a less attractive option than rolling the dice with crop insurance.

The innovative Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP) survived the House bill’s attempt to absorb it into the Environmental Quality Incentives Program but saw its budget nearly cut in half. The CSP, as it is known, rewards farmers for a range of stewardship activities rather than per acre output of corn, soybeans, etc. CSP pays farmers to reduce their use of chemicals, grow cover crops, optimize their use of energy, protect wildlife habitat, and diversify their operations. This is exactly the type of farming we need more than ever, as the climate warms and becomes less predictable and nitrogen levels in our waterways and oceans have reached crisis level.

Federal money spent on conservation programs are arguably the most justifiable investments the government makes in our rural landscapes. In the absence of policies that encourage supply management, crop subsidies and crop insurance payments encourage the overproduction of commodities by taking the risks out of planting. The consequences of low prices and intensive farming practices then become the responsibility of the taxpayers.

When global markets are flooded with cheap commodities, it’s often the small holder farmers in nations without subsidies who are most affected. Conservation programs should be designed to support landowners for efforts the market does not: building resilience with perennial habitats that can harbor fish and wildlife, filtering runoff, limiting storm damage, and removing carbon from the atmosphere by storing it deep within the soil.

Some policymakers have declared the preservation of conservation budgets at the current spending levels as a key victory. But in the larger scheme of things, citizens were still done a great disservice. Conservation programs were slashed by $6 billion during the 2014 Farm Bill and should have been restored to those former spending levels at a minimum.

That funding could be directed to drastically increase our use of cover crops such as rye and legumes, which provide non-chemical nutrients and build organic matter and protect bare soil on farms and rangelands. On-farm energy use could be aggressively reduced. Research into soil building, no-till and organic farming, and rangeland management must be significantly scaled up. Animals could be removed from massive feeding operations and re-integrated in lesser numbers in managed pasture rotations. This effort will require a whole new generation of training and infrastructure, including hundreds of regional processing facilities.

Farmers could massively expand habitat in and around farmlands by taking marginal lands and former field borders and drained wetlands out of production and planting deep rooted perennials to create a bank of underground carbon. There are historical examples of such bold action in response to crisis. In 1935, for example, the government launched the Plains Shelterbelt Project, with the goal of planting a 100-mile wide swath of trees from North Dakota to Texas to provide a line of defense against wind erosion and the Dust Bowl.

The farm bill is our chance to invest in agriculture that is ecologically and economically sustainable. When it comes to food and agriculture policy, we reap what we sow.

Samson Ogbole Is A Nigerian Farmer Who Wants To Bring Aeroponics To The World

12/24/2018

by Perry Miller

Samson Ogbole is a Nigerian farmer who is trying to solve the problem of land shortages in his native country. Nigeria’s population has now reached 190 million, but there isn’t enough land in the country to grow the food needed for the ever-growing population. So, Ogbole has found a solution — aeroponics.

This unconventional method is the process of growing plants in the air without using soil. Ogbole first got involved with soilless farming in 2014, and just two years later founded PS Nutraceuticals, a company that puts cutting-edge agricultural technologies into action to improve the efficiency of food production and to ensure food security.

“Soilless growing entails removing the soil component, bringing in substitutes, and applying fertilizer to enable the plants to grow,” Ogbole says. “With soilless farming, we have been able to push for what you call urban farming, where we now have farms in cities such that we are able to cut off the middlemen and marketers.”

Ogbole says that there are many advantages to aeroponics, the biggest being that you can grow crops at any time of the year. The method has also allowed them to eliminate pathogens that naturally exist in the soil and affect crops.

Nigeria needs an estimated 78.5 million hectares of land to produce enough food for the population. But, right now there are only 30 million hectares of farmland under cultivation, according to the International Trade Administration of the United States.

And, Ogbole says that only 46 percent of Nigerian soil is fertile to grow crops, so the country needs to take steps towards self-sustainability in food production and let technology play a more prominent role. He believes that the “war of the future will be fought through agriculture.”

“We’re bringing in technology into agriculture so that the youth can actually see this as a viable option,” explains Ogbole. “We also want to ensure that food production is no longer seasonal, and we’re also bringing in smart sensor technologies into agriculture so that you’re able to get feedback from your plants.”

The farmer added that the future of the economy depends on a few people who have bright ideas and can think outside the box. It is ideas, not money, that solves problems.

Via CNN

Images via Shutterstock