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California Rain Affecting Arugula Supplies
Growing conditions for arugula in parts of California have not been ideal after the heavy, consistent rainfall over the last few weeks
Growing conditions for arugula in parts of California have not been ideal after the heavy, consistent rainfall over the last few weeks. Production remains steady though and growers are expecting that the effects from the rain will be short-lived. Moreover, the rainy conditions are something growers say they are accustomed to during winter and therefore plan accordingly.
"We grow both flat leaf and the more popular wild arugula year round," said Mark Lopez of Kenter Canyon Farms in Sun Valley. "At the moment, it has been very difficult because there has been more instances of mildew due to the rainy and humid conditions over the past month. For the most part, supplies have remained consistent. We plant in two-week cycles, so if there are any problems, they never lasts long. As a result, we are hoping the issue with the presence of mildew will disappear very shortly."
Multiple packaging options
Kenter Canyon Farms grows a wide selection of salad greens including Baby Kale, Tatsoi, Mizuno as well as ingredients that make up the spring mix blend. The company supplies a diverse mix of customers from high-end restaurants to retailers, mainly in the Los Angeles area. Consequently, they also have a varied selection of packaging options to suit each market.
"Arugula is always in high demand for salad mixes, gourmet burgers, restaurant menus and for family meals," Lopez shared. "Kenter Canyon Farms has multiple packaging options from as small as a 5oz clamshell for our retail customers, up to a 4lb bulk case for foodservice. We only deliver to the LA produce district, however our products do appear nationally."
"We are a California family farm producing year round crops of certified organic lettuces, herbs and leafy greens," he concluded. "Seasonally, we produce Valencia oranges, navel oranges, Meyer lemons and heirloom avocados. We also grow a selection of heritage tomatoes for our local farmers markets."
For more information:
Mark Lopez
Kenter Canyon Farms
Ph: +1 (818) 768-5545
mark@kentercanyonfarms.com
www.kentercanyonfarms.com
Publication date : 2/19/2019
Author: Dennis Rettke
© FreshPlaza.com
Are You A Teenager Who Is Passionate About Technology And The Environment?
This is your time to shine!
Seeds&Chips and Fondazione Francesca Rava - NPH Italia Onlus
launch the Call for Teenovators
Applicants have the chance to speak at the next edition of the Summit and meet with the innovators and world leaders who are shaping the future of the planet
The deadline for applications is April 10th 2019:
https://seedsandchips.com/#call-teenovator
Milan, February 14th 2019 - Seeds&Chips - The Global Food Innovation Summit – the largest food innovation summit in the world – in collaboration with Fondazione Francesca Rava - N.P.H. Italia Onlus, a charitable non profit foundation that helps children in serious need in Italy and worldwide, is launching the Call for Teenovators.
The objective is to find the most passionate and dedicated teenagers (ages 13 to 19), determined to change the food system and address the most pressing global issues in accordance with the UN Sustainable Development Goals. These teenagers will inspire the current and next generation of leaders at the fifth edition of Seeds&Chips, from May 6-9, 2019 in Milan, Italy at Fiera Milano, Rho.
At the Summit, Teenovators will have the chance to open the conference sessions for our exceptional speakers – heads of state, entrepreneurs, opinion leaders and innovators – from around the world, and share their thoughts and experiences with them.
Giving a voice to young people has always been a priority for Seeds&Chips. As ambassadors for the next generation, they are spokespeople for the fundamental changes that we must undertake, and symbols of the incredible potential we have to meet these challenges. It is them, after all, who have the most influence on the future, not just from a food innovation point of view. In addition to involving many teenagers, Seeds&Chips 2019 is also calling for Young Pioneers (age 20-25) to share with the world their current projects and plans for the future.
“The world needs to take inspiration from young people,” says Marco Gualtieri, Chairman and Founder of Seeds&Chips. “In the years to come new generations will have to face great challenges: soil degradation, biodiversity loss, pollution, access to water and climate change pose very serious threats to the future of humanity as we know it. With their choices and efforts, new generations have the power to help humanity transition to a better food system and to reverse the environmental damages that are threatening life on Earth. Luckily, research shows that Generation Z is poised to become the most entrepreneurial generation ever, bound to influence the next big wave of innovation and fully achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.”
“We’re enthusiastic about the synergy with Seeds&Chips because an important part of the Fondazione Francesca Rava – N.P.H. Italia Onlus is educating young people about respecting themselves, others and the environment that surrounds them,” says President Mariavittoria Rava. “N.P.H. Nuestros Pequeños Hermanos, which represents the Francesca Rava Fouundation in Italy has been changing people’s lives for over 60 years, with the motto one child at a time, from the streets to the degree.
Through our work in schools and campuses, we listen to the motivated voices of many young people who don’t often get the chance to express themselves and be valued.
The partnership with Seeds&Chips, thanks also to the support of Eco Eridania, allows us to give many deserving young people the opportunity to bring their ideas to the world stage with and be influencers for a better tomorrow.”
Seeds&Chips and the Fondazione Francesca Rava – N.P.H. Italia Onlus are thus launching a worldwide call to all teen innovators who are motivated to shape the future of the planet and of humanity.
Are you ready to impact the future?
Complete and submit the application form available on our website https://seedsandchips.com/#call-teenovator no later than April 10th, 2019.
Seeds&Chips - The Global Food Innovation Summit, founded by entrepreneur Marco Gualtieri, is the largest food innovation event in the world. Every year since 2015, the Summit has brought together and expanded an ecosystem of startups, companies, universities, organizations, investors, accelerators and incubators, opinion leaders and policy makers from all over the world. It functions as an international meeting point for innovators, influential experts and global leaders from the public and private sector to develop and implement solutions for the most pressing issues in food production and supply.
It showcases the latest ideas and state-of-the-art technologies that hold the potential to transform our food system and help achieve the targets set by the Sustainable Development Goals. In 2017, Seeds&Chips’ keynote speaker President Barack Obama delivered inspiring remarks on the importance of food innovation and the impact of climate change and sustainable practices on our global food system. T
he 2018 edition saw more than 300 international speakers, among them former US Secretary of State John Kerry, President of IFAD Gilbert Houngbo, Minister of Agriculture of the Kingdom of The Netherlands Carola Schouten, former European Commission President and Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi, Starbucks’ former CEO and Chairman Howard Schultz and Intellectual Ventures Founder Nathan Myhrvold.
Fondazione Francesca Rava Fondazione Francesca Rava – N.P.H. Italia Onlus is an independent, non political, charitable non profit foundation whose mission is to help children in serious need, in Italy and worldwide, through children sponsorship, fundraising projects, volunteers and educational programs. In Italy the Foundation represents N.P.H. (Nuestros Pequenos Hermanos – Our little brothers and sisters) a charitable organization for orphaned and abandoned children in Latin America, founded in 1954 by Father William Wasson, from Phoenix, Arizona. NPH philosophy was even studied by Doctor Erich Fromm, a renowned German social psychologist. In more than 60 years, more than 25,000 orphaned and abandoned children have been saved, nourished, raised with love and educated in the N.P.H. orphanages in Mexico, Haiti, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Dominican Republic, Peru and Bolivia. The Francesca Rava Foundation was born in 2000 in the name of Francesca, a bright and generous young woman who suddenly died in a car crash, after her sister Mariavittoria, a lawyer, met N.P.H. and decided to dedicate her life to help children. Since then, an outstanding amount of projects were supported from Italy, accomplished in Haiti, where the Foundation is particularly committed, and in other countries in Latin America to support N.P.H. children.
Heritage Crops That Feed on Sea Water Could Feed the UAE's Growing Population
Scientists are looking to genetically modify crops that were grown here in ancient times to help solve the region's food security issues.
Scientists are hoping to tackle the region’s food insecurity by reintroducing heritage crops that have been genetically modified to grow using saltwater straight from the sea.
Poor soil coupled with a scarcity of fresh water has led the UAE, and much of the region, to rely on importing food to feed its populations.
Euro-centric methods of agriculture are ill-suited for the hot and dry land, and some vegetables require 30 or more times the water in the UAE than is needed to grow the same plant in cooler environments.
Importing sufficed for decades as little consideration was given to environmental impact. But today, with the threat of global warming and the food industry being one of the biggest culprits, the way we eat has become one the most important frontiers for sustainability.
Dr Ismahane Elouafi, director-general of the International Centre of Biosaline Agriculture, does not agree with the idea that deserts are barren environments. Instead, she believes that although regional appetites have veered away from what the land naturally provides, they must be brought back.
“Sixty per cent of our food comes from only four crops. There are only 150 crops available on the market out of the 7,000 our ancestors used to grow,” Dr Elouafi said.
Wheat, maize, rice and potatoes feed the majority of the world’s population. But all four of those crops, which were genetically engineered to sustain people during the European industrial revolution, are unsuitable for growth outside the Northern Hemisphere.
Instead, she says that crops such as millet, which some historians believe was among the first seeds grown in the Fertile Crescent – an area of the Middle East where agriculture and some of the earliestcivilisations began – can fulfil food demand.
Pearl millet is among the crops the ICBA are hoping to reintroduce to the UAE. Photo by Showkat Nabi
Dr Elouafi is now seeking other plants that can grow in the UAE, adding thousands of species of ancient crop seeds to ICBA’s gene bank. Her scientists are digging through time to find some of the 7,000 crops our ancestors used and, from those, identifying species that are saline-resistant, nutrient-rich and, of course, tasty.
“We’re only focusing on a few for now because breeding is extremely expensive. That’s why most of the countries to the south [of the Northern Hemisphere] still use crops from the north – they are put on the market by multinationals,” she said.
But now, breakthroughs in genetic coding technology can tremendously reduce the cost of breeding, meaning that it may be possible to engineer endemic crops to become easier to grow and better suited to mass cultivation in the region.
The shortage of water, she said, is one of the main constraints to UAE food production. Water scarcity has been offset in the country by some of the world’s most substantial desalination plants – an energy-intensive practice.
But instead of desalinating seawater for crops, Dr Elouafi wants to engineer crops so they can be irrigated with water straight from the sea.
“It is possible – there are crops that have salinity tolerance already. We’re looking at these crops and into using either gene editing or hybrids to get crops on to the market that take more saline water and are more nutritious,” she said.
Omar Al Jundi is the founder and chief executive of Badia Farms, the region’s first vertical farm, in Al Quoz, Dubai. Reem Mohammed/The National
These innovations could be used in conjunction with developments such as Omar Al Jundi’s vertical farm, the first commercial one to launch in Dubai. It could be used to grow ICBA’s regionally-suitable crops to disrupt current energy-intensive agriculture in the Arab world.
“Our water bill for August was Dh1,500. That is lower than my home water bill. We’re able to harvest the majority of the water we use, recycle it and use the humidity to nourish plants,” said Mr Al Jundi, the founder and chief executive of Badia vertical farm, which produces 1,000 heads of lettuce at a time.
Vertical farming uses hydroponic systems to yield crops. Being indoors, vertical farms seldom need pesticides and the technology is progressing at a rate that could allow it to grow anything, including ancient or heritage crops.
He said using his technology to grow sustainable plants, such as the ones ICBA is rediscovering, is completely achievable and part of his vision for the future of urban agriculture.
“You can grow as high as you want, but going up 10 to 20 storeys produces a lot – it could feed thousands, if not more. This is the future.”
Updated: January 16, 2019 08:35 AM
Can We Grow More Food on Less Land? We’ll Have To, A New Study Finds
If the world hopes to make meaningful progress on climate change, it won’t be enough for cars and factories to get cleaner. Our cows and wheat fields will have to become radically more efficient, too.
By Brad Plumer
Dec. 5, 2018
WASHINGTON — If the world hopes to make meaningful progress on climate change, it won’t be enough for cars and factories to get cleaner. Our cows and wheat fields will have to become radically more efficient, too.
That’s the basic conclusion of a sweeping new study issued Wednesday by the World Resources Institute, an environmental group. The report warns that the world’s agricultural system will need drastic changes in the next few decades in order to feed billions more people without triggering a climate catastrophe.
The challenge is daunting: Agriculture already occupies roughly 40 percent of the world’s land and is responsible for about a quarter of humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions. But with the global population expected to grow from 7.2 billion people today to nearly 10 billion by 2050, and with many millions of people eating more meat as incomes rise, that environmental impact is on pace to expand dramatically.
Based on current trends, the authors calculated, the world would need to produce 56 percent more calories in 2050 than it did in 2010. If farmers and ranchers met that demand by clearing away more forests and other ecosystems for cropland and pasture, as they have often done in the past, they would end up transforming an area twice the size of India.
That, in turn, could make it nearly impossible to stay below 2 degrees Celsius of global warming, the agreed-upon international goal, even if the world’s fossil-fuel emissions were rapidly phased down. When forests are converted into farmland, the large stores of carbon locked away in those trees is released into the atmosphere.
“Food is the mother of all sustainability challenges,” said Janet Ranganathan, vice president for science and research at the World Resources Institute. “We can’t get below 2 degrees without major changes to this system.”
Less meat, but also better farming
The new study, the result of six years’ worth of modeling work conducted in partnership with French agricultural researchers, is hardly the first to warn that feeding the world sustainably will be a formidable task. But the authors take a different view of the most plausible solutions.
In the past, researchers who have looked at the food problem have suggested that the key to a sustainable agriculture system is to persuade consumers to eat far less meat and waste far less of the food that’s already grown.
The new report, however, cautions that there may be limits to how much those strategies can achieve on their own. The authors do recommend that the biggest consumers of beef and lamb, such as those in Europe and the United States, could cut back their consumption by about 40 percent by 2050, or down to about 1.5 servings a week on average. Those two types of meat have especially large environmental footprints.
But the authors are not counting on a major worldwide shift to vegetarianism.
“We wanted to avoid relying on magic asterisks,” said Timothy D. Searchinger, a researcher at Princeton University and the World Resources Institute and lead author of the report. “We could imagine a significant shift from beef to chicken, and that by itself goes a long way.” (Poultry production has about one-eighth the climate impact of beef production.)
So, in addition to actions on diet and food waste, the researchers also focused on dozens of broad strategies that could allow farmers and ranchers to grow far more food on existing agricultural lands while cutting emissions, a feat that would require a major shift in farming practices worldwide and rapid advances in technology.
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A farm in the Pays de la Loire region of France. Cows have an especially large environmental footprint.CreditLoic Venance/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
For example, they note, in parts of Brazil, the best-managed grazing lands can produce four times as much beef per acre as poorly managed lands — in part owing to differences in cattle health and how well the grass is fertilized. Improving productivity across the board could help satisfy rising meat demand while lessening the need to clear broad swaths of rain forest.
The authors also pointed to possible techniques to reduce the climate impact of existing farms. For instance, new chemical compounds could help prevent nitrogen fertilizers from producing nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas. And scientists are exploring feed additives that get cows to burp up less methane, another big contributor to global warming.
The report notes that producing 56 percent more calories without expanding agricultural land could prove even more difficult if, as expected, rising temperatures reduce crop yields. But, Mr. Searchinger said, many of the recommendations in the report, such as breeding new, higher-yielding crop varieties or preventing soil erosion, could also help farmers adapt to climate change.
Conserving the world’s remaining forests
The researchers emphasize that strategies to improve the productivity of existing croplands and pastures will have to be paired with more rigorous conservation policies to protect existing forests in places like Brazil or sub-Saharan Africa. Otherwise, farmers will just find it more profitable to clear more forests for agriculture — with dire climate consequences.
“In the past, we’ve often seen agricultural policies and conservation policies moving in parallel without a lot of interaction,” said Linus Blomqvist, director of conservation at the Breakthrough Institute, who was not involved in the study. “The big challenge is to link the two, so that we get more intensive farming without using more land.”
In another contentious recommendation, the report’s authors call for a limit on the use of bioenergy crops, such as corn grown for ethanol in cars, that compete with food crops for land.
Money is also a hurdle. The report’s authors call for large increases in research funding to look at ideas like fertilizers that can be made without the use of fossil fuels, organic sprays that can reduce waste by preserving fresh food for longer, and genetic editing techniques that might produce higher-yielding crops. They also urge new regulations that would encourage private industry to develop sustainable agricultural technologies.
Over the past three years, 51 countries have spent roughly $570 billion a year to support food production, said Tobias Baedeker, an agricultural economist at the World Bank, which contributed to the new study.
If those subsidies were overhauled so that they helped support more sustainable practices, Mr. Baedeker said, “we could have a real game-changer on our hands.”
Hippie Amenities With A High-End Twist
A hippie house share? Not quite. It was crafts and cocktails night at Urby Staten Island, an upscale rental complex where the demographic skews more young professional than drum-circle enthusiast.
By Kim Velsey
Aug. 18, 2017
Garden construction in progress on the eighth floor deck of 550 Vanderbilt in Brooklyn.CreditCreditEmon Hassan for The New York Times
As dusk fell over Staten Island on a recent evening, about 10 people sat around a large wooden table in a communal kitchen, listening to Van Morrison and painting terra-cotta flowerpots. Houseplants were suspended from the room’s high wood-beamed ceilings, and the smell of freshly baked bread hung in the air.
A hippie house share? Not quite. It was crafts and cocktails night at Urby Staten Island, an upscale rental complex where the demographic skews more young professional than drum-circle enthusiast. Nonetheless, the complex has features that might make that crowd feel right at home: In addition to the communal kitchen, there’s a 5,000-square-foot urban farm, a 20-hive apiary — both tended by live-in farmers/beekeepers — and a kombucha workshop planned for later this summer.
“Live cultures are really something people are responding to,” said Brendan Costello, the complex’s in-residence chef, as he wiped the last of the bread crumbs and black maple butter from the countertops. He has already taught well-attended workshops on making sauerkraut and kimchi.
Just as Birkenstocks and bee pollen have come back in style, so have crunchy lifestyle concepts, from yoga and meditation to composting and home fermentation. And with veganism, Waldorf schools, doulas and healing crystals shifting from far out to very much in fashion, a growing number of New York luxury buildings have embraced the hallmarks of 1970s hippiedom with a high-end twist. Look for amenities like rooftop gardens, kitchen composters, art and meditation studios, bike shares, infrared saunas, even an adult treehouse.
“Especially in Brooklyn, the concrete jungle is not the atmosphere people are aiming for,” said Ashley Cotton, an executive vice president of Forest City New York, whose recently opened condo in Prospect Heights, 550 Vanderbilt, developed in partnership with Greenland USA, has window planters for units on lower floors and a communal garden terrace with individual plots on the eighth floor. Two of the terrace’s six large planters will be tended by a nearby farm-to-table restaurant, Olmsted, which will also offer gardening lessons to residents.
Residents of URBY in Staten Island visit a farmstand set up by Empress Green in Urby’s communal kitchen.CreditEmon Hassan for The New York Times
Residents of URBY in Staten Island visit a farmstand set up by Empress Green in Urby’s communal kitchen.CreditEmon Hassan for The New York Times
At Pierhouse, the Toll Brothers City Living condo in Brooklyn Bridge Park in Brooklyn, every kitchen has an in-unit composter, a first for a Toll Brothers development.
“If we were deciding between a compost unit and a wine chiller, we’d probably go with the wine chiller since more people would be interested,” said David von Spreckelsen, the president of Toll Brothers City Living division. “But here we had large kitchens and a lot of the units have outdoor space, so we thought people could compost in their kitchen and go right out to their garden.”
While such amenities might be aspirational for some, others are yearning to get their hands dirty. Christine Blackburn, an associate broker at Compass real estate, said that for a woman to whom she recently sold a condo at 144 North Eighth Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the roof garden was the most important amenity.
“She didn’t care about the gym, she didn’t care about the garage,” Ms. Blackburn said. “They live in a $2 million condo, but for her to be able to grow tomatoes with her son, that was it.
“The garden plots in that building are tiny,” she added, “but it makes some people feel like they’re not living in a high-rise.”
Public green space has always been a priority, of course, and let’s not forget that large swaths of all five boroughs were once farmland.
Green rooftops have some historical antecedents in the city: The Ansonia, on the Upper West Side, kept 500 chickens on its rooftop farm in the early 20th century, with eggs delivered daily to the tenants, according to “The Sky’s the Limit,” a book by Steven Gaines. But the roof was shut down by the Department of Health after just a few years, in 1907. And for the past century, it was accepted that living in New York meant leaving nature, and local honey, behind.
“It definitely used to be an either/or mentality,” said Rick Cook, a founder of the architecture firm CookFox and a designer of 550 Vanderbilt, who moved to New York from a small town upstate in 1983. But after studying abroad in Florence, Italy, he said, “I understand you could have both. That, in fact, the highest quality of life is to have both.”
Indeed, the explosion of the wellness industry has left many craving a different kind of New York lifestyle.
For a younger generation, practices like organic gardening and meditation may not carry any whiff of the counterculture.
“Being green is modern, being organic is modern,” said Jordan Horowitz, 26, an assistant manager of Enterprise Rent-a-Car who grew up gardening in suburban New Jersey and was excited to get a studio at Urby, where residents have an entire city block of gardens. But he is equally enthusiastic about the pool, the giant bean bags strewn across the grounds and learning to make Vietnamese cuisine from scratch in Mr. Costello’s cooking classes.
That many such offerings tend to be far more upscale than their 1970s counterparts no doubt helps to remove any lingering hippie vibe. Rather than a stable of rusty Schwinns, for example, 50 West, in the financial district, allows residents to pedal out on Porsche bikes that cost $3,700 a pop.
Javier and Irina Lattanzio, residents and brokers of 50 West in Lower Manhattan, take a spin on Porsche bikes provided by the building.CreditSasha Maslov for The New York Times
Javier and Irina Lattanzio, residents and brokers of 50 West in Lower Manhattan, take a spin on Porsche bikes provided by the building.CreditSasha Maslov for The New York Times
“Yes, it’s sharing, but in a luxury manner,” said Javier Lattanzio, the sales manager at the condo.
The adult treehouse at One Manhattan Square on the Lower East Side, likewise, is hardly primitive, with Wi-Fi and a staircase. As for all those rooftop herb gardens, asked if they are actually used, one broker replied that they definitely were, though not necessarily for a Moosewood recipe: On a recent trip to 338 Berry in Williamsburg, she saw people with Aperol spritzes clipping herbs to put in their cocktails.
Frank Monterisi, a senior vice president of the Related Companies, emphasized that the new generation of renters and buyers “like to see sustainability, they like to see rooftop gardens.”
At Hunter’s Point South, Related’s massive affordable housing complex in Long Island City, Queens, residents can receive deliveries of fresh vegetables from a C.S.A. — community-supported agriculture. There are also an apiary, about 2,300 square feet of rooftop gardens and a waiting list for the gardening club.
“Everyone wants to garden now. I think New Yorkers have gotten comfortable with the amount of concrete we have, but they also want to see green,” said Joyce Artis, a retired Port Authority worker who helps organize the gardening program at the complex and grows microgreens and lemon trees in her apartment.
Ms. Artis said that when she was growing up in Brooklyn, she was sent to visit relatives in North Carolina in the summer, and hated having to get up early to weed. “But then as I got older, I started missing it,” she said. “And I started growing things in my apartment. No matter how small your space I always say: ‘You can grow one thing.’”
Ms. Blackburn, the Compass broker, said that gardening, for some, is a version of meditation. “Maybe they’re not sitting there with a meditation app, but sticking their hands in the soil — it doesn’t matter if someone’s making $10 million a year — it can be very therapeutic.”
She expects the enthusiasm to continue and intensify. “I wouldn’t be surprised in a year if a luxury building had a chicken coop,” she said.
The Number One Reason Why Indoor Vertical Farming Makes Sense?
Contributed Content by: Robert Colangelo, Green Sense Farms Holding’s, Inc.
With a temperature of -23 F and a -53F windchill,
the Green Sense Farms team is still growing strong!
ZipGrow Helping To Transform Indoor Agriculture
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.
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
Belgian Supermarket to Introduce In-Store Vertical Farms
The retail group sees multilayer cultivation as part of its wider aim of pursuing more sustainable products, shortened chains and innovation.
Colruyt Group is testing a system developed in-house for 'vertical farming' or multilayer cultivation in climate-controlled conditions. The retail group sees multilayer cultivation as part of its wider aim of pursuing more sustainable products, shortened chains and innovation. Colruyt Group aims to start stocking the shelves of its retail formula Bio-Planet with the first herbs from its vertical farm from the autumn of 2019, under its own label Boni Selection, which is strongly committed to a sustainable product range.
Ambition: herbs with a very small ecological footprint
Consumers are making increasing demands regarding responsible consumption. Colruyt Group wants to offer a possible solution using vertical farming. "Our multilayer cultivation creates the perfect conditions for plants", explains Stefan Goethaert, Director at Colruyt Group and responsible for product sustainability. "Air, light, water and nutrients are dosed in the ideal quantities. As a result, we only use the amount of energy and raw materials that is strictly necessary, whilst still allowing the plant to achieve optimum growth. And it's no longer necessary to use pesticides. The plants are therefore 100% natural. Moreover, they reach maturity twice as fast than when conventionally cultivated. And the quality remains high throughout the year, regardless of the weather conditions."
The first results after a year of testing confirm the story, says Stefan Goethaert. "We are already using 90% less water and 50% less nutrients than in conventional cultivation. We reuse all of the nutrients that the plant doesn't use. Moreover, we only work with filtered rainwater. Our LED lighting is twice as efficient as the current standard on the market. And the system runs on green electricity from our own wind turbines and solar panels." It is Colruyt Group's ambition to sell herbs that have a very small ecological footprint. That's why the entire lifecycle of the plants is looked at, from seed to consumer's home. The retailer is therefore also working on recyclable packaging and a long shelf life, and will minimise the number of kilometres driven by integrating the vertical farm in a distribution centre in the future.
Home-grown innovative technology
Colruyt Group is the first retailer in Belgium to test a vertical farm that was developed in-house. The technology used has been fully developed within its own R&D department. In the current test set-up, biotechnologists and engineers continue to work on optimising growing conditions.
For Colruyt Group, this project isn't a leap into the unknown: recent innovation projects around water purification, LED lighting, renewable energy, automation, eco-design and refrigeration have formed the basis. In addition, the R&D department works together with a number of knowledge institutions. "We are also in talks with potential partners", adds Stefan Goethaert. "We also want to make some of the plants available to innovative entrepreneurs who work on food trends. Together we can explore the possibilities for using our products."
First trial at Bio-planet in 2019
"We are still in the testing phase, but the goal is to sell the first herbs at Bio-planet within a year", says Jo Ghilain, business unit manager of Bio-planet. "Vertical farming fits perfectly with our brand positioning. Bio-Planet stands for healthy, natural and local products. Furthermore, our customers are early adopters and are looking for added value. They are the people demanding products with a sustainable story." The herbs are currently grown using certified organic seed and substrate. "That was a decisive argument, in addition to the sustainability score of the plants", says Jo Ghilain.
Meanwhile, Bio-Planet customers were the first to taste test basil plants in three stores: on 27 November in Uccle, on 28 November in Grimbergen and Jambes. Jo Ghilain emphasises the added value of this co-creation: "The people of Uccle, Grimbergen and Jambes will help us determine the eventual flavour of the plants. Based on their opinions, we will adjust the cultivation process and the taste. This means that our customers actually choose the end result themselves."
For more information:
Colruyt Group
www.colruytgroup.com
Publication date : 12/5/2018
Seeds&Chips
“We believe that technological innovation can create a better, safer, and more resilient food system to fight hunger for everyone”
ITALY
Marco Gualtieri is an Italian businessman who has used his entrepreneurial skills to put together a coalition of private-sector partners and others focused on innovation in the global food chain.
Gualtieri’s innovative company, Seeds&Chips, concerns itself with a wide variety of issues surrounding the challenges of sustainable food system. Seeds&Chips in fact works with people who are dedicated to transforming the food chain towards a more meaningful future in the belief that the key to sustainability lies in connecting the dots, creating partnerships and fostering collaborations that bring new ideas to life.
“But we can’t do it alone. Collaboration is at the heart of our mission,” Gualtieri says.
Through their Global Food Innovation Summit and other activities, participants look at new ways to improve their roles in food production, processing, distribution, communication and consumption.
In fact, Seeds&Chips has built one of the largest food and ag tech ecosystems in the world, and through this network they engage innovators, investors, companies, institutions and policy makers from every point of the global food chain, and provide a platform for them to connect and work together for a more sustainable future.
They are applying their expertise in agriculture, food distribution, technology, economics, socio-economic development, and other areas to address issues as varied as the promotion of local food crops for better nutrition, improving financing, training and markets for smallholder farmers, reducing the environmental footprint of irrigation, food transportation and packaging, and reducing food loss and waste along the entire supply chain.
Tesco’s CEO Calls On Food Industry To Tackle Food Waste
Every year, a third of the world’s food goes to waste.
Posted By: Martin White on: September 25, 2018
Tesco CEO Dave Lewis will today call on the global food industry to be more transparent and publish their food waste data, to ensure that no food goes to waste across the global food chain.
Lewis will announce his call for action at the Champions 12.3 conference in New York today, and a statement from the retailer said that 27 of Tesco’s major suppliers such as Müller Milk & Ingredients, Kerry and Arla will soon publish their food waste data for the first time.
The statement also claimed that major branded Tesco suppliers such as Mars, General Mills and Unilever will commit to measure and publish their food waste data within the next year.
Tesco published food waste figures for its Republic of Ireland and Central European operations for the first time last year, and the retailer claims that it is “70% of the way towards its target that no food, safe for human consumption, goes to waste.”
According to the statement, Lewis will say: “Every year, a third of the world’s food goes to waste. That’s the equivalent of 1.3 billion tonnes of food being thrown away and we think that’s simply not right.
“We hope every country, major city and company involved in the food supply chain publishes their own food waste data, so that together we can take targeted action to reduce waste.
“We believe that what gets measured gets managed. Ultimately, the only way to tackle food waste is to understand the challenge – to know where in the supply chain food is wasted.”
Champions 12.3 is a coalition of executives from governments, businesses and international organisations which aims to halve global food waste at the retail and consumer levels by 2030.
Study Shows How Badly Smog Can Cripple Solar Farms
New research finds that severe air pollution can eliminate all profits from solar panel installations.
Aug 30, 2018
A lot can keep solar panels from generating electricity, from cloud cover blocking the sun to simply being nighttime. But according to recent research, one of the biggest obstacles facing solar farms is smog and haze from air pollution.
It’s not surprising that air pollution can make solar panels less effective since it can cut down on visibility and reduce the amount of sunlight reaching the ground. In the past, researchers have found that air pollution can lead to dust buildup on solar panels that can dramatically reduce their effectiveness.
This new research, from scientists at MIT and Singapore, calculates how much solar energy is lost due to smog in many of the world’s biggest cities. In the city of Delhi, one of the world’s most polluted cities, electricity generation is reduced by more than 10 percent the study finds, which translates to a cost of more than $20 million.
The problem is more than just inefficiency. A loss of this size could spell doom for many urban solar farms by seriously inhibiting their ability to turn a profit. Pollution can turn a money-making solar farm into a money sink.
Even worse, the lack of a solar alternative naturally just increases reliance on smog-generating fossil fuels and could serve to lock entire regions into a vicious cycle. This gives us another reason to keep our air clean, just in case we didn’t have enough.
Source: Energy and Environmental Science
What Humanity Can Learn From Plants
On trees, moss, and feeling at a distance
Recently, on a plane, I remembered the moment when the plane began to descend beneath the clouds. One moment, I could see the brightly lit and expanding city unfolding out below me, a brilliant landscape of lights and systemized movement.
Then the plane began to dip below the clouds, and in that stretched-out moment of time, it felt as if everything slowed down and expanded around me, crushing me with the expanded density, the suffocating largeness of it all, the claustrophobic realization of space and height and my place on that plane, with all the other people sitting in their seats around me.
My eyes locked only with the dismal and thick, thick white outside the window, looming and full; the momentary lapse in sight that was, in its own way, a kind of opening of vision, a revelation. When the apocalyptic moment passed and the city burst forth again beneath the clouds and the familiar brightness reminded me that no time had passed at all, not really, but also knowing that I had lived an eternal purgatory in that moment, as if alone and shivering and quivering in the corner of a tiled shower, the water pouring down and myself a body that could only shake and absorb the water through the skin as the tears rolled out my eyes. And when my feet were finally on the ground again, I thought only of the immensity and magnificence of the sky.
In these strange and sensitive moments when my anxiety flaunts itself as a determined and reverential haunting of sorts, I remember what it was that I really learned from my mother, what I really know through her, because of her, and after her.
I think about a particular individual, perhaps a rare bird, one who has been exiled for documenting facts and archiving flight patterns and creating maps and observing different species of trees, this bird who sees value in concretizing memory to outlast one’s own life and trajectory. This bird is also capable of being homesick, of longing for a home that exists or could one day exist, because language, diagrammed and phantomized and stricken, is also capable of forging a threshold between this world and the dream world, and so that in-betweenness might be construed as a concrete space, and there might be new language vociferated to articulate all that does not yet fit into the confines of the current restrictions of what is known.
That is, there are so many different types of knowing, and we have so many words to describe all these forms of knowing that privilege certainty and fact and truth, so that everything else becomes relegated to the dismal categories of feeling or intuition, as if there is a hierarchy predicated on certainty, though we know of course that certainty is an illusion and a framework for control, for cutting down trees, for carving out swaths of land to be territorialized on maps as evidence, for allowing some categories of living beings to have hope and for others to never glimpse the possibility of future beyond tomorrow.
When I was a little girl, my mother taught me the the Korean concept ofnunchi (눈치). When I was older, I came across more official definitions that defined nunchi (a combination of the Korean words for “eye” and “measure”) as an unspoken social intuition, an awareness of the feelings of those around you, or the ability to sense another person’s mood. Growing up, though, I feltthis concept more eminently. It is about survival, my mother would repeat to me. That friend of yours, 눈치 없다. (She doesn’t have nunchi.) Without a dictionary definition of the word, I inherited a feeling of this concept and its importance through the way my mother would use it to describe other people and in the ways she forced me to pay attention to invisible gestures, details, resonances, feelings. Essentially, she taught me to feel at a distance.
This, of course, is the definition of telepathy. Coined by Frederick W.H. Myers in 1882, telepathy essentially means “feeling at a distance.” In English, we only have words for “intuition” and “feeling” to describe all the kinds of knowing that aren’t grounded in logic, rationale, fact, or certainty. And we tend to dismiss telepathy as an interesting but unprovable concept. For many reasons, our culture has privileged scientific types of knowledge and deemed feelings and emotions as unreliable, uncertain, unpredictable. The thing is when we think of humans and other animals, much of the genetic code for what we’ve labeled “feelings” or “instinct” is some of the oldest code that is shared between humans and other lineages of living species. Evolution has modified and built off more primitive versions of “instinct” or “feeling,” but not only are feelings not unique to humans, I’d also like to consider them one of our most ancient (and therefore reliable) ways of knowing. (For example, there are studies showing how our brains often make decisions instinctually several seconds before we are aware of them, and then we actually spend the remainder of our time rationalizing and justifying the decision that our unconscious has already made for us.)
I have often felt imperceptible shifts in the environment around me, different resonances that resound on frequencies that don’t seem to be visible to a rational frame of mind. Is it so terrible to be irrational?
Life is a series of breaths: to see a perspective only when the seer and the seen are perfectly aligned. That is, to be in a position to be able to see and to want to see. For example, a lunar eclipse occurs only when the sun, earth, and moon are aligned in syzygy, our home planet’s shadow creeping across the moon until the moon appears red because our atmosphere acts as a filter for the sun’s light.
How often we forget the scale of the universe: That is, as Carl Sagan famously declared, we are only a pale blue dot in the vast landscape of space.
How often we forget to look: That is, to look past the mundanities of rational and privileged life and see the worlds exploding between our feet and inside weathered cracks.
How often we forget about the arrogance of finality: That is, with cultural concepts like the apocalypse, we lean toward narratives with grand endings, ones that promise linear time, resolution, and redemption and therefore attempt to secure our role as a worthwhile species in the overall scheme of things.
How often we forget about the constructedness of language: That is, though we articulate what we know using the limits of language, the limits of language are not the same as the limits of knowing.
How often we forget that position and perception are related: That is, we study the gravitational effects of, on, and between planetary bodies but often forget that human bodies, animal bodies, bodies of water are also affected by these same forces and that we are not uniquely immune to any of them.
How often we forget that our future stopped existing a long time ago: That is, our ability to speculate on a future beyond the constraints of the present involves a larger and different vantage point than the one we have limited ourselves to; that because the past and future intersect in the present moment, it is in this present moment that we must learn to see differently.
Witnessing the apocalyptic (not final, but catastrophic; not singular, but simultaneous; not biblical, but unseen) devastation that seems to have become a static reality, and sitting here, feeling the invisible embers of cosmic tremors, it’s hard not to see how we’ve simply deferred the future so many times that we can no longer see where the present ends and where the future begins. For me, this is a question of hope. To be blunt, shit is fucked up on a very large scale, and I think there is little left to be learned from humans’ forms of knowing. And so I have turned to the trees, the moss, the birds, all the other and synchronous forms of knowledge that we have largely ignored or buried.
Let’s consider trees. Standing in an immense forest still induces feelings of awe. This isn’t just about sheer size or power, but how a forest, a community of towering trees, affects our perception of interconnectivity and intimacy and breath by reminding us of the forces of life, the impossibility of presence, and the obviousness of influence.
The oldest trees in the world are thousands of years old. These trees have seen the births and deaths of nations, the migration of human populations, the evolution and extinction of life. How could we not benefit tremendously from the knowledge of trees? How could we not listen?
I first learned truly about the generosity of trees from my friend N.R., who reminded me, as I pressed my palm against the trunk of a huge oak tree, how trees absorb so much for us, not just carbon dioxide and other harmful gasses, but also our pain, anxiety, suffering; how trees gladly extend their wisdom if you only might ask. Always leave an offering, she reminded me. Always remember to express your gratitude to the tree. I lifted my hand away and obeyed her instructions by pouring out the remainder of my water bottle over the tree’s massive roots.
I want to change the way you think about forests. You see, underground there is this other world, a world of infinite biological pathways that connect trees and allow them to communicate and allow the forest to behave as though it’s a single organism. It might remind you of a sort of intelligence. —Suzanne Simard, “How Trees Talk to Each Other”
[T]ree songs emerge from relationship. Although tree trunks seemingly stand as detached individuals, their lives subvert this atomistic view. We’re all trees — trees, humans, insects, birds, bacteria — pluralities. Life is embodied network…Our ethic must therefore be one of belonging, an imperative made all the more urgent by the many ways that human actions are fraying, rewiring, and severing biological networks worldwide. To listen to trees, nature’s great connectors, is therefore to learn how to inhabit the relationships that give life its source, substance, and beauty. —David George Haskell, The Songs of Trees
Apart from humans, maybe, trees are the best form of life on this planet. Trees remain in one place, but reach elsewhere always. They stretch down into the ground, and they constantly strain toward the sun. They are the embodiment of our shared presence on a rocky planet that orbits a star. Hedgehogs and helminths may be interesting, but they don’t constantly remind us, simply by existing, that we are in a solar system. —Rebecca Boyle, “Make Like a Tree and Get Outta Here”
Trees can teach us about interconnectedness and intimacy and communication. We are, after all, more interconnected than we perceive, and the invisible communicatory gestures between all living things are just as significant as the visible ones. Trees can teach us about time and slowness and patience. Trees are slow; they don’t operate on the level of seconds, moments, even hours, nor do they think so constantly of immediate futures. Trees take years, real time. They live and die each year, and yet their lifetimes encompass centuries. Trees can teach us about cycles and circularity. Seasons, cycles of the planet, and patterns both local and beyond are perceived by trees. Time is not linear, trees remind us. Trees can teach us about the long breath, about breathing, about presence. We could learn so much from just looking more closely at the process that involves constant and steady breath, sunlight, growth, water. We could learn more about balance and collaboration, about the merging of body and mind that is unique in every individual but intertwined with the network of other living, breathing beings. Trees can teach us about movement and scale. (Did you know that trees migrate?) Growth patterns and migration patterns of trees exist, just on a different scale than our own. We might learn to see past our own context, past the importance of a single species.
Then, trees can teach us to listen differently, to see differently, to perceive differently, to feel differently, to live differently.
What is important is that seeing trees—not only as trees, but as collaborators, neighbors, givers — allows us to view our own communities and ourselves in a different light. Telepathy is about feeling at a distance, and this is what is required when we attempt to communicate with and listen to anyone who is not your own self. To go further, perhaps it isn’t just telepathy that is required, but clairvoyance. Clairvoyance (“clear vision”) isn’t just about the ability to perceive events in the future. Because the past and future collide so loudly in the present, clairvoyance, in this moment of the speculative present, is also the ability to perceive events that are happening right in front of you, the invisible and spectral gestures of the present, all that is imperceptible or “unknowable.” Do we ever stop conjuring ghosts? Even still, why don’t we listen?
Because I don’t yet fully understand the extent of the telepathy between plants, I water the small patch of moss I am growing on a stone in my bathroom according to the weather patterns outside. On rainy days, I generously drench it with water. On sunny days, just a spritz to mimic the morning dew. When I am traveling, I ask my sister to water the moss while I am gone, just as I also ask her and my father to take care of my dogs while I am gone. If the moss can perceive what is happening outside, or if it is able to communicate with its comrades just on the other side of the window, I want it to feel in synchronicity with its community. So far, it seems to be thriving and is already growing new shoots.
There are many things to say about moss, but perhaps I could just point you to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s wonderful book, Gathering Moss, in which I learned about, through moss, adaptation, in-between states, resiliency, compassion, learning to see, and giving thanks.
Among other characteristics, moss (and the creatures that live among the moss like birds among trees: water bears, or tardigrades, and rotifers) blurs the distinctions between life and death. As Kimmerer writes, “All signs of life are extinguished when they are dry: no movement, no gas exchange, no metabolism. All enter a state known as anabiosis, or lack of life. And yet, as soon as water is returned, life suddenly is renewed. Their apparent death, followed by resuscitation, suggested that life might be stopped and then restarted.” Like with trees and the passage of seasons, we might learn to see past the simple narrative of birth and death and understand the importance of cycles, perhaps also learning to not constantly flee the face of death and instead embrace those processes that affect all those around us, widening one’s own consciousness to encompass so many others.
I also learn, from moss, the importance of language. Many mosses don’t have common names, just their scientific ones, because they aren’t normally attended to by the public in the same way as other plants (trees, flowers, edible vegetables). And yet the vocabulary Kimmerer teaches her students (gametophytes, sporophytes, acrocarps, pleurocarps, etc.) helps the students see the moss more closely, more intimately: “With words at your disposal, you can see more clearly. Finding the words is another step in learning to see.”
It is true that as I learned the words to describe different parts of a moss and different species, I started examining the different mosses that grow in my front yard, in my neighborhood, and in nearby forests, saying their species out loud, calling them by name, pointing at their sporophytes and attempting to bridge the chasm between our seemingly distant species.
Beyond the dignity that might be bestowed living beings by naming, even the grammar with which we use to describe plants greatly affects our entire worldview. For example, in English, we set aside special pronouns (he, she) for human subjects, relegating all nonhumans, objects, trees, mosses, even animals to the category of “it.” Why do we put so much stake in personhood? Kimmerer reminds us that in Potawatomi (as well as other indigenous languages), there is no “it” for nature or beings that exist as part of nature. She writes in an essay, “Living beings are referred to as subjects, never as objects, and personhood is extended to all who breathe and some who don’t.”
Kimmerer continues:
Because we speak and live with this language every day, our minds have also been colonized by this notion that the nonhuman living world and the world of inanimate objects have equal status.
Bulldozers, buttons, berries, and butterflies are all referred to as it, as things, whether they are inanimate industrial products or living beings…[W]e need words that heal that relationship, that invite us into an inclusive worldview of personhood for all beings.
Because we provide such preferential treatment for humans in our everyday use of grammar and language, it becomes easy for us to create a hierarchy, supported linguistically, that privileges humans over all other objects and animal species. With this subject/object dichotomy built into our use of language, and with a linguistic hierarchy that holds humans above all other species, it becomes all too easy to create a similar hierarchy within our own species. That is, we are already accustomed to privileging subjects via linguistic differentiation, and so we can start to see categories of humans as being “better than” or “less than.” We’ve already seen the consequences of such thinking, and continue to see them: false differentiations of race, color, gender and other characteristics as having caused significant damage to our collective consciousness.
Tomorrow, you will go up the mountain. Tomorrow you will sleep and you will dream. Tomorrow, you will kneel down before a tree and realize what it has given you, what you have taken, what you have received. And you will eventually hear the language of the birds and the language of the trees, and you will remember what it was like before home was stripped away from you, and then, on your knees, you will remember how to stand tall like the trees, eyes unfixed and seeing in all directions, especially down, because this is where things happen too, below you, and though gravity asks bodies to fall down, hope asks bodies to rise up.
I return to knowing and the core of it all, the breath, the long and sustained breath that connects us all together. In a time when it seems that people are wanting to feel less and think more, I wonder about the benefits of us all learning to feel more, at a distance. How might our vision of the future change when we can learn to receive more in the present? How might an understanding of telepathy make us more compassionate with trees, with those around us? And how might an understanding of the resilience of moss change our understanding and perception of the future? If only, for a moment. Just remember to breathe.
Here’s How America Uses Its Land
What can be harder to decipher is how Americans use their land to create wealth.
There are many statistical measures that show how productive the U.S. is. Its economy is the largest in the world and grew at a rate of 4.1 percent last quarter, its fastest pace since 2014. The unemployment rate is near the lowest mark in a half century.
What can be harder to decipher is how Americans use their land to create wealth. The 48 contiguous states alone are a 1.9 billion-acre jigsaw puzzle of cities, farms, forests and pastures that Americans use to feed themselves, power their economy and extract value for business and pleasure.
Methodology Land use classifications are based on data published in 2017 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service in a report called the Major Uses of Land in the United States (MLU). Data from the report provide total land-use acreage estimates for each state across six broad categories. Those totals are displayed per 250,000 acres.
Data from Alaska and Hawaii are excluded from the analysis. Special-use land and forestland make up the biggest land types in those states.
Bloomberg referenced the USDA data against estimates from the National Land Cover Database to generally locate these categories within each state.
Miscellaneous uses are defined as wetlands, rural residential lands, non-harvestable forests, desert, tundra and barren land of low economic value. Unlike all other land-use categories in the USDA data, a component breakdown for miscellaneous uses by state is not provided in the MLU.
To locate miscellaneous areas, Bloomberg referred to the National Land Cover Database to generally calculate and locate acreage by miscellaneous uses. “Rural residential lands” in the USDA data make up most of the 69 million-acre miscellaneous-use category. This category does not equally correlate to data in the National Land Cover Database, so Bloomberg subtracted the total of the other miscellaneous components to arrive at a rough estimate of “rural residential lands”—about 50 million acres.
Total pasture/range areas are proportionally divided by animal group based on National Agricultural Statistics Service livestock counts.
Data showing the 100 largest landowning families are based on descriptions of acreage and land type in The Land Reportmagazine. Representative amounts of acreage were subtracted from private timber and cropland/range to show this category, which is not a part of the USDA data.
Sources: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service: Major Uses of Land in the United States, 2012; U.S. Department of the Interior, National Land Cover Database, 2011; U.S. Census Bureau; State governments; stateparks.org; American Farmland Trust; Golf Course Superintendents Association of America; USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service; USDA Census of Agriculture; U.S. Bureau of Land Management; U.S. Forest Service; Weyerhaeuser Co.; The Land Report magazine
"Universal Paper Provides Fragile Roots Excellent Protection"
At this year's IPM in Essen, Ellepot introduced their new Universal paper. Ellepot are stocking up on their newly developed paper, after many customers report that the paper is doing well when it comes to root development and protection of fragile root tips.
The new product is characterized by a special “diamond” pattern so that the paper on one side has fine tiny small holes, and, on the other side, a fine netting ensuring that soil and dirt does not escape the paper.
“The Universal Paper has one of the best air flows of the papers we produce. We’ve made the pattern clearer, opening up the paper to allow them a significantly larger amount of air to pass through the pot. The result is that Ellepot Universal provides fragile roots an excellent protection and let roots grow perfectly through after transplanting minimizing transplant shock”, CEO Lars Steen Pedersen explains.
Perfect for plant out cultures
The new product is based on all-natural and environmental friendly wood fibres, sourced from responsibly harvested FSC certified forests. This means that the Universal paper is certified according to multiple industry standards such as RainForest Alliance, FSC and Veriflora. Combined with a relative short decomposing time of 6-9 months makes Ellepot Universal ideal for almost all types of crops and very useful for frequent plant out cultures.
Highlights and benefits of Ellepot Universal:
Special “diamond” pattern
Perfect root development and excellent protection
Roots grow perfectly through after transplanting
Short decomposing time of 6-9 months
Comes in brown color
You can experience the Universal Paper at Ellepot USA's booth 3018 & 3025 at the Cultivate Ohio this weekend.
For more information:
Ellepot
info@ellepot.dk
www.ellepot.com
Publication date: 7/13/2018
Starting An Outdoor Hydroponic Garden
Indoor gardening can get expensive if you’re constantly running air conditioners and dehumidifiers. Why not take advantage of free sunlight and start an outdoor hydroponic garden?
Source: Pixbox77 / Dreamstime.com
Takeaway: Indoor gardening can get expensive if you’re constantly running air conditioners and dehumidifiers. Why not take advantage of free sunlight and start an outdoor hydroponic garden?
Indoor gardening can get expensive in the heat of the summer, especially if you’re constantly running air conditioners and dehumidifiers. Why not take advantage of all the free sunlight nature has to offer and start an outdoor hydroponic garden?
Outdoor hydroponics still provides the perfect balance of water and nutrients, and your plants will grow much faster than in soil. Plus, there’s no weeding!
Choose a Sunny Location for Your Hydroponic Garden
There is no substitute for full-spectrum summer sunlight, and best of all, it’s free! Even a 1,000W lamp, placed a foot from your plants, can’t compare with a sunny day in mid-July. So when setting up an outdoor hydroponic garden, pick a sheltered area with a good southern exposure if you can.
I’ve grown prolific amounts of basil in a nutrient film technique system in a parking lot, towers of aeroponic herbs and strawberries on my back porch, and a huge row of tomatoes in stonewool in front of my garage.
The vines grew so dramatically that strangers driving by would stop their cars, knock on my door and ask me how I was making the tomatoes grow so fast!
They were amazed when I showed them my hydroponic systems. By the end of the summer, the vines were growing up to the roof and I had a wall of gourmet-quality tomatoes.
Keep the Water Reservoir Cool
Plants will transpire a lot more water in the outdoor heat than when they are grown indoors, so make sure you top off the reservoir with cool water from your garden hose often. It’s also a good idea to keep the reservoir in the shade whenever possible.
In an ebb and flow system, it’s easy because the nutrient reservoir is underneath the flood table anyway. But if the reservoir is somewhat exposed, I like to at least partially bury it if I can. The earth acts as a natural heat sink to pull some of the excess heat out of the reservoir.
On the hottest days of the summer, adding a little ice to the reservoir can help. Keep a couple of two-liter bottles of water in the freezer, and drop one into the reservoir occasionally.
If you walk by later in the sweltering afternoon and you notice the ice has melted, put the bottle back in the freezer and drop in another. Luckily, the worst heat waves usually don’t last more than a few days, so such emergency measures are rarely needed.
Lower the Electrical Conductivity (EC)
In hot weather, it’s best to lower the electrical conductivity of the nutrient solution. For example, if I normally keep the EC for my lettuce-growing system at 1.2, I’ll lower it to 1 in the summer. Plants are thirstier in the summer, so doing everything possible to make it easier for them to take up water is a good thing.
Low-to-medium EC stimulates vegetative growth by making the nutrient solution less salty, while medium-to-high EC restricts vegetative growth. During the heavy fruiting and flowering stage, a little salt stress is good but watch your plants carefully. At the first sign of browning at the edges of the leaves, lower the EC a little more.
The worst thing that can happen to an outdoor hydroponic garden is to let the reservoir run dry. Plants won’t last long in the summer sun without water. It might be a good idea to add a float valve to your reservoir as an insurance policy.
If the water level gets too low, the float valve will open automatically and top off the tank with fresh water. Plants can go a few extra days without fertilizer, but they will only last a few hours without water. Plan ahead so you can enjoy a few days away at the beach when you want to.
Boost the Heat Tolerance of Plants
The best time to condition your plants against stressful situations is before the stress happens. In the earlier part of the summer, try adding a combination of humic acid and kelp extracts to your nutrient solution.
A 10-year study at Virginia Tech showed that humic acids combined with seaweed extracts work 50% better than either product alone. A 5:2 ratio of humic acid to kelp works best to greatly stimulate lateral root growth and improve overall root mass. When the summer heat comes, the more roots the better for taking up the extra water they need.
The humic acid/kelp combo also encourages the plant to make extra plant-protection agents. Under ideal conditions, plants have no trouble protecting themselves from cell damage, but when plants are under too much stress, they can’t keep up with the constant barrage of damaging free radicals.
Free radicals break down cell membranes such as chloroplast and mitochondrial membranes, which is why plants go from green to yellow to brown under excessive heat and UV light.
If you condition your plants against stress with a combination of humic acids and kelp, plants will produce 50% more of the protective molecules that sponge free radicals, and plants will stay green longer when the summer heat arrives.
Remember to condition the plants before it gets hot—if the plants are already suffering in the middle of the summer, the bio-stimulants won’t have enough time to help.
Ensure Air Movement
Air movement is important, especially in the summer. One of the advantages of outdoor hydroponics is the breeze. The air movement helps cool the plant and keep the stomata open.
Stomata are the pores in the leaves that take in carbon dioxide and transpire water vapor and oxygen. As the breeze takes away the water vapor from the leaves, it has a cooling effect on the plant.
Too much wind has the opposite effect—plants close their stomata to conserve water so they don’t dry out too fast. Outdoors, we don’t have much control over the wind, so try to grow in a spot that has good air movement but also provides a protective windbreak.
Planting along a fence row with southern exposure is a good choice. Also, think ahead about what you will do if a major storm approaches. I’ve learned the hard way how important it is to properly stake and trellis my plants and provide a little extra emergency protection.
Protect Against Pests
One downside to growing outdoors is that you often have to share your crops with animals and other pests. The simplest advice is to fence in your garden or grow a few extra plants and hope the critters don’t get too greedy.
If you’re not willing to share, there are other deterrents available at your hydro store such as wolf and coyote urine (I’m serious!) that help keep rabbits and other invaders away. There are also some good natural sprays such as neem oil and insecticidal soaps that help fight bugs and act as natural insect repellents.
But the best defense against pests, particularly sucking insects, is to grow healthy plants. Use full-spectrum, all-purpose fertilizers, and keep the potassium-to-nitrogen ratio high. Too much nitrate nitrogen produces large cells with thin cell walls, making them an easy target for sucking insects and fungi, so don’t over-fertilize.
For even healthier plants, try using a bio-hydroponic fertilizer that combines minerals with organic bio-stimulants. For example, amino acids stimulate the uptake of calcium.
Due to the extra calcium intake, plants grown with amino acids have thicker cell walls and a higher resistance to temperature extremes. The plants will also have a stronger vascular system, allowing them to take up water and minerals more efficiently. (Read more about pests in Maximum Yield's pest control article archives)
It all adds up to nutrient-dense, high-brix plants that have an increased resistance to pests and diseases. If all goes well, sucking insects won’t even recognize the plants as food.
Just wait until you taste what a well-managed outdoor hydroponic garden can produce. Healthier plants mean tasty, nutrient-dense food high in vitamins and minerals.
Colors and aromas are also much richer, and you can literally see the difference in growth from day to day. It’s hard to imagine just how productive an outdoor hydroponic garden can be until you try one for yourself!
US: The EPA’s Latest News on Asbestos Has A Lot of People Nervous
Asbestos is arguably one of the most well-known cancer-causing agents, and one that the Environmental Protection Agency has been trying to regulate on and off for decades.
The Carcinogen Is Banned In 55 Countries, But Not Here.
By Jennifer Lu August 9, 2018
The potent carcinogen is banned in 55 countries. DepositPhotos
Asbestos is arguably one of the most well-known cancer-causing agents, and one that the Environmental Protection Agency has been trying to regulate on and off for decades. The toxic construction material, banned in other 55 other countries, made the news earlier this week amidst fears that the EPA is easing the way for an uptick in asbestos manufacturing.
In fact, asbestos never left the U.S. market, though there are certain restrictions limiting its uses. Instead, the EPA plans to track asbestos imports for review every time a manufacturer wants to use them for a new purpose, as is required by the law. But since the current EPA has eyed more lenient regulations on everything from pesticides to air pollution from cars and coal-fired power plants, environmental groups fear that the “new uses” review could signal an uptick in asbestos manufacturing, despite its dangers to public health, rather than a move toward the total ban the EPA sought under the Obama administration.
Congress enacted the Toxic Substances Control Act in 1976 to "comprehensively regulate chemicals and toxic substances that we come into contact with in the everyday," starting with asbestos, says Melanie Benesh, a legislative attorney at the Environmental Working Group. "Because it's one of the toxic substances that everyone has heard of and knows is bad, it's become a poster child for this law and why it is broken."
Asbestos is an umbrella term for six naturally-occurring fibrous minerals that contain some amount of silicon and oxygen. Greek for "unquenchable," asbestos doesn't evaporate, dissolve, burn, or react readily with most chemicals, making it an ideal insulation and fireproofing material. Asbestos can be found in attic and wall insulations, vinyl floor tiles and roof shingles, around hot water and steam pipes, and in automobile brakes.
Because the filamentous material is easily friable, or crumbled to a powder when handled, asbestos is easily inhaled into the lungs, where it can cause mesothelioma, a rare and aggressive cancer that grows in the tissue lining around the organs.
Between 1999 and 2015, the Center for Disease Control counted 45,221 deaths from malignant mesothelioma in the United States. Though most deaths occurred in people 85 or older, the fact that people younger than 55 were also dying from mesothelioma suggests that occupational and environmental asbestos exposure was still a problem. Asbestos is also associated with lung cancer and other lung diseases. In light of its toxicity, the Environmental Protection Agency banned most asbestos products in 1989, only to have the rule overturned in court. As a result, certain asbestos products are restricted in the U.S., but asbestos is still allowed in other productions.
In 2016, Congress updated the Toxic Substances Control Act in an attempt to strengthen it, and asbestos was put back on EPA's roster as one of the first ten chemicals for review.
The agency released a framework in June 2017 for how it would evaluate exposure risks from asbestos being produced now or in the foreseeable future. The guidelines allow EPA to exclude legacy sources of exposure from consideration—for example, asbestos installed into the frames of schools and older buildings using outdated production methods.
“They're only going to look at a very narrow use for asbestos and ignore that people might be exposed to it from older cases,” says Rena Steinzor, a professor of environmental law at the University of Maryland. But failure to account for pre-existing routes of asbestos exposure could downplay the overall risk and lead to a less protective evaluation.
The material easily crumbles when handled, and inhaling the dust can cause health problems.DepositPhotos
Separately, to stay on top of future uses, the EPA is requiring manufacturers to give them at least 90 days notice before importing asbestos to make new asbestos products the EPA doesn’t currently know about. The rule also forbids companies from making new asbestos products until the EPA has review each new use, which include certain types of adhesives, sealants, roof coatings, gaskets, pipeline wrap, sealant tape, and vinyl floor tile, to name a few.
On the one hand, the rule makes sense because the EPA needs some time to decide whether the new uses are okay, Steinzor says.
“But why not just ban them when we know asbestos are not safe,” Benesh points out.
The market seems ready to take advantage of the EPA’s mixed signals.
A Russian asbestos mining company, perhaps sensing an opportunity, posted photos of its products stamped with a seal bearing Donald Trump's face on Facebook. The social media caption read, "Donald is on our side!"
President Trump, who made his businesses in the real estate sector, has expressed support for asbestos as a maligned construction material in the past. In 2012, he tweeted that the World Trade Center would not have burned down if it had been fire-proofed with asbestos.
Meanwhile, asbestos imports to the U.S., which have declined overall and in the last few years, rose 45 percent between 2015 to 2016 to 700 metric tons. Ninety-five percent of the asbestos entering the U.S. in 2016 came from Brazil, with Russia supplementing the rest. However, Brazil banned asbestos mining, use and commercialization in November of 2017.
"Maybe five or ten years ago, you wouldn’t think anyone would be reintroducing asbestos to the marketplace," says Steinzor. "It's a sign of the times that this is happening.”
tags: construction asbestos carcinogens environmental protection agency
No, Vertical Farms Won’t Feed the World
While they are well-intentioned, new indoor “farms” won’t help feed the world or reduce the environmental impacts of agriculture. We would be better to focus our efforts elsewhere.
Lettuce grown in my garden. Photograph © 2016 Jonathan Foley
August 1, 2018
While they are well-intentioned, new indoor “farms” won’t help feed the world or reduce the environmental impacts of agriculture. We would be better to focus our efforts elsewhere.
We’re beginning to see a new fad in agriculture — so-called “vertical farms” that grow food indoors with energy-intensive, artificial life support systems.
In the last few years, a number of tech companies have designed “farms” that utilize artificial lights, heaters, water pumps, and computer controls to grow crops inside. These systems glow with a fantastic magenta light — from LEDs that are specially tuned to provide optimal light for photosynthesis — often with stacked trays of plants, one on top of the other. Some of this technology is new, especially the LEDs, although pot growers have used tools like this for years.
Some of the more notable efforts to build indoor “farms” include Freight Farms in Boston. And there is a group at MIT that is trying to create new high-tech platforms for growing food inside, including “food computers”. These folks are very smart and have done a lot to perfect the technology.
At first blush, these “farms” sound great. Why not completely eliminate food miles, and grow food right next to restaurants, cafeterias, or supermarkets? And why not grow crops inside closed systems, where water can be recycled, and pests can (in theory) be managed without chemicals.
It sounds great, doesn’t it? But there are many challenges.
First, Vertical Farms Cost a Fortune
But there are costs to these farms. Huge costs.
First, these systems are really expensive to build. The shipping container systems developed by Freight Farms, for example, cost between $82,000 and $85,000 per container — an astonishing sum for a box that just grows greens and herbs. Just one container costs as much as 10 entire acres of prime American farmland — which is a far better investment, both in terms of food production and future economic value. Just remember: farmland has the benefit of generally appreciating in value over time, whereas a big metal box is likely to only decrease in value.
Second, food produced this way is very expensive. For example, the Wall Street Journal reports that mini-lettuces grown by Green Line Growers costs more than twice as much as organic lettuce available in most stores. And this is typical for other indoor growers around the country: it’s very, very expensive, even compared to organic food. Instead of making food more available, especially to poorer families on limited budgets, these indoor crops are only available to the affluent. It might be fine for gourmet lettuce, or fancy greens for expensive restaurants, but regular folks may find it out of reach.
Finally, indoor farms use a lot of energy and materials to operate. The container farms from Freight Farms, for example, use about 80 kilowatt-hours of electricity a day to power the lights and pumps. That’s nearly 2–3 times as much electricity as a typical (and still very inefficient) American home, or about 8 times the electricity used by an average San Francisco apartment. And on the average American electrical grid, this translates to emitting 44,000 pounds of CO2 per container per year, from electricity alone, not counting any additional heating costs. This is vastly more than the emissions it would take to ship the food from someplace else.
And none of it is necessary.
But, Wait, Can’t Indoor Farms Use Renewable Energy?
Proponents of indoor techno-farms often say that they can offset the enormous sums of electricity they use, by powering them with renewable energy —, especially solar panels — to make the whole thing carbon neutral.
But just stop and think about this for a second.
These indoor “farms” would use solar panels to harvest naturally occurring sunlight, and convert it into electricity so that they can power…artificial sunlight? In other words, they’re trying to use the sun to replace the sun.
But we don’t need to replace the sun. Of all of the things we should worry about in agriculture, the availability of free sunlight is not one of them. Any system that seeks to replace the sun to grow food is probably a bad idea.
Besides, “Food Miles” Aren’t a Big Climate Problem
Sometimes we hear that vertical farms help the environment by reducing “food miles” — the distance food items travel from farm to table — and thereby reduce fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.
This sounds logical, but it turns out to be a red herring.
Strange as it might seem, local food typically uses about the same amount of energy — per pound — to transport as food grown far away. Why? Short answer: volume and method of transport. A larger food operator can ship food more efficiently — even if it travels longer distances — because of the gigantic volumes they work in. Plus, ships, trains, and even large trucks driving on Interstate highways use less fuel, per pound per mile, than small trucks driving around town.
Plus it turns out that “food miles” aren’t a very big source of CO2 emissions anyway, whether they’re local or not. In fact, they pale in comparison to emissions from deforestation, methane from cattle and rice fields, and nitrous oxide from over-fertilized fields. And local food systems — especially organic farms that use fewer fertilizers, and grass-fed beef that sequesters carbon in the soil — can reduce these more critical emissions. At the end of the day, local food systems are generally better for the environment, including greenhouse gas emissions. Just don’t worry about emissions from food miles too much.
And These Vertical “Farms” Can’t Grow Much
A further problem with indoor farms is that a lot of crops could never develop properly in these artificial conditions. While LED lights provide the light needed for photosynthesis to occur, they don’t provide the proper mix of light and heat to trigger plant development stages — like those that tell plants when to put on fruit or seed. Moreover, a lot of crops need a bit of wind to develop tall, strong stalks, needed later when they are carrying heavy loads before harvest. As a result, indoor farms are severely limited and have a hard time growing things besides simple greens.
Indoor farms might be able to provide some garnish and salads to the world but forget about them as a means of growing much other food.
A Better Way?
I’m not the only critic of indoor, high-tech, energy-intensive agriculture. Other authors are starting to point out the problems with these systems too (read very good critiques here, here, here, and here).
While I appreciate the enthusiasm and innovation put into developing indoor farms, I think these efforts are, at the end of the day, counterproductive.
Instead, I think we should use the same investment of dollars, incredible technology, and amazing brains to solve other agricultural problems — like developing new methods for drip irrigation, better grazing systems that lock up soil carbon, and ways of recycling on-farm nutrients. Organic farming and high-precision agriculture are doing promising things, and need more help. We also need innovation and capital to help other parts of the food system, especially in tackling food waste and getting people to shift their diets towards more sustainable directions.
An interconnected network of good farms —real farms that provide nutritious food, with social and environmental benefits to their communities — is the kind of innovation we really need.
Dr. Jonathan Foley (@GlobalEcoGuy) is a global environmental scientist, sustainability advisor, author, and public speaker. These views are his own.
© 2018 by Jonathan Foley. All rights reserved.
NOTE: parts of this piece were adapted from an earlier blog article of mine called “Local Food is Great, But Can It Go Too Far?”
Foreign Beef Can Legally be Labeled “Product of U.S.A.” It’s Killing America’s Grass-Fed Industry.
How rampant mislabeling puts America's grass-based cattle producers out of business.
How rampant mislabeling puts America's grass-based cattle producers out of business.
July 16th, 2018
by Joe Fassler
CULTURE ENVIRONMENT FARM POLICY SYSTEMS
Last month, in a petition formally filed with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), two advocacy groups made a stunning claim: Your American grass-fed beef might actually come from overseas, even if it’s labeled “Product of U.S.A.”
Those two groups—the American Grassfed Association (AGA), which offers the country’s leading “grass-fed” certification, and the Organization for Competitive Markets, a watchdog group that fights corporate consolidation in the food industry—point out that a massive regulatory loophole allows companies to falsely, and yet legally, claim their imported beef comes from our pastures.
The trouble began in 2015, when the Obama administration’s USDA rolled back Country of Origin Labeling (COOL) for beef and pork products, allowing meat to be sold without disclosing its home country on the label. But that decision, which angered many American ranchers, has further muddied the waters in a way no one quite anticipated. Under the current rules, beef and pork products that are shipped to the United States and processed further here, can be labeled “product of U.S.A.,” even if the animal was raised a continent away. That means a steer slaughtered in Uruguay and broken down into steaks at a meatpacking plant in Colorado is technically American meat—even if it isn’t.
Photograph by simarik (iStock), graphic by NFE
That’s a huge issue for American grass-fed producers, who are now finding themselves undercut by foreign competition. Allen Williams, a 6th-generation rancher and founding partner of Grass Fed Insights, a leading consulting group on grass-fed beef, says U.S. producers owned more than 60 percent of the domestic grass-fed market in 2014. Then came COOL repeal. By 2017, American ranchers’ share had plunged to just 20 to 25 percent, according to an industry analysis by the Stone Barns Center for Agriculture. Today, Williams, who consulted on the Stone Barns report, says American producers claim only about 15 percent of the grass-fed market—and that share is rapidly shrinking.
Ranchers attribute the decline directly to COOL repeal. The fact that foreign companies can pass their imported beef off as American, they say, has made fair competition impossible.
“The very idea of labeling beef in a grocery store ‘product of U.S.A.,’ when the animal never drew a breath of air on this continent, is just horrible,” says Will Harris, owner of White Oak Pastures, which produces its branded line of grass-fed beef in Bluffton, Georgia. (Harris is also on AGA’s board of directors.) “I don’t begrudge importers or producers from other countries selling to knowing consumers that want to buy that imported product. But I’m appalled at what the deception has done to the economies of our membership. It has moved the needle from grass-fed beef producers being profitable, to being a very break-even—or, if you’re not careful, a losing—proposition.”
But though pastured beef often isn’t as American as it looks, a question remains: How much does it actually matter? I found myself wondering how much we mean to prioritize domestic purchasing when we spend a little more to buy grass-fed, and whether the product’s country of origin makes a meaningful difference. Are grass-fed steaks from Australia all that different from those raised on a ranch outside Austin, Texas? I wanted to know whether we we should stop handwringing about geography—or if misleading labels somehow betray the grass-fed ethos, and amount to a profound abuse of consumer trust.
Grazed and confused
If Williams is right that only 15 percent of the grass-fed beef is raised domestically, you wouldn’t necessarily know it just by strolling through the grocery store. On a recent trip to Trader Joe’s, I inspected a package of “100 percent grass-fed organic ground beef,” looking for clues about its origins. The casual observer could be forgiven for mistaking that product for American meat. The splashy consumer-facing label features a USDA organic seal, a USDA inspection sticker, and, in smaller print, the phrase “processed in USA” alongside Trader Joe’s corporate address in Monrovia, California. Of course, foreign beef can still be certified USDA organic and all imported meat goes through USDA inspection. But this product features not one but four allusions to the U.S. on its label. The average shopper wouldn’t be crazy to assume it’s coming from here.
Flip the package over, though—to the side few people read up close—and the label tells a different story. In small, no-frills font, below the freeze-by date and above the safe handling instructions, are the words “Product of USA, Australia, and Uruguay.” That phrasing would seem to suggest that Trader Joe’s ground beef is a blend of beef from American, Australian, and Uruguayan cows—an arrangement that might surprise some customers, given what the front of the package says. But even thatreasonable assumption may not be accurate. Trader Joe’s may only be buying Australian and Uruguayan meat that’s then ground at a facility in the U.S.—enough to qualify as American in the eyes of regulators. It isn’t really possible to tell.
Joe Fassler
If Trader Joe’s and other grocery brands were really selling meat from cows raised in this country, you’d think they’d make a bigger deal of it.
Trader Joe’s organic grass-fed ribeye steak also prominently features USDA’s organic and inspection seals on the front—as well as the phrase “Product of USA” in small font on the back, by the nutrition facts. But are the company’s grass-fed ribeyes really produced here? Or are they just processed here? It’s impossible to tell from the label alone, and Trader Joe’s had not responded to my requests for clarification by press time.
The Trader Joe’s scenario is a good example of how products can follow the letter of the labeling law and still be misleading. But other brands have done more to take advantage of this legal ambiguity—and some are downright deceptive.
Bubba Burger
Bubba Foods’ marketing would suggest that its beef is born and raised in the U.S. A look at its affidavit to the USDA suggest otherwise
Bubba Foods, a Jacksonville, Florida-based company whose products are sold by major retailers like Walmart, Kroger, and Wegman’s, puts its American-made claims front and center. The label on the company’s grass-fed ground beef displays a prominent “Product of USA” banner, complete with an American flag—and, if that wasn’t enough, the proud phrase “Born & Raised in the USA.” But paperwork filed with USDA, obtained by the American Grassfed Association and shared with me, suggests the product may not be American at all—at least, not in the conventional sense most shoppers would understand.
Any producer who wants to sell a commercial grass-fed beef product has to file an affidavit with USDA’s Food Standards Inspection Service (FSIS), laying out the agricultural practices it will use and submitting an example of their product label. Bubba’s affidavit includes several details that caught my attention, considering the aggressive nationalism of its label. A nutritional analysis describes the product as “import grass-fed” beef. It also includes an import record from Australia, noting that an “Australian National Vendor Declaration” will certify the product’s grass-feeding regime. The final 20 pages of the document lay out the specifics of Australia’s Pasture-Fed Cattle Assurance Standard, a program that isn’t available in other countries.
Bubba Foods initially assured me the company would answer my questions about the discrepancy, but did not provide more information after multiple follow-ups. At this point, the opacity only furthers my suspicion that the company is passing off its Australian grass-fed beef as a “born and raised” U.S. product—with the U.S. government’s blessing. (Bubba’s affidavit also contains a copy of its product label, which regulators presumably viewed in all its chest-thumping patriotism.) No wonder eaters are confused.
By now, it should be obvious that misleading—and, in some cases, overtly deceptive—labels are out there. But we still haven’t established whether any of this is a meaningful deception, materially speaking. Does anyone really care if their grass-fed beef comes from America or Australia—and, if not, should they?
Eating American
In his work as a consultant, Allen Williams and his clients have spent millions of dollars trying to pin down exactly what compels shoppers to buy grass-fed beef. His findings suggest that (relative) locality is a huge selling point: A desire to support America’s rural economies is one major reason people spend more to buy grass-fed. The preference is so clear that Williams believes virtually all of the products with fine-print “Product of USA” claims are really imported. If Trader Joe’s and other grocery brands were really making the effort to buy meat from cows raised in this country, you’d think they’d make a much bigger deal of it.
Charlie Bradbury runs Grass Run Farms, an American-raised, grass-fed beef brand owned by JBS, the world’s largest multinational meatpacker. He tells me that JBS—which has long sold grass-fed products from Australia and elsewhere, and marketed them as such—acquired Grass Run Farms because so many customers asked for specifically domestic grass-fed beef.
“The fact that the cattle are born and processed in the U.S. is an important reason people buy this product,” he says. “These cattle generally do come from smaller, family-farm operations. They [shoppers] believe the animal welfare is improved [in that context] and so, since our job is to sell beef, we’re trying to produce a system that fits in with those concepts.”
Will Harris offers some insight into why demand for American grass-fed is so strong. Over the years, he’s learned that customers buy White Oaks beef for three primary reasons: environmental sustainability, animal welfare, and to support rural economies, in that order. (Health considerations are a factor, too, but not in the top three.)
Each of these main drivers has a strong local emphasis, he tells me. If someone wants to help improve the environment, they’re likely to want to do so in their own backyard first. Those worried about animal welfare are more likely to feel assured by local products, with a farmer they know by name and a ranch they can visit, than by a product from a continent away. Finally, anyone buying grass-fed to support the local farm economy is certainly going to privilege domestic product. In Harris’s view, it couldn’t be any clearer—when buying grass-fed, Americans explicitly prefer that it be American.
But say you’re the kind of ethically minded meat eater who just wants to do what’s best for the planet in general. Does it really matter whether your burger comes from your local farmers’ market versus a ranch in Australia or Uruguay?
That’s harder to say.
Photograph by dustypixel (iStock), graphic by NFE
“If we are comfortable with the assumption that grass-fed beef is indeed more environmentally friendly than CAFO beef—and this depends quite a bit on your method for calculating environmental costs—then the real environmental impacts of grass-fed beef products have much more to do with how they are produced than where they are shipped from,” Caitlin Peterson, a PhD student in ecology at the University of California, Davis, told me by email. That’s because shipping beef across the ocean in a storage container is an incredibly cheap and efficient transportation method that doesn’t require much energy use or generate much pollution, even if it does rack up so-called “food miles.” Agricultural methods, she says, matter far more in general than transportation distances.
The trouble is that it’s very hard to get information about a given grass-fed producer’s practices. No government I could find legally defines a “grass-fed” standard. (The U.S. did, beginning in 2007—but ultimately revoked its standard in 2016, citing USDA’s inability to properly enforce it.) Though a few respected third-party certifications exist—the American Grassfed Association’s “Certified Grassfed” label is considered the gold standard by producers—ranchers can claim their product is grass-fed without independent verification. To use the term on products sold in the U.S., meat companies must only file an affidavit with USDA explaining how their grass-feeding program will operate. They can use an existing certification, or define their own protocols. As a result, practices vary widely, and quality control is difficult.
“Grass-fed is all over the map,” says Rick Machen, a professor and livestock specialist with Texas A&M University. “It could be a 700-pound calf right off the cow up to a 14-year-old cow that’s lived out its productive life. And within those there are all kinds—some are supplemented, some are 100-percent grass-finished. There’s a wide, wide, wide array of pre-harvest production systems, and technically they’re all within the bounds of what can technically qualify as grass-fed.”
Considering that, it’s hard to compare the environmental impact of domestic versus imported grass-fed beef in general. But if sustainability concerns are a wash, the domestic product really does fare better by one all-important metric: economics.
The price of grass
There’s a reason that imported grass-fed beef has come to dominate the American marketplace. It’s not because it’s a better product, necessarily. It’s simply cheaper.
Take Australia, for instance—the country that by far exports the most grass-fed beef to the U.S.—where virtually all beef production is pasture-based. Since cattle can graze year-round on the country’s naturally lush pastures, it makes far less sense to fatten them on grain. That makes the cost of bringing a steer to weight a much cheaper proposition—especially compares to many regions of the U.S., where grassland must be irrigated, or where cattle must be fed dried forage during the winter.
Though severe drought in Australia has complicated this picture in recent years, bringing the price of imported grass-fed beef closer to its domestic competition, the country has built-in advantages that have allowed it to undercut U.S. producers on price.
But Australia has an additional, and perhaps more significant, advantage. Grass finishing has been the standard for so long that it’s big business, and has been for decades. Cargill and JBS, two of the biggest meatpackers in the world, process a combined 49 percent of the country’s grass-fed beef.
A company like Greeley, Colorado-based JBS, which owns farms, slaughterhouses, and transportation infrastructure on multiple continents, and has accounts with major retailers and foodservice providers, benefits from economies of scale unheard of in U.S. grass-fed beef production. In the U.S., where grass-fed claims just 1.5 percent of the overall market, it’s mostly small producers working with small, independent processors and marketing their products themselves. More than half of America’s grass-fed producers sell twenty or fewer cattle a year, according to the Stone Barns report, and most of them are too small to access the country’s hyperproductive slaughterhouses.
This distinction marks perhaps the fundamental difference between U.S. and imported grass-fed beef. In America, grass-based production is an alternative vision supported by individual innovators and rooted in local economies. In Australia, New Zealand, Uruguay, and other countries, it’s an established industry controlled by powerful global players.
“It’s a commodity product,” says Williams, speaking of imported grass-fed beef. “It’s produced off many different ranches, then harvested by the big packers. They’re the same guys that are the big packers over here in the U.S. It’s all aggregated together and shipped over here.”
If Americans are buying grass-fed as a way to support local foodways and bring dollars back to rural communities—and many of them seem to want to—that’s not happening when they’re fooled into buying imported beef.
For U.S. ranchers, switching to grass-fed can completely transform the economics of production. Williams says that the average American cattle rancher, someone who sells live animals to the big meatpackers churning out commodity beef, makes only about 14 cents of the retail dollar. “That way,” he tells me, “you’re working on razor-thin margins and any little economic hit can take you out of the game.”
Photo by gerenme (iStock), graphic by NFE
.But grass-fed producers selling directly via farmers’ markets can keep up to 85 percent of the retail dollar, according to Williams. And ranchers who run branded programs—paying a smaller, custom packer to process their animals, then selling that signature line of beef with the help of various retail partners—can reach thousands of customers while still keeping 25 to 50 percent of the retail dollar.
There are challenges, of course. Greenmarkets are a low-volume business—it’s hard to reach that many customers, even if the margins are significantly higher. And branded programs are a more expensive way to do business, with added costs related to marketing, distribution, and slaughter. Still, the margins improve enough to double or triple the income earned on every animal—giving ranchers a chance to make up for the increased costs of grass-fed production, mitigate their risk, and earn a sustainable living.
But now that the market’s been flooded with cheap imports, America’s grass-based ranchers aren’t thriving the way they’d hoped to. Though retail sales of grass-fed beef have soared—from $17 million in 2012 to more than 16 times that, $272 million, in 2016—American ranchers aren’t the ones reaping the benefit of all that increased demand. Harris and other ranchers attribute this directly to consumer confusion over labels. If we can’t tell the difference between Australian and American grass-fed beef—if both are labeled “Product of USA”—even a locally minded shopper is more likely to go with the cheaper product. The result, for ranchers who have spent heavily to transition or grow their herds, may be economic devastation.
Let’s go back to the petition that the American Grassfed Association filed with USDA for a moment. The organization believes that, if labeling law can be changed, ensuring that only truly American-raised beef is labeled that way, shoppers will start buying domestic grass-fed again, even if it costs more. If the choice between domestic and imported is made more apparent, grass-fed proponents like Carrie Balkcom and Will Harris think American grass-fed beef will have a fightning chance—that our rural communities will finally see the economic benefits of the standard they helped to build.
The fact that USDA is taking public comments on the issue suggests that the agency may be reconsidering things. And that could be a sign that significant change is on the horizon.
“As a U.S. grass-fed beef producer, I believe it is imperative that honest, transparent labeling is required for grass-fed beef sold in America,” writes Kay Allen, a Texas rancher, one of many producers who has commented publicly on the petition. “Not only does honest labeling protect American beef producers economically, it insures that WE, American citizens, control our own food supply.”
For those who want to see rural economies revitalized, the stakes are high. Labeled grass-fed beef is only about a $1 billion market in the U.S., tiny compared to the nation’s $105-billion conventional beef industry. But Williams points out that if the U.S. producers took back only 50 percent of the market—still down from more than 60 percent market share they enjoyed in 2014—it could send hundreds of millions of dollars into local communities each year. That would be a major departure from the current system, where profits from grain-finished domestic and grass-fed imported cattle flow primarily to large corporations.
“Instead of requiring just a handful of mega-feedlots to finish all this beef, we would need tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of smaller farmers and ranchers,” Williams says. “So instead of having one mega business, one major corporation, we’d be allowing thousands of small businesses, vibrant small businesses, to thrive. It would be a major boon not just to ranchers, but to local processors, and cold storage, and everyone who has a finger in this pie. Why would we not want to do that?”
The USDA is currently asking itself that same question. The agency will take public comments until August 17.
From Farm to Fork: The Regulatory Status of Non-GMO Plant Innovations Under Current EU Law
A new article on the latest plant breeding methods will be published on the next issue of BIO-SCIENCE LAW REVIEW.
The existing EU regulatory framework, when considered holistically, provides efficient guarantees that every stage of the agri-food supply chain, from lab to fork, is subject to constraints and obligations dictated by harmonized legislation, each providing various degrees of scrutiny, risk management and control, sanctions and remedial action.
Comparisons between the existing non-GMO legal framework with the GMO legislation or with any other authorization regime based on a full pre-market risk assessment are, by definition, of little practical relevance, since such regimes aim to address potentially serious risks, which, as the SAM Note clarifies, have not been identified in the case of Non-GMO NBT Products.
In the absence of any such concrete, identifiable risk induced by (the use of NBTs for) Non-GMO NBT Products and in view of their non-distinguishability from CBT products, the protection of human/animal/plant health and the environment should thus be considered to be adequately ensured and Non-GMO NBT Products should not be treated differently from products resulting from CBT.
The opposite conclusion would not only raise serious concerns under the SPS Agreement but would essentially also mean that all non-GMO plant products on the market today must be considered inadequately regulated. Just as Advocate-General Bobek concluded in his Opinion in Case C–528/16,133 with regard to mutagenesis, that ‘one could hardly assume that a reasonable legislator could ever wish to state, en bloc and for the future, that something is safe to such a degree that it does not need regulating at all’, one can neither assume that all NBT-products should en bloc be considered to only yield products suspect of causing unacceptable risks.
Against that backdrop, it is submitted that both the precautionary principle and the specific safeguard clauses in horizontal and sectoral legislation can justify and sufficiently guarantee the adoption of stricter risk management measures if a previously unidentified risk arises.”
The Chemical Industry Scores A Big Win At the E.P.A.
The E.P.A., after heavy lobbying by the chemical industry, narrowed how it will conduct safety checks on toxic substances — like perchloroethylene, used in dry cleaning.CreditJustin Sullivan/Getty Images
By Eric Lipton
- June 7, 2018
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration, after heavy lobbying by the chemical industry, is scaling back the way the federal government determines health and safety risks associated with the most dangerous chemicals on the market, documents from the Environmental Protection Agency show.
Under a law passed by Congress during the final year of the Obama administration, the E.P.A. was required for the first time to evaluate hundreds of potentially toxic chemicals and determine if they should face new restrictions, or even be removed from the market. The chemicals include many in everyday use, such as dry-cleaning solvents, paint strippers and substances used in health and beauty products like shampoos and cosmetics.
But as it moves forward reviewing the first batch of 10 chemicals, the E.P.A. has in most cases decided to exclude from its calculations any potential exposure caused by the substances’ presence in the air, the ground or water, according to more than 1,500 pages of documents released last week by the agency.
Instead, the agency will focus on possible harm caused by direct contact with a chemical in the workplace or elsewhere. The approach means that the improper disposal of chemicals — leading to the contamination of drinking water, for instance — will often not be a factor in deciding whether to restrict or ban them.
The approach is a big victory for the chemical industry, which has repeatedly pressed the E.P.A. to narrow the scope of its risk evaluations. Nancy B. Beck, the Trump administration’s appointee to help oversee the E.P.A.’s toxic chemical unit, previously worked as an executive at the American Chemistry Council, one of the industry’s main lobbying groups.
A spokesman for the E.P.A. said that the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and other laws already provided the agency with the authority to regulate chemicals found in the air, rivers and drinking water, so there was no need to revisit them under the 2016 law, which updated the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976.
The agency can “better protect human health and the environment by focusing on those pathways that are likely to represent the greatest areas of concern to E.P.A.,” said the spokesman, Jahan Wilcox.
Nancy B. Beck, who oversees the E.P.A.’s toxic chemical unit, previously worked at one of the industry’s main lobbying groups.CreditU.S. Senate Committee Channel
But three former agency officials, including a former supervisor of the toxic chemical program, said that the E.P.A.’s approach would result in a flawed analysis of the threat presented by chemicals.
“It is ridiculous,” said Wendy Cleland-Hamnett, who retired last year after nearly four decades at the E.P.A., where she ran the toxic chemical unit during her last year. “You can’t determine if there is an unreasonable risk without doing a comprehensive risk evaluation.”
Senator Tom Udall, Democrat of New Mexico, and Representative Frank Pallone Jr., Democrat of New Jersey, who played leading roles in passing the 2016 law, said the E.P.A. was ignoring its directive for a comprehensive analysis of risks.
“Congress worked hard in bipartisan fashion to reform our nation’s broken chemical safety laws, but Pruitt’s E.P.A. is failing to put the new law to use as intended,” Mr. Udall said in a statement referring to Scott Pruitt, the E.P.A. administrator.
A spokesman for Senator John Barrasso, Republican of Wyoming, who is chairman of the Senate committee that oversees the agency, declined to comment.
Cumulatively, the approach being taken for the 10 chemicals means the E.P.A.’s risk analysis will not take into account an estimated 68 million pounds a year of emissions, according to an analysis by the Environmental Defense Fund, based on agency data.
Dr. Beck declined requests for comment. She had pushed the E.P.A. during the Obama administration to narrow the scope of the risk evaluations, in a fashion similar to the approach under her watch.
Also helping oversee the risk evaluation effort is Erik Baptist, a former senior lawyer at the American Petroleum Institute, another big player in the chemical industry.
The American Chemistry Council said in a statement last week that the E.P.A.’s approach met “the requirements of the law,” adding that it wanted the risk assessments to be “protective and practical.”
Scott Pruitt, the E.P.A. administrator, signing new rules related to the Toxic Substances Control Act last year. CreditEnvironmental Protection Agency
Under the approach, the E.P.A. will examine what harm can be caused, for example, to anyone directly exposed to perchloroethylene — a dry-cleaning solvent and metal degreaser designated by the E.P.A. as a likely carcinogen— during manufacturing or when using it in dry cleaning, carpet cleaning or handling certain ink-removal products.
But the agency will not focus on exposures that occur from traces of the chemical found in drinking water in 44 states as a result of improper disposal over decades, the E.P.A. documents say. The decision conflicts with a risk assessment plan detailed by the agency a year ago, which included drinking water. And the change came after the American Chemistry Council argued in February last year that “the E.P.A. has discretion to select the conditions of use that it will consider.”
The agency will also not consider the hazards of perchloroethylene discharged into streams or lakes, landfills or the air from dry-cleaning stores or manufacturing or processing plants, the documents say.
The documents contain similar conclusions about nine of the 10 chemicals under review. One of these is 1,4-dioxane, which can be found in small amounts in antifreeze, deodorants, shampoos, and cosmetics and is considered “likely to be carcinogenic to humans.” Another is trichloroethylene, which is used to make a refrigerant chemical and remove grease from metal parts and is associated with cancers of the liver, kidneys, and blood.
Other changes identified in the E.P.A. documents narrow the definitions of certain chemicals, including asbestos. Some asbestos-like fibers will not be included in the risk assessments, one agency staff member said, nor will the 8.8 million pounds a year of asbestos deposited in hazardous landfills or the 13.1 million pounds discarded in routine dump sites.
The most likely outcome of the changes will be that the agency finds lower levels of risks associated with many chemicals, and as a result, imposes fewer new restrictions or prohibitions, several current and former agency officials said.
“They don’t want to open Pandora’s box by looking comprehensively at the risk, as they may prove to be significant and then they have to deal with it,” said Robert M. Sussman, a former chemical industry lawyer and E.P.A. official who now works as a consultant to Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families, an advocacy group.
Despite the changes, the E.P.A. is still expected to ban the use of methylene chloride as a paint stripper soon — an action first proposed at the end of the Obama administration. The chemical, one of the 10 under review, is a popular ingredient used in dozens of products sold at home improvement stores nationwide and has been blamed in dozens of deaths.
A collection of more than a dozen groups — representing environmental, public health and labor organizations — are suing the E.P.A. to challenge earlier changes in the toxic chemical evaluation program. The case is before the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco.
A version of this article appears in print on June 7, 2018, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: E.P.A. Eases Way It Evaluates Risk From Chemicals.