Farming | Civil Eats

For Contract Farmers, the Election Could Change Everything—or Nothing at All

Lisa Held — Tue, 08 Oct 2024 09:00:44 +0000

A version of this article originally appeared in The Deep Dish, our members-only newsletter. Become a member today and get the next issue directly in your inbox.

This spring, Minh and Nhu-Hai Ngo were so stressed out by being at home on their farm in Vienna, Georgia, they made plans to visit family in Vietnam. When they spoke to Civil Eats, Nhu-Hai was already there. Minh, a soft-spoken farmer, was getting ready to join her. He sounded defeated.

“I go outside, look at the [chicken] houses, and it’s just empty,” he said. It was the first time in nearly eight years that the houses weren’t packed with birds owned by Tyson, a $21 billion company.

Minh started raising chickens in 2016, when he and Nhu-Hai took out a federal loan to purchase a farm with eight long metal barns built for housing poultry. Every few months, Tyson employees dropped off chicks and feed. They came back six weeks later to fetch fattened birds ready for slaughter.

After five years, in 2021, Tyson demanded that Minh install new fans and controllers in the houses, even though the old ones worked just fine, said Nhu-Hai, who handled the finances. So, despite the debt they still had from the initial farm purchase, the couple took out another loan. Less than three years after that—in October 2023—a Tyson production manager sent a letter with an ominous heading: “RE: Expiration and subsequent non-replacement of Broiler Production Contract.” Tyson was ending its relationship with the Ngos, effective January 26, 2024.

In 1992, the top four chicken companies controlled 41 percent of the market; today, they control 60 percent.

Ever since, Minh and Nhu-Hai have been fretting over how to come up with the money to pay back the bank. They put the farm on the market, but Nhu-Hai said it’s now nearly worthless, without an accompanying contract to grow chickens. (There is little else, after all, that one can do with eight windowless metal barns, each longer than a football field.)

“They give you just enough to survive every day—that’s it,” Minh said, of Tyson’s approach to compensation. “And then they make sure you spend any money on the houses.” Tyson did not respond to a request for comment.

For the Ngos, the situation is uniquely and intimately distressing. However, it’s a common story among America’s chicken farmers, because companies set up the system to place the risk of capital investments on farmers, while they control pretty much everything else. And as the industry has become more consolidated, their power has grown.

Over the past three decades, under both Democrat and Republican administrations, concentration across the meat industry has accelerated. In 1992, the top four chicken companies controlled 41 percent of the market; today, they control 60 percent. In pork, those numbers are 43 vs. 67 percent. In beef, 71 vs. 85 percent.

Economists predict market abuses are likely to occur when control by the four top players in any sector exceeds 40 percent. “What a monopoly does . . . is it uses its market power to raise prices for consumers or to raise prices in a stealthy way by reducing quality,” explained Christopher Leonard, author of The Meat Racket, while moderating a virtual Farm Action event called “Justice for America’s Poultry Growers” in July. “At the same time, on the other end of the ledger, they suppress what they pay producers . . . and they capture the profits that are in the middle. It’s a pretty simple playbook.”

Now, as the election approaches, many experts and farmers say the outcome could determine whether the farm economy continues toward consolidation and monopoly, or whether—if the next administration enacts policies to restore a more competitive marketplace—it shifts power away from corporations and toward farmers.

They’ve got good reason: Upon taking office, the Trump administration immediately scrapped rules meant to protect farmers and was generally passive on antitrust enforcement. Meanwhile, shortly after being sworn in, the Biden Administration announced it would tackle consolidation with an executive order on “promoting competition in the American economy.” The order included a long to-do list for Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack to, among other goals, “address the unfair treatment of farmers” and a directive for the chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to “address the consolidation of industry in many markets across the economy.”

Some farmers and advocates say the Biden administration has delivered on an impressive number of those priorities, while others see its passionate rhetoric as disguising a lack of meaningful progress. Many predict that as president, Vice President Kamala Harris is likely to advance efforts to confront consolidation in meatpacking, but without a formal policy document, it’s hard to know exactly how. Most say that despite Trump’s populist language and popularity among commodity farmers, his focus on deregulation and actions during his first term point to a future with more power for meatpackers and less for contract farmers.

Industry groups that represent the biggest companies, including the National Chicken Council and the Meat Institute have repeatedly pushed back on the characterization of consolidation and harms to contract farmers as an issue, calling the Biden Administration’s efforts “a solution in search of a problem.”

However, experts like Austin Frerick—author of Barons and former co-chair of the Biden campaign’s Agriculture Antitrust Policy Committee—say the problem of consolidation and its multiple impacts on Americans represents a real opportunity for candidates. “The piñata is so big, and it’s saying, ‘Hit me, hit me,’ especially in meat markets,” he said. For example, recent reports show that some of the largest meat companies including Tyson and JBS USA have used their power to skirt child labor laws and to fix prices, raising the cost of groceries. “Someone’s eventually going to latch onto this. The politics are just too good.”

A Century of Regulatory Inaction

“(The companies) say we’re independent, but we’re not independent,” said Jonathan Buttram, a former contract chicken farmer who is now president of the Alabama Contract Poultry Growers Association, during the Farm Action event. “How can we be independent when we have the debt, we have all the dead chickens, and that’s basically all we have? They own everything else. They make you feel like a sharecropper.”

Americans have been here before. Worker abuses perpetrated by turn-of-the-century meat barons prompted Congress to pass the Packers & Stockyards Act in 1921, in part to “assure fair competition and fair trade practices, to safeguard farmers and ranchers.”

Meatpacking workers in Chicago circa 1905. Photo from the Library of Congress.

More than 100 years later, however, after a mind-numbing series of false starts, there were still no rules on the books to enforce the law when President Biden took office. Former President Trump is partially responsible: During the Obama administration, Secretary Vilsack got some rules started, but Trump immediately threw them out when he took office. Trump then went a step further, dissolving the office that was set up to enforce Packers & Stockyards and moving oversight of the law to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS).

“AMS’s job is basically promoting the largest corporations, including meatpackers and grain traders, so to say, ‘You have to hold these companies accountable, but your bigger mission is to promote those companies,’ that gave us a lot of concern,” said Angela Huffman, president of Farm Action.

When Vilsack came in with a directive from Biden to restart work on Packers & Stockyards, he didn’t reverse that decision. However, under his watch, the USDA has finalized or proposed multiple rules that have earned the support of a wide range of farmer groups, including the National Farmers Union and the American Farm Bureau Federation. “We’ve been really happy that the Biden administration has taken this up,” Huffman said, and she’s been surprised by how vigorously they’ve pursued it. “Our big concern is just with the pace.

A USDA spokesperson said the agency used maximum resources to expedite the pace but that the rulemaking process is complex.

Huffman sees two pending rules as the most important for contract poultry farmers, and notes that if they’re not finalized before the election, an incoming president could throw them out immediately. Given that’s what Trump did the last time around, there’s reason to believe he would do it again, while Harris would likely let them stand. However, support of the rules doesn’t always break down along party lines: Some Republican lawmakers have attempted to roll back progress on the rules by attaching policy riders to legislative packages, while a few Democrats have made requests to slow down the process in ways that echo meat industry requests.

Others are frustrated by the fact that the rules seem to flit around the edges of deeper reform. For example, one of the most controversial aspects of contract farming in the chicken industry has long been the “tournament system,” so called because wages are turned into a competition, with farmers paid based on how fat their chickens are compared to those at neighboring farms. If implemented, the rules could set minimums for base pay and require companies to provide more information on how their pay rate is calculated. The fundamental structure of the tournament system, however, would remain.

Experts at organizations like the Open Markets Institute say that while the rules would help, the system itself is unfair and therefore violates the law and should be banned outright.

The National Chicken Council, on the other hand, says the Packers and Stockyards Act already prohibits anti-competitive practices and that some of the rules would increase costs, including to farmers.

Another rule would require companies to provide more details on the purpose and costs of upgrades when they demand farmers make expensive improvements to chicken houses, like Tyson did with the Ngos in 2021. But Nhu-Hai said there’s only one thing that would really make a difference for farmers: if the pay covered the upgrade. “Otherwise, you still have to be more in debt. It’s not worth it.”

Still, some farmer advocates see big potential in small tweaks to regulations, and Biden’s USDA did deliver on another major priority of independent cattle ranchers: In March, the USDA finalized a new “Product of USA” rule so that meat carrying that label will now have to come from animals born, raised, and processed here. It’s a change that comes after years of work, to ensure American farmers don’t face unfair competition from cheaper imports that carry the USA label.

The Consolidation of Agriculture

During Trump’s presidency, Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue famously told a group of struggling Wisconsin dairy farmers that “In America, the big get bigger, and the small go out.”

Secretary Vilsack’s language couldn’t be more different. Since the USDA released the 2022 Farm Census data earlier this year, statistics on consolidation and the loss of small and mid-size farms have been a fixture in his regular speeches. At a recent Field Day at the Rodale Institute in Pennsylvania, for example, he shared the fact that in 2022, the largest 7.5 percent of farms took in 89 percent of overall farm income, “which means that 1.7 million farms had to share 11 percent.”

“How can we be independent when we have the debt, we have all the dead chickens, and that’s basically all we have?

He also noted that 544,000 farms have gone out of business since 1981. “If you took every farmer today in North Dakota and South Dakota and added them to the ones in Minnesota and Wisconsin and those in Illinois and Iowa, as well as those in Nebraska and Colorado and those in Missouri and Oklahoma, you’d have roughly 544,000 farmers,” he laid out, for emphasis.

One of the key actions his USDA has taken to save small- and mid-size farms has been to invest in slaughterhouses and processing plants that work with farmers at that scale. The reasoning is simple: If there are more smaller, independent plants to buy and process animals for small farmers, competition will increase and the big packers will have less power.

In January 2022, the USDA announced a plan to invest $1 billion in competitive meat infrastructure. In July of this year, the agency said it had already distributed $700 million to that end.

But many experts say that because the big packers have already gotten so big, new, smaller plants will never be able to compete. “The reality is that the meat markets got more concentrated these last four years. JBS made a purchase. Tyson made a purchase. Cargill got back into the chicken industry,” Frerick said.

A spokesperson for the USDA emphasized that many of the smaller plants have not even opened yet, and that reversing decades of concentration will require a long-term commitment to a whole-of-government approach.

“From the very first days of the Biden-Harris Administration, USDA has been working to promote competition in agriculture by making landmark investments that diversify agriculture processing and support small and rural businesses, modernizing the rulebook under the Packers & Stockyards Act, and implementing wide-ranging policies to address the harms that market concentration poses to farmers and consumers,” the spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “These unprecedented actions will help to bring transparency, choice, and integrity back to the markets and serve the interests of farmers and small- and mid-sized independent processors alike.”

The USDA’s actions on other fronts have strengthened large companies: Vilsack’s USDA, for example, gave Tyson a $60 million Climate-Smart Commodities Grant. Under Trump, Brazil-based JBS, the largest meat company in the world, got the largest pork contract in a program meant to compensate American farmers for trade deficits, netting nearly $78 million. (In both cases, the administrations have said that the money is passed through to farmers.)

Where Frerick thinks real change could happen to reign in consolidation is in antitrust regulation, which the Biden administration has also been pushing forward after appointing antitrust crusader Lina Khan to chair the FTC. Kahn has met with Iowa farmers about consolidation in the fertilizer industry, and in 2023, she led a significant update to the government’s merger guidelines. “The FTC and DOJ [Department of Justice] now have much stronger guidelines. Over time, I think that’s going to make a big difference, regardless of who’s president,” Huffman said.

Looking to November

As to the two candidates angling to move into the White House next year, neither has said much or published detailed positions on meat industry consolidation.

However, Harris recently said she plans to crack down on food industry mergers, and the 2024 Democratic Party Platform mentions concentration and notes the Biden administration’s work to “make livestock and poultry markets fairer and more transparent.” Her past actions also provide some clues: Huffman said that when Harris was a senator, she voted in favor of checkoff reform, another big priority for groups working on curtailing corporate power in the food system.

Frerick said it will all depend on who Harris appoints to lead the USDA. Because while he is emphatically disappointed in the Biden Administration’s performance on corporate consolidation, he thinks much of the failure lies in Vilsack’s ties to industry. If Trump wins, on the other hand, based on the former president’s last term, “everything bad will get turbocharged,” he said. While farmers have become a sort of emblematic picture of a typical Trump voter and many support the former president this time around, across a diverse agricultural landscape, there are also many who agree with Frerick’s opinion.

Carlton Sanders has been advocating for farmers since his Mississippi farm went into foreclosure in 2017, after, he said, the company he grew chickens for drove him out of business using discriminatory practices (which were later documented by the USDA). During the Farm Action event, he told a story of going to D.C. to meet with Trump during his first term. “He checked my case and my records, and he said I should get back to Mississippi and be proud that Koch Foods is providing jobs for the Mississippians. He said he won’t help with nothing, and he did not,” Sanders said. “Donald Trump is definitely not gonna help the chicken farmers.”

The 2024 Republican Party Platform does not mention corporate power, antitrust issues, or farmers in the meat industry.

As for Minh and Nhu-Hai Ngo, at the end of the day, they’re not sure it matters who is in office in Washington. They are desperate to get out of the chicken business altogether, and Minh is thinking about going back to driving a truck. But they also just heard that Tyson sold its local operations to a smaller company that may be offering new contracts to farms in the region. So, they waver as they reason it out: If they can’t sell the barns or make loan payments and a company comes along offering a contract, will the least terrible option be to get back in?

In August, after half a year of empty barns, they were increasingly anxious about their financial predicament. It seemed, Nhu-Hai said, that as long as companies like Tyson could amass unlimited wealth and power, elections would do little to change the course of their future. “Sometimes, I don’t feel like it makes a big difference,” she said.

The post For Contract Farmers, the Election Could Change Everything—or Nothing at All appeared first on Civil Eats.

Immigrant Workers Are the Backbone of Our Food System

The Civil Eats Editors — Wed, 02 Oct 2024 18:03:32 +0000

As part of our mission, Civil Eats reports on the U.S. food system’s disproportionate impact on immigrants and communities of color. Immigrant food system workers toil in the nation’s restaurants, farms, and food processing facilities, and have some of the least visible but most strenuous and dangerous jobs in the country. Many are underpaid and vulnerable to food insecurity and workplace abuses. They were also subjected to unprecedented risks during the early days of the pandemic. Despite this, their contributions to the food system are overwhelmingly positive.

In fact, immigrants form the backbone of the U.S. food and agricultural industries, which would face unimaginable strain without their human labor. They also demonstrate remarkable resilience and creative ingenuity in their own cooking and farming, introducing us to their cultural traditions and enriching us as a society.

To counter the negative narratives currently rampant in this country, we selected just a few of our many stories from the recent past that demonstrate how immigrants play an important, outsize role in planting, picking, and processing the food on our plates. They also make up the very fabric of our culture and make us what we are as a nation.

We will continue to tell their stories.

How a Community Gardener Grew Food for Her Family, Quit Her Job at McDonald’s, and Started a Farm
A Q&A with Maximina Hernández Reyes, who credits her success to a Portland, Oregon, food network called Rockwood Food Systems Collaborative.

A Community of Growers
How East New York Farms builds food security and provides jobs for its neighborhood.

Photo courtesy of ALBA

This Group Has Helped Farmworkers Become Farm Owners for More Than 2 Decades
California’s farmworkers face untold barriers accessing the land, capital, and training needed to strike out on their own. For 20 years, ALBA has been slowly changing the landscape for this important group of aspiring growers.

The Struggle for Food Sovereignty in Immokalee, Florida
The majority of migrant farmworkers live below the federal poverty line, without easy access to healthy foods or affordable housing. To survive, many in this tight-knit community have found strategies for mutual aid and collaborative resilience.

This Community Garden Helps Farmworkers Feed Themselves. Now It’s Facing Eviction.
The members of Tierras Milperas in Watsonville, Calif. are struggling to maintain access to their garden. Similar stories are unfolding across the country.

A New Film Documents the Immigrant Farmworker Journey
‘First Time Home,’ a short film created by American children of Triqui farmworkers, offers an unscripted, authentic glimpse into life for farmworker families—and why people choose to sacrifice their lives in Mexico for opportunities up North.

On the Rural Immigrant Experience: ‘We Come With a Culture, Our Own History, and We’re Here to Help’
Organizer Gladys Godinez on the way immigrants change, and are changed by, rural America.

The Fight for L.A.’s Street Food Vendors
Getting a permit is difficult and expensive, and the state food code is prohibitively complex for small-scale vendors. A coalition is working to help protect this important economic and cultural tradition.

Photo by Sarah Sax

A Vietnamese Farmers’ Cooperative in New Orleans Offers a Lesson in Resilience
VEGGI Co-op has weathered Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill. Now, it’s facing the twin threats of the coronavirus pandemic and climate change.

Immigrants Lift Up a Food System in Need of Reform
Farmworker advocates argue that if we want to revitalize the food economy, we must embrace—and not criminalize—immigrants.

The Halal Restaurant Helping Build Community in Suburban Detroit
Bismallah Kabob has become a gathering hotspot for Detroit’s Bangladeshi community—and is building bridges between immigrants and longtime residents.

A New American Dream: The Rise of Immigrants in Rural America
The upsurge of immigration has inarguably helped revitalize dying towns, especially in farm country.

Immigrant Farmers Help Grow Organic Ag in Wisconsin and Beyond
Hmong farmers Blia and Phua Thao put their 40-plus years of experience to work in Spring Valley, where they grow organic produce entirely by hand.

Immigrant Women are Providing a Taste of Oaxaca in California’s Central Valley
Diverse immigrant communities are forging new paths and bringing traditional culture to rural America.

A Cookbook Highlights the Power of Immigrants to Make Positive Change
Leyla Moushabeck, editor of The Immigrant Cookbook, talks about the power of food, and immigrants, in shaping this country.

On Cleveland’s Largest Urban Farm, Refugees Gain Language and Job Skills
The Refugee Empowerment Agricultural Program expects to harvest 22,000 pounds of produce this year, while helping refugees find a community.

Refugee Farmers are Putting Down Roots in North Carolina
Transplanting Traditions Community Farm is helping Burmese farmers create new community.

The post Immigrant Workers Are the Backbone of Our Food System appeared first on Civil Eats.

Good Goats Make Good Neighbors

Carmen Kohlruss — Wed, 02 Oct 2024 09:00:39 +0000

On a sunny California day, Ricky Bobby the goat chomps across a hillside with the speed and pizazz of his NASCAR driver namesake from Talladega Nights.

Along with his fellow herd members, all employed by the nonprofit Happy Goat to reduce wildfire risks, Ricky Bobby is doing what he does best, gobbling up weeds, shrubs, and leaves from low-hanging branches. No plant appears to be too much of a challenge, including poison oak and spiky live-oak leaves. He and 100 caprine teammates can clear about an acre a day.

“I really think that this is a hope of the future—organizations like them who really care about the environment, who care about the welfare of the Earth, who care about the climate and the quality of life for people,” says Carole Beckham, who hired Happy Goat to graze a portion of her 23-acre residential property in the Sierra Nevada. “With all the big fires we’ve had over the last several years, it’s really impacted the quality of life for a lot of people. It seems like Mariposa County has been in PTSD every year.”

A goat nips on a branch on a hillside property outside of Mariposa. The goats are part of Happy Goat of Mariposa, California which provides the vegetation-clearing creatures to landowners to reduce wildfire risk. Photo by Craig Kohlruss.

Founded in 2020, Happy Goat farm sits on a 2,000-acre property in Mariposa County, near Yosemite National Park. The organization’s Goats for Good program leases out its grazing herd to nearby landowners in the Sierra Nevada at a reduced price, and hopes to make the service free of charge for some residents via a lottery. The farm also teaches local students about agriculture and conservation—and donates much of the fruits and vegetables it grows to people in need.

“It’s a crazy twisted road that I went down that ended up here in this magical place,” says John Cahalin, one of three Happy Goat co-founders (and the one who named Ricky Bobby).

Ricky Bobby is doing what he does best, gobbling up weeds, shrubs, and leaves from low-hanging branches.

The San Diego transplant came to Mariposa several years ago in search of land for an off-road vehicle rally school, but his vision for the property changed after he met Jesse Fouch, a sixth-generation farmer, rancher, and owner of Fouch Farms. As Cahalin learned more about his new home, he decided farming was a better fit—something intrinsic to Mariposa and good for tourists, too. Fouch joined him as one of three co-founders of Happy Goat.

Cahalin wanted goats to be a big part of the farm. “Goats are mischievous, they’re affectionate, and they’re just the most beautiful animals to me,” Cahalin says. “They make me laugh every time I see my favorite ones.”

Happy Goat co-founder John Cahalin holds a baby goat on the nonprofit’s farm in the Sierra Nevada foothill community of Mariposa. Photo by Craig Kohlruss.

Lacey Sharp, Happy Goat’s daily operations manager, among other things, launched the organization’s Goats for Good grazing program over a year and a half ago, and since then, the goats have cleared more than 40 properties in the Mariposa area. That amounts to approximately 200 acres in addition to the 220 acres the goats take on each year back at the farm.

Sharp runs a holistic program that puts the health of all involved—the animals, the landscape, and the humans seeking fewer wildfire risks—at the center of every decision. The goats spend a limited amount of time in each section of a property, managed by a moveable fence and the watchful eyes of a couple of shepherds and dogs. Sharp is careful not to let the goats overgraze, which can compact soil.

“We’re very in tune with the climate around us and the land we’re working on,” she says. Sharp is also a veterinary technician, and runs a small cattle business influenced by the Texas ranch where she grew up.

Happy Goat grazing director Lacey Sharp pets Ricky Bobby, one of the many goats that Happy Goat uses for Sierra foothill wildfire mitigation. Photo by Craig Kohlruss.

The nonprofit has around 450 goats—primarily the cashmere type—with plans to grow the herd to nearly 3,000. About 100 billy goats currently handle the grazing contracts, while the nannies grow the herd back at the farm. Their kids enjoy a happy youth that includes scrambling all over a massive jungle gym called the “Goatnasium.”

The goats are part of a growing trend of using livestock to mitigate wildfire risks across the West. That need is acute in California’s Sierra region, where catastrophic fire presents an unprecedented challenge. More than 880,000 people live in this mountainous stretch of the state, according to the California Wildfire & Forest Resilience Task Force.

Mariposa County, where 16 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, is still recovering from the particularly devastating Oak Fire, an arson-caused blaze that leveled 127 homes and 66 outbuildings in 2022. In July, a new threat, the 908-acre French Fire—caused by a lawn mower that ignited dry grass—burned dangerously close to Mariposa’s historic main street and destroyed or damaged 18 structures.

The use of goats for targeted grazing is becoming more popular statewide as it is consistent with increasing the protection of people, structures, and communities

“The use of goats for targeted grazing is becoming more popular statewide as it is consistent with increasing the protection of people, structures, and communities,” says Kara Garrett, coordinator of Cal Fire’s Community Risk Reduction Program. “Many have found grazing to be an effective tool. Not only do [the goats] help clear annual vegetation, but they also browse up trees and reduce fuel loads, helping property owners with their fuel reduction.”

Cal Fire doesn’t hold contracts specifically for grazing, Garrett says, but 18 of the Wildfire Prevention Grants it awarded for 2022-2023 went to projects that included grazing. “Lawn mowers, weed eaters, chainsaws, tractors, and trimmers can all spark a wildland fire if used during the wrong time of year,” Garrett says. “And with work still left to be done across California, the grazing goats are a safe alternative to help maintain vegetation.”

Happy Goat co-founder John Cahalin, in lime green, tosses out feed to a mob of goats as they climb over him and some fellow Happy Goat supporters during a break in the daily work effort. Photo by Craig Kohlruss.

Nearly a third of all acres treated in fuel-reduction projects by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in California utilize grazing, which includes goats, says Sarah Denos, a spokesperson for the BLM in California. Acres grazed for fire mitigation through the agency more than doubled between 2018 and 2022, Denos says. BLM data shows a spike from about 5,400 acres in the state to 18,000 acres during that period.

Goats can be used in lieu of herbicides to target invasive plants in a way that helps restore balance to the ecosystem, including by adding nutrients back to the soil through their waste, Denos says. Additionally, goats can navigate steep, rugged terrain where machines aren’t practical, she adds.

There are drawbacks, of course. A herd of goats, if not properly monitored, can mow through a lot of land, eating up everything.

But if they’re well guided, goats can also be an appropriate tool in locations requiring a “lighter touch,” such as sensitive cultural sites, says Mark Thibideau, a spokesperson for the U.S. Forest Service Pacific Southwest Region. Beyond general grazing permits, which the Forest Service has issued since its inception, Thibideau says that last year his region used livestock to graze 4,544 acres specifically to mitigate wildfire.

In rural Mariposa County, where many large, historic ranches have been replaced by smaller residential parcels that can easily get overgrown, Happy Goat provides help. Goats’ love of leaves means they create extra clearance between the ground and low-hanging branches, which helps prevent fire from jumping into the tree canopy. Happy Goat’s humans also assist by doing some pruning to ensure that clearance extends to six vertical feet.

Other goat operations in California include those led by the Ojai Valley Fire Safe Council, City Grazing in San Francisco, and numerous Sonoma County grazing cooperatives. “They’re more sustainable—they have less impact to the environment,” one Southern California Edison worker told The Fresno Bee about using goats from Chasin Goat Grazing for vegetation management beneath power lines in the Sierra. “And from a sociological perspective, people can get behind goats.” A free, online search tool and map called match.graze, launched by the University of California Cooperative Extension and previously reported on by Civil Eats, displays many more California herds for hire.

“In California every year, everyone gets nervous for wildfire season, and rightfully so,” says entrepreneur Willie Morris, the third Happy Goat co-founder. “But the fact that we can take goats—which to me are like such silly, funny creatures—and they can be the frontline of fire prevention, and they can get to places we could never really do with machinery, to me, it’s just a no-brainer.”

Jessica Segale talks about her work as Happy Goat’s greenhouse manager and produce grown on their regenerative farm in the Sierra Nevada foothill community of Mariposa, California. Segale is also director of Happy Goat’s farm-to-school program. Photo by Craig Kohlruss.

Grazing is just one of the programs that makes Happy Goat a boon to its community.

Happy Goat’s farm-to-school program connected with around 1,400 students last year from several local schools, supported by federal and state grants, for hands-on learning experiences in agriculture and conservation. That outreach continues, and the farm recently became a new contracted provider of produce for Mariposa County Unified School District. Happy Goat also helps recycle food waste from local school cafeterias, using it to create compost for small school gardens and its farm.

Meanwhile, Happy Goat is working toward regenerative farm certification from the Savory Institute, a nonprofit focused on restoring grasslands through holistic management. “We’re building topsoil, we’re sequestering carbon, we’re improving the forage, the trees, the grasses,” says Fouch, who designed the farm and is also an associate educator with the Savory Institute. “We monitor insect populations, the birds, the bees—everything.”

Goats can be used in lieu of herbicides to target invasive plants in a way that helps restore balance to the ecosystem, including by adding nutrients back to the soil through their waste.

The farm grows a wide variety of fruits and vegetables by intercropping them, choosing varieties that are “happy around each other,” says Jessica Segale, director of its farm-to-school program. This classic organic farming technique promotes biodiversity and can also reduce pests. Also, plants are sprayed with natural compost extracts instead of harmful chemicals.

Happy Goat donates much of its produce to food banks. It gave away 4,400 pounds of produce last year—more than a third of all it grew—and plans to double that number. Beyond goats, other animals on its farm include chickens for eggs, sheep, pigs, ducks, guineafowl, and a goose. None are used for meat.

The organization also has a goat therapy program that provides stress relief for humans—including some college students who got to enjoy the animals at the University of California, Merced, campus during finals week.

Funding for Happy Goat’s philanthropic efforts comes from related enterprises, like its for-profit diner, Happy Goat Farm to Table, which opened last fall in the town of Mariposa just down the road. Happy Goat was also awarded a rural development grant from the United States Department of Agriculture last year to research the feasibility of using the goats’ hair for cashmere production, which is limited in the United States.

Happy Goat Farm to Table diner in downtown Mariposa offers meals with ingredients from the nearby Happy Goat farm. The for-profit diner opened in the fall of 2023 and its proceeds support the work of nonprofit Happy Goat. Photo by Craig Kohlruss.

Happy Goat intends to keep growing, all with the help of Ricky Bobby and the rest of the goats.

“They have limitless land to range on.” Sharp says. “They never run out of feed. They are not put into a holding pen where they spend 24/7 on a dry lot. We literally use them for what they were created for, and that’s what makes them so happy—and it’s what makes us happy.”

The post Good Goats Make Good Neighbors appeared first on Civil Eats.

Weathering Climate Shocks: How Restaurants Survive Supply Disruptions

Hannah Wallace — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 11:00:28 +0000

This is the second article in a five-part series about restaurants and climate-change solutions, produced in collaboration with Eater.

When Peter Platt was in Newport, Oregon in 2018, visiting Local Ocean Seafoods to bring them on as a supplier, he spoke with some of the fishermen docked outside the waterfront fish market and restaurant. “All the salmon fishermen were like, ‘We don’t even bother to fish off the coast here anymore. Everyone heads to Alaska,’” says Platt, founder and owner of Portland’s high-end Peruvian restaurant Andina. “‘There’s just no fish.’” The dearth of Pacific salmon, he learned, was partly due to warming waters in salmon streams and drought-fueled water shortages, which are lethal to salmon eggs and juvenile fish. Platt, who is in charge of sustainability initiatives at Andina, did the only thing he could: He and his staff took salmon off Andina’s menu.

“We’re just not going to offer it,” he says. “It’s either unavailable or too expensive for the quality. . . . climate has a lot to do with it.”

With all the challenges restaurants have faced in the past five years—COVID, inflation, price gouging—the impact of climate change on their supply chains has often been overlooked. Yet global warming is steadily affecting fisheries and farms around the world and the foods they yield.

Here in the U.S., extreme climate-related events like forest fires, floods, and drought ruin crops and harm aquatic life. They also cause power outages and disrupt transportation and distribution, which increases the price of all goods, including food.

Read the stories in our series with Eater:

Beyond Farm to Table: How Chefs Can Support Climate-Friendly Food Systems As global warming bears down, some restaurants are forging stronger bonds with regional food systems and regenerative farms.
Weathering Climate Shocks: How Restaurants Survive Supply Disruptions To overcome ingredient shortages and high food costs, some restaurateurs are rethinking their staple ingredients and strengthening their relationships with suppliers.
Battling Meltdown: If You Can’t Stand the Heat, Work for Change in the Kitchen As climate change drives temperatures up, restaurant staff face uncomfortable, even unsafe conditions with no heat regulations to protect them. Some workers are taking matters into their own hands.

For many restaurant owners and chefs, the impact is a real, daily challenge, causing a shortage of quality ingredients and sudden fluctuations in price. All of this makes it harder to keep menu prices consistent and run a profitable business. “There’s a lot of topsy-turviness right now,” Platt says.

Staple Ingredients in Short Supply

Climate change has affected the supply of other foods, too. Cocoa yields have already fallen due to changes in rainfall patterns, an uptick in pest and fungus infestations, and increased droughts. Half the suitable land for coffee will be gone by 2050. And there’s mustard: Prices skyrocketed in 2021 due to a severe drought in Canada, the world’s largest producer of brown mustard seeds.

Andina founder Peter Platt. Right, Andina’s shrimp ceviche with local ocean-farmed dulse seaweed. Photos by Anna Caitlin.

Salmon is just one of the menu problems Platt has had to deal with recently. Citrus is another. Andina requires a steady supply of key limes for leche de tigre, the marinade that’s used for ceviche, Peru’s flagship dish. Andina sources them mostly from Mexico, where a perfect storm of colder weather, floods, and price manipulations by drug cartels caused prices to fluctuate between $37 and $67 per case from July 2023 to July 2024. Nevertheless, Platt and his brother, Victor, who leads the chef team, did not raise the price of ceviche. “Like most restaurants, we have simply had to decrease or even forgo margins on certain dishes to avoid passing on the sticker shock to our customers,” Platt says. “You just have to suck it up, you know?”

Ayad Sinawi, chef-owner of Mabu Kitchen in Philadelphia, has had no choice but to suck up the cost increases, which are crippling for a small operation like his. A beloved French restaurant serving bistro classics and Southern comfort food, Mabu has paper-thin margins and no liquor license to bring in extra cash from the bar.

The croque madame at Mabu Kitchen, a French and Southern–inspired restaurant. Photo by Grace Cavallo.

“Prices tend to take a weird roller coaster ride on a weekly basis,” he says. “I get 15 dozen eggs for $25 one week and then $52 the next.” Last winter, when there was a national egg shortage, that price shot up to $89. The shortage was caused in part by farmers culling millions of birds due to an outbreak of avian flu, which, experts increasingly believe, is worsening as climate change alters the migration patterns of wild birds that spread the disease. Other factors are at play as well, like the rising costs of fuel, feed, and packaging.

Mabu’s brunch is tremendously popular, filled with eggy specialties like a French omelette, croque madame and fried-chicken, and waffles Benedict. “We had to charge a little more for our eggs for a while,” Sinawi says. But he did so with extreme reluctance, wanting to abide by his principles of offering excellent yet affordable food. “The business plan was always about being a local bistro, catering to the neighborhood, keeping prices within the parameters that will encourage people to be impulsive [with their orders],” Sinawi says. “The minute I start making it a ‘destination,’ I’m going to lose all my locals. It’s not worth it to me.” When prices went back down to $52 for 15 dozen, he lowered menu prices accordingly. “But that’s still 29 cents [per] egg. That’s a lot for a restaurant!” he says. During the worst of the egg shortage, that added roughly $500 to his monthly costs.

Mabu Kitchen in Philadelphia, PA. Right: Chef and owner Ayad Sinawi. Photos by Grace Cavallo.

When factoring in rising inflation and hikes in other costs besides food, the financial environment feels increasingly insurmountable for many restaurants. Everything from internet connections to waste removal services has gotten more expensive. For example, Sinawi had originally contracted with a garbage removal service that charged $129 a month. The business was bought out by a bigger company that increased his bill by $40 without warning, meaning he was now expected to pay $169 for the same service with no time to negotiate or plan. (This happened at the same time as the egg shortage.) Three months later, his bill rose again, to $228.

Given these combined financial pressures, it’s no wonder that small independent restaurants often go out of business. According to a report released in February 2024 by the Global Food Institute, 26 percent of single-location, full-service restaurants fail in the first year. Mabu Kitchen is still going strong after two years, but Sinawi admits he doesn’t know how much longer he’ll be able to make it.

A Surge in ‘Unnatural Disasters’

Tara A. Scully, associate professor of biology at George Washington University, is one of the report’s authors. The 60-page document, titled “The Climate Reality for Independent Restaurants” and released in collaboration with the James Beard Foundation, drives home how vulnerable independent restaurants are to climate change disruptions. Furthermore, Scully and her colleagues write, “We choose to call these ‘unnatural disasters’ because they are driven by the increase in greenhouse gases generated by human activities. To call these events ‘natural disasters’ ignores their true origin.”

Though meat, poultry, and fish have never been high-profit menu items, the margins have grown even slimmer as protein prices have spiked, increasingly due to climate events that can unfold rapidly.

Scully, who is also director of curriculum development for the Global Food Institute, says that the most alarming part of the report to her is the data about global climate incidents. In just the past three years—2020 to 2023—storms have increased by an annual average of 19 percent, floods by 23 percent, and wildfires by 29 percent, according to the International Disaster Database. “I literally called up my colleague and said, ‘you are not going to believe this!’” She hopes this panic-inducing statistic will serve a purpose. “It should be a total wake-up call,” Scully says.

Whether extreme heat, hailstorms, flooding, or forest fires, these unnatural disasters lead to a plethora of correlated financial crises for restaurants. These can range from power outages, air-conditioning breakdowns, delivery delays, and loss of food quality to ingredient shortages that lead to the unpredictable price spikes both Platt and Sinawi are experiencing. Also, crop shortages are directly tied to inflation, the report found, taxing restaurants further. A study from the European Central Bank estimates that by 2035, inflation will increase U.S. food prices by an additional 0.4 to 2.6 percent in a best-case scenario—if emissions are drastically decreased. If they are not, inflation could rise as much as 3.3 percent over its current values.

A Pivot to Local Sourcing—Mostly

To avoid climate-caused supply chain disruptions, many U.S. chefs and farmers are trying to source more ingredients locally.

For the past two decades, Platt has sourced ají chiles from Peru, which was the only place you could find these flavorful peppers so essential to Peruvian cuisine. But over the past 15 years, he’s been collaborating with a farm in Corvallis, Oregon called Peace Seedlings. “They’ve been patiently hybridizing varieties [of ají] and finding out which seed varietals grow best in this climate,” Platt says. “To my knowledge, we’re the first growers of this product locally.”

Peace Seedlings farmers Dylana Kapuler and Mario D’Angelo; aji amarillo, a Peruvian pepper, at the farm. Photos courtesy of Andina.

Now Andina has diversified its sources of ají: their Peruvian supply is vacuum-sealed fresh organic ají paste, supplemented with fresh ajís—several hundred pounds this fall—from Peace Seedlings. They also purchase frozen ajís from GOYA and other mainline importers. One of Andina’s major ingredient suppliers, Charlie’s Produce, is also experimenting with growing ají chiles in its fields in California. Expanding their domestic farming partnerships gives Andina a more reliable source than Peru, which is facing its own set of climate-change challenges.

However, local sourcing isn’t always a guarantee of supply. In 2011, 90 percent of Texas—one of the U.S.’s largest agricultural producers—was classified as being in “exceptional drought.” The drought was devastating, causing $7.6 billion in losses and lowering the agricultural GDP in the state to a mere .8 percent. According to Tara Scully of the Global Food Institute, it’s highly likely we will continue to see an increase in extreme weather, and ultimately U.S. restaurants will have to start importing more ingredients from other countries. “We’ll have no choice,” she says.

Adapting to Change as the New Constant

Though meat, poultry, and fish have never been high-profit menu items, the margins have grown even slimmer as protein prices have spiked, increasingly due to climate events that can unfold rapidly. Within a matter of days, warming waters can cause massive algae blooms that suffocate marine life, depleting populations of fish and shellfish—and, if the blooms release toxins, make them unsafe for people to consume. Or, as with salmon, the higher temperatures can reduce fish runs, driving prices so high that it doesn’t make sense for chefs to keep salmon on the menu.

Being nimble, quickly finding answers to problems like these, makes all the difference. Buying in bulk is one solution. Andina buys so many limes—50 cases per month—that Platt was recently able to negotiate bulk purchases on an annual basis.

Platt has also staved off price volatility by precontracting with suppliers. That’s what he did with shrimp. He signed a purchasing contract at the beginning of the year to lock in a price for a given number of pounds. “Oftentimes that would save us a lot of money, because they would have some kind of hurricane or another algae bloom or something along those lines that would wreak havoc on the fishery there,” Platt says.

George Frangos, co-founder and president of Farm Burger, resolves supply-chain issues by developing strong, personal connections with a wide network of local sources. The Georgia-based restaurant chain has 11 locations throughout the Southeast, and serves 100 percent grass-fed (and grass-finished) beef burgers, pasture-raised pork burgers, seasonal salads, and, in the summer, peach compote with local goat cheese.

Left to right: Farm Burger; George Frangos, co-founder and president of Farm Burger; grass-fed beef burger. Photos courtesy of Farm Burger.

Frangos says he’s learned to avoid surprise price fluctuations by knowing each of his suppliers by name and relying on them to give him and his team a heads-up when prices head south. “We try to work together, so it’s not just an overnight thing of, ‘Our prices are going up 50 cents a pound.’”

One of Farm Burger’s main beef suppliers is Hickory Nut Gap, a fourth-generation family-owned regenerative ranch based outside Asheville, North Carolina, that is a network itself, partnering with 22 ranches across the South. In Hickory Nut, accredited by the Savory Institute, Frangos feels he’s found a resilient partner for his key ingredient. In addition to the animal welfare benefits of most grass-fed beef, there are also likely climate benefits. Another perk: its relatively consistent price. “When there is a shortage of feed from drought or other climate related hardships, the price of grain-fed beef increases, whereas the price of grass-fed beef is very resilient to climate forces,” says Frangos. That said, even grass-fed beef prices have gone up in recent years due to ranchers’ increased operating costs, labor costs, and the cost for hay and silage (reflecting slower grass growth due to heat waves).

In Philadelphia, chef Sinawi resolves the high price of beef through his relationship with his customers. He’s broken his unspoken rule to keep entrees under $30 with only one item: steak au poivre, which he’d been selling for $29. The dish, which Sinawi makes with USDA Choice New York striploin, is seared to order with cracked peppercorns and comes with a Cognac cream sauce that gives it an umami richness. “I had no choice. I took it off the menu for a month and people were asking for it,” he says. Ultimately, he put it back on the menu and raised it to $36. Having conversations with his customers, sharing his pricing challenges with them so they have a context for the increases, is key to their acceptance of the cost.

Plant-Based Alternatives

Higher protein prices—beef is up 4.5 percent over last year and whole-chicken prices increased by 26.6% from 2021 to 2024—are ultimately driving some restaurants like Andina to shift to more plant-based alternatives. “[Higher protein prices are] a big part of what’s driving a shift towards more vegan and vegetarian menus,” Platt says, drawing on his longtime observations of the restaurant industry. Also, there’s another incentive for the shift: He sees customers increasingly opting for vegan and vegetarian menus for environmental and ethical reasons.

Quinoa salad with cucumber, corn, olives and cotija cheese at Andina. Photo courtesy of Andina.

Andina has several vegetarian main courses on the menu, and has always offered quinoa, a Peruvian mainstay grain, as part of several dishes. Victor Platt (Peter’s brother), who leads the chef team at the restaurant, will soon be launching a quinoa risotto (“quinotto”). Peace Seedlings is beginning to grow quinoa domestically, but quantities are small, so Victor Platt sources bulk organic quinoa mostly from Bob’s Red Mill (who in turn sources it from Peru and Bolivia—also a climate consideration).

Quinoa has an auspicious climate future, says Peter Platt. “It’s incredibly adaptive. It’ll grow in sub-standard soil, in conditions that wheat won’t,” he says. “It’ll grow wherever you plant it. And it’s one of the world’s most nutritious foods.” He points out that quinoa, like meat, contains all nine essential amino acids, and is delicious when well prepared.

Tara Scully says that many of the chefs she interviewed for the GFI report were reducing the portion size of protein, because it’s now so much more expensive. She heard echoes of this refrain at a Food Tank discussion this past week in New York City about how restaurants can take action on climate change. “Plants are more climate-friendly and they cost less,” Scully says. “So if you’re looking to reduce your costs and also deal with climate change as a chef, it’s a win-win.”

She also thinks consumers—especially younger ones—are willing to pay for vegetable-based dishes because they’re healthier, better for the planet, and taste amazing. Meat seems simplistic, almost too easy to make taste good, while vegetables can showcase a chef’s skill and creativity: “You can transform a portobello mushroom into something that’s over-the-top umami.”

The post Weathering Climate Shocks: How Restaurants Survive Supply Disruptions appeared first on Civil Eats.

The US Weakens a UN Declaration on Antibiotic Resistance

Lisa Held — Wed, 25 Sep 2024 09:01:29 +0000

Last May, the United Nations (U.N.) released the first draft of a global plan to tackle antibiotic resistance that aligned with a call from world leaders’ expert advisors to take “bold and specific action.” That included a commitment to reduce the use of antibiotics used in the food and agriculture system by 30 percent by 2030.

But when those leaders meet at the U.N. on Thursday to adopt the Political Declaration on Antimicrobial Resistance, that concrete goal and others will be missing from the latest draft.

After months of negotiations and edits to the proposal, these ambitious—and likely effective—commitments have been replaced with a toothless target: to “strive to meaningfully reduce” antibiotic use in agriculture. Now, experts and advocates are concerned that this new, vague provision, among other weakened commitments, will be included in the final declaration.

“I think it’s a serious mistake,” said Andre Delattre, the senior vice president and COO for programs at the Public Interest Network, which has advocated for reducing antibiotic use on farms as a matter of public interest for years. “We’ve known for a very long time that the overuse of antibiotics in animal agriculture is really problematic for public health. Saying we’re going to reduce without setting targets just shows we’re not as serious as we should be about the problem.”

The news comes at a pivotal moment. While the urgency of antibiotic resistance as a public health threat is well known, a new study released last week upped the ante. According to a systemic analysis of the problem, researchers predicted deaths directly caused by resistance will increase nearly 70 percent between 2022 and 2050, rising to around 2 million per year globally, with another 8 million deaths associated with the issue.

In the U.S., the largest volume of antibiotics are used in animal agriculture. Also, the preventive dosing of animals with medically important drugs—that is, drugs for treating humans—is still routine. This use of drugs can drive the development of resistant bacteria that then threaten human lives. Reducing or eliminating the use of medically important antibiotics in livestock would slow the development of resistant bacteria, experts say, safeguarding the efficacy of important drugs for longer.

U.S. officials were at least partially responsible for weakening the U.N. declaration’s commitments on animal agriculture. The advocacy organization U.S. Right to Know obtained a document showing that the U.S. was one of a few meat-producing countries that suggested deleting the 2030 goal. The organization also cites the fact that a Washington, D.C. trade group representing the animal drug industry objected to the goal. In response to questions about involvement in the U.N. declaration, a U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) spokesperson referred Civil Eats to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). FDA officials did not respond by press time.

Steve Roach, the Safe & Healthy Food Program Director at Food Animal Concerns Trust (FACT), has been tracking U.S. policy on antibiotic use in agriculture for years. He said that on the international stage, he’s seen the U.S. “actively undermining” stronger policies time and time again.

“The U.S. always seems to be aiming for something weaker,” he said. For example, he said the U.S. worked to keep targets for the reduction of antibiotic use out of international food safety standards. The U.S. was also one of five countries—all top users of antibiotics in animal agriculture— that did not sign onto an earlier global agreement, called the Muscat Ministerial Manifesto on AMR, that did include targeted reductions.

And Roach said that this approach on the global stage mirrors how federal agencies continue to approach the issue at home. “We’ve been calling for targets for years, and FDA is always saying, ‘We don’t have enough data to determine how much use is inappropriate. So, therefore, we don’t support targets,’” he said.

The FDA does track the volume of medically important antibiotics sold for use in animals, but it is still not tracking exactly how those drugs are being used on farms. Instead, it has funded small pilot projects and is now in the process of working with the meat industry on a voluntary reporting system.

The agency outlined some of those efforts in a letter sent to Senator Cory Booker (D-New Jersey) last week. The letter was in response to concerns Booker raised in July about updates he felt would weaken guidance the FDA creates for the industry on responsible antibiotic use. Booker’s team was far from satisfied with the agency’s response and said that after more than a decade of attention, they found it incredibly troubling that basic issues of data collection and setting concrete targets were still unresolved.

“It is estimated that by 2050, as many as 10 million people globally will die annually from antibiotic-resistant infections unless the United States joins with other countries to quickly take aggressive action to address this issue. That is why I am deeply concerned that the FDA has caved under pressure from special interests for decades and failed to take any meaningful steps to address this overuse in industrial livestock production,” Booker said in an email to Civil Eats. “Not only has the FDA been unwilling to use its legal authority to reduce the massive overuse of antibiotics on factory farms in the U.S., but the agency is now actively working to block international commitments to address antimicrobial resistance.”

In 2016, the agency banned the use of medically important drugs on farms solely for the purpose of making animals get bigger, faster. That change led to a big drop in overall drug use. But pork producers and cattle feedlots still routinely add antibiotics to feed and water, often for long stretches, and drug use in those sectors has been rising over the past two years.

At the end of August, the USDA reported its recent testing even found antibiotic residue in about 20 percent of beef samples labeled “raised without antibiotics.” And over the past year, companies that once committed to moving their supply chains away from routine antibiotic use have been backtracking.

Multiple experts expressed dismay over what they said now feels like continued steps away from stronger regulations that can adequately protect public health.

“The U.S. government will do whatever it can to fight the serious public health threat of antimicrobial resistance—as long as that action has no impact on anyone whatsoever, as long as nobody has to make any changes to what they’re doing,” Roach said. “It’s really disappointing, because the U.S. could be a leader on this issue, and it just consistently chooses not to.”

In the absence of government leadership, Delattre said, watchdog groups will have to work harder.

“The commitment as it’s drafted now says it’s supposed to aim for meaningful reductions by every member country. Those numeric targets represented an idea of meaningful reduction,” he said. “Whether they’re in there or not, they’re the sort of thing we need to aim for, and it’s what we’ll be holding the U.S. farm animal industry to going forward.”

Poultry Implosion. According to a lawsuit filed today, an ambitious plan to create a poultry company dedicated to slower-growing chickens involved rapid company growth that led to its downfall—and ultimately harmed farmers raising its birds. Although Cooks’ Venture set out to raise healthier birds under better farm conditions, it replicated the contract system used by bigger industry players like Tyson and Perdue, placing financial risk on the shoulders of producers.

In the legal complaint, farmers say the company’s leadership misled them by misrepresenting the financial health of the operation. As a result, many took on debt to house and care for the chickens in anticipation of a long-term payoff. When the company went out of business without notice, it left farmers in the lurch. The lawsuit also alleges the individuals in charge of the company conspired with the Arkansas Department of Agriculture to kill more than a million chickens after the company folded—so they wouldn’t have to process them or pay farmers for the flocks—and left farmers to clean up the mess.

The lawsuit will be one of the first brought under new rules finalized by the Biden administration intended to better enforce the Packers & Stockyards Act.

Food-and-Climate Funding. As companies, advocates, and investors gather in New York City for Climate Week, multiple organizations are calling attention to the flow of capital toward food and agriculture systems that accelerate climate change—and how to redirect those funds.

Given meat’s outsized climate impacts, the global meat industry is at the top of the list. A group of 105 food and environmental organizations sent a letter to the world’s biggest private banks demanding they halt new funding for industrial livestock production and require meat and dairy clients to report emissions reduction targets. Meanwhile, Tilt Collective, a new nonprofit promoting a rapid shift toward plant-based diets, released a report highlighting investment opportunities. According to its analysis, investments in transitioning to a plant-based food system could reduce energy emissions far more than investments in renewable energy or electric vehicles, while also delivering other benefits, like reduced water use and biodiversity loss.

Nonprofits that work directly with the biggest food and agriculture companies are also in on the action. The Environmental Defense Fund released a report for investors on how they can play a role in reducing methane from livestock, while Ceres updated its investor-focused reporting on the 50 biggest food companies’ greenhouse gas emissions reporting and reductions. Their data showed that only 11 of the 50 companies reduced their overall greenhouse gas emissions compared to their base years, while 12 increased emissions. Lack of progress on emissions reductions was largely linked to the food companies’ supply chains. So while many companies did cut emissions from their own operations by shifting to renewable energy, for example, they struggled to reduce those that happened in farm fields and feedlots, which typically represent about 90 percent of a food company’s overall emissions.

Fresh Cafeteria Fare. A lengthy progress report on California’s farm-to-school grant program—the largest in the nation—found the state’s efforts are paying off. More local food is getting into schools while supporting farmers. Between 2020 and 2022, the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) distributed about $100 million to increase locally farmed food served in school cafeterias. The results of this program—which includes farm-fresh meals and nutrition education efforts—disproportionately benefitted students from lower-income families who were eligible for free or reduced-price meals. At the same time, the funding went primarily to small- and mid-size farms, more than half of which were owned by women; more than 40 percent were owned by producers of color.

Participating farms were also much more likely to be organic or transitioning to organic production compared to the state average. They were also likely to be implementing and/or expanding other environmentally friendly practices.

Still, despite California’s advantages over other states—namely a super-long growing season that overlaps with the school year and a plethora of farms selling fruit, vegetables, meat, and dairy—the total money spent by school grantees on local food represented just 1 percent of total food budgets. And schools cited many challenges common across the farm-to-school landscape: price constraints, processing capacity, and staffing. “The challenges around changing a complex school food system are substantial,” said Dr. Gail Feenstra, one of the researchers involved in the report, in a press release. “Fortunately, the state’s strategic and innovative investments in the entire farm to school supply chain—meaning funding for school districts, farmers, and also their regional partners, combined with support from CDFA’s regional staff—are beginning to address those long-standing challenges.”

The post The US Weakens a UN Declaration on Antibiotic Resistance appeared first on Civil Eats.

JD Vance Funded AcreTrader. Here’s Why That Matters.

Grey Moran — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 09:00:54 +0000

A version of this article originally appeared in The Deep Dish, our members-only newsletter. Become a member today and get the next issue directly in your inbox.

Some of the most pristine farmland in California can be yours, at least by proxy, in just a matter of minutes. That’s the promise that AcreTrader, a company with the mission of simplifying investing in valuable U.S. farmland, makes to prospective financiers.

Its current offerings include 83 acres of almond trees in the San Joaquin Valley, advertised as “an opportunity to invest in a water-secure almond orchard in the world’s most productive almond-producing region.” This property also boasts of senior water rights on the Kings River, suggesting that the land will continue to turn a profit long into the future—a dream of farmers and investors alike.

AcreTrader is just one of many companies launched in the past decade that facilitate the sale of farmland, which has increasingly become a staple in investor portfolios. Recently, it was revealed that this includes the investment portfolio of vice presidential nominee JD Vance, the Republican senator from Ohio.

“There’s no indication that Vance has divested from AcreTrader, and there’s every indication that that investment remains in place.”

Vance invested up to $65,000 in private investments in AcreTrader during his stint as a venture capitalist, according to his 2022 financial disclosure to the Senate ethics committee. The investment firm Narya Capital—which Vance launched in 2020 with backing from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel—was a vehicle for these investments, and a key backer in early funding rounds of the farmland startup. And while Vance is no longer listed as a partner at Narya Capital, according to his 2023 financial disclosure, he appears to still be an investor in the firm—or more technically, multiple legal entities with names including Narya.

“There’s no indication that Vance has divested from AcreTrader, and there’s every indication that that investment remains in place,” said Lisa Graves, the executive director of True North Research, an investigative research group. She points to how Vance sold off his stock in “Narya Capital Management LLC” in 2023, but that’s not the same as the (albeit similarly named) investment vehicles used to invest in AcreTrader.

In a social media post, Sarah Taber, a farm and food systems strategist and the Democratic candidate for North Carolina commissioner of agriculture, describes AcreTrader as “like Uber for buying U.S. farmland.” Like Uber, AcreTrader makes it easier for more buyers to gain quick access to an ordinarily expensive asset. “And who’s one of its key investors, profiting off of every sale?” Taber asks. “JD Vance.”

For Taber, Vance’s large investment portfolio—in AcreTrader and a slew of other opaque start-up companies—raises questions about conflicts of interest and the mixing of venture capitalist and political pursuits. Vance’s 2022 portfolio also included AppHarvest, the start-up company that promised to revolutionize farming and bring good jobs to eastern Kentucky, only to quickly implode.

“There’s an ethical case for any venture capitalist to disinvest from their interests before running for political office,” said Taber, in an interview with Civil Eats. “We don’t know what he’s incentivized to do.”

AcreTrader streamlines the process of investing in valuable farmland across the U.S. and Australia—from the flooded rice fields of the Mississippi Delta to the vast tracts of high-yielding corn in the Midwest—by placing the farmland in a limited liability corporation, or LLC.

“You can then purchase shares in that [LLC] through a simple online process that takes just minutes,” the company explains in a tutorial video for prospective investors. “AcreTrader handles the administrative details for you, and works with experienced farmers to manage the land.”

“It’s just the expansion of the Real Estate Investment Trust [REIT] business model into farmland,” said Taber. “It’s basically like a mutual fund for real estate.”

With the REIT model, instead of buying a single condo, you buy a share in a company that owns 100 or 200 condos. This investment vehicle was established by Congress in the 1960s, opening the doors to large-scale real estate investments for smaller investors. It’s a model that has enabled real estate hedge funds to buy up large swaths of the housing market, driving up demand and prices. Recently, companies have begun applying a REIT-like model to land.

AcreTrader isn’t technically a REIT, but it’s similar in that it enables a wider pool of investors to passively invest in farmland, reaping the benefits of one of the most reliable assets to produce a return. But instead of buying shares in one company, like a REIT, investors buy shares in individual LLCs that own the property.

This ownership model makes it hard to tell who is invested in the farmland and, therefore, more challenging to evaluate ethical conflicts and other risks of this investment, Taber observed. (Vance is listed as an investor in AcreTrader, not the individual LLCs, according to his Senate disclosure forms.)

“What we’ve seen in reality is when investment interests come into communities, they drive up land prices and push farmers to increasingly marginal ends.”

After a fixed period, typically between five and 10 years, investors sell the land almost inevitably at a higher price than they purchased it, given that farmland appreciates over time. As AcreTrader’s website boasts, “Land is one of the oldest investment classes in existence, which in many cases has produced significant wealth over generations.” On top of their earnings from the sale, investors potentially benefit as well from renting the land to a farmer, without being involved in managing it.

AcreTrader is part of a larger trend of the financialization of farmland. The last two decades have witnessed a sharp uptick in investor interest in farmland as investors seeking to hedge against inflation and stock market volatility have turned to it as a reliable bet. Between 2008 and 2023, the amount of farmland purchased by investors increased by a staggering 231 percent.

In recent years, bipartisan political leaders have pushed to curb foreign investments in U.S. farmland, citing the potential for a national security risk. Earlier this week, the Republican-controlled House passed a bill restricting citizens from China, Russia, North Korea, or Iran from purchasing U.S. farmland. But even so, farmland is more concentrated in the hands of U.S. investors than ever before: Bill Gates, The Wonderful Company, and billionaire John Malone are the top owners of U.S. farmland.

This investor-driven farmland “gold rush” has come with many unintended consequences for agriculture and farmers. It has led to the consolidation of farmland in regions with high-value land, while pricing out the farmers unable to compete with major investors for farmland. This has led land-strapped farmers to either drop out of farming or become tenant farmers, operating farms on rented land.

“What we’ve seen in reality is when investment interests come into communities, they drive up land prices and push farmers to increasingly marginal ends,” said Paul Towers, the executive director of Community Alliance with Family Farmers (CAFF). He says that he consistently observes farmers struggling to buy land, often outbid by investors who have the ability to pay for land entirely in cash.

Even when investors seek to keep farmland in operation, rental arrangements can be challenging for farmers, because it gives them less freedom and security over their land, especially if they have a short-term lease. Towers has observed that leasing (rather than owning) farmland can make it harder for farmers in their network to make the kind of long-term investments in their land necessary for pursuing environmental and climate solutions

“How can a farmer make significant investments in their soil health, if they don’t know if they’re going to be on that property next year?” said Towers. “Why would they invest in hedgerows for beneficial insects and pollinators? Why would they develop more water-holding capacity on their farm?”

AcreTrader promises to be different, however, claiming to partner with farmers in “stewarding land” and “supporting livelihoods.” This includes the language of their leases: “We structure our leases according to industry leading sustainability standards, encompassing specific conditions related to soil fertility, erosion control, groundwater protection, and input management,” states the company’s website. AcreTrader declined a request to provide Civil Eats with a copy of a lease, or to explain the process for determining its sustainability standards.

“Senator Vance has no involvement in AcreTrader’s operations or strategic direction.”

“For AcreTrader’s typical buyers, the AcreTrader Platform connects U.S. investors to farmers who want to grow their operations, and we believe it’s a good thing to see capital formation in favor of helping the American farmer,” wrote Rob Moore, the company’s vice president, in an email. He also added, “Senator Vance has no involvement in AcreTrader’s operations or strategic direction.”

Some caution against painting all investors with a broad brush, pointing to a potential role for some forms of investors in helping facilitate land access for farmers in some cases. “I do believe that there is an opportunity for investors to think about how to deploy non-destructive capital to access the purchase of farmland,” said Gaby Pereyra, a farmer and the co-director of the Land Network Program at the Northeast Farmers of Color Land Trust. She points to Dirt Capital, which works with farmers in financing farmland, including through shared ownership models. This differs from AcreTrader’s model, which is aimed at helping investors, not farmers, buy farmland.

The ownership of farmland can also be especially important to Black farmers who have been systematically denied land access, and therefore, denied one of the most reliable investments for generating wealth. “Most Black farmers for historical reasons, for family reasonsare seeking to own their land…because it’s related to reparations,” said Pereyra.

“For Latino farmers, on the other hand, the ownership of land is related to self-determination, on being able to do the type of operation that they want,” Pereyra has observed in her work. In some cases, she’s seen that a rental agreement can provide self-determination, but it largely depends on the relationship with a specific landowner.

And while AcreTrader emphasizes “land stewardship,” Pereyra pointed to how the company currently limits these rental partnerships to “row crop, permanent crop, and timber.” This leaves out diversified vegetable operations, the farms that are often engaged in some of the most innovative, climate-friendly practices. These are also the farms that tend to struggle to access crop insurance, lacking the guarantee of a stable income even when crops fail—which may deter investors.

In general, the company mainly lists farmland with high-value crops that can deliver short-term profits, but aren’t always best for the environment. Take California’s almond industry, a water-intensive crop. “Almonds already use an estimated 28% of the reliable water supply available to California agriculture,” according to AcreTrader’s analysis.

However, the company assures investors that “California’s almond industry isn’t going anywhere,” even as the state implements water restrictions. Instead,AcreTrader advises that investors seek out almond orchards with reliable water rights, expecting these properties to appreciate over time. On the other hand, the company advises against investing in almond orchards without water access, expecting these acres to shrink and be removed from production. It’s an approach to investing that appears to be based on a market analysis of the projected value for farmland and specific crops per region, rather than environmental or climate concerns.

“What a lot of these these kinds of investment models fail to see is that farming is far more than just a short-term return [on an investment],” said Towers. The farming systems that we want to be investing in for our future—farms that can survive droughts, wildfires, erratic water supplies, and other climate extremes—are not always the methods that turn a profit the quickest.

And while it’s hard to fully evaluate AcreTrader’s model, it’s clear that it allows an investor-backed startup to play a role in steering the future of agriculture and the U.S. food system. It begs the question: Should we trust investors with this power—even the many investors that claim to help farmers—over the most fertile, water-rich farmland in the U.S.?

The post JD Vance Funded AcreTrader. Here’s Why That Matters. appeared first on Civil Eats.

Why Are US Agricultural Emissions Dropping?

Grey Moran — Wed, 11 Sep 2024 09:00:47 +0000

The fall has become the season for reviewing climate progress, book-ended by two major climate summits. First comes New York City Climate Week, held between September 22 and 29, followed by the most important global climate event of the year, the 2024 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP29), which will be held in Baku, Azerbaijan, from November 11 to November 22. There, global leaders will gather to fulfill the legally binding promise of the Paris Agreement: to keep worldwide emissions at a livable threshold.

In recent years, curbing emissions from agriculture and the broader food system has become a bigger piece of the conference’s programming. And this year, the most influential group in American agriculture has been pointing to big strides made.

“The impact that the drought is having on pasture is forcing the culling of cattle and reducing the cattle herd.”

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) annual emissions inventory report showed that emissions from the agricultural sector dropped by nearly 2 percent, falling from 10.6 to 9.4 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions between 2021 and 2022—the sharpest drop of all sectors in 2022. In response, the American Farm Bureau’s president, Zippy Duvall, attributed the shift to U.S. farmers adopting climate-friendly practices through “voluntary and market-based programs that support farmer efforts in sustainable agriculture practices.”

However, the report doesn’t support the conclusion that a bump in conservation practices drove the drop in emissions. Instead, while there is plenty of uncertainty, the most likely causes are fewer cattle burping methane and less fertilizer use. Concentrated feedlot cattle farming and fertilizer production are among the biggest drivers of emissions from agriculture.

It’s a significant conclusion, because in the past, industry groups have fought all efforts to draft climate policy around reducing meat and dairy consumption and chemical fertilizer use. Going into climate event season, with the clock ticking even louder, that could happen again.

Fewer Cattle

Duvall is right about farmers adopting valuable conservation practices. For example, many more are planting cover crops, with acreage increasing by 17 percent between 2017 and 2022. But despite the proven environmental benefits of these practices, their real climate impact is still in question.

However, the impact of reducing methane is well understood. And in its report, the EPA explicitly states that the drop of methane emissions was “largely driven by a decrease in beef cattle populations.” Through no fault of their own, ruminant animals, like cattle and sheep, exhale methane as they digest their food. Known as enteric fermentation, this is a top driver of human-related methane emissions in the U.S. In 2022, these emissions decreased by 2 percent, contributing to the overall drop.

Why were there fewer cattle? The decline in numbers isn’t due to any regulations on methane or herd size—a frequent Republican talking point—but rather the impacts of climate change. The record-breaking drought since 2022 has dried the landscape and shrunk the available grassy pasture for raising cattle, explained Ben Lilliston, the director of rural strategies and climate change at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. As a result, farmers have had to make hard choices to prevent the overgrazing of this limited green pasture.

“The impact that the drought is having on pasture is forcing the culling of cattle and reducing the cattle herd,” said Lilliston. “So, when you have fewer cows, you’re going to have fewer enteric [fermentation] emissions coming from the cow itself.”

And it’s not just methane. The EPA also reported lower nitrous oxide emissions from feedlot manure, captured in manure lagoons, “which are major sources of both methane and nitrous oxide,” said Lilliston. “So, when you reduce the cattle herd, you affect both those sources of emissions.”

This relationship has generally held true over time. The EPA has observed a consistent relationship between the size of cattle herds and fluctuations in methane emissions from enteric fermentation. As the report states, “this increase in emissions from enteric fermentation from 1990 to 2022 generally follows the increasing trends in cattle populations.” The agency pointed to how “emissions increased from 2005 to 2007, as both dairy and beef populations increased.” Now, as cattle herds decrease, that trend has reversed.

The multi-year drought continues to devastate ranchers, which could mean further declines in emissions. “Based on USDA statistics, cattle populations have continued to decrease in 2023 and 2024, which tend to drive methane and nitrous oxide emissions from the enteric fermentation and manure management categories as described in the GHG Inventory,” wrote an EPA spokesperson in an email.

Reduced Fertilizer Use

The drop in nitrous oxide emissions could also be driven by less fertilizer use, related to the dramatic surge in fertilizer prices in 2021 and 2022, beyond what farmers could afford. This coincided with Russia’s attack on Ukraine, which disrupted fertilizer supply chains. In response, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) noted that farmers made different business calculations: “Some producers may have chosen to reduce the overall acreage planted, while others chose to maintain acreage but change crop mix or modify other practices,” the USDA commented in a 2022 report.

This is likely especially true for farmers growing corn, the most widely planted crop in the U.S., primarily grown to produce ethanol. “Corn is the main driver of nitrogen fertilizer use,” said Lilliston. But as fertilizer prices surged, “a lot of commodity farmers responded by planting more soybeans, which doesn’t require as much fertilizer,” he noted.

Rather than a permanent shift, this suggests a more temporary fluctuation. Lilliston expects nitrous oxide emissions to rebound in the EPA’s next report, as fertilizer prices leveled in 2023 and the U.S. produced a record corn crop.

“Ultimately, it seems primarily the big story is that there’s less production of U.S. agriculture and [therefore] less emissions. Farmers aren’t necessarily producing food in much more climate-smart ways than they were in 2021, just producing a little bit less of it,” said Dan Blaustein-Rejto, the director of food & agriculture at the Breakthrough Institute.

“The EPA report is really not meant to assess the impact of conservation programs or specific farming practices,” added Blaustein-Rejto. “[It] certainly is not looking at the effect of specific voluntary programs or other efforts,” he said.

In general, agricultural emissions experts interviewed for this article agreed that the EPA’s annual greenhouse-gas emissions inventory reflects such a brief snapshot of time that it can be hard to tell if it indicates a larger shift in the food system or a fluctuation based on agricultural market changes and disruptions. The EPA also continually refines its methodologies for calculating emissions, which can make it hard to compare smaller shifts in emissions included in the reports.

‘There’s so much uncertainty in those predictions that I would hesitate to really read too much into any small variation from year to year, outside of demonstrable changes and practices out on the landscape,” said Steven Hall, a professor in the Department of Plant and Agroecosystem Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “The emissions inventories published by EPA are subject to substantial uncertainty.”

“I think the EPA is doing an admirable job at trying to estimate this,” he added. “It’s sort of an impossible task.” The report, perhaps, most clearly shows that we still have work to do in transforming our systems for growing food.

And it points to two simple things that policy wonks and world leaders could be spending more time debating: How climate policy should and could tackle emissions from beef production and fertilizer use. “Unfortunately, the 2022 reductions were not part of a planned strategy to support farmers in a transition toward less emitting, more resilient agricultural systems,” said Lilliston in a commentary on the EPA report. “Instead, the reductions were the result of sudden shocks that caused enormous harm to farmers and their animals. Volatile prices make it nearly impossible for farmers to plan ahead or transition to more diverse cropping systems that require less fertilizer use.”

Going forward, he argued, policy conversations should prioritize transitioning away from industrial animal agriculture, which also depends on fertilized corn for feed. “Instead, policymakers continue to defer to the wants of powerful global grain and meat companies, while climate-related events, such as drought, wildfires, and floods, warn us that change is coming, ready or not.”

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The Pawpaw, a Beloved Native Fruit, Could Seed a More Sustainable Future for Small Farms

Ben Seal — Tue, 10 Sep 2024 09:00:27 +0000

As the sun beats down from a cloudless morning sky across Horn Farm in York, Pennsylvania, Dick Bono ambles among his pawpaw trees, admiring their pale green fruits like a proud parent. In late July, the pawpaws are fist-sized and hard as a rock, still two months shy of being full-grown and ripe. But soon they’ll soften and sweeten into a fruit revered for its tropical flavor and texture—a blend of banana, mango, and pineapple, so soft it’s eaten with a spoon.

“It was like going to heaven on a surfboard.”—Jean Vargas, pawpaw festival attendee

Pawpaws are America’s largest edible native fruit, and their ineffable mystique will bring thousands of visitors to the farm’s annual pawpaw festival in late September. They grow abundantly in the wild here in central Pennsylvania and across much of the fruit’s native range, which spans 26 states as far west as the Great Plains and from northern Florida to Maine. But the pawpaw’s two- to three-week harvest window, short shelf life, and delicate skin still make it anathema to the rigid needs of grocery stores and a rare find even at farmers’ markets.

Despite the inherent obstacles to enjoying a pawpaw—and perhaps, in part, because of them—interest in the fruit continues to grow. Festivals in several states, mostly throughout September, give people a chance to taste the fruit for the first time or celebrate an old favorite.

Meanwhile, research and plant breeding efforts are underway to explore and expand its potential as a sustainable low-input, high-value crop that could figure into the future of small farms throughout the eastern U.S. If the pawpaw’s greatest admirers have their way, it will also show the way forward for a localized approach to agriculture that operates outside of the mass-produced mainstream.

The pawpaw’s green skin (left) gives way to a custardy interior (right). (Photo credit, left: Kat Arazawa)

Bono and his wife, Judy, manage 52 pawpaw trees on land they rent at Horn Farm Center for Agricultural Education, a regenerative agriculture nonprofit. Dick predicts well over 1,000 pounds of fruit this year, and he’ll need it all to satisfy the 2,000 visitors expected for the festival.

“We bring joy and happiness for that one little weekend in September,” Judy says.

While many at the festival will be getting their first exposure to the pawpaw, Dick, a land conservationist and retired architect, and Judy, a native plant enthusiast, have been enamored for 20 years now. They had tasted the hit-or-miss wild varieties that grow in the fertile soil along the Susquehanna River, but got hooked during a visit to Deep Run, a Maryland orchard with a range of pawpaw cultivars among its 1,000 trees.

They wanted to bring some of that sweetness north to York, so in 2004 they hosted a downtown dinner at Blue Moon Cafe that made pawpaw the star of the show. The French chef they hired turned out chicken with hot peppers and pawpaw, a salad with the fruit sliced fresh, pawpaw bread with pawpaw butter, and a crepe filled, of course, with pawpaw.

The dinner was a hit—and so were the modest events the Bonos began hosting in the driveway of Judy’s plant shop every September, letting friends and neighbors in on their little secret with pawpaw tastings, baked goods, ice cream, and salsas. When they planted their orchard 11 years ago, the gatherings turned into a festival, which soon outgrew anything they could manage themselves. Now, Horn Farm Center runs the show.

What started as a “quaint event,” in the words of the center’s executive director, Alexis Campbell, has expanded into a countywide, four-day festival. The festival includes tastings and cooking demonstrations, giving visitors a chance to appreciate the pawpaw and other crops native to the region, as well as tours exploring ecosystem restoration and biodynamic farming on nearby land.

The Pawpaw ‘Experience’

While Dick Bono describes the subtle differences in fruiting patterns that differentiate one pawpaw variety from the next, a zebra swallowtail butterfly flits among them, a reminder that native plants like the pawpaw support biodiversity. Pawpaws are the only host plant for zebra swallowtails.

Dick Bono and his pawpaw trees growing at the Horn Farm Center. (Photo credit: Kat Arazawa)

As the butterfly flutters between three rows of trees, its black and white wings vivid against their green foliage, Bono introduces the members of his orchard. The Canadian NC1 ripens early, with fewer smooth black seeds than other varieties. The Allegheny’s yellow flesh brings a pop of citrus flavor. The Susquehanna’s firm flesh is sweeter than most, and the Shenandoah, his favorite in the orchard, has a mild flavor and a custardy texture that everyone loves.

So much of the interest in the pawpaw is about curiosity, Bono says, both because of the fruit’s fickleness and the fact that it’s more akin to tropical cherimoya and soursop than anything else in its range. But the flavor keeps people coming back. “The taste,” he says, “is what it’s about.”

Jean Vargas would agree. A self-described “fruit hunter” who says he has tried some 700 varieties, he came from Florida for his first pawpaw festival in 2021. His first bite, which he says tasted of mango, banana, coconut, and vanilla, was “mind-blowing.”

“It was like going to heaven on a surfboard,” he says.

That weekend, Vargas spent nearly $100 on pawpaws, befriended the Bonos and other aficionados, and committed to coming back. He’s visited three years in a row and sounds pained to admit that work will keep him away this September. A festival is the best way to experience everything the pawpaw can offer, he says, even if it’s six states away.

“It’s mystical,” Vargas says.

Chris Chmiel of Integration Acres in Albany, Ohio, started the Ohio Pawpaw Festival in 1999 and has since heard countless stories of people’s relationships with the fruit he says has become “a symbol of our Appalachian heritage.” He had a “communal experience” with some pawpaws when he first launched the festival, asking for their blessing. It seems to have worked. His festival now draws in 10,000 people for pawpaw beers, a pawpaw cook-off, and a pawpaw-eating contest.

“Everyone’s got these stories that the pawpaw has been a part of for them. You don’t get that when you go to the grocery store and buy a banana,” Chmiel says. “It’s an experience.”

Thousands of people are expected to attend York County’s annual Pawpaw Festival at Horn Farm Center. As pictured here from past festivals, visitors can sample pawpaws and take some home. (Photo credit: Andrew Leahy, Horn Farm Center)

Pawpaw’s Agricultural and Ecological Benefits

The pawpaw is not only a part of Appalachian heritage. Its abundance in the wild helped sustain Indigenous tribes across its range for centuries, including the Susquehannocks, whose territory included the land on which Horn Farm is now located. Indigenous people first cultivated it in woodlands, using the tree’s fibrous inner bark to make ropes and string and its leaves and stems as medicine. The Shawnee word for “September” translates to “pawpaw moon.”

Pawpaw enthusiasts have found many ways to celebrate the fruit. (Photo credit: Judy Bono)

As pawpaw aficionados often mention, it was George Washington’s favorite fruit, and Lewis and Clark relied on it for portions of their westward expedition. Its cultural connection to Appalachia runs deep. It’s the subject of a folk song and the namesake of towns in West Virginia, Illinois, Michigan, and Kentucky.

Today, it is emerging from this long history as the subject of renewed public interest, thanks to its varied ecological and agricultural attributes. For those investing in sustainable landscapes and watershed restoration, the pawpaw’s roots can hold stream banks in place and prevent runoff. On farms focused on agroforestry and silvopasture—the integration of livestock and trees—it’s a welcome neighbor, including at Integration Acres, where goats graze among the pawpaws but leave their fruit for humans to eat.

And, because it ripens after apples in many places, the pawpaw offers farmers a way to continue harvesting into the fall, and bring in extra income. At a time when most produce we eat is available year-round, the pawpaw’s seasonality is significant, says Tim Clymer, who specializes in unusual fruits at Threefold Farms in Mechanicsburg, an hour northwest of Horn Farm.

He grows blackberries, kiwi berries, persimmons, and figs, which were his primary crop until pawpaws took the mantle. With 160 trees in full production at the farm and nearly 300 more on the way, Threefold will contribute some of the 3,000 pounds of pawpaws sold at the festival.

The pawpaw has other advantages that set it apart from so many mainstream fruits, particularly from a farmer’s perspective. It’s high-value (Clymer sells it for $5 to $7 a pound and it goes for more elsewhere) and low-input (impervious to most insect and fungus pests, it can easily be grown organically). It can survive temperatures below freezing and, as a native fruit, it grows well with consistency in much of its home range.

That range is expanding as climate change brings warmer temperatures north, opening up nearly all of New England as an ideal climate for the pawpaw in the years to come. Increases in extreme weather, in the form of both drought and heavy rains and wind, however, could pose a long-term threat to the pawpaw, which thrives in the moist, nutrient-dense soil alongside bodies of water. For many years, though, festivals like those in Pennsylvania and Ohio will be well positioned to expand the fruit’s cult following.

A pawpaw tree in winter. (Photo credit: Judy Bono)

Seeding a Sustainable System

Adam D’Angelo wants more people to find their own pawpaw story. As the breeding operations manager at the Savanna Institute, a Midwest agroforestry nonprofit, he’s studied currants, persimmons, elderberries, mulberries, and hazelnuts. But the pawpaw has his heart. When he was a kid, his brother showed him a pawpaw tree in Cornell University’s MacDaniels Nut Grove, and he stayed up late into the night combing the internet to learn more about it.

“I was amazed to see there was this delicious, tropical fruit that grew here,” D’Angelo says. “And not only did it grow here, but it had evolved here.”

He planted his first tree when he was 11. At Project Pawpaw, a crowdfunded initiative focused on research, breeding, and market development, he’s working to seed a more resilient agricultural system, starting with the pawpaw. The organization opened its first large-scale research orchard this spring, planting 800 trees—enough to produce 10 tons of pawpaw once mature—on an acre in South Jersey, and has plans for two more, including one in Wisconsin.

D’Angelo’s goal is to develop pawpaws with firm flesh, great flavor, and thicker skin, so they don’t bruise quite so easily in transport. (The Bonos say they pack them in a single layer, laid over bubble wrap.) A color break from green to yellow, to signify ripeness, would allow farmers to harvest the fruit more efficiently. Currently, the only way to tell is by squeezing each one. With some improvements, the pawpaw could help diversify farms across the eastern U.S., D’Angelo says.

Alongside other native and perennial fruit and nut crops, the pawpaw can be part of a better agricultural future, he says, encouraging people to think beyond just what’s consistent and available in grocery stores. “We need to start embracing things that grow well where we are,” he says.

D’Angelo’s work will take a while to materialize—plant breeding always does. He doesn’t expect to release a new variety for 10 years. But in the meantime, researchers are finding other ways to improve the pawpaw’s viability for small farms. Kentucky State University has over 2,000 trees in its research program, which started in 1994, focused on fine-tuning propagation methods, orchard management, and ripening and storage techniques. Ohio State University started its own research in 2006, aiming to increase the pawpaw’s profitability for local growers. It hosts a conference each year to discuss production and marketing of the fruit.

“If we’re 10 to 15 years from a new variety, we might only be a couple years from telling farmers the best temperature to store their fruit—or we could develop a new harvest crate, so they don’t bruise,” D’Angelo says. “That’s what propelled the avocado.”

At Horn Farm Center, where neighbors tend a flourishing community garden a short distance from young hazelnuts, persimmons and elderberries, Campbell hopes the pawpaw can be part of something bigger than itself. With that in mind, this year’s festival, now called Wild & Uncommon Weekend, will widen its scope beyond the pawpaw to consider a range of native fruits that are central to the farm’s regenerative vision. The broader focus can educate visitors about “bioregional living,” a way of engaging with agriculture to elevate “what’s inherent and special about this particular climate, this particular land,” Campbell says.

Perennial crops like the pawpaw require little or no tillage, allowing them to improve soil health, sequester carbon, and prevent agricultural runoff into waterways, all while creating habitats for wildlife. For Campbell, that makes it a “gateway” to developing more locally focused and ecologically beneficial food systems.

To have that impact, though, the pawpaw needs to be more than a curiosity. The festivals, research, and personal connections with the fruit are all part of that journey.

“The pawpaw and the festival are a small glimpse of what could be,” she says.

August 31: The South Carolina Pawpaw Festival at Blue Oak Horticulture in Taylors included lessons on pawpaw history, pruning, and care, as well as propagation and planting.
September 7: The second annual Louisville Pawpaw Festival at the Louisville Nature Center in Kentucky featured guided hikes, local vendors, and live music.
September 7-8: At the two-day Indiana Pawpaw Festival in Merom, the hosts raffled off a pawpaw tree every hour.
September 13-15: The 26^th annual Ohio Pawpaw Festival in Albany, Ohio, will highlight the growing, cooking, and sustainability of pawpaws.
September 14: A festival in Paw Paw, West Virginia, will feature special guest Neal Peterson, known as Johnny Pawpaw Seed, for the many varieties he’s bred.
September 21: The ninth annual festival in Frederick, Maryland, will celebrate pawpaws and permaculture.
September 26-29: The Horn Farm Center’s Wild & Uncommon Weekend spans four days across York, Pennsylvania, with a pawpaw celebration on the farm on Sep. 28.
September 28: Paw Paw, Illinois, will get its first pawpaw festival, with tastings and seedlings for sale.
September 28: West Virginia University will host its own festival featuring Andrew Moore, the author of Pawpaw: In Search of America’s Forgotten Fruit.

The post The Pawpaw, a Beloved Native Fruit, Could Seed a More Sustainable Future for Small Farms appeared first on Civil Eats.

How a Vermont Cheesemaker Helps Local Farms Thrive

Jake Price — Wed, 04 Sep 2024 09:00:07 +0000

This story was co-published and supported by the journalism nonprofit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

The post How a Vermont Cheesemaker Helps Local Farms Thrive appeared first on Civil Eats.

Our Reporting Is Now Free for Everyone

The Civil Eats Editors — Tue, 03 Sep 2024 16:00:51 +0000

When Civil Eats launched in 2009, no major media outlets focused on the relationship between food and other significant social and political issues. For the past 15 years, we have led the charge in creating robust conversations around food and farming, and worked to make complicated, underreported stories more accessible to a mainstream audience.

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