With a bit of due diligence, Rubba has found local substitutes for all these ingredients. “We don’t use a lot of sweeteners in our food, but we source a really good maple syrup from Pennsylvania that is sometimes reduced down to a maple sugar,” he says.

He and his team use alternatives to other staples, too: They source vinegars from Keepwell Vinegar in Pennsylvania, which relies on sweeteners like honey, maple syrup, fruit, and sorghum from nearby farms to prepare vinegar from scratch. They get their salt from Henlopen, a flaky sea salt from the Delaware coast. They source sunflower and canola oil from Pennsylvania farms. For spices, they work with foragers to gather and preserve Northern spicebush, a shrub native to the eastern U.S. with a delightfully versatile flavor, both fruity and peppery at once. They use a dash of this spice instead of pepper, mixing it with ginger and chiles for a hit of complexity and warmth.

And, just because food is raised locally doesn’t mean it’s grown with climate-friendly practices. “[The farmer] could be spraying with every insecticide, pesticide, fertilizer, and drive a big, stinky diesel truck into my city and sit outside idling for 20 minutes while he unloads all his plastic containers into my restaurant, right?” says Rubba.

This has prompted Rubba to develop deeper relationships with the farms in his network, including an interview process to understand how the food is produced before he buys from a particular farm. Although he sources organic produce, USDA organic certification isn’t his biggest requirement—he’s more interested in the actual farming methods. Certain farming practices and crop varieties can help farms adapt to the erratic, intensified weather patterns and disasters shaking the foundation of U.S. agriculture. Healthy soil can act like a sponge, easily absorbing water during intense flooding and retaining water during times of drought. Some approaches, like agroforestry, can directly fight climate change by drawing down planet-warming carbon.

Rubba visits all the farms that supply the restaurant, asking about their crop rotations, soil health practices, and how the farmworkers are treated. “I love to see the operation, how they do things, what it’s like, and who works there,” he said. “I don’t want to serve food that someone labored over and wasn’t paid correctly for.”

Origins to Table

“We’re in it for the relationships,” said Dana Honn. “The whole idea of farm-to-table has always been so important, but what I realized is that we’re trying to do origins-to-table–we’re trying to tell the story of where our food came from.”

Chefs can be part of the next chapter of this story, not only by telling the history of a food but also by helping build a sustainable market for its future. This is part of the inspiration behind the Honn’s project Origins: Amazonia, the result of a decades-long relationship formed with Juruna Indigenous communities in the state of Pará, Brazil, whose livelihoods and traditional food systems were upended by a megadam. The project is an ambitious, multidimensional effort to tell the story of the violent destruction of biodiversity and Indigenous land, while also helping support a market for traditional Juruna foods like cassava, which allows the communities to cultivate them once more. By focusing on the richest source of biodiversity in the world—one that affects the entire planet, where  deforestation has eradicated at least 20 percent of the rainforest—the Honns hope to help their customers understand what’s at stake there, and by extension, everywhere.

“If there are more people engaged in production of ancestral foods, they actually begin to consume those foods again,” said Honn about the Juruna communities. Many of their traditional plants, like manioc, are also highly adapted to the environment and climate, cultivated over thousands of years. Carmo has been supporting the renewal of these foodways, in part, through a dinner series partly sourced from the Juruna (along with fresh ingredients from the New Orleans area) that also functions as a fundraiser. The money is returned to the Juruna peoples to help restore the agroforestry systems that have long sustained them.

Honn has developed a similar approach to supporting a more sustainable market for Louisiana’s shrinking fishing industry, which has been eroding for decades. The local industry is struggling to compete with cheap imported seafood, which currently accounts for the majority of seafood sold in the U.S. Many New Orleans chefs find it easier to rely on cheaper, imported seafood, readily available through major restaurant distributors like Sysco or Restaurant Depot that source from around the globe. Yet the reliance on imported seafood—at the expense of local seafood—can come with steep consequences.

For instance, shrimp farms in other countries are routinely linked to labor abuses and the destruction of mangroves—a coastal ecosystem critical for adapting to climate change by building carbon-rich soil and buffering against sea-level rise. To address this, Honn has been working with a group of chefs, fishers, and other experts to build back Louisiana’s seafood economy, including shrimp, by developing a more sustainable, local supply chain. They’re developing a program called Full Catch, a set of protocols for harvesting, transporting, and distributing fish from the Gulf of Mexico, including cutting down on food waste by selling and marketing the whole fish.

“When you go to seafood processing houses, they just cut the filet off and throw the carcass in the bin. You have the collars and the cheeks and the pectoral fins and the ribs and everything else that could . . . literally just be cooked and put on a plate,” said Honn. “We sell it every night at Carmo and run out of it every night. Really, people love it.”

Supporting Climate-Conscious Farms

Many farmers don’t grow a fixed amount of each crop every year; instead, they experiment and innovate with different crop plans, the varieties of crops grown, methods of building soil health and minimizing fertilizer use, and other variables. In other words, climate-friendly farming can be a bit messy and unpredictable–a system that is designed to be more responsive to climate disruptions and ecosystem fluctuations, building long-term stability, resilience, and high yields.

The restaurants that support these kinds of  farms also tend to be highly adaptable, adjusting their menu to reflect the needs of farmers. They source according to the schedule of the crops growing nearby, the waning and waxing seasons. For some chefs, this means keeping in constant touch with farms to know when their crops will be ready, and then adjusting their menu accordingly–rather than relying on a predictable production schedule.

Isaiah Martinez, the chef and owner of Yardy Rum Bar, a Caribbean restaurant in Eugene, Oregon, says he keeps close tabs on local farms. “I’m asking them, ‘When are your peppers going to be in season? When are melons going to be in season? When are you going to have different cucumber varieties? When will you have stone fruit?’” He admits that he’s a bit competitive about this, too; he wants to be the first chef that farmers call when a new crop is ready to be delivered, so he builds strong relationships with them.

“I create a relationship where [farmers] feel like they have to tell me first,” he said. “They’re giving me the first handful of perfect peaches, and I’m putting it on my menu.” This approach is also good for farmers: The peach grows according to its own timeline, and the chef is enthusiastically waiting for it as soon as it is ready. He changes his menu usually every three to four weeks, while making smaller tweaks on a daily basis. “When carrots are not very good, we can do beets, and when beets are not very good, we can do collards.”

For peppers, herbs, lettuces and gem beets, Martinez goes to Red Tail Organics, a certified organic vegetable farm along Oregon’s Mohawk River that focuses on the often overlooked edges of the farm. Red Tail  plants hedgerows of elderberries, Oregon Grape trees, and  Cascara trees, native plants that serve as a habitat for wildlife while helping sequester carbon in the soil. They’ve also planted Pacific willow, California incense-cedar, Western red cedar, Ash trees, and Alders along the river that cuts through the farm. Known as a riparian buffer, this prevents erosion, stabilizes the soil, and can absorb storm water, helping the farm adapt to more erratic weather.

Martinez also sources some ingredients from Hummingbird Wholesale, a local distributor in Oregon focused on building a market for regional organic farms that are sustainable in the truest sense of the word. “We have a big, audacious goal that organic becomes the norm in agriculture, as opposed to the 2.5 percent [of U.S. food sales] that it is currently,” said Stacy Kraker, the company’s director of marketing. Hummingbird does this by acting as the missing link between the area’s organic farms, retailers, and restaurants, building a regional supply chain that chefs that quickly tap into. In pursuing what it calls “distributor supported agriculture,” Hummingbird—and chefs like Martinez, who support it—are helping create a local foodshed that nourishes all the life that depends on it, from humans to soil microbes and pollinators.

Hummingbird’s sourcing team considers some of the regional climate stressors, such as prolonged periods of drought, when seeking out farmers. “Some of the farmers we work with are, in fact, dry-land farming, which means that they rely on rain to give them as much moisture as they’re ever going to use,” said Kraker. “So, they’re intentionally choosing to grow crops in the regions that can handle long periods without any rain.”

While Martinez deeply values building direct relationships with farmers, Hummingbird Wholesale allows him to confidently source from nearby organic farms for some ingredients, sparing him a bit of time and research in what can be a lengthy process.

A chef’s vigilant, knowledgeable sourcing can lead to cherishing certain ingredients—and using less of them. Oyster Oyster’s Rob Rubba thinks some foods are best reserved for special occasions, including his restaurant’s namesake bivalve.

His oysters come from Chesapeake Bay, which has lost nearly all of its once-abundant oyster population due to reckless harvesting techniques like dredging. Although Rubba buys from farmers dedicated to sustainably raising Bay oysters, he still sources them in moderation. Part of the idea is simply not taking too much from the earth, especially for ingredients that have historically been extracted like they are an infinite resource.

“I think we have to look at [these oysters] as a luxury,” he said. “It doesn’t mean that they should be limited out of a sense of elitism. I just think in how we consume them—we should just be a little more grateful for them when we do get them.”

The post Beyond Farm to Table: How Chefs Can Support Climate-Friendly Food Systems appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2024/09/23/beyond-farm-to-table-how-chefs-can-support-climate-friendly-food-systems/feed/ 1 https://civileats.com/2024/09/18/jd-vance-invested-in-acretrader-heres-why-that-matters/ https://civileats.com/2024/09/18/jd-vance-invested-in-acretrader-heres-why-that-matters/#comments Wed, 18 Sep 2024 09:00:54 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=57646 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. 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 […]

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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.

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.)

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.

“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.

]]> https://civileats.com/2024/09/18/jd-vance-invested-in-acretrader-heres-why-that-matters/feed/ 5 https://civileats.com/2024/09/17/can-lawmakers-really-tackle-high-food-prices/ https://civileats.com/2024/09/17/can-lawmakers-really-tackle-high-food-prices/#comments Tue, 17 Sep 2024 09:00:05 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=57643 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. In a subsequent speech, Harris blamed high grocery prices on large, consolidated food companies, which have raked in record profits, but offered few further details about what a price-gouging […]

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In a subsequent speech, Harris blamed high grocery prices on large, consolidated food companies, which have raked in record profits, but offered few further details about what a price-gouging ban might entail. The campaign then added a policy platform to its website, repeating the pledge to install a national price gouging ban.

“As president, she will direct her administration to crack down on anti-competitive practices that let big corporations jack up prices and undermine the competition,” the website states.

Republicans and pro-business groups pushed back immediately after the announcement. The National Grocers Association called the proposal a “solution in search of a problem,” while former President Donald Trump posted on social media about “Soviet style” price caps.

“If you think things are expensive now, they will get 100 times WORSE if Kamala gets four years as President,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. The former president has also mentioned high food prices repeatedly in recent weeks; he informed Elon Musk, in an interview on X, that bacon prices are “four to five times” more expensive than they were a few years ago.

While Trump’s statement about bacon is false, there’s no question that groceries have become increasingly expensive. Food prices ballooned by 25 percent between 2019 and 2023, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), outstripping increases in other important spending categories like housing and medical costs.

And it’s clear that voters are not only taking notice of the high prices, but also increasingly see corporate profits and consolidation as part of the cause. In recent polling focused on voters in seven swing states, 56 percent said food was the hardest essential good to pay for. And 61 percent of respondents, including 63 percent of independents, blamed across-the-board high prices on corporate greed.

Few other goods and services are as omnipresent as food purchases, and food prices are often where everyday Americans feel economic shifts most immediately.

“It’s the most frequent purchase most households make,” said Dawn Thilmany, an agriculture and resource economics professor at Colorado State University. “You eat three times a day. You probably shop at least a couple times a week. There’s almost nothing else like it in our economy.”

In a tight presidential election, where nearly one in five voters is still undecided, food prices could be a key issue, but what can elected officials actually do to bring them down?

Consolidation and ‘Greedflation’

Supply chain disruptions, resulting shortages, and inflation have contributed to high food prices in recent years. Economists note that other factors, like increases in the minimum wage across the country, ballooning energy costs—inflated by the war in Ukraine—and changing consumer behavior have likely played a role. Some pandemic-era habits, like the newfound love for baking bread, and cooking at home in general, seem to have stuck, according to Thilmany. “Even controlling for inflation, we found that people are seemingly allocating a higher share of their budget to food spending,” she said.

But even as inflation has slackened in the past year, prices remain high, and some economists and progressive Democrats argue that large corporations have taken advantage of the recent economic disruptions to keep prices artificially high—a tactic known as “greedflation.”

A recent study by the Groundwork Collaborative found that “corporate profits drove 53 percent of inflation during the second and third quarters of 2023,” and more than a third of the inflation since the start of pandemic—vastly outstripping the price growth attributable to corporate profits in recent decades. Corporations can do this, according to the report, thanks to decades of corporate consolidation, resulting in a lack of competition.

“From the fertilizer industry to the feed production industry to the grocery retail industry, all along this food chain, you have deeply concentrated markets with only a few major players,” said Rakeen Mabud, chief economist at the Groundwork Collaborative, “and that lack of competition means that at every point in the system, these companies don’t have to lower their prices.”

Policymakers can curb this by discouraging consolidation and encouraging competition. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC), for example, is attempting to block a $25 billion merger between grocery giants Kroger and Albertsons. A merger would allow Kroger to acquire its main rival, and the FTC argued in a hearing in Oregon earlier this year that the consolidation would be anti-competitive and push costs onto consumers.

Details from the hearing, meanwhile, show that food pricing isn’t all driven by inflation. In a March email to other company executives, Andy Groff, Kroger’s senior director for pricing, seemed to confirm that the grocery chain had raised its prices to higher levels than required by inflationary conditions. “On milk and eggs, retail inflation has been significantly higher than cost inflation,” Groff wrote. In response to questions from FTC lawyers about the email, Groff said that Kroger attempts to “pass through our inflation to consumers.” He also acknowledged that Kroger was able to raise prices in areas where it faced little competition without seeing a drop in sales.

Under Trump, consolidated corporations generally benefited. The Trump administration dissolved the USDA agency tasked with regulating anti-competitive practices in the livestock, poultry, meat, grain, and oilseed industries.

The Biden administration made some attempts to rein in consolidation. In 2022, for example, President Joe Biden signed an executive order aimed at creating more competitive practices, especially in meat and poultry supply chains. Harris’s plans to go after “price gouging” fall in line with these initiatives.

The problem is deeply embedded in the U.S. food system, and it continues to have real impacts. In cities or regions with just a few large food distributors, the consumer costs of consolidation can be stark: USDA data from June shows that, in a few major Midwestern cities with notably scant competition in the dairy distribution supply chain, consumers were paying almost $1 more per gallon of milk, according to The Milkweed, a dairy industry newsletter.

Kansas City, for example, has virtually no competition among its milk producers. One distributor, Hiland Dairy, a joint venture between two large-scale dairy cooperatives, dominates the area Over the past two years, Kansas City has experienced the highest milk prices among 30 major cities, according to The Milkweed. In Chicago, milk prices increased in 2023, even as raw milk costs declined for the two major milk distributors that dominate the local market.

“The food industry is just full of cartels,” said Austin Frerick, author of Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry. “And that’s what cartels do. They gouge.”

Extreme concentration can be seen everywhere in the food industry. Walmart sells approximately one in three grocery items nationwide—and more than half the groceries in dozens of regional markets. Tyson, JBS, Cargill, and National Beef buy and process 85 percent of beef in the U.S. JBS, the largest meatpacker in the world, has agreed to multiple settlements in recent years related to bribery and price-fixing.

Similarly, in the egg industry, a few large corporate entities hoard the market; Cal-Maine alone controls about 20 percent of egg production in the U.S. This concentration allowed companies to keep egg prices high in 2022 and 2023, after supply chain issues and an avian flu outbreak cut into supply, according to Senator Elizabeth Warren’s (D-Massachusetts) office. Cal-Maine, with no reported avian flu cases in its operations, saw profits increase by 65 percent in late 2022.

“In times of crisis like we saw over the course of the pandemic and over this inflationary period, these companies, in many cases, have added to the prices that consumers or downstream purchasers are paying, because they can, because there’s no competition to put them down,” Mabud of Groundwork Collaborative said.

Other Legal Tools to Address Excess Prices

It is one of 38 states with similar laws on the books, including red states like Texas and Tennessee. In Tennessee, two Nashville-based state lawmakers—Sen. Charlane Oliver and Rep. Aftyn Behn—recently urged the state attorney general to join a multi-state collaboration task force with the USDA to address anti-competitive actions in the food industry.

“High prices at the grocery store have weighed heavily on Tennessee families, and they deserve to know that their state government is taking every possible step to ensure fairness in the marketplace,” Oliver said in a statement.

In some states, price hikes are illegal beyond a certain percentage increase. Others use standards like “grossly excessive” to evaluate the legality of sudden cost raises. In her recently released platform, Harris said that national price gouging legislation would build on the existing state laws. However, the patchwork nature of state price-gouging laws currently makes this challenging, given the diffuse nature of supply chains and distribution networks.

A bill introduced earlier this year by Senator Warren offers a glimpse of what legislative action might look like at the federal level. Warren’s bill would codify price gouging as an “unfair and deceptive” practice under federal law, allowing both the federal government and state attorney generals to tackle exploitative pricing nationwide.

The law would also target large corporations, those with at least $100 million in revenue. And during periods of severe stock-market shock, as during COVID or, say, during extreme natural disasters, the bill would require large, publicly traded companies to disclose extra information to the SEC, especially the cost of goods sold, gross margins, and pricing strategies.

This proposal and others would require an empowered FTC, one willing to use existing antitrust law and any new legislation to target large corporate entities. During the Biden administration, FTC Chair Lina Khan has aggressively used antitrust law to target monopolies and consolidation, including the Albertsons–Kroger merger. Since announcing her candidacy, Harris has been pressured by populist economists and the left wing of the Democratic party to keep Khan, while billionaire donors have urged Harris to get rid of her, seeking a more business-friendly administration.

Government leaders have other tools at their disposal as well. The American Prospect recently detailed a variety of anti-price gouging tactics, ranging from a vigorous corporate tax regime and expanded enforcement to counter “unfair, deceptive, or abusive acts or practices”—to a greater array of public, not-for-profit institutions like publicly owned grocery stores and credit unions.

Though details remain scant, Harris’s announcement against price gouging could have teeth. Her speeches to date suggest support for legislation similar to Warren’s bill, antitrust efforts against large corporations—including civil penalties—and possible federal support for small businesses. Trump, too, has said he’ll tackle inflation, though policy details are minimal.

Any solution will need to also factor in the impact that prices have on farmers. When commodity prices are low, or supply is too high, for example, a power dynamic widens, benefiting brokers in the middle and hurting farmers. Supply management, where farmers grow what’s needed and are paid fairly in the process, is one policy solution.

But those are long-term issues likely far from most voters’ minds. What many of them are thinking about now is the cost of food.

For Mabud, the fact that Harris’ first big economic announcement focuses on food prices is grounds for hope—especially when combined with a more vigorous FTC and broader conversations about policy tools to take on monopolies.

“Concentration is not just a theoretical concept,” she said. “It’s actually harming people, full stop.”

“The reason I’m heartened by the focus on the high cost of groceries,” Mabud went on, “is because it’s really emblematic of a broader problem in our economy—which is that corporations have too much power and people have too little power.”

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]]> https://civileats.com/2024/09/17/can-lawmakers-really-tackle-high-food-prices/feed/ 2 https://civileats.com/2024/09/09/are-these-corporations-pocketing-your-kids-lunch-money/ https://civileats.com/2024/09/09/are-these-corporations-pocketing-your-kids-lunch-money/#respond Mon, 09 Sep 2024 09:00:34 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=57534 A version of this story was originally published by  The Lever, an investigative newsroom.  A cafeteria lunch at Emily Dickinson Elementary School, where Krieger’s children attend, costs $2.25, plus $1 for a carton of milk. Yet last year, the cost of loading money onto students’ meal accounts—which are managed by a website called MySchoolBucks—increased to […]

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]]> A version of this story was originally published by  The Lever, an investigative newsroom. 

A cafeteria lunch at Emily Dickinson Elementary School, where Krieger’s children attend, costs $2.25, plus $1 for a carton of milk. Yet last year, the cost of loading money onto students’ meal accounts—which are managed by a website called MySchoolBucks—increased to $3.25 per transaction. The fee had grown larger than the cost of an entire meal.

“It caught my attention,” Krieger told The Lever. On the MySchoolBucks website, the $3.25 charge was called a “program fee.” But that money, Krieger learned, wasn’t going toward her children’s school.

Instead, the fees were going to one of the largest payment processing companies in the world—one that has been fighting a years-long legal battle to protect the millions it makes upcharging parents on lunch money. Now, that operation is facing new scrutiny from the courts and federal regulators.

At the same time, efforts are ramping up to provide universal free school lunches, which Minnesota adopted last year under the governorship of Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz.

MySchoolBucks, a subsidiary of financial behemoth Global Payments, is the largest of three payment processors that dominate an increasingly lucrative K-12 payments market, mediating millions of dollars in payments from students and their parents for everything from school lunches to athletic events. As the company has increasingly cornered the market, it has drawn attention from consumer-rights lawyers and federal regulators—and is now at the center of a growing battle over school-lunch junk fees.

“They’re making billions off a very large service fee,” Krieger said—on the backs of her own family and families around the country, as students head back to school. “It’s like, yikes, is this the best or only option? Is this what most schools are using?”

The company and its competitors are raking in more than $100 million a year from fees on lunch money alone, according to a July report by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a federal consumer watchdog. The fees are particularly burdensome on low-income families, who often can’t afford to load a large lump sum of money onto a student’s meal account and therefore pay more frequent flat transaction fees. Regulators found that vulnerable families may pay as much as $0.60 in fees for every $1 they spend on lunch.

“They designed a system to nickel and dime hundreds of thousands of people once every other week,” said Adam Rust, the director of financial services at the consumer advocacy group Consumer Federation of America, calling the fees “a hidden cost of just living.”

Yet while MySchoolBucks has signed more and more contracts each year, making it a central growth driver for Global Payments, challenges to its business practices are brewing. A consumer fraud lawsuit, which was brought in 2019 against the company, may soon be certified as a class-action suit, which could allow attorneys to pursue settlements on behalf of many more families, according to new court records reviewed by The Lever. The CFPB’s recent report on the market, which documented the companies’ disproportionate burden on poor families, could represent a prelude to further enforcement.

Any attempts at reform, however, will come up against a company with annual revenues of more than $9 billion, and which spends hundreds of thousands of dollars a year lobbying lawmakers in Washington.

“There is every incentive in the world for [Global Payments] to throw everything they’ve got at us, as long as they possibly can, until a court makes them pay back parents,” said Janet Varnell, one of the lead attorneys on the ongoing lawsuit against MySchoolBucks, and the president of Public Justice, a pro-worker and pro-consumer legal advocacy group.

“This is the first case of its kind,” she added. “No one has successfully sued a K-12 payment processor company for this type of fraud.”

Global Payments did not return requests for comment.

Fees ‘Way Above Industry Standards’

In 2016, another deal further drove school lunches into the grip of corporate America. That December, Global Payments announced a $4.3 billion deal to acquire Heartland Payment Systems, with executives promising the sale would be “transformative” for the industry.

Heartland’s “school solutions” are now a prized asset for Global Payments, helping drive “double-digit growth” in one of the company’s divisions, executives told investors on an earnings call last year.

The company is by far the biggest player in the market, which is largely controlled by three companies. The others are SchoolCafé, which is owned by Cybersoft Technologies, and LINQ Connect. Regulators estimate that MySchoolBucks has captured nearly 40 percent of the market, with SchoolCafé and LINQ holding 17 percent and 12 percent, respectively.

MySchoolBucks also charges the highest fees. The company’s average transaction fee is $2.55, according to federal regulators, the highest on the market. But in Bozeman and elsewhere, the company is increasingly raising fees to over $3. Families have no choice but to pay up.

While those fees may seem small at first glance, they add up: the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s conservative estimate was that families pay $42 per school year on average. For families with more children, or who add money to their accounts more frequently, that total may be far higher. And it’s worth noting that a $3.25 transaction fee on a deposit of $20 or even $50 (16 and 6 percent of the total transaction) is far higher than, say, credit or debit card transaction fees, which are usually between 1 and 2 percent of a given purchase.

“[The fees] are way above industry standards,” said Varnell. “The amount they are charging to parents for school lunch is several times more than whatever they’d be charged in virtually any other part of the market.”

But lured by the promise of cashless convenience for families and back-end services for administrators, schools are increasingly signing up for MySchoolBucks. The company says that more than 30,000 schools and two million families now use its technology, and Global Payments executives told investors in August that the platform had secured a contract with the Los Angeles Unified School District, which meant that “we now have partnerships with the three largest school districts in the United States.”

Schools, however, may not always consider the fees that families are charged when negotiating these contracts. Indeed, the fact that the companies’ customers—school districts—are not factoring fees into their decision-making has arguably become a pillar of MySchoolBucks’ business model. Districts might choose MySchoolBucks for its point-of-sale technology for cafeterias and school stores, for instance, without considering that these programs then automatically integrate sky-high fees for families. Or districts might not realize they can push the company to lower the fees in contract negotiations.

This arrangement has created a captive market, critics charge—one consisting of parents and families who have no choice about what payment platform their schools use.

“This is an example of corporate monopoly power. They exert a certain price—really, any price that they want—and the parents are at the corporations’ mercy to pay that price,” said Christine Chen Zinner, senior policy counsel at Americans for Financial Reform, a pro-consumer advocacy group. “They have no choices.”

There’s Nothing Stopping Corporations From Raising Fees

Story, himself a consumer-protection attorney, had begun wondering where the program fees that MySchoolBucks charged him each time he put money on either of his children’s meal accounts were going. In court documents, he testified that he was led to believe that this money was going to the Duval County schools. It wasn’t.

“I could immediately see that there was nothing stopping this private corporation from just raising the fees,” Varnell said.

In 2019, Story filed suit against MySchoolBucks, alleging that he was misled about the destination of the fees, which he claimed amounted to consumer fraud, and that the transactions violated credit card laws. At the center of the case is alleged deception by MySchoolBucks, which attorneys claim was trying to hide the fact that its fees were going straight to its own corporate coffers.

“Parents behave differently when they think that the money is going to their child’s school than when they think the largest payment processor in the world is stealing their money,” Varnell explained.

Global Payments has been fighting hard to keep it that way. As Varnell and Story got to work on the case, the company began to go to extreme lengths to stop them.

Shortly after the lawsuit was filed, with Story as a plaintiff, MySchoolBucks deposited $40,000 into Story’s bank account in an attempt to nullify his claim, as the company explained in court documents at the time. Story was undeterred. He refused the money and reversed the deposit, in order to keep the case in court.

MySchoolBucks then rolled out a new “terms of service” agreement to all users, requiring them to waive their rights to participate in a class-action lawsuit against the company in order to continue using the platform. To avoid signing it, Story went to “tremendous lengths,” he testified in court documents, to work out an alternative way to pay for his children’s school lunch.

That terms of service—which, five years later, parents are still required to sign to pay for their child’s lunches—explicitly mentions the Story v. Heartland Payment Systems case: “If you accept these terms of service… you will not [be] permitted to participate in the Story case as a class member,” it says.

“They are still, to this day, saying they can enforce that,” Varnell said of the terms of service.

That may soon change. At a hearing on July 17, the federal judge presiding over the proceedings told attorneys for both sides that he was leaning toward certifying the case as a class-action lawsuit—a major victory for the plaintiffs, who could then pursue claims in the case on behalf of MySchoolBucks users around the country.

“My inclination is to say yes to some class certification in this case,” said U.S. District Judge Timothy Corrigan, according to a transcript of the hearing, which The Lever obtained. Corrigan emphasized, though, that he had not yet ruled on the issue. “I do think there’s been some indication in the discovery that Heartland internally knew there were some problems here.”

Before moving forward, Corrigan sent both parties to settlement talks, which are expected to last the next several months. In the meantime, the lawsuit is not the only threat Global Payments is currently facing.

Cracking Down

Regulators followed this notice with another report in July—the first in-depth study of the companies that make money from school lunch fees. The report found that the fees were “burdensome” and they had a disproportionate impact on low-income families.

Zinner, the attorney with Americans for Financial Reform, said the report was a sign that regulators were working to hold the companies to account. “I think the [Consumer Financial Protection Bureau] has the right idea,” she said. “They’re doing everything that they can to make sure these payment processing companies are in full compliance with the law.”

School lunch programs—whether students are paying full price or qualify for free or reduced-price lunches—are not supposed to charge additional fees, beyond the cost of a meal. As regulators highlighted, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees school lunch programs, has long had this as a policy: Students “shall not be charged any additional fees” for lunch.

Whether the practices of MySchoolBucks and other K-12 payment companies are running afoul of this policy is a key focus of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau report. As schools increasingly turn to digital payment options, parents might not realize they have any alternative ways to pay, even if they exist.

The fees have persisted even as schools in some states have started implementing free lunches for all, as in Minnesota, which recently launched a universal free breakfast and lunch program. But the new guarantee of free lunch has not driven MySchoolBucks out of the state. Some schools still use the platform to allow students to pay for milk or additional food at lunch—preserving the platform’s fees.

“Families may be paying fees for electronic payments without knowing that they are entitled to fee-free options,” regulators found, saying that it believed payment processors were violating consumer protection laws if they did not make it clear that fee-free alternatives were available to families.

In Bozeman, Krieger said that she was unaware of other ways to pay for school lunch at her children’s district: “[There wasn’t] one that was obvious to me,” she said.

A representative from the Bozeman School District wrote in an email to The Lever that “Parents can also send cash or check to the school for lunch deposits, and many take advantage of that option.”

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]]> https://civileats.com/2024/09/09/are-these-corporations-pocketing-your-kids-lunch-money/feed/ 0 https://civileats.com/2024/09/04/how-a-vermont-cheesemaker-helps-local-farms-thrive/ https://civileats.com/2024/09/04/how-a-vermont-cheesemaker-helps-local-farms-thrive/#comments Wed, 04 Sep 2024 09:00:07 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=57486 This story was co-published and supported by the journalism nonprofit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

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]]> 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.

]]> https://civileats.com/2024/09/04/how-a-vermont-cheesemaker-helps-local-farms-thrive/feed/ 1 https://civileats.com/2024/08/27/is-recycled-plastic-safe-for-food-use/ https://civileats.com/2024/08/27/is-recycled-plastic-safe-for-food-use/#respond Tue, 27 Aug 2024 09:00:22 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=57374 Since 1990, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the agency responsible for ensuring food contact materials are safe, approved at least 347 voluntary manufacturer applications for food contact materials made with recycled plastic, according to a database on its website. Approvals have tripled in recent years, from an average of seven to eight per […]

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Recycled content in food packaging is increasing as sustainability advocates press manufacturers to cut their use of virgin plastic.

Since 1990, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the agency responsible for ensuring food contact materials are safe, approved at least 347 voluntary manufacturer applications for food contact materials made with recycled plastic, according to a database on its website. Approvals have tripled in recent years, from an average of seven to eight per year through 2019, to 23 per year since then, and they continue to climb. The FDA has already approved 27 proposals through June this year.

Other than Coca-Cola, most manufacturers seeking approval are petrochemical giants such as Eastman Chemicals, Dupont, and Indorama; and lesser-known plastic packaging manufacturers, including many from China, India, and other countries.

“The FDA has been very reluctant to adopt a modern perspective.”

The end buyers of the recycled materials aren’t included in the FDA database, but many popular brands are using recycled content. Cadbury chocolate bars come in a wrapper marketed as 30 percent recycled “soft plastic packaging.” The Coca-Cola Co. in North America reports it sells soft drinks in 100 percent recycled PET (polyethylene terephthalate) bottles, while General Mills says its Annie’s cereal boxes use a liner made from 35 percent recycled plastic film.

Increasing recycled content in packaging may be good news for the planet, but researchers say the FDA has a lax approval process for plastic food packaging that hasn’t kept pace with the science on chemical hazards in plastics. The agency’s approval process for recycled plastics is voluntary and ignores the potential risk of chemical mixtures, researchers told EHN. Companies can seek guidance on their recycling process, but they are not required to. In addition, the FDA relies on manufacturers’ test data when it approves materials, leaving companies essentially in charge of policing themselves. Meanwhile, some studies show that recycled plastic can harbor even more toxic chemicals—such as bisphenol-A (BPA), phthalates, benzene and others—than virgin plastic.

FDA spokesperson Enrico Dinges defended the process, telling EHN the agency “reviews [industry] data against stringent scientific guidelines” and can “use its resources to spot test materials” if it sees an issue.

But researchers say the agency fails to protect the public from the toxic chemical soup found in recycled plastics.

“[The] FDA is most concerned about pathogen contamination coming with the recycled material, rather than chemicals,” Maricel Maffini told EHN. The approval process “is very lax,” she said.

Recycled Plastic Is More Toxic

Globally, just 9 percent of plastic is recycled. Most is recycled mechanically, by sorting, washing, grinding, and re-compounding the material into pellets.

Most recycling centers collect a mix of materials, allowing milk jugs, say, to intermingle with detergent bottles or pesticide containers and potentially absorb the hazardous chemicals from those non-food containers. Recycling facilities that are set up to collect one plastic type, such as PET bottles, can better control potential contamination, although chemicals could still be introduced from bottle caps or the adhesives in labels.

Hazardous chemicals can also be introduced when plastics are decontaminated and stabilized during recycling. Plastics degrade with recycling, “so you may need to add more stabilizers to make the material as robust as the virgin material,” Birgit Geueke, senior scientific officer at the nonprofit Food Packaging Forum, told EHN. “Recycling can therefore increase the material complexity and the presence of different additives and degradation products.”

Geueke, who led a review of more than 700 studies on chemicals in plastic food contact items, said that research on recycled plastics is limited. Despite that caveat, “there are a few studies really showing that contamination can be introduced more easily if you use recycled content.”

One study found 524 volatile organic chemicals in recycled PET versus 461 in virgin PET. Chemicals detected in the recycled PET included styrene, benzene, BPA, antimony, formaldehyde, and phthalates—chemicals linked to an array of health issues, including cancer, and the ability to hack hormones and cause development delays in children, obesity, and reproductive problems.

Most studies have focused on recycled PET, which is “not as prone to picking chemicals up,” in comparison to other plastics such as recycled high-density polyethylene (HDPE) and polypropylene, or PP, Geueke said. “HDPE milk bottles really take up chemicals during all stages of their life cycle, much more than PET bottles, and [those chemicals] are harder to remove, because they stick harder to the material,” she said.

Indeed, a study on recycled HDPE pellets obtained from various countries in the Global South identified pesticides, pharmaceuticals, and industrial chemicals in the pellets.

FDA’s Lax Approach

The FDA must authorize all materials that contact food before they reach the market. To be authorized, a material cannot contain intentionally added cancer-causing chemicals nor any other chemicals that leach from the material at a level of more than 0.5 parts per billion.

But as Maffini pointed out, the FDA recommends, but does not require, the type of testing that manufacturers should do to ensure their products are safe, and it doesn’t always require them to submit any safety data, she said.

“If you tell the FDA the substance or substances used to make the plastic are not mutagenic or genotoxicant, and the exposure in the diet would be less than 0.5 parts per billion, FDA does not expect you to send any safety data [to back up these claims].”

In defense, the agency’s Dinges said, “the FDA has robust guidelines for the underlying scientific data that should be provided” by industry. But he also said, “it is the responsibility of the manufacturer to ensure that their material meets all applicable specifications.”

For recycled plastics, companies may also voluntarily submit a requested review of their recycling process. In this case, the FDA asks companies to provide a description of the process, test results showing that the process removes possible incidental contamination, and a description of how the material will be used.

The FDA further advises manufacturers to conduct “surrogate testing,” which involves challenging recycled materials with, or submerging them into, different classes of hazardous chemicals that could theoretically contaminate the plastic, to determine whether the company’s recycling processes can eliminate those toxic chemicals.

Surrogate testing is the “best available practice” for evaluating chemical migration from recycled plastics, Gueke said, although research shows it works better for PET than for other plastics like PP or HDPE. Though the FDA doesn’t require surrogate testing, Tom Neltner, executive director at Unleaded Kids, said, “I don’t think you’re going to find a market in the industry without having gone through FDA review.”

Neltner, who formerly worked with Environmental Defense Fund’s Safer Chemical Initiative, said that in his experience, big food companies are skittish about using mechanically recycled plastic on packaging that touches food.

According to the FDA database of recycled plastic applications, two-thirds of the approvals are for recycled PET, for a broad range of products from drink bottles to clam shell containers for fruits and vegetables to tea bags. Most of the remaining approvals are for recycled PP for products including clam shells, disposable tableware, cutlery, caps, and lids; recycled HDPE for grocery bags, milk and juice bottles, meat trays, and disposable tableware, and recycled polystyrene (PS) for meat and poultry trays and clam shells.

Most requests are for mechanical recycling processes, though a couple dozen were submitted for chemical recycling, which uses an energy-intensive, largely unproven, process to convert plastics back to their original monomer chemicals. [The FDA no longer evaluates chemical recycling proposals for PET because it says the process produces material of suitable purity for food-contact use.]

Outdated Approach to Evaluating Toxics

“The FDA has been very reluctant to adopt a modern perspective,” Tom Zoeller, professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, told EHN, referring to testing for the effects of endocrine disruptors or for the mixtures of chemicals found in plastics.

FDA’s requirement that a chemical not exceed a threshold of 0.5 parts per billion is based on cancer risk, Zoeller said, and while that number is protective for evaluating exposure to a single chemical, “I’m not sure that means a lot, when you consider the 16,000 chemicals that are put in plastic.”

In other words, the FDA’s approach doesn’t account for multiple chemical exposures, even as research shows that chemical mixtures can have significant health impact. A European study, for instance, found that a mixture of nine different chemicals had a greater impact on children’s IQ than what was expected based on individual risk assessments.

“It’s the combination of chemicals that are impacting IQ and basically stealing human potential,” Zoeller said. “We are way behind the curve,” in assessing chemical risks, he added.

Dinges responded that “while it is unlikely that appropriately sourced and controlled feedstock will experience incidental contamination to any appreciable amount, potential incidental contamination is addressed by the FDA’s surrogate testing recommendations.”

Yet the ability to control feedstock is what worries experts. Researchers who found BPA and heavy metals migrating at higher levels from recycled PET compared to virgin PET, stressed that the plastic’s safety depends on transparency and cooperation across the value chain. Moreover, surrogate testing is not required.

Neither does FDA’s approach account for endocrine-disrupting chemicals, which can act at levels in the parts per trillion by disrupting metabolism, Maffini and Zoeller commented. “This concept that there’s a threshold below which there are no effects or no adverse effects is fundamentally incorrect,” said Zoeller.

Dinges countered that the “effects on the endocrine system are just one of many areas of toxicology that the FDA evaluates,” while also repeating industry talking points. “Endocrine activation . . . does not necessarily translate into toxicity,” he wrote. “Consumption of any food (for example, sugar) can activate the endocrine system.”

Such responses have led Zoeller to conclude that FDA has “become a foil for industry,” and that their “precautionary principle is applied to industry, not public health.”

Unless government agencies can do a better job at ensuring manufacturers are keeping chemical hazards out of recycled plastic, experts think it shouldn’t be used for food contact materials.

“I’m not a big fan of recycled plastic and food contact, because it’s really hard to know [if it’s safe], and I think producers have to be more careful than when they produce virgin materials,” Geueke said, adding that she thinks that only recycled PET should be considered because the other types so readily absorb chemical contaminants.

“If you have a very good process and can prove that it gets rid of most of the contaminants . . . but nobody knows whether that really happens or not,” she said.

This article originally appeared in EHN, and is reprinted with permission.

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]]> https://civileats.com/2024/08/27/is-recycled-plastic-safe-for-food-use/feed/ 0 https://civileats.com/2024/08/12/farm-stops-create-new-markets-for-small-farms/ https://civileats.com/2024/08/12/farm-stops-create-new-markets-for-small-farms/#comments Mon, 12 Aug 2024 09:00:35 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=57188 And when these same farmers make a delivery to Argus Farm Stop, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the staff treat them like minor celebrities: free coffee, shout-outs from the owners, the works. “They are like rock stars,” says Bill Brinkerhoff, Argus’ co-owner, a tall, friendly businessman with a passion for local food. “It’s like, ‘Farmer John […]

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At Argus Farm Stop, the shelves are full of locally raised vegetables and fruit, herbs, beef, chicken, fish, and more. Beets from one local farm snuggle up against sunchokes from another, across eggs from yet another. Above many of the market’s displays hang smiling pictures of farmers alongside their produce.

And when these same farmers make a delivery to Argus Farm Stop, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the staff treat them like minor celebrities: free coffee, shout-outs from the owners, the works. “They are like rock stars,” says Bill Brinkerhoff, Argus’ co-owner, a tall, friendly businessman with a passion for local food. “It’s like, ‘Farmer John is in the house!’”

Argus represents an emerging business model, the farm stop, which connects consumers and farmers in a local food web. A farm stop sells food on consignment from nearby small and medium farms, landing it somewhere between a grocery store, a farmers’ market, and a food hub. Here, farmers deliver freshly harvested produce to a brick-and-mortar retail shop with a full staff. The farmers set their own prices and keep the bulk of the revenue.

Bill Brinkerhoff, Argus Farm Stop co-owner. (Photo credit: Paige Hodder)

Farm stops operate quite differently from typical mainstream grocery stores like Kroger or Albertson’s, which rely on industrialized food systems and complex supply chains. They are also distinct from a farmers’ market, which requires farmers to either be there for sales or hire someone to sell for them. With farm stops, retail consumers have better access to local food, and farmers can spend more time farming.

It’s a small but expanding niche. At least six farm stops operate in the Midwest, and many of them opened over the past decade, including Bloomington Farm Stop Collective, in Indiana, and the Lakeshore Depot, in Marquette, Michigan.

At Argus, the hope is to make life easier for farmers. Too many small farmers quit, Brinkerhoff says, because “there is not enough money and it’s too hard. We are trying to change that narrative: to make it sustainable, economically, to be a small farmer.”

A Niche for Smaller Farms

Smaller farms in the U.S. are buckling under the weight of financial, legal, and logistical challenges. A farm could try to supply a grocery store, but the major chains don’t pay enough to cover the higher costs of independently grown produce. Even if a store did pay adequately, a small farm might struggle to meet licensing and regulation requirements designed with industrial farming in mind. 

“We have to trust that they are going to supply us, and they have to trust that we are going to take good care of their products.”

As a result, smaller farms are disappearing. From 2012 to 2022, the number of farms in the U.S. decreased by almost 10 percent, according to the USDA’s 2022 Census of Agriculture, while the average farm size increased 6.7 percent, from 434 acres to 463 acres. That has created a food system that may be more efficient, but is also less resilient. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the complex supply chains of large-scale systems proved vulnerable to shock, while smaller-scale operations were able to adapt and pivot. Such adaptability will prove essential as climate change continues.

In the meantime, the current industrial system is hard on smaller farm operators, who are forced “to be price takers instead of price makers,” says Kim Bayer, the owner of Slow Farm, which sells organic produce at Argus.

Farm stops can change the equation. Slow Farm, based on the north side of Ann Arbor, typically makes two deliveries a week to Argus from May to October: a small run on Wednesday, directly to the market, and a larger one on Sunday, for Argus’ community-supported agriculture program (CSA), with customers picking up their weekly boxes at the store. And, like all of Argus’ farm suppliers, Slow Farm earns 70 percent of the retail price for their food, at prices Bayer herself sets. That’s a significant difference compared to the average of 15 percent of retail going to growers who sell to supermarkets.

Kim Bayer, owner of Slow Farm, with farm managers Zach Goodman and Magda Nawrocka-Weekes. (Photo credit: Paige Hodder)

The model relies on a “mutual trust relationship” between the food stop and the farmers, Brinkerhoff says. “We have to trust that they are going to supply us, and they have to trust that we are going to take good care of their products.”  

Better Food, Better Access

For customers, meanwhile, farm stops supply ultra-fresh goods that are otherwise hard to come by.

In Michigan, corn and soy farming dominate the agricultural economy, and smaller vegetable farms are less common, says Jazmin Bolan-Williamson, the farm business coordinator at the Michigan State University Center for Regional Food Systems. So large grocery chains in the region often fill their shelves with heavily processed foods that are transported from thousands of miles away.

Farms supplying Argus, by contrast, produce a wide range of crops, including heirloom varieties. All of it travels only a few miles to arrive on the shelf. The food is not only fresher, but its carbon footprint is lighter, another boon.

The benefits of farm stops extend to larger groups, too. Argus hopes to become as a single point of contact for school kitchens in the community, making it easier for them to source locally grown food. This creates a network of support for a resilient local food system. And not just in farm country. The model can also help create those networks in cities, too.

In Rock Hill, South Carolina, for example, FARMacy Community Farmstop provides quality food to the city’s lower-income residents. A farm stop’s flexibility, size, and community-centered focus are uniquely suited to help, FARMacy’s founder, Jonathan Nazeer, says.

FARMacy employs a pay-what-you-will system, where lower-income customers pay what they can and others pay above sticker price to compensate. The farm stop has received funding from the South Carolina Dept of Local Food Purchasing Assistant for produce at the market and in weekly boxes.

FARMacy also cultivates learning and gathering around food, Nazeer says. In the seating area outside the store, FARMacy hosts concerts, workshops, and cooking classes. Here, people connect more deeply with what they’re eating, while they create community. When people value and understand their food, he says, “we empower them to take charge of their health and feel good about how they are participating in this system.”

Paving a Path for Farm Stops

Creating alternative food systems comes with its own set of obstacles, some of which are regulatory.

Farmers’ markets typically work under cottage food laws, which allow farmers to sell unregulated food as long as they are present for the sale. Farm stops, however, operate outside of this regulatory system, which can create some unusual challenges—and ad hoc solutions.

For example, in 2016, after receiving a complaint, the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development (MDARD) cited Argus for selling eggs from small farms that hadn’t processed their eggs in a licensed facility. Under Michigan law, unlicensed egg producers can only sell their eggs directly to consumers. An inspector visited the farm stop and seized 90 dozen eggs, according to the MDARD.

Over the following weeks, Argus worked with the department, local farms and experts, and elected state officials to find a way for the unlicensed farms to sell directly to customers. Now, Argus merely holds the eggs (in a distinct refrigerator) but takes no money; customers pick up the eggs they’ve purchased from farmers.

“MDARD has been working in collaboration and partnership with Argus Farm Stop for many years,” says Jennifer Holton, a spokesperson for the department. “It is a success story in Michigan from a farmer perspective, in that they provide a way for farmers to get their products to an enthusiastic, supportive customer base in an economically viable way that respects the limited time farmers have for selling their products away from the farm.”

Eggs from Shady Glade on display at Argus Farm Stop. (Photo credit: Paige Hodder)

Other challenges are financial and practical.

Establishing and maintaining a farm stop takes a lot of time and money, says Michigan State University’s Bolan-Williamson. It can be tricky to find the right building for a market, and it can cost millions to build a grocery-ready facility from the ground up, she says.

Getting a bank loan could prove difficult, too. It’s likely a bank would want to see local interest in a farm stop before lending funds, Bolan-Williamson says. She suggests that farm stops hold town meetings, gather signatures or even seek donations as proof of that interest.

Despite these challenges, Brinkerhoff says, if you find the right niche, a farm stop can be entirely supported by consumer demand. He and his partners founded Argus roughly 10 years ago with $180,000. Argus now operates two markets and two cafés, employs 65 people, and partners with roughly 200 local farmers, food producers, and artisans. In 2023, the store made $6.5 million in sales.

Argus is now taking a leading role in expanding the movement. Its success, and its galvanizing effect on local farms, provide a beacon: In the past decade, the acres of farmland in Washtenaw County—where Argus is located — actually grew, according to the USDA census of agriculture.

In March, Argus held the first-annual National Farm Stop Conference in Ann Arbor. The conference hosted roughly 120 participants from across the country, including existing farm stops, representatives from communities looking to adopt the model, and policymakers hoping to understand more about it.

They’re learning from each other. Nazeer, who attended the conference on behalf of FARMacy, says different cities can adapt the model to their needs, and each has unique strategies to share. In fact, after the conference, Argus visited FARMacy to learn more about its approach.

Senior representatives from the USDA were also at the conference; they connected with Argus and expressed interest in using the model to grow local food systems.

Employee Tess Rian checks new herbs on display at Argus Farm Stop. (Photo credit: Paige Hodder)

Rebecca Gray, director of The Wild Ramp farmers’ market in Huntington, West Virginia, felt energized by the event. She says she recognized the chance to learn from successful, long-running farm stops, and appreciated how a span of a few days helped bridge the gap between politicians and small farmers. “It was a really great opportunity for these two groups of people to connect and learn about each other’s operations,” she says, and “for policymakers to see what their policy is actually doing.”

Besides hosting the farm stop conference, Argus also offers monthly hour-long webinars and sells three-day online courses for anyone interested in starting their own farm stop, plus private consulting.

Brinkerhoff is not looking to open more farm stops, but he remains committed to helping other communities do so. Farm stops are “efficient, effective, enjoyable, and affordable,” he says. “Any town that has a farmers’ market can do one.”

This article was updated to correct one of the sources of FARMacy’s funding.

The post Farm Stops Create New Markets for Small Farms appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2024/08/12/farm-stops-create-new-markets-for-small-farms/feed/ 1 https://civileats.com/2024/07/31/the-hard-work-of-bringing-kelp-to-market/ https://civileats.com/2024/07/31/the-hard-work-of-bringing-kelp-to-market/#respond Wed, 31 Jul 2024 09:00:37 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=57122 “Anything you do on a boat is a long day,” says Scott. Especially if you’re a kelp farmer, trying to make the most of a short, 12-week season. That day, they’d been out to their 4-acre farm and back twice, harvesting a total of 6,300 pounds. The wind had whipped the rubbery, golden-brown kelp fronds […]

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It was nearly sunset on a breezy May afternoon when Scott Lord and his wife Sheena pulled into Port Clyde, Maine, on the Eva Marie. The hull sat low in the water, weighed down by 2,500 pounds of sugar kelp. The Lords had been out on the water since 5 a.m.

“Anything you do on a boat is a long day,” says Scott. Especially if you’re a kelp farmer, trying to make the most of a short, 12-week season. That day, they’d been out to their 4-acre farm and back twice, harvesting a total of 6,300 pounds. The wind had whipped the rubbery, golden-brown kelp fronds across Sheena’s face as she hand-cut the seaweed from the lines raised up from the water onto the deck.

Scott Lord pictured in Port Clyde, Maine. (Photo credit: Alexandra Talty)

She and Scott had worked quickly to stuff the kelp ribbons into giant bags. Now those bags were ready to be offloaded into a waiting truck and driven 100 miles southwest to their processor, Atlantic Sea Farms (ASF), near Portland, where many of the state’s kelp companies are based. Maine is the heart of America’s farmed seaweed industry, supplying half its harvest—well over a million pounds—last season.

Largely developed in Asia, seaweed farming is a new venture on American shores. One type in particular, kelp—a large brown algae with many species, including sugar kelp— has been hailed as an ecologically beneficial, nutritious superfood that can be farmed on both U.S. coasts—and could help fight climate change. These remarkable characteristics have helped the seaweed industry attract roughly $380 million in investments since 2018, from government, venture capital, and nonprofits.

Kelp’s Tangled Lines

Read all the stories in our series:

• The Promise and Possible Pitfalls of American Kelp Farming An overview of our four-part in-depth series examining the growth of the U.S. seaweed industry. With little regulatory oversight and skyrocketing funding, how will this industry evolve?
• Can Seaweed Save American Shellfish? Seaweed farms on both coasts are beginning to take hold, tapping into decades of painstaking science—and could help shellfish thrive in waters affected by climate change and pollution.
• Rescuing Kelp Forests Through Science Breakthrough genetic research at a Massachusetts lab could save the world’s vanishing kelp forests—and support American kelp farming, too.
• The Hard Work of Bringing Kelp to Market As seaweed farms develop on both coasts and begin to contribute to America’s blue economy, much depends on infrastructure.
• The Future of Seaweed Farming in America The outlook has seemed bright for this crop of multiple uses, including mitigating the impacts of climate change. But major obstacles remain for the seaweed industry.

However, that’s a drop in the bucket compared to the global $9.9 billion market. And, according to farmers and kelp companies, the U.S. investment doesn’t yet address a range of logistical issues that challenge—some might even say threaten—the success of seaweed production.

A Highly Perishable Food

Scott Lord became a seaweed farmer five years ago to potentially help his other harvests—oysters and lobsters—adapt to rising ocean acidification in Maine; kelp has a remarkable ability to lower the water’s pH. What he calls “kelping” also gives him an additional income stream.

But for small farmers like himself, he says, kelp farming “wouldn’t be possible for us if we didn’t have a good business to deal with.” Atlantic Sea Farms, the largest seaweed aquaculture business in the country, has solved several challenges that seaweed farmers face in Maine and other states.

Transportation is one. For Lord, trucking kelp to Portland would be cost- and time-prohibitive. Obtaining the reliably productive, inexpensive kelp seed for the farm is another. But as part of the ASF co-op, he is one of 40 farmers that the company provides with kelp seed string—nylon or cotton strings inoculated with kelp spores—at the beginning of the season, in early winter. Farmers grow these out in the water, strung between buoys, until the fronds reach maturity in springtime. Then they sell the harvest to ASF, which picks up the kelp on the dock.

The second problem: Compared to other ocean harvests like oysters, lobster, or fish, kelp is infinitely more complicated to get onto store shelves. After reaching maturity, it must be harvested within three months, before the water becomes too warm and the seaweed begins to degrade. Harvested kelp is also incredibly perishable. Immediately after leaving the water, it begins to ferment, so must be chilled and processed to extend its shelf life—through freezing, fermenting, pickling, or drying—within a few days. And that requires space and expensive, specialized equipment that can resist the corrosive effects of salt water.

Frozen sugar kelp at Atlantic Sea Farms. (Photo credit: Greta Rybus)

To date, leading American kelp companies–including ASF and Ocean’s Balance, also in Maine—have poured millions into equipment like industrial freezers and dehydrators. Coastal Enterprises, a nonprofit and lender in Maine, says that most of their loans to the kelp industry are for working capital operations and equipment. Other states with less-developed but emerging kelp businesses—like Alaska, Connecticut, and New York—need processing help even more urgently.

According to a recent paper by Connecticut Sea Grant, a national network of university programs dedicated to marine resources, kelp’s “use as a food product in Connecticut and in other parts of the U.S. is limited, because there is a need for post-harvest and marketing infrastructure.”

Maine: Building a Vertically Integrated Business

Docked at Port Clyde, Sheena Lord stays on the boat, securing the gigantic seaweed bags to a winch while Scott operates a forklift that hauls the 1,000-pound bags off the boat and onto dry land. The bags are then weighed and loaded into ASF’s 18-wheeler.

“This is the moment that they become inventory. Every bag has an individual tag that says the Julian date, weight, farm, kelp type, and farmer,” says Liz McDonald, seaweed supply director at ASF. Driving her 18-wheeler across New England to reach partner farmers, McDonald lives out of Airbnbs for the majority of harvest season and is a familiar sight at small docks and quaint harbors across the coast.

Once the Lords’ bags are all on board, McDonald drives nearly three hours to ASF’s building in Biddeford, Maine, tucked off I-95 next to defunct railway track. At the loading dock, workers immediately haul the bags of seaweed from the truck, moving rapidly and efficiently. During kelp harvest season, the scene is a little like the Olympic Village during the Games: Everyone’s been training for this singular stretch of time.

The Biddeford facility includes a fermentation room, closed to outsiders, as it contains proprietary machines; storage freezers; a packing room; a cultivation room for breeding kelp; a kitchen for recipe development; and offices upstairs for the marketing and communications teams.

Workers unload sugar kelp from Bangs Island Mussels at the Portland Fish Exchange in Maine. (Photo credit: Greta Rybus)

“It’s not Instagram beauty like, ‘Look at this beautiful kelp harvest,’” says Briana Warner, CEO of ASF. But she’s visibly proud of the space, beaming as she gives me a tour of the newly built $2 million processing center. At every turn, the air is filled with the briny, spicy smell of the company’s signature Sea-Chi, a seaweed-based kimchi made with fresh kelp.

Atlantic Sea Farms CEO Briana Warner. (Photo credit: Greta Rybus)

A former diplomat specializing in economic development, Warner knows that her company’s success is built on nitty-gritty details. “The reality is: Machines break. Every machine downstairs we had to create from scratch, because it doesn’t even exist in Asia . . . because they’re eating dried kelp,” she explains. “Every safety protocol, we’ve had to come up with.”

Early on in Warner’s tenure as CEO, the company almost went under due to processing issues. In February 2020, a deal ASF had reached to supply Maine-grown kelp to Sweetgreen, in a collaboration with celebrity chef David Chang, evaporated as the pandemic shut down the chain’s business. Back then, ASF had limited storage space and needed somewhere to store 240,000 pounds of kelp pouring in from its farms when the deal fell through. Warner tapped into her network of Maine businesses, and Bristol Seafood, a fish wholesaler based out of Portland, came to the rescue.

“They froze almost every bag of kelp,” says Warner, getting teary. Bristol gave her a bill for $3,000—far less than the true cost of their services—at the end of the season.

The event was clarifying for Warner. She plunged into fundraising for an ASF processing center and worked on consumer marketing. Now, the company has four products in every Whole Foods in the country, foods in national supermarket chains like Sprouts and Albertsons, and 20 ingredient partners like Thorne and Navitas.

For the 2023–2024 season, they harvested a record-breaking amount of kelp: 1.3 million pounds. “You can’t have this incredibly positive impact on the environment, on the food chain, on our partner farmers . . . unless you run a really good business,” Warner says.

ASF’s dedication to infrastructure also pays off for the consumer. When a shopper buys one of the company’s burgers, they can look up where the kelp grew, who harvested it, and when. This is a markedly different situation than with seafood writ large, where one-third of grocery store labels have been found to be wrong.

Traceability is the cornerstone of a larger shift toward the blue economy, a movement among coastal and ocean nations that equally supports workers’ rights, environmental concerns, and sustainability goals. It is a huge selling point for the millions invested in American-grown kelp.

For seaweed growers outside Maine, the logistics still have a long way to go.

Alaska: Dealing With Distance

After Maine, the next biggest kelp-producing state is Alaska. It’s also the most productive state on the West Coast, harvesting 871,000 pounds in the 2022–2023 season. With more than 33,000 miles of shoreline and 41,000 people directly employed in seafood industries in 2022, according to the state’s Department of Labor, as well as access to marine science institutions like the University of Alaska, many here expected seaweed farming to boom when it was first legalized in 2016.

Kodiak Island in the summer. Alaska’s thousands of miles of coastline could help the state develop a booming seaweed-farming industry.

Federal officials also bet on Alaska’s rapid transition to seaweed farming. In 2022, the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration (EDA) announced $49 million to jump-start the state’s seaweed and shellfish industry, with a quarter of those funds earmarked for Alaska Native communities.

But for farmers and companies, the kelp boom hasn’t quite happened yet. In 2016, one of the first seaweed companies to open after legalization here went on a hiring spree and immediately started putting buoys into the water. According to former employees, they were expecting to hit 1 million pounds of harvested kelp in a few years. Instead, they’ve significantly reduced operations since then, although they do maintain a farm in Alaska. As for the EDA’s 2022 funding, it is still being allocated, and to an industry that’s just beginning to take shape.

Alaska’s mammoth size presents the biggest hurdle: At 663,268 square miles, it’s much larger than any other state and even most countries. Kelp-producing regions can be thousands of miles away from one another. Many of these coastal communities aren’t connected by road, and the only way to haul kelp from farm to processor is by boat. Even after kelp is made into a final product, it still has to be shipped to Seattle, 2,000 miles south.

“We’ve looked at chartering an Alaska Airlines plane,” says Lia Heifetz, laughing. Heifetz is the co-founder of Barnacle Foods, a vertically integrated kelp company known for its Bullwhip Kelp Hot Sauce. She isn’t kidding; in its early days, her company explored flying thousands of pounds of fresh kelp from Kodiak to its headquarters and processing facility in Juneau, a distance of 500 miles. Heifetz admits that the plan wasn’t cost effective—and came with quite a carbon footprint—so they dropped the idea.

Now in its eighth year of business, Barnacle Foods works only with farms within a 70-mile radius. The company still ships everything by boat, relying on commercial fishing vessels, thanks to relationships with fishers that Heifetz has built over the years. To process their kelp, Barnacle has slowly constructed a 3,000-square-foot production floor and additional warehouse. While Heifetz wouldn’t disclose how much they’ve invested in the facility, she points out that one machine, a “capper” for jars, cost $40,000. Other equipment includes container freezers, container refrigerators, and two forklifts.

“Some level of primary processing or stabilization needs to happen at any port [where] there’s a kelp farm,” she says, adding that a single processing company—and there are only a few others in the state—is unlikely to be able to serve thousands of miles of coastline.

“Most of the profit is coming from having farms double as grant-funded research.”

Farmers and kelp companies say that a cohesive strategy at the state level, particularly around what types of kelp products to initially focus on—food, fertilizer, or bioplastics, for example—could help farmers and kelp companies build infrastructure more efficiently.

As the $49 million in federal EDA funds are being dispersed through the Southeast Conference’s Alaska Mariculture Center, up to $10 million will go toward infrastructure-related projects; other funds include the Native Regenerative fund, aimed at providing money for permitting, equipment, and lease fees for Native Alaskans; a Kelp Climate fund operated by GreenWave, a kelp nonprofit; and the Saltonstall-Kennedy Grant, which can help address processing issues.

An additional challenge for Alaska kelp processing is the cost of energy, which varies widely. Each coastal community is isolated, often operating on its own electrical grid and using a variety of energy sources. Juneau has hydropower, which means Barnacle Foods has relatively low electricity costs, according to Heifitz. In other parts of Alaska, diesel generators can be the only source of electricity, a high-cost option that could deter some types of processing, like freezing.

Because of these expensive bottlenecks, farms have to make money in creative ways. “Most of the profit is coming from having farms double as grant-funded research,” says Brianna Murphy. A former commercial fisher, Murphy and her co-founder, Kristin Smith, created Mothers of Millions in 2021 to do just that, funded by a $30,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Their mobile kelp hatchery, built on a repurposed fishing vessel, means they can navigate straight to farms with spore-laden kelp ready for propagating, instead of waiting for the kelp to come by cargo plane and then working frantically to revive it. Murphy and Smith are kind of a one-stop shop for seaweed farmers: They also offer on-water processing capabilities, shredding harvested kelp directly from the water.

There’s no shortage of interesting and valuable kelp-farming projects in Alaska, including the Native Conservancy’s kelp program, founded to support Indigenous people in starting their own farms. (Native Conservancy founder Dune Lankard was recently featured in the PBS docuseries Hope in the Water for his traditional Eyak kelp cakes.)

Over the next several years, as the EDA grants begin to bear fruit, Alaska could edge closer to realizing the farming potential of its thousands of miles of coastline.

New York: Starting from Scratch

For other coastal states trying break into this nascent blue economy, commercial processing often doesn’t exist. Most kelp companies are based in Maine or Alaska, so farmers elsewhere must rely on themselves to harvest, process, and create end products.

Sue Wicks lifts a line of sugar kelp. (Photo credit: Cam Burton)

One determined New York oyster grower came up with her own solution.

“This is my bay, a tiny piece of a world that is besieged on every side with climate change and pollution,” says Sue Wicks, the founder of Violet Cove Oysters. Each day, Wicks motors 20 minutes from her house to her 2-acre farm on the Great South Bay, using a Pickerell clamming boat that was designed specifically for this body of water.

“With this little spot, I feel an opportunity, a space to do something tangible,” she says, looking out at her acreage, oyster cages bobbing in the distance as she checks the growth on her kelp lines. She plucks off a furl of young sugar kelp and chews it, enjoying its briny sweetness.

Sue Wicks’ sugar kelp in its initial drying phase. (Photo courtesy of Sue Wicks)

A former Women’s National Basketball Association star, Wicks became an oyster entrepreneur after retiring from professional sports, inspired to work on the waters that her family has fished for more than 10 generations.  Her ancestors could harvest shellfish by hand, but wild stocks have plummeted in Wicks’ lifetime, a consequence of warming waters and nitrogen pollution. After witnessing the decline of her families’ livelihood and pastimes—the traditions of clamming, oystering, fishing, and scalloping—she wanted to restore the waters that surrounded her house and hometown. In 2019, she began growing seaweed as part of a research project with Stony Brook University.

After receiving the state’s first commercial kelp farming lease for the 2023–2024 season, Wicks began construction on New York’s first processing center, a dehydrator. Supported by Lazy Point Farms, a New York-based nonprofit, the center cost around $50,000 to build, says Wicks, and is part of a public-private partnership with Suffolk County and the nearby town of Brookhaven. She’s already started using it for this season’s haul.

Wicks first dries her kelp near the water, on racks in the open air, where it shrinks to 20 percent of its original size. Then she moves the racks to a shipping container equipped with a heater exhaust fan and dehumidifier to finish drying completely. Everything is powered by solar, bringing the whole process as close as possible to net-zero emissions.

The shipping container can be converted into a mobile unit, she says, and it’s easily replicated. As for the dried seaweed, Wicks is experimenting with a hot sauce and a seasoning mix, in collaboration with Lazy Point Farms and available through the nonprofit’s website.

“We don’t have working waterfronts on Long Island anymore, and that makes it very difficult,” says Wicks. She hopes her processing center encourages other oyster growers to try kelp farming, since it gives them a way to create their own shelf-stable product, right after harvest. “The fisheries are part of our heritage. It is who we are. Our biggest success is getting other farmers in the water.”

This series was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center’s Ocean Reporting Network.

The post The Hard Work of Bringing Kelp to Market appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2024/07/31/the-hard-work-of-bringing-kelp-to-market/feed/ 0 https://civileats.com/2024/07/08/in-brazil-a-powerful-law-protects-biodiversity-and-blocks-corporate-piracy/ Mon, 08 Jul 2024 09:00:26 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=56852 This is the second of two articles about plant biodiversity and genetic resources. Read the first story here. But if you are in Brazil representing a company in search of new food, drugs, or cosmetics, the Jardim’s research center is of far greater significance than the meandering garden paths. Here, inside a former colonial villa, […]

The post In Brazil, a Powerful Law Protects Biodiversity and Blocks Corporate Piracy appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> This is the second of two articles about plant biodiversity and genetic resources. Read the first story here.

In the center of Rio de Janeiro sprawls a lush enclave of tropical flowers, vines, and palm trees, with howler monkeys screeching from the leafy canopies. Just blocks from the traffic-clogged bustle of Rio’s boulevards, the Jardim Botanico do Rio de Janeiro is a remaining 130-acre patch of the rainforest from which the city was carved three centuries ago. Locals and tourists alike go there to enjoy the bounty of Brazil’s legendary abundance of plant and animal life.

Inside the Jardim Botanico do Rio de Janeiro. (Photo credit: Jon Hicks, Getty Images)

But if you are in Brazil representing a company in search of new food, drugs, or cosmetics, the Jardim’s research center is of far greater significance than the meandering garden paths. Here, inside a former colonial villa, the Jardim maintains what amounts to an inventory of the nation’s plant life, more than 65,000 samples.

Each one is a potential treasure trove for companies seeking new plant-based products. And each is now subject to a Brazilian law governing genetic resources, the Law on Access to Genetic Heritage and Associated Traditional Knowledge—known as the genetic heritage law—which is finally being implemented after almost a decade of political and logistical hurdles.

While data on the nation’s plant life is inventoried at the Jardim in Rio, the most powerful tool for implementing this ambitious new law resides in a locked chamber 600 miles away in the nation’s capital of Brasilia. There, in the basement of the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change, sits an extensive database for registering access to and paying benefits for the nation’s abundant quantities of genetic resources.

Each plant sample is a potential treasure trove for companies seeking new plant-based products. And each is now subject to a Brazilian law governing genetic resources.

It’s called SisGen, shorthand for the National System for Genetic Resource Management and Associated Traditional Knowledge. Commercial enterprises must register with SisGen when they leave a region with a sample and when a “finished product,” in the words of the law, “is developed as a result of the access.” Scientists must also register their access and sampling of a plant if they intend to use it for research. In other words, all possible uses of the plant, including efforts to obtain patent protection for any product developed from it, must be registered.

Furthermore, the Brazilians add a requirement to block any return to the days of biopiracy: All those accessing the resources must have a Brazilian partner (many U.S. companies have Brazilian subsidiaries). For the Indigenous people who provided the know-how necessary to turn plants into commercial products, SisGen is a potentially key pathway to ensuring compensation.

Numerous U.S. companies, universities, and research centers are already making regular use of such ingredients. Among the companies that have recently registered the export of plant or seed samples are agrichemical giants like Bayer Crop Science (which bought Monsanto in 2018); the biotech firm Novozyme; smaller firms like ProFarm, a company that sells biologically based fungicides, insecticides, and seed treatments; and the U.S. subsidiaries of European companies like Givaudan, which develops plant-based snacks and meat alternatives.

Centers of Food Origin: Genetic Treasure Troves

Leaf by leaf, flower by flower, Brazil is a genetic powerhouse. The relative stability of the nation’s climate—for thousands of years it rarely veered more than 10 degrees in either direction—has made it ideal for the rapid evolution and adaptation of species. It is one of a handful of countries located along the equator that are home to as much as 90 percent of the planets’ biodiversity.

It’s fair to say that most of the foods we eat in North America began their journey to our tables in one of these centers of origin. Corn originated in Mexico; potatoes in the Peruvian Andes; chiles in the mountains of Jamaica; apples in the rugged valleys of Kyrgyzstan’s Tian Shan Mountains; wheat in Syria and Lebanon; coffee in Yemen; peanuts, cashews, and pineapple in Brazil.

So, when new diseases strike, new pests emerge, and climate stresses increase on North American farms, scientists tend to look to places that are far from American farmland to find genetic resources in centers of origin that were never domesticated. There, plants haven’t had their survival characteristics bred out of them in favor of qualities like super-charged yields and other features of industrial agriculture.

For many years, Europeans and Americans took whatever they found in these and other biodiverse places without asking, or paying, anyone. For instance, when Dr. Moises Santiago Bertoni, an Italian-Swiss botanist, learned in the late 19th century about the stevia plant with the help of the Guaraní people in Brazil and Paraguay, he never had to acknowledge where or how he found the samples he took with him back to Switzerland.

Nor, a century later, did Cargill, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola or any other company have to provide payments or other benefits to the Guaraní community when they released stevia-enhanced products now worth more than $700 million in annual sales.

Coca-Cola Life, a drink sweetened with cane sugar and stevia. (Photo CC-licensed by Mike Mozart)

Who, finally, gets the credit and gets paid for any products that may result from the use of these traditional plants? That is a raging question in Brazil and other biodiverse countries where people are tired of paying for imported foods or drugs that originated from plants in their own home territories.

A UN Law for Protecting Biodiversity

Brazil is now at the forefront of a group of nations who have demanded an end to this free-for-all. Beginning in 2018, the country joined forces with Indigenous groups around the world as well as Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, other mega-biodiverse countries, to demand that the U.N. recognize the sources of these genetic resources and find a way to provide benefits to the people whose traditional knowledge contributes to their use.

In December 2022, in Montreal, at the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity, their efforts bore fruit. The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, which emerged from that meeting, was seen as a major step toward reckoning with how we value the Earth’s resources and the people most responsible for conserving them.

Americans have largely sidestepped these debates over genetic resources, because the U.S. is the only country, along with the Vatican, that has not ratified the Convention on Biological Diversity. But the agreement will certainly impact the U.S., because it will play a role in shaping many of the foods, agricultural products, and drugs of the future, and many of the companies that develop and sell those products are global and have extensive markets in the United States.

The Montreal deal called for a global system to ensure that benefits are paid in return for providing access to living genetic resources and to the gene sequences within them that are increasingly providing the basis for new tastes, foods, and drugs. This is called, in U.N. shorthand, access and benefit sharing (ABS). Here, access means obtaining consent to access a nation or tribe’s genetic resources, and benefits means an equitable distribution of profits made from those resources. A U.N. working group of public officials and academics has been charged with devising the details for the system in time for the next Convention on Biological Diversity, to be held in Cali, Colombia, in October 2024.

After centuries of rampant biopiracy, Indigenous communities and their advocates hope that a sea change is at hand. And Brazil, with the most sophisticated system yet for ascertaining the value of genetic resources, is widely seen as a model for the world.

Political Drama and the Birth of Brazil’s Genetic Heritage Law

Brazil’s Law 13,123, the Law on Access to Genetic Heritage and Associated Traditional Knowledge, was born in May 2016, at a moment of great political drama. A new genetic heritage decree, formulated the previous May, was in its final negotiations. At the same time, left-leaning President Dilma Rousseff was being impeached after a group of conservative lawmakers accused her of corruption in an effort to oust her from office.

“Dilma was watching her impeachment on TV at the same time we were negotiating,” recalled Henry Novion, the former head of Brazil’s Department of Genetic Heritage, who co-authored the law. Later that day, he, two other government officials, and Rousseff’s legal adviser rushed to her office in the presidential palace to get her signature on the decree, which was the final step necessary to implement the nation’s new law governing its genetic heritage.

That eleventh-hour act, one of her final as president, would set into motion the unprecedented system that Brazil devised to track where its genetic resources are located and who was accessing them. It was also the first step toward the allocation of benefits for the insights that Indigenous and local people have long provided to outsiders about the characteristics of plants in their territories, what’s known as “traditional knowledge.”

The law calls for compensation if such knowledge, according to Novion, “adds significant value to the products’ functional characteristics . . . or its market appeal.” The new law replaced an earlier genetic resources law, passed in 2001, that put most of the responsibility for compliance on companies, had little enforcement muscle, and was widely seen, by Indigenous communities as well as the business community, as unwieldy and ineffective. Law 13,123, Novion said, was intended to correct those errors and give the regulations over genetic resources some teeth.

When Jair Bolsonaro was elected as president two years later, progress on implementing the new law—and many other environmental laws—was frozen. Novion stayed on at the department until 2020. He then spent two years working as an independent consultant for foreign governments—including Japan, Angola, and Mozambique—on their own rules governing genetic resources. Then, in February 2023, Novion got his old job back after Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva, who had served as president before Rousseff, returned to the presidency.

Also in 2023, Lula reappointed Marina Silva, the one-time Green Party presidential candidate and environmental leader, as his Minister of Environment and Climate Change. The new team set out to slowly but steadily shift Brazil away from its heavy reliance on selling commodities—many of them grown in deforested areas—to what Lula has called a “bio-economy,” which creates value out of Brazil’s bounty of genetic resources. At last, the 2016 law began to be implemented across the country.

The document itself is an extremely complicated 22-page piece of legislation. It requires that any company or research institution accessing the country’s resources must engage with a Brazilian partner, and must register their accessions with SisGen. More than 16,000 plant accessions have been registered so far this year, says Novion. When a commercial product is developed from those resources, 1 percent of the annual retail sales must be either provided to the local community or deposited into the National Benefit Sharing Fund. (In some instances, companies may opt to provide services that amount to less than that figure).

The funds are to be dispersed to support local and Indigenous communities’ biodiversity conservation efforts. Thus far in 2024, 9 million reales—roughly $1.6 million U.S.—have been collected for the fund, according to Maira Smith, a biologist with the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change team, which is implementing the new law.

The program offers recognition and monetary compensation for conservation to three distinct Brazilian populations: Indigenous people living on the land long before the arrival of the Portuguese and other colonial powers; traditional small and subsistence-scale farmers who have lived off the land for long enough to develop their own knowledge of local genetic resources; and the Quilombolas, the Afro-Brazilian communities descendant from enslaved people who have been living in the tropical forests for generations.

The SisGen database represents the most substantive effort yet to identify the provenance of the country’s genetic resources, a key first step toward recognizing their ties to traditional knowledge. The global nature of farming and the mobility of seeds—which easily traverse national frontiers by means of wind, water, trucks or shipping containers transporting crops—means that the provenance trail is not always clear, however.

According to Novion, many crops grown in Brazil, like corn, soybeans, coffee, and sugarcane, did not originate there, and thus would not be subject to the genetic heritage law. But the many other plants that are clearly endemic to Brazil—açai, stevia, guarana are among the better-known examples—do qualify, and so companies that utilize them for any new products are subject to the registration requirements.

Many global food and agribusiness companies with large Brazilian subsidiaries are subject to these rules, including Corteva, Bayer, Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Nestlé, and Cargill.

And it gets even more complicated, explained Novion: “If a plant emanating from an exotic, non-Brazilian source finds its way to Brazil and develops independent of human intervention into another related variety, then it, too, is a Brazilian genetic resource.”

Smith explained that the law includes some sharp enforcement tools that will be used with any foreign company or institution. “If there is an American company that does not comply with our legislation,” she said from her office in Brasilia, “we can reach them through their subsidiary industry in Brazil.”

Many global food and agribusiness companies with large Brazilian subsidiaries are subject to these rules, including Corteva, an agrichemical and seed conglomerate which until recently was a subsidiary of DowDuPont; Monsanto and its corporate owner, Bayer; and the food processing and commodity companies Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Nestlé, and Cargill.

With potentially tens of millions of dollars’ worth of new plant-based products at stake, however, a number of major food and agribusiness companies launched a sustained campaign to weaken the measure as it made its way through the Brazilian Congress. Among the major lobbying forces were the Agricultural Parliamentary Front and the Pensar Agro Institute, which receive support from major international companies like Bayer, Syngenta, Cargill, and Nestlé, according to the Brazilian NGO De Olho Nos Ruralistas.

They succeeded in writing loopholes into the law big enough to steer an atmospheric river through.

Agribusiness Loopholes in the Genetic Heritage Law

Two major concessions to the agribusiness coalition exempted them from key provisions of the new law, according to Gustavo Soldati, a botany professor at the Federal University of Juiz de Fora, who has followed the law closely and worked with Indigenous communities to strengthen its enforcement.

Those making foods based on Brazilian plants must register with SisGen, but are exempted from seeking consent from communities or paying benefits. For example, if you’re looking to make a new facial lotion containing açai, you have to get consent from the local population and pay benefits; but if you’re making a new snack food with açai, no consent or compensation is required.

“We call this a juridical fiction,” says Naiara Bittenfeld, a lawyer for Terra de Cereitos, an organization that advocates for the land rights of Indigenous and local farm communities. As she sees it, the loophole lets many companies off the hook. “Traditional communities can always identify the [people] that produce knowledge. All knowledge has an origin.” She cites stevia as an example. “If Coca-Cola uses stevia in [products], then Coca-Cola needs to pay something. And they don’t need to ask the Guaraní for their consent to use it, though we know the knowledge about stevia comes from the Guaraní.”

Additionally, those seeking access to Brazil’s unique bounty of native seeds—defined in the legislation as “reproductive organisms”—have to pay into the benefits fund, but are exempt from having to obtain consent from local communities. The law states that, for seeds, there are “no recognizable sources” of traditional knowledge.

“Traditional communities can always identify the [people] that produce knowledge. All knowledge has an origin.”

Soldati asserts that such provisions “violate one of the most important rights of Indigenous people, the right to be consulted about every subject that involves their lives.”

Maira Smith explains the government’s view: Because many forest communities have practiced agroforestry for centuries, traditional knowledge is shared by many people; knowledge and seed have essentially evolved together. “The traditional knowledge is contained inside the seed,” she says. That makes it difficult to identify any one community as the primary source of traditional knowledge. In such instances, payments are made into the National Benefits Fund, which makes grants to communities that protect their genetic resources.

For the past year, Soldati, supported by the U.N.’s Green Environment Fund, has been traveling to many of the biodiversity-rich communities that are far from the corridors of power in Brasilia to explain their potential rights under the law, and lobby for an expansion of protections. “We want to plant the roots of knowledge deep inside the soil,” he said.

In January 2024, Soldati and a coalition representing hundreds of Indigenous communities met with Minister Silva to discuss their concerns. Among their top demands, according to Soldati: Stronger enforcement of “prior informed consent” rules, and greater transparency to ensure benefits are paid. The current system requires navigating the complex SisGen database, and some of the information—like how much each company pays—is confidential.

The coalition also demanded government guarantees of access to their traditional tribal territories (many communities have been ousted from traditional lands by mining, ranching, and agribusiness interests), and government support for an Indigenous-run pharmacopeia of native plants that explains their history and uses. Those last two things are connected: Compiling such a guide would require revitalizing an effort, begun during Lula’s previous presidency, to clearly demarcate tribal lands.

Natural Resources as Property versus Relationships

Like the Brazilian initiative, the U.N.-led effort underway to create a global access and benefit-sharing system ahead of the October 2024 Convention on Biological Diversity requires navigating between two very different views of “genetic resources.” It can be murky territory, according to Preston Hardison, a longtime adviser to the Tulalip tribe in Washington state and a negotiator at the 2022 CBD in Montreal. The dominant view of such resources is steeped in U.S. and European principles of intellectual property, which considers them as singular organisms whose origins can be clearly delineated according to Western concepts of land and ownership.

By contrast, an Indigenous view, says Hardison, sees such “resources as part of their relationships with kin, with knowledge of their ancestors, and relationships with other animal beings.”

A stevia plant. (Photo credit: Leila Melhado, Getty Images)

Daniele Manzella, a policy officer for the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), says the current ABS negotiations involve synthesizing multiple perspectives: impulses to conservation, open scientific exchanges, Western science, traditional knowledge, and the rapidly expanding technologies for reproducing characteristics obtained from plant DNA. “It’s different souls,” he said, “competing with each other.”

The SisGen computer, containing all that information about Brazilian plants and their possibilities, is whirring away in the middle of these contradictions, translating the evolutionary relationship between humans and plants into Western concepts of intellectual property and mechanisms of financial recognition. “We are working with different knowledge systems,” says Smith, at the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change. “We’re trying to encourage the flow of knowledge between the two systems.”

The Genetic Sequencing Twist

As the next U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity, to be held in Colombia, draws near, Colombian President Gustavo Petro says signing an ABS deal is one of his top three priorities for the conference. “Access and benefit sharing lies at the core of the Biodiversity Plan. This is a crucial issue in the negotiations,” reads a press release on the conference website. The Brazilians, who were key to passing the agreement in Montreal, are actively engaged in the negotiations, passing along their experiences with their country’s genetic heritage law.

At the heart of these negotiations is an attempt to also address the new frontier for genetic resources: the digital information contained within each plant. Now that the genomes of hundreds of thousands of plants have been mapped, and the data entered into global gene banks, food and pharma scientists are able to identify gene sequences that contain desired characteristics—the “sweet” sequence in a stevia leaf, for example, or the sequence in a seed that may convey resistance to drought. In other words, they may no longer need the physical specimen to get what they’re looking for. Once identified, that sequence delivering a specific characteristic can be synthesized with a technology known as Digital Sequence Information, or DSI.

At the heart of these negotiations is an attempt to also address the new frontier for genetic resources: the digital information contained within each plant.

The practice, now pursued by many food and seed companies, poses a profound challenge. DSI offers the real possibility of disconnecting an organism from its origins. Manzella says that the quandary inherent in the U.N.’s asset and benefit-sharing work lies in trying to place the high-speed, highly technical science of genetic sequencing alongside traditional knowledge based on millennia of experience and life on, and from, the land. Never before have negotiators tried to find a common ground between the two.

At a meeting of the U.N. working group assigned to hammer out a benefit-sharing plan in advance of the November meeting, the challenges presented by DSI were central to the conversation. Such questions included whether such a system should indeed be global, or give individual countries leeway to devise their own ABS systems, such as the one that now exists in Brazil. Other contentious issues on the table: How do you identify the source pool of a set of chromosomes, and who do you pay? What to do if no specific community source for the material—either physical or chromosomal—can be identified, or the trail leads to multiple locations?

Proposals being considered include a subscription service to seed banks or gene banks, with the subscription fees going toward indigenous-led conservation of threatened genetic resources. Then the question: Who pays? What restrictions are placed on taking such resources and placing them behind an intellectual property paywall? How negotiators deal with such questions on a global scale will determine the shape of genetic resource use for decades to come.

A global agreement has the potential to begin reversing centuries of unhindered extraction by funneling millions of dollars toward long-ignored communities. It could also flounder under the pressures of companies, scientists, and nations that perceive the recognition of traditional knowledge, and even minimal profit sharing, as a threat.

Meanwhile, in the realm of actual plants, almost a decade after Brazil passed its groundbreaking genetic heritage law, the country is preparing to unlock the first round of grants from the National Access and Benefit Sharing Fund. The fund will be offering an initial amount of 1,250,000 reales, roughly U.S. $235,000, for which any of the more than 300 officially identified Indigenous and local communities may apply.

The first round of awards will be in November, according to Smith. Twenty-four communities determined to be “guardians of biodiversity” will each be awarded grants of 50,000 reales (U.S. $8,940) based on their work preserving their genetic resources. It will mark one of the first times that funds generated through the sharing of traditional knowledge will be sent back, by the government, to those who shared it.

An earlier edition of this article misstated the 2024 amount gathered for Brazil’s local and Indigenous biodiversity conservation efforts. That figure has been updated.

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