Those plants—and the pollinators they feed—have been there since long before Far North’s owners Mike Swanson and Cheri Reese took over Swanson’s family farm and built a distillery in 2013. But this year, they decided to start making their presence known to their customers by applying for a Bee Friendly Farm designation from Pollinator Partnership, a national nonprofit dedicated to protecting and promoting pollinators and the ecosystems they rely on.

For one, says Swanson, pollinators provide a lively entry point for talking with his customers about the way he and Reese run the farming part of their operation.

“Soil health, ecological diversity, sustainable ecosystems—all these things are very important to us. But I wanted a way to talk to people about what was going to be interesting to them,” he says. “When you’re talking about bees, that tends to pique people’s interest a little better. So, we’re able to talk about farming without talking about farming.”

Swanson is not alone in seeing the abundance of bees and other pollinators on his farm as a selling point, and a way to get his customers’ attention.

In fact, Americans are increasingly focused on pollinators, and they’re concerned about their well-being. In 2017, a survey found that 69 percent of respondents said they recognized pollinator populations are in decline and that number has likely grown as the news of the larger insect apocalypse—science that shows rapid decline in insect populations around the world—has been widely reported since then. In 2019, another survey found that 95 percent of respondents said they want to see designated areas where plants support pollinator health.

Pollinators are critical to food production: More than 80 percent of the world’s flowering plants—and around one third of the food crops—require a pollinator. And while it’s not clear exactly how many people are considering the plight of pollinators when buying groceries, a 2015 study found that use of the term ‘‘bee-friendly’’ had more economic value than other claims that advertised the absence of pesticides. And another study in 2018 found that consumers were willing to pay more (51 cents per dry liter) to buy blueberries and cranberries farmed in a way that supports wild pollinators.

Cal Giant Blueberries bearing the Bee Better Certified label. (Courtesy Xerces Society)

“Pollinated foods are some of our most nutrient-rich foods, some of our most colorful, and flavorful,” says Liz Robertson, who helps oversee the Xerces Society’s Bee Better Certified, another certification farmers are now seeking out. “There are wind-pollinated crops out there, but the nutrient-rich diet really depends on these animal-pollinated crops. And just over the last several decades, and increasingly in the last couple of years, there has been this real awareness and research on the decline of insects globally.”

All these factors explain why pollinator certifications have begun to appear in a growing number of grocery stores and corporate sustainability reports. The Bee Better seal is showing up on products sold by certified farms as well as on those from companies sourcing ingredients from those farms, says Robertson. Silk, Häagen-Dazs, and Cal Giant Farms are just a few of the brands that have sported the seal so far. Meanwhile, Pollinator Partnership’s Bee Friendly logo has appeared on a signature wine from Francis Ford Coppola Winery, and may soon make its way to more packaging.

Yet while the Bee Better and Bee Friendly certifications offer up similar wordplay, and similar stated goals—both want to see more diverse and flowering forage plants on farm landscapes and less pesticide exposure for pollinators—they are markedly different in multiple ways. One is reaching a smaller number of farms with a stringent, third-party certification, while the other is aiming for much larger adoption, especially among conventional farmers, and is asking less of participating farms by design.

Taken together, however, the two certifications provide a glimpse of some of the benefits —and the limitations—of using pollinator health to gauge the overall sustainability of a farm.

The Certifications

The Central Valley’s almond orchards rely heavily on millions of honeybees that are trucked in from the Midwest every spring—and many beekeepers have seen record-setting bee losses in recent years. As a result, the almond industry has moved to improve its image in the eyes of consumers.

“They really wanted to educate their growers and bring the industry in on bee-friendly practices,” says Dakin, who had studied integrated pest management (IPM) in the almond industry before taking the job.

Dakin was hired in 2020 and has been working with farms in California and across the country since, helping farmers add bee-friendly forage and habitat to their land and certifying around 250,000 acres of farmland and in the last two years. “We’re definitely expanding,” he told Civil Eats. “We have avocados, coffee, a whole bunch of different systems now certified.”

The Bee Friendly Certified program requires growers to pay $45, prove that they have forage “providing good nutrition for bees” (or are planning to plant it) on 3 percent of their land, as well as nesting habitat and water. They also must use Integrated Pest Management (IPM), a wide range of practices that can involve replacing pesticides with pheromones or simply identifying the location of pests before spraying to ensure that the application is targeted.

Once they are on board, Dakin says, “every three years, the growers have to provide us with compliance documents, and we review those.” He also conducts field visits on 6 percent of the farms every year.

“We’re not a prescriptive program,” he added. “We don’t tell them what to do or how to do it. We give them the criteria, and we help them meet that criteria in the way that works for them.”

Farms that receive Xerces’ Bee Better Certification, on the other hand, are independently audited and verified by Oregon Tilth, an organic certifier that has been in business since 1975.

Even before the certification launched, the Xerces Society had been working with the agricultural industry, both directly with larger brands and their supply chains as well as through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Natural Resources Conservation Service to help farmers to install pollinator habitat and engage pollinator-friendly practices such as pesticide mitigation on their farms, says Xerces’ Robertson. “The farmers who were doing the work were like, ‘How do we communicate this to consumers?’”

She adds that the certification’s parameters are grounded in peer-reviewed scientific research done by Xerces and other institutions that looks at everything from the best native plant compositions for pollinators to the impact of pesticide drift.

To date, Bee Better has certified more than 20,000 acres of farmland in the U.S., Canada, and Peru, with more applications in progress. Almonds are also a major crop for the certification, as are blueberries. Xerces is also in the process of bringing more certifiers on board so they can begin certifying farms in more countries.

In order to earn Bee Better Certification, farms must maintain pollinator habitat on at least 5 percent of the farm, and 1 percent of that habitat needs to be permanent year-round, meaning things like trees, hedgerows, and riparian corridors that include native plants. The certification also requires a “rigorous pest management strategy” that includes non-chemical practices as a first line of defense, targeted pesticide use, and limiting or eliminating the use of what Xerces calls high risk pesticide applications.

Changes on the Farm

Ceanothus serves as pollinator habitat on the Klickitat Canyon Winery. (Photo courtesy of Xerces Society)

But for the larger, conventional growers who sign up, pollination certification may require undertaking a paradigm shift.

Take Woolf Farming, a more than 20,000-acre, vertically integrated farming company based in Fresno, California, that grows a wide variety of crops, including massive tracts of almonds, pistachios, and canning tomatoes all over the state. Peter Allbright, the crop manager at Woolf Farming, says a business partnership spurred them to pursue Xerces’ Bee Better certification back in 2016.

“One of our almond customers is a very progressive European food company,” says Allbright. “They wanted us to look into pollinator habitat developments and that kind of thing, and they pushed us to work with the Xerces Society, so we were actually one of the first growers of theirs to be certified.”

Woolf Farming still has 3,000 Bee Better-certified almond acres, but the company has since chosen to put more than 7,000 additional acres of almonds into Pollinator Partnership’s Bee Friendly Farming program because, Allbright says, it’s much easier. Bee Better certification requires regular, multi-hour inspections that he describes as “more in-depth than an organic inspection” and maintains “a packet—a hefty list of rules.”

On top of the certification cost itself, Allbright says that planting pollinator-friendly habitat has also cost the company “well over a quarter million dollars in the last couple of years,” between buying the pants, irrigating them, and paying workers to weed them.

“Once [the habitat] gets established, it’s fine. It’s doable, but it’s extremely expensive to implement the Bee Better program,” added Allbright.

He says Pollinator Partnership’s Bee Friendly program has been much more flexible about where he can plant the additional habitat (they don’t require that it be in or near the almond orchard, for instance). And when a pest infestation looked like it could cut the almond crop on one of the farm’s properties a few years back, he says he struggled to get Xerces to make an exception that would allow him to spray approved pesticides aerially. Bee Better eventually made an exception, but he found the process frustrating. “Xerces is the gold standard. But you can’t blanket that across every acre of almonds in California,” added Allbright. “It’s not compatible. Hence, we haven’t done it on all of our acres.”

Pollinator Partnership, on the other hand, requires “minor bits of documentation to demonstrate that you’re not spraying insecticides during the almond bloom, those kinds of very common-sense things that most growers are already doing,” adds Allbright. He’s also concerned that Xerces, on the other hand, is so focused on supporting wild bumblebees and other wild pollinators that they may not always be looking out for farmers like him. As a conservation group, he added “They’re actively behind the scenes working against production agriculture.”

A metallic green sweat bee. (Photo by Amber Barnes, courtesy of Pollinator Partnership)

The fact that the organization advocated for the protection of wild bumblebees in California under the state’s Endangered Species Act—and that advocacy may have had an impact on the recent decision by the California Supreme Court to allow new protections for the pollinators—is one example that concerns Allbright. He believes the change will “severely impact almond production, because that really eliminates a lot of the tools we have for crop protection.”

However, Eric Lee-Mäder, an apple and seed crop farmer and the pollinator and agricultural biodiversity co-director at Xerces, says there’s nothing behind the scenes about the group’s work. “Xerces and other stakeholders have been open and transparent in examining the decline of California’s wild bumble bees precisely so the ag sector isn’t caught off guard. Ultimately the bees in question mostly do not even occur in agricultural areas.”

Dialing in on Pesticides

“We don’t ban specific active ingredients in pesticides, because to us, it’s more about integrative pest management, about the mindset behind using the chemicals,” says Pollinator Partnership’s Dakin, who says IPM can greatly reduce pesticide exposure to pollinators when done right.

“The goal is still to reduce or even eliminate chemicals in general, but what we’re trying not to do is make something that’s not achievable by most of agriculture.” If you eliminate specific chemicals, he adds “it actually closes the doors for a lot of farmers.” Instead, Dakin says the organization wants to have all farmers at the table, and even some pesticide producers.

In the latest example of the latter, Pollinator Partnership is partnering with Bayer Crop Science (the company that bought Monsanto in 2016, making it the world’s largest pesticide and seed company) and other local entities in a $1.7 million project with the USDA to “improve pollinator habitat and forage across California’s agricultural landscapes.”

These kinds of partnerships are far from unusual for Pollinator Partnership, which also founded and runs the North American Pollinator Protection Campaign, a large collaborative body that includes 170 scientists, researchers, and government entities, alongside Bayer and CropLife America, a trade group that represents manufacturers of pesticides and other agricultural chemicals.

In another example, Pollinator Partnership has initiated research a few years back into the toxicity of the dust that’s released by pesticide-treated corn seeds that received funding from Bayer Crop Science, BASF, and Syngenta—the very companies that manufacture the seed-coating pesticides that cause the dust at the heart of the research.

Xerces Society has also engaged the pesticide industry in dialogue over the years. However, says Lee-Mäder: “We’ve never taken pesticide money as an organization. We never would, and we would never plant habitat or create pollinator conservation features where we feel there’s a potential risk to counteract the work we’re trying to do.”

But that doesn’t necessarily make it easier to work with farmers on pesticides. And Lee-Mäder and Robertson acknowledge that, like Allbright, not everyone they work with is eager to change their practices when it comes to pesticide use.

“We don’t always have the leverage to change pesticide practices. But it’s something that we stay pretty laser-focused on,” said Lee-Mäder. “And we constantly make that part of the dialogue with the grower. Bee Better does provide really clear sideboards on what you can and can’t do. But outside of Bee Better I think [Xerces] is constantly making judgment calls about what we’re comfortable with and what we’re not.”

Willa Childress, who leads state-to-state policy organizing work at Pesticide Action Network, compares working on pollinator habitat with large conventional farms to harm reduction, a strategy that acknowledges that making systemwide changes can be difficult, and many farmers need to be met where they’re at if they’re going to begin to change entrenched patterns and practices.

But exactly where they’re at doesn’t always allow for a shift. “Having worked with many, many farmers over the years, it’s like people are on this pesticide treadmill and can’t get off; they can’t see their way out of it,” Childress said. “And they encounter challenges even when trying to move slightly away, because they’re already bought into a system and have all their acreage in [conventional] agriculture.”

Childress says she’s seen a number of examples in the policy arena where the focus on getting more habitat in the ground is politically much more palatable than reducing pesticide use.

“We’ve seen this approach over and over again, which is to separate these different impacts that we know are contributing towards huge pollinator and other insect declines: pesticide use, lack of habitat, and disease,” says Childress. “Policymakers and different constituents have tried to pry apart the three pieces of this problem and the result is that we’ve passed lots of legislation trying to address increased habitat. And yet we haven’t seen a measurable difference in how pollinators are faring.”

The pesticide industry has such a powerful lobbying presence all around the country, says Childress, that bills calling for reduction in pesticide use rarely make it very far. “Our legislation isn’t matching up to our science, and the only reason can be corporate control of agriculture and corporate influence,” she adds.

When asked directly, Allbright said he hadn’t reduced his pesticide use at all—and it’s clear that he doesn’t see that as a goal either on the land certified by Xerces’ Bee Better nor the land certified by Pollinator Partnership’s Bee Friendly program.

For Xerces’ Robertson, the hope is to reach a productive, if sometimes challenging, middle ground. “If you look at the two ends of the spectrum, you’re going to have a certification that is so incredibly rigorous that nobody adopts it. Then you’re not moving the needle at all,” she says. “On the other side, you can have a certification that is easy and anyone can adopt it without changing their practices. So again, the needle isn’t moving. Our goal is always conservation and we’re always evaluating where we’re at and adjusting and weighing in on: Can we get farms to nudge and move the needle and adopt these practices? And are we matching with the science that says, ‘This is what has to be done to help curb the biodiversity loss we’re seeing?’”

For Far North Spirits’ Mike Swanson, even the less-stringent Bee Friendly certification is an important start—a catalyst of sorts. He has about 50 acres of land set aside through USDA’s Conservation Reserve Program—which pays farmers to give their land a rest—and he says ever since he received the pollinator-focused certification he has seen his property through fresh eyes.

Before, Swanson says, he saw that land primarily as valuable because the plants growing on it kept his soil from eroding. Now, he adds, “I see that it provides not just pollinator habitat, but wildlife, birds—of all kinds of critters like to hang out in there! And I think that’s one of the big benefits of doing a certification like this; you start to look at property as an ecosystem rather than just a property.”

The post Coming Soon to a Food Label Near You: ‘Bee-Friendly’ Certifications appeared first on Civil Eats.

“All of those flexibilities, collectively, will disappear on July 1,” said Jillien Meier, director of partnerships and campaign strategies for Share Our Strength’s No Kid Hungry campaign. She worries that the shift could be, “absolutely catastrophic for schools, but even more catastrophic for kids and their families.”

With the waivers in place, schools served more than double the number of summer meals in July 2020 and 2021 compared to previous years. Share Our Strength estimates that the expiration could mean that children will miss out on 95 million meals this summer and that schools will struggle to feed children during the 2022–2023 school year. And it’s one of thousands of organizations—including the powerful School Nutrition Association—that have been pushing Congress to extend the waivers for months.

In March, Republicans prevented the provision from being included in a spending bill, and they have since (with some exceptions) opposed new measures introduced by Democrats and championed by Senator Debbie Stabenow (D-Michigan). Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has expressed support for extending the waivers, but the USDA’s authority is constrained by Congress. “This has become a partisan issue. We are not hearing [of] any compromises,” Meier said.

While those who oppose the extensions point to the fact that children are back in school, many parents are back to work, and meal programs should be able to go back to pre-pandemic operations, Meier said that in No Kid Hungry listening sessions, school nutrition directors are reporting that in some ways, they are facing even tougher challenges compared to two years ago. While quarantines and delivery meals have ended, COVID absences have meant lower participation in meal programs, which tightens budgets. Directors still can’t find many ingredients, and deliveries are inconsistent. With inflation soaring, they’re paying significantly more for food. According to a recent report from the Food Research & Action Center, more than half of districts surveyed identified supply chain disruptions, rising food prices, and labor shortages as significant challenges during the 2021–2022 school year. “There is nothing normal about the situation they’re operating under right now,” Meier said.

As the deadline approaches, many groups are turning to state policy advocacy as a pathway to expand school meal flexibilities in the absence of federal action. California, Maine, and Vermont have already passed laws guaranteeing universal school meals, while similar bills are moving forward in New York, Colorado, Minnesota, and Massachusetts.

Meier said those efforts are commendable but in the end, state action alone will likely just result in inequality. “Particularly in the South, where hunger is most acute in rural communities of color, they’re not going to get the benefits,” she said. “That’s my biggest concern: In the places where we already had a hunger crisis pre-COVID, we’re only going to see inequities get exacerbated.”

Read More:
The Pandemic Reveals Racial Gaps in School Meal Access
As School Meal Programs Go Broke, a Renewed Call for Universal School Meals
The People Behind School Meals Are Pushing for Free Access for All

A Standard for Salmon Welfare? While a wide range of animal welfare certifications exist for chickens, pigs, and cattle, fish farmed for food have not been afforded the same attention over the years. Now, Global Animal Partnership (GAP) is wading into new waters with its first certification program for farmed Atlantic salmon. GAP, which works closely with Whole Foods Market, is known for its five-step certification system that covers more than 400 million land-based farm animals around the world, from turkeys and laying hens to beef cattle and bison. It is a well-respected certification in the industry but has also been accused of “humanewashing” by some advocacy groups. The new salmon standard has three levels that include requirements such as minimum stocking density, water quality monitoring, and enrichments to the environment. In a press release, Ben Williamson, the U.S. Director of Compassion in World Farming, said, “The new GAP standards for Atlantic salmon are now the highest and most comprehensive available.”

Read More:
Will Fish Get Their Animal Rights Moment?
What the History of Salmon Can Tell Us About the Future of the Planet

Fighting for Farmworkers. To show his solidarity with immigrant farmworkers, Senator Alex Padilla (D-California) recently headed to the fields, harvesting and packing parsley and radishes alongside workers in Southern California. But the event once again resurfaced previous disagreements over immigration reform in the conversation around farm labor and justice. Padilla used the media opportunity to express his support for the Farm Workforce Modernization Act, a bill that would create a pathway to legal status for some undocumented farmworkers, expand the controversial H-2A guestworker program, and require employers to use an electronic verification system to certify immigration status. It’s supported by the United Farm Workers, who hosted Padilla in the fields, and by Farmworker Justice. But other food and farm labor groups firmly oppose the legislation, and this week, the Food Chain Worker Alliance reiterated its position on Twitter. “The Farm Workforce Modernization Act has not changed, it’s still a deportation and anti-labor bill that will hurt farmworkers for generations,” the group wrote.

Read More:
A Path to Citizenship is on the Horizon for Undocumented Farmworkers
The H-2A Guest Worker Program Has Ballooned in Size; Farmers and Workers Want it Fixed

The post The Field Report: Are Expiring School Meal Waivers a Looming Catastrophe? appeared first on Civil Eats.

Today, their neighbors are much more accepting. Fitzgerald and his parents have spent over 20 years building relationships in their region while a much broader cultural shift has also taken place.

In that time, Fitzgerald Organics has expanded to 2,500 acres and the family has started a consulting business to help other commodity farmers transition to organic. “Our farm has grown as the industry has grown,” Fitzgerald said.

Now, they’re transitioning another 144 acres with the help of the Perennial Fund, which is putting $10 million into expanding organic acreage and has already funded 10 farmers transitioning 5,700 acres. It’s one of a number of new efforts to increase the number of certified organic acres across the U.S. Last year, the Rodale Institute launched an initiative with Cargill, the country’s largest private agriculture company, and Bell & Evans poultry company to transition 50,000 acres of crops grown for organic animal feed. And just last week, Daily Harvest announced a partnership with American Farmland Trust and California Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF) to offer grants of up to $10,000 to more than 100 fruit and vegetable farmers looking to transition to organic.

Meanwhile, demand for organics continues to grow. The Organic Trade Association (OTA) reported that sales of certified organic products (from both food and fiber) increased a record 12.4 percent to $62 billion in 2020, and surveys show more shoppers than ever care about the environmental impact of their food choices.

The story of organics is one of a disruptive underdog industry that has been growing steadily alongside the old guard for ages and is finally approaching the mainstream. But as organic products make it into the hands of more consumers than ever before, it’s clear that the industry is also at an important inflection point and is struggling on many fronts.

While “USDA Organic” used to be the only label on the shelf that quickly communicated a promise of environmental sustainability, there are now many other certifications that serve as add-ons to that label, as well as labels offering competing benefits like low-carbon and regenerative.

In just a few years, conventional farm groups have swooped in and claimed the banner of environmentally friendly farming through “regenerative practices,” and an increasing number of private and government dollars for climate mitigation have begun flowing toward conventional farms using practices like cover crops and reduced tillage. Case in point: When Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack released a long list of climate-related actions his USDA took during its first year, the word organic did not appear once.

And while the USDA Certified Organic label is still the only one in the country that is regulated by the federal government with third-party certification, some consumers appear to have lost faith in the idea that the seal can guarantee that their food has been produced in a way that’s better for people, animals, and the planet. In November, The New Yorker published a lengthy investigation called “The Great Organic Food Fraud” that followed a Midwest grain dealer who sold a large volume of conventional grain as organic before he was caught and prosecuted. The story highlighted loopholes in organic inspection and came to conclusions such as, “there’s no way to confirm that a crop was grown organically.”

“It left the impression, almost, that the system completely failed,” said Laura Batcha, the CEO and executive director of the OTA. “The disappointment [I felt] when I read the story was really about the missed opportunity to look under the hood and do a real post-mortem on how it happened and what’s been done since then.”

The Fight Over Who Owns Organic

“We can’t say that the organic label is losing its luster because people are questioning it,” said Dave Chapman, an organic tomato farmer based in Vermont. “They’re questioning it because they should question it.”

Chapman is the executive director of the Real Organic Project (ROP), a nonprofit that offers a new, secondary organic certification to farms with practices in line with what he and others in the group see as “real” organic farming. Namely, it’s not just about the synthetic fertilizers and pesticides the farms don’t use; crops have to be grown in soil and animals have to be raised on pasture. To the farmers behind ROP, these components are the heart and soul of what organic means. They see the fact that the USDA has allowed hydroponic (soil-less) systems and large concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) to receive the certification as a betrayal of the movement. For the last two years in a row, ROP’s farms have doubled in number and the current network now includes 850 farms.

In their eyes, the root of the problem is that as organic gained market value, big companies wanted in on the profits and began finding ways to exploit the system, tilting the scales against the bulk of organic farmers, who operate small farms and prioritize biodiversity and soil health. For example, Costco and Walmart are now top sellers of organic food, and Cargill, Driscoll’s (which sells organic berries grown hydroponically), and Nutrien Ag Solutions (a major seller of chemical farm inputs) are all OTA members.

“They believe we need to build a big tent, and the bigger the tent, the [more likely it is] we’re going to change American agriculture,” Chapman said. “But I believe if you build a tent big enough for Godzilla, you’re going to change what’s happening in the tent.”

Batcha acknowledges there are disagreements among farmers, food companies, and organizations within organic, but she said it’s par for the course within a broad coalition and compares it to the way the Democratic party struggles to bring together progressives and moderates. But the differences within organic are further complicated by the fact that one of the partners in the coalition is a federal agency.

“From its inception, the law was so aspirational, and you’re taking these big aspirations and you’re trying to operationalize them in a partnership with the government,” Batcha said. “There’s a natural gap there.”

Despite all this, nearly everyone agrees on a few key things the USDA should do right now to ensure a brighter future for organic farmers, food sellers, and consumers. For starters, a rule that will strengthen inspections and tracking to prevent fraud is in final review at the agency. The other two rules that are most important to organic—one that closes a loophole hurting small dairy farms and another that will bring animal welfare standards in line with organic ideals—were moved forward under the Obama Administration and then stalled or withdrawn under Trump. Representatives of the National Organic Program (NOP) at the USDA told Civil Eats that both rules are “very high priorities” but would not comment on when exactly they might be finalized.

Batcha also pointed out organic is the only industry in which multiple stakeholders are arguing for more regulation, not less. In addition to pushing for rules that will make certification more rigorous, the OTA is lobbying Congress to pass a bill that would direct the USDA to act on future rulemaking more quickly and ensure certifiers are enforcing new standards consistently.

Still, policy change requires strong coalitions, and it’s unclear if this one can stick together around a common message. “With the emergence of interest in regenerative agriculture, the divisiveness within organic becomes more problematic,” said Kathleen Merrigan, who is now the executive director of the Swette Center for Sustainable Food Systems at Arizona State University and served as Deputy Secretary of Agriculture at the USDA from 2009 to 2013.

Will the Future be Regenerative, Organic, or Regenerative-Organic?

And yet, at this moment in the U.S, it’s not the climate-smart agriculture du jour. Part of the narrative gap is likely due to the organic industry’s own focus on “avoiding pesticide residue” in food as the key marketing message for years, based on survey after survey that showed people were motivated to buy organic out of concerns for the health of their families.

Whatever the reason, when the world started heating up and everyone started talking about sequestering carbon in soil, only the farmers knew that building organic matter had been a key tenet of organic farming since the get-go.

And equally important is how quickly the term regenerative was embraced in conventional agriculture, where powerful industry leaders recognized the pressure that the industry would face to reduce emissions and sequester carbon. The fact that regenerative practices like cover crops and reduced tillage can fit squarely into already established systems built around chemical inputs allows for speed and scale, and many farmers and advocates believe that those two factors are necessary to meaningfully move the needle. Some regenerative advocates also question organic farming’s ability to sequester carbon because many farmers rely on tillage to control weeds (but this effect has mainly been measured in the top layer of soil and research trials show organic soils may store carbon further down).

And so far, federal investment in climate-smart agriculture has supported the conventional regenerative track.

Secretary Vilsack has explicitly said the U.S. will not take any cues from the European Union’s plan for a more sustainable food system, which includes cutting farmers’ use of pesticides in half, reducing synthetic fertilizer use by 20 percent, and transitioning at least 25 percent of the E.U.’s farmland to organic production by 2030. The AIM for Climate initiative Vilsack launched at COP26 is so far primarily supporting industrial agriculture projects, none of which mention organic farming and at least one of which is in partnership with the pesticide industry’s trade group.

In an interview, NOP Deputy Administrator Jennifer Tucker and Senior Advisor for Organic and Emerging Markets Marni Karlin said the overall agency is committed to climate action and that “support for organic” is one of the many ways it is achieving that commitment. They also referenced additional cost-share payments for certification as an example of the kinds of support USDA is providing to organic farmers.

Karlin said one of her biggest priorities is “making sure that organic has a seat at the table in the big discussions that are happening throughout the department,” on issues like climate, equity, loan programs, and market development. At the same time, Tucker said she’s focused on both moving forward rules that are important to organic farmers and groups as well as putting “tremendous thought and resources” into improving compliance and enforcement alongside certifiers.

But neither Tucker nor Karlin could directly specify why organic had been left out of the climate initiatives outlined by Secretary Vilsack.

Way beyond the Beltway, out in the fields, some farmers are forging ahead to claim regenerative and its climate promises for organic farmers. Based in Boulder, Colorado, Mad Agriculture was created in 2018 to eliminate barriers that prevent farmers from adopting regenerative systems. The founders were on a clear climate mission, and after identifying financing as one of those barriers, they created the aforementioned Perennial Fund. Yet while their ultimate goal is to build diversified, regenerative farms, they identified organic certification as their baseline, and they’re using the bulk of the initial capital to help farmers finance the three-year organic transition period, explained Brandon Welch, the Director of Capital at Mad Agriculture. During this window, farms have to stop using synthetic chemicals but don’t yet receive higher prices for their crops.

Since such a large percentage of agriculture’s emissions come from nitrous oxide, “We wanted to focus on a form of agriculture that doesn’t use any synthetic nitrogen,” he said. Many of the farmers the group is working with, such as Matthew Fitzgerald in Minnesota, are thinking far beyond eliminating synthetics. “Our farmers are also cover cropping, they’re using a four-year [crop] rotation,” Welch said. “They also want to move away from the industrial corn and soybean system. They want to be growing other crops, they want to be growing food for people, and they want to do it in a way that’s improving soil health.”

So far, the 10 farms transitioning 5,700 acres represent half of the fund’s allocations, and Welch said he plans to distribute the other $5 million to farmers by the end of March. Eventually, Mad Agriculture’s ambition is to help transition half of the total land they’re working on to Regenerative Organic Certified (ROC), another add-on label to USDA organic (like the Real Organic Project certification) which includes stricter soil health, animal welfare, and worker rights provisions.

Buzz about ROC was bubbling up in 2019 and then seemed to quiet down for a while. But Elizabeth Whitlow, the executive director of the Regenerative Organic Alliance, which administers the certification, said the team has been making quiet progress over the last few years, just at a slightly slower pace than expected due to the pandemic. As of now, Whitlow said they have issued 45 ROC certifications to cooperatives that represent 27,000 farmers on 152,000 acres, largely in the global South.

However, Whitlow is convinced this spring is going to mark a turning point for the ROC label on farms in the U.S. Her team is bringing on five new certifiers, including CCOF, the industry leader. “We’re going to hit the ground running with them this year,” she said, explaining that many farms and wineries are waiting in the wings. Last year, Alexandre Family Farm became the first dairy in the U.S. to achieve ROC certification.

“Now it’s time to start looking outward and working on the consumer education part, and this is a really key moment for us, because there’s so much buzz about regenerative, but nobody really fully agrees on what it means,” Whitlow said. “For the Regenerative Organic Alliance, it means organic is the baseline, and you can’t be regenerative if you’re . . . still using chemicals, no matter how judiciously.”

While it’s not clear how many consumers know the difference between a label with a certification behind it and one without it, nearly everyone Civil Eats spoke to in or about the organic industry mentioned that at some point they expect that regenerative producers will eventually have to contend with the same kinds of consumer confusion and pushback that they themselves have experienced over the years.

While splashy headlines about “regenerative” can make organic seem like old news, “We’re 30 years ahead,” Batcha said. “All the other claims that have nothing behind them, nobody has any idea what they mean.”

Batcha is not alone. Many advocates feel that even if all the players rarely see eye to eye on what organic is or where it’s going, at least “the organic world has gone through establishing a clear standard and a process for inspection and certification,” said Merrigan (see more from her below).

Merrigan believes that’s a thread that has the potential to hold it all together. Plus, “Organic has always been a very divisive policy sub-sector to work in,” she added. “You have to have a steel stomach and quiet nerves to do it.”

The post What Is the Future of Organic? appeared first on Civil Eats.

https://civileats.com/2021/11/23/could-a-rapid-test-for-antibiotics-force-transparency-in-the-meat-supply-chain/ https://civileats.com/2021/11/23/could-a-rapid-test-for-antibiotics-force-transparency-in-the-meat-supply-chain/#comments Tue, 23 Nov 2021 09:00:16 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=44450 “So much of what is being sold as ‘antibiotic-free’ or ‘no antibiotics ever’ is just not that,” says Bill Niman, cattle rancher and founder of the Niman Ranch brand. As he sees it, that gap between what consumers expect and what’s happening behind most farmgates—where antibiotics, which happen to speed growth, are routinely used to […]

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Many major meat brands sell a range of products labeled antibiotic-free. And yet, sales of medically important antibiotics in the pork and beef industries have ticked up in the last two years.

“So much of what is being sold as ‘antibiotic-free’ or ‘no antibiotics ever’ is just not that,” says Bill Niman, cattle rancher and founder of the Niman Ranch brand. As he sees it, that gap between what consumers expect and what’s happening behind most farmgates—where antibiotics, which happen to speed growth, are routinely used to prevent animals from getting sick in stressful and crowded conditions—is a major cause for concern.

“We know this works, and we’re very optimistic that when we succeed and this is deployed, that change will occur.”

According to scientists, antibiotic resistance—the growing number of “superbugs” that are resistant to treatment—is “widely considered to be the next global pandemic.” And while a number of countries have successfully reduced dependence on them, the U.S. is behind the curve. For example, the U.S. cattle industry uses medically important antibiotics four to six times more intensively than four of the top livestock-producing countries in Europe, according to analysis by the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Now, Niman and FoodID, the company he co-founded, are hoping a simple test—and a resulting food label for products that pass it—will provide much-needed transparency and, as a result, force wide-scale change in the industry. Niman has been calling attention to how antibiotic use in meat production drives the public health threat for decades, and in an interview with Civil Eats, he presented FoodID as not just a company that will expose fraudulent claims and provide a marketing tool to better meat sellers, but also as a bold opportunity to transform the food system.

“We know this works, and we’re very optimistic that when we succeed and this is deployed, that change will occur,” he said.

The approach would be strikingly different from the existing efforts to curb the overuse of antibiotics in agriculture. In recent years, advocates have been pressuring fast food chains to make public sourcing commitments—just to see most of them fail to follow through on those commitments—and working to influence federal and state-level policies.

But while advocates and experts agree that any innovation that increases transparency around antibiotics’ use in farmed animals is a good thing, many are skeptical about whether the technology will move the needle on antibiotic use in a larger, more consequential way, especially since its current model relies on voluntary adoption and is likely to be utilized by companies already implementing more responsible antibiotic policies.

The Story Behind the Tech

Bill Niman is one of the biggest names in sustainable meat. His namesake pork and beef company, Niman Ranch, is now owned by Perdue Farms; he sold another meat company, BN Ranch, to Blue Apron in 2017, and he continues to raise beef cattle on pasture in Bolinas, California.

In addition to his five decades of experience ranching, Niman was a member of the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production, which investigated the issue of antibiotic resistance and in 2008, recommended a ban on non-therapeutic uses of antibiotics in agriculture.

Bill Niman on his Bolinas, California ranch. Photo by John Burgess.

In 2014, Niman met Dan Denney, a Stanford microbiologist and immunologist who had taken an interest in the many unverified claims made on food labels. “He was really astounded that there wasn’t, in this day and age, technology being applied to validating claims or data accumulated to support the guys who were doing the right thing,” Niman said. They joined forces to found FoodID and later brought on Kevin Lo, a tech executive who has worked for both Facebook and Google, as CEO. The company launched in 2020 and raised $12 million in a Series B investment round this past March.

While tests for antibiotic residue in meat already exist, FoodID’s version uses flow-through technology, the same technology used in at-home pregnancy tests, to make the process faster, cheaper, and more sensitive than ever before, Niman says. Using that tech, the company’s first application seeks to partner with companies to validate their “no antibiotics” claims, since the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) requires testing just .0025 percent of animals each year. With chicken, FoodID’s team tests multiple birds pulled from each chicken house; with cattle and pigs, they test carcasses at the slaughter facilities.

Just like in humans, antibiotics are metabolized and excreted after a certain amount of time, and while different drugs stay in different tissue types for various lengths of time, Lo explained by email that FoodID’s test is sensitive enough to detect whether the animal was ever administered antibiotics within its lifetime.

“We are validating whether the animal has been administered antibiotics and not whether there is residue in the meat,” Lo said. “If an antibiotic is detected, it means that drugs were present. It’s like human drug testing at the Olympics.”

Keeve Nachman, the director of the Food Production and Public Health Program at Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future, is an expert on industrial agriculture’s public health impacts and has worked on studies that tested feather meal and supermarket meat for antibiotic residues in the past. He said that depletion in tissues does matter, and that it would be impossible for him to evaluate whether FoodID’s test could do what the company says it does without seeing data from their verification processes. A spokesperson for the company told Civil Eats that “data from FoodID’s technology is under USDA review to inform label approvals,” and is therefore confidential.

“We’ve tested tens of thousands of animals and have proven the ability to test, and now it’s just a matter of it being deployed in the best possible ways,” Niman said.

The most obvious application of FoodID’s test is to hold sellers that say they are removing antibiotics from their supply chain accountable.

Currently, FoodID tests for seven drug families, chosen because they represent the most common drugs used in animal agriculture. Tetracyclines, for example, are used widely in both beef and pork production, and tylosin, used in cattle, is a macrolide. Niman said providing information on families of drugs tested rather than individual drugs kept the information simple for companies and consumers, but Steve Roach, senior analyst for Keep Antibiotics Working and the Safe and Healthy Food Program director at Food Animal Concerns Trust, said he thought a limitation of the report was that it didn’t give more detailed information on individual antibiotics.

On the flipside, Roach thought the fact that the panel also tested for beta-agonists—which are not antibiotics but are also given to cattle and other farmed animals in feed—would be helpful to raise awareness of the fact that those drugs are routinely administered purely for faster growth.

FoodID in the Future

In October, FoodID employees ran tests on liver, kidney, and muscle tissue from 13 chickens raised by Arkansas farmers in the supplier network for Cooks Venture, a relatively new company that works with farmers to raise slower-growing chickens outdoors.

Just like in the more than 700 previous tests they’d performed on the company’s birds since March 2020, they found no trace of antibiotics.

Soon, all of that information will be available to Cooks Venture’s customers through a scannable QR code on the packaging, backing up its stated commitment to use “no antibiotics ever.”

The most obvious application of FoodID’s test is to hold sellers that say they are removing antibiotics from their supply chain accountable. “As long as companies are making ‘raised without antibiotics’ commitments . . . it’s really good to have people making sure that they’re actually fulfilling those,” Roach said.

In chicken, several of the biggest poultry companies, including Perdue and Tyson, fall into that category. The latter came under fire at one point for injecting eggs with an antibiotic while making “raised without” claims.

In cattle especially, Niman sees FoodID’s technology as critical for catching cheaters, since most cattle moves from cow-calf operations to feedlots and then on to meat processing businesses, making the practices along the way difficult to trace.

But questions remain as to why a company would choose to pay to test their meat when they can make (or not make) claims without doing so. Niman and Matt Wadiak, the founder and CEO of Cooks Venture, are both banking on peer pressure, for starters. “The bottom line is the industry has to move to science to represent claims, and just simply saying something is no longer enough,” said Wadiak. “The whole world knows at this point that any affidavit-based systems can be abused.”

While the routine use of antibiotics in pork and beef production hasn’t fallen dramatically the way it has in chicken in response to consumer pressure, Wadiak says all kinds of claims—including natural, grass-fed, and antibiotic-free—are being made on every cut of meat at stores like Walmart. “It’s become mainstream,” he said. “That’s the indicator; they wouldn’t sell it if they didn’t think it was important to people.”

“Eventually this will be in the consumers’ hands, and industry will have to come to grips with that.”

Companies like Cooks Venture, which have been committed to raising animals without antibiotics from the start, are out in front, but it’s hard to imagine a company that is actively cheating signing up. At Hopkins, Nachman said FoodID seemed like a tool with lots of regulatory potential, but outside of that context, he wondered what the added value for consumers would be.

“What impact will a label like this have on consumer decision making, if the company already could make a claim that it never used antibiotics?” he said. “Now, there’s a verification by a company that’s working closely with the company selling the product; will it make consumers feel any more confident? Maybe some . . . but I wonder if the juice is worth the squeeze.”

But Niman sees potential in the tool beyond its elective use, especially if in the future FoodID makes its technology more widely available to consumer watchdogs, who could choose to test meat from a number of large companies as a way to pressure them to acknowledge, and ultimately change, their practices.

Niman points to the European Union, where a number of nations have undergone major efforts to significantly cut down on the use of antibiotics in livestock in recent years. “In the E.U., when they outlawed the use of antibiotics to promote growth . . . at first they had a lot of sick animals and then they realized they had to make husbandry changes—to provide more space, better ventilation, deep bedding instead of [having the animals] standing in their liquified manure . . . and all of those changes ended up being better for the animals, community, and the environment,” he says.

Niman also argues that while making those changes will require initial investments from companies and consumers, he’s optimistic that leveling the playing field, and removing the markup on antibiotic-free products, “can actually reduce the price as opposed to just appealing to an elitist customer base. If everyone has the same methodology they’re going to find ways to make it more efficient,” he says.

If the data from FOOD ID’s initial work passes muster, Niman is also looking toward future iterations of the technology that will have broader applications, and therefore, implications. “My vision is . . . a whole family of tests on a pegboard at the checkout counter at your local market and you can test for: Is this really GMO-free? Is it grass-fed beef? Is it farm-raised fish? And you can know quickly and easily when you get home or in your car,” he said. “Eventually this will be in the consumers’ hands, and industry will have to come to grips with that.”

Twilight Greenaway contributed reporting.

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