Technology | Civil Eats

In Brazil, a Powerful Law Protects Biodiversity and Blocks Corporate Piracy

Mark Schapiro — Mon, 08 Jul 2024 09:00:26 +0000

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.

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

Op-ed: I’m a Restaurant Worker, Not a Robot

Caitlin Hart — Fri, 28 Oct 2022 08:00:07 +0000

In 2021, I worked in a restaurant that promoted itself as the future of dining. Diners would sit down and immediately download an app to browse the menu, place their order, and pay with a credit card, all on their phones. As a server my job was not only to prepare drinks and run food, but to assist customers in navigating the technology, troubleshooting when it didn’t work, and explaining, repeatedly, why exactly our restaurant did things that way—and I didn’t exactly have a good answer. Things could sour quickly, and the customers often left frustrated and hungry. Some days I went home feeling like a punching bag, and an unwitting symbol of a broader cultural shift.

Like much of the world, new and ever-changing technology is a fact of life for restaurant workers. From the COVID-19 lockdown and the wave of resulting closures to the recession and labor shortages, the restaurant industry has been on a rollercoaster ride over the last several years. As restaurant owners search for solutions, many are turning to automation and other technology designed to replace humans as a silver bullet. But what does it mean for workers?

“Paper menus and hand-written orders were never the problem with the industry—it’s the working conditions, wage theft, and lack of benefits.”

Disrupters and the Silicon Valley Effect

As startups have “disrupted” the restaurant industry, they’ve replaced menus and hand-written orders with kitchen display systems (KDS), ordering tablets, and QR codes. Tablets on tables have also proliferated in chain restaurants like Olive Garden and Applebee’s, offering customers games to amuse children, and the ability to order desserts and appetizers. It’s yet another indication that Silicon Valley’s executives see restaurants as places to consume, not to connect.

While some customers thrill at the idea of a robot bringing their food to their table, or the efficiency of an ordering kiosk, what fosters loyal customers is the quality of the food and drink and the human relationships they build. Mom-and-pop restaurants are thriving after the pandemic, “the personal connections [the customer] has made with the staff and other diners keep him coming back,” according to one reporter.

When met with online menus and QR code, customers who are uncomfortable navigating technology often find themselves alienated from the dining experience, too embarrassed to ask for help. For customers who don’t have a smartphone, it sends an unambiguous message about who belongs in the restaurants of the future. For servers, baristas, and other food industry employees, it can already feel like we’re competing with customers’ phones for their basic respect.

And while digital payment systems increase tipping rates, it can be impossible to know how much of your tip will make it into the server’s hands, unlike with old-fashioned cash. My coworkers tell horror stories about tip theft by owners who take as much as 20 percent for themselves, or tip-out structures where chefs or managers take significant cuts.

And when customers don’t tip, servers can end up paying out of pocket to pad a manager’s paychecks. The switch to automation has put more money in the owners’ wallets and less in the hands of the low-level workers who earn a tipped minimum wage as low as $2.13 an hour in some states.

Indeed, paper menus and hand-written orders were never the problem with the industry—it’s the working conditions, wage theft, and lack of benefits. And these are all problems that tech cannot fix.

“Relying on technology in a way that removes agency from the humans in the equation is hell on workers.”

“Restaurants don’t provide the minimum wage or job protections. There’s no paid leave, there’s no sick leave. There’s no health insurance. Rather than addressing the real problem, the restaurants are now looking for new ways of getting around labor issues,” said Anthony Advincula, director of communications for Restaurant Opportunity Center (ROC) United, an organization that fights for the rights of restaurant workers across the U.S.

Thriving restaurants are not those with the latest technology—they’re ones that invest in their employees. Restaurants like Bell’s in Los Alamos, California, offer paid time off, a living wage, and health care to their workers—and that investment in their workers has helped them succeed where many have failed.

Handing Over Our Agency to Machines

Tech has a place in restaurants—point of sales, online reservations, and waitlist websites make running a restaurant easier. But relying on technology in a way that removes agency from the humans in the equation is hell on workers. It also often bypasses one of the central joys of dining out: human connection.

App-based service, robotic servers, and other forms of automation also often require employees to be digital interpreters. Restaurant work comes with enough stress already: drunk people, balancing plates, and keeping up with requests for more napkins, more ketchup, another round. Adding the stress of shepherding a customer through brand new technology is a weight we shouldn’t have to bear.

And while business owners will tell you that technology saves workers time and energy, they’re reaping the most benefit.

“The rise of technology in the restaurant industry is mainly for the owners,” said Advincula, who points to the fact that while the “Great Resignation” has affected all industries, hospitality was hit the hardest.

“The restaurant industry has lost 5 million jobs,” Advincula said. “Chains like McDonald’s or Applebee’s are avoiding their responsibility to provide job protections to workers.”

Servers, dishwashers, line cooks, bartenders, and chefs already work long hours on unpredictable schedules. Women make up more than half the workforce and people of color and women are more likely to be in low paid positions in the industry, while white men hold the more prestigious and high-earning positions, and workers of color make up more than half of back-of-house employees. One-third of undocumented workers in the U.S. work in food service, and they often work in invisible, but essential, positions.

As technology is promoted as a salve for all kinds of problems, many food industry workers are fighting for basic rights and dignity.

“Multiple baristas described how mobile ordering oriented them toward speed and volume rather than cultivating relationships with customers.”

Starbucks is a good example. During the pandemic, mobile ordering at the national coffee chain skyrocketed, making up a quarter of all orders. Baristas I spoke to told me that mobile ordering prioritizes speed, and mobile orders are more likely to have a large number of special requests. As any barista or line cook will tell you, these modifications slow down workers as they prepare drinks and meals.

The increase in mobile ordering has led to burnout amongst baristas, who are increasingly voting to join unions, along with other workers across the hospitality and food service sector. Over the last couple years, workers at businesses from distilleries to doughnut shops to coffee chains to fast food restaurants have successfully won unionization votes.

Multiple baristas I spoke with described how mobile ordering oriented them toward speed and volume rather than cultivating relationships with customers. At its best, coffee shops offer a “third place” that fosters community and gives people a place to belong. Mobile ordering has turned many cafés into coffee vending machines.

“Management really emphasized how important Starbucks being a third place was, being that space where you connect with your friends, that space between home and work where you can gather,” said Jo, a former Starbucks barista who asked to go by their first name only. They worked for Starbucks in Vancouver, B.C. between 2018 and 2019, as mobile ordering was rolled out in stores.

Since the introduction of mobile ordering, however, Jo said customers tend to grab their coffee and leave without interacting with staff—unless there’s a problem. Customers also tend to get frustrated by delays, as they assume mobile ordering will be faster and more efficient, and they take it out on burned-out, overwhelmed baristas.

“Those points of connection get lost in mobile ordering. So, it’s just like, ‘Here’s your order, bye,’” Jo said. “The experience is so frustrating for both baristas and customers; I don’t know what purpose it serves anymore outside of increasing profits.”

Post-COVID Landscape

As we emerge from the early days of the pandemic, customers returning to restaurants are especially likely to be seeking human interaction. When it comes to complex problem solving, human beings are much more adept than bots at dealing with customer complaints, questions, and problems that come with serving the public. While a kiosk can tell you what menu items are gluten-free or vegan, it won’t be able to tell you its favorite dessert or recommend a great spot for live music. And for workers, moments of connection make a difficult job a little easier.

As a server, I’ve seen customers struggle to communicate, awkward and nervous as they admit this is their first time in a restaurant since before the pandemic began. Technology can widen this gap and alienate customers further. And for workers, our labor is often rendered invisible, and therefore not worth compensating. When customers order via app, for example, it can seem like servers aren’t working as hard for the customers. Customers are already mostly unaware of the amount of physical and mental labor involved in making a restaurant run efficiently–and technology obscures that further.

As Advincula points out, invisibilizing this labor also makes it harder for workers to connect and it makes labor law violations less visible. This is particularly true for gig economy workers who deliver food for GrubHub, UberEats, and other apps. These workers spend their whole days and nights working on their own, which makes them some of the most atomized, as they battle health and safety concerns and take home less than minimum wage.

“Restaurant workers deserve safer work environments. They deserve time for healing and rest.”

In the case of Instacart, wages are determined by an algorithm, putting workers at the whim of technology more than ever. And while delivery people in some states have been organizing for more rights and better pay, many are still struggling to make ends meet.

“It’s increasingly difficult for workers to organize and build power,” Advincula said.

And yet while the rise of technology to replace workers in restaurants can feel like a losing battle, there is a growing movement to improve these worker’s lives.

“Restaurant workers deserve safer work environments. They deserve time for healing and rest,” said Advincula. He and ROC United are advocating for a restaurant worker’s bill of rights that places humans over technology. Other organizations are advocating to abolish tipped minimum wage.

Meanwhile, the Restaurant Organizing Project supports food service workers in organizing their restaurants, connecting them to resources and other workers. Campaigns like these offer more for workers than a tablet, a QR code, or a robot ever will.

The post Op-ed: I’m a Restaurant Worker, Not a Robot appeared first on Civil Eats.

As Investors Bet on ‘Milk Without Cows,’ Questions About Transparency Loom

Flora Tsapovsky — Tue, 08 Mar 2022 09:00:42 +0000

When Ryan Pandya and Perumal Gandhi stopped eating dairy around a decade ago, they found themselves at a loss to try to replace the creamy consistency associated with the milk and cheese they had grown up eating. In the ensuing years, the pair founded a startup called Muufri—which has since been renamed Perfect Day—dedicated to creating “dairy without the cows.”

“They would open their fridge and it was stacked with all of these plant-based options that were fine, right?” Nikki Briggs, Perfect Day’s vice president of corporate communications, told the local publication Berkeleyside last year. “But it just wasn’t the same thing as stretchy cheese on pizza, or silky yogurt, or creamy ice cream.”

The answer, Pandya and Ghandi decided, was to replicate the protein found in whey using precision fermentation to make products that are strikingly similar to “the real thing.”

And, by many accounts, that plan seems to be going well for the company. Perfect Day provides its whey protein to existing food company “partners”—such as Graeter’s ice cream and General Mills, which uses it in its animal-free Bold Cultr cream cheese. The company also has its own consumer packaged goods (CPG) arm, called The Urgent Company, which has so far unveiled both an ice cream brand (Brave Robot) and a cream cheese brand (Modern Kitchen). Over the course of the last two years, Perfect Day has accumulated $750 million in funding. In November, it revealed a potential partnership with Starbucks and then, in December, The Urgent Company acquired the ice cream brand Coolhaus.

Although Perfect Day—which received its first $2 million investment in 2014—has been a kind of pioneer in the space, it’s now one of a handful of companies making lab-produced milk. Competitors like Imaginedairy and RealDeal Milk all appear to be using a similar fermentation process. According to a 2020 report from the trade group the Good Food Institute, three quarters of precision fermentation companies are working on dairy. That may be because meat produced through cellular agriculture may ultimately be too costly to make it worth doing at scale. Or it may be that lots of consumers dream of a way around the pitfalls of dairy, but can’t break the habit.

Either way, “there is a real revolution going on here,” Jim Mellon, a biotech investor and the author of Moo’s Law: An investor’s Guide to the New Agrarian Revolution, said about the trend when speaking to New Scientist last August.

And yet while these “animal-free” dairy brands are promising lower-carbon, kinder products through technology, they may also be benefiting from the fact that most consumers know little to nothing about the science it relies on. And a number of the scientists and food system advocates Civil Eats spoke to worry that a loophole at the U.S. Food and Drug and Administration (FDA) has allowed the company to declare its own products safe, despite being an ultra-processed food made with a novel set of proteins that have never before been on the market. There are also big questions about whether Perfect Day and its peers are simply providing a very expensive distraction from other more—to use their own word—urgent systemic solutions.

Or, as Anna Lappé, sustainable food advocate and author of Diet for a Hot Planet (and a Civil Eats advisory board member), put it in a recent interview about the phenomenon: “I don’t think the conversation about alternative meat and dairy should take the place of the important conversation about how dominant the meat and dairy industry is, how it needs to be regulated better. We’re not going to take on that corporate power by choosing a different [product] in the marketplace.”

Perfect Day’s Promises

Although Perfect Day was founded by dedicated vegans, and promises consumers a “kinder world” on its website, the company’s marketing doesn’t share facts or spend time talking in detail about factory animal farming. Instead, it’s positioning itself in a more neutral way that might appeal to omnivores as well as vegans.

“We hear from vegans all the time who love our products, but our target consumer is really any food lover who wants to reduce their environmental footprint,” said Tim Geistlinger, Perfect Day’s chief scientific officer.

Indeed the company says its supply chain results in as much as 97 percent fewer greenhouse gas emissions than traditional milk. According to Briggs, if just 5 percent of the dairy industry replaced the whey in their products with Perfect Day’s, it would save 12.3 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions or the “equivalent to the carbon emitted from every single car registered in the city of Los Angeles.”

Perfect Day also provides its own detailed life cycle analysis (LCA) of the powdered whey protein on its website, where it claims to use less “blue water” and use 60 percent less nonrenewable energy than traditional milk production. When the company released the 2021 LCA— which was created for Perfect Day by WSP, a global engineering and infrastructure company and reviewed by a panel of experts—Leonardo DiCaprio applauded the company’s “forward-looking vision.”

However, Alastair Iles, associate professor of Sustainability Transitions at the University of California, Berkeley, is skeptical of the company’s claims, in part because they’re so dramatic.

“Biotech fermentation manufacturing can use up a lot of water and lead to significant wastewater pollution,” says Iles. “The centrifuge and drying parts will also use a lot of energy. This is why I would be a bit wary of a life cycle assessment that makes the big claims that the company does.” Case in point, while the LCA claims the emissions are reduced by anywhere from 85 to 97 percent, the company has chosen to use the largest number in its materials. And while the analysis is “based on projected production at a co-manufacturing site in the U.S.,” Geistlinger told Civil Eats that the company produces “our protein at a number of large food manufacturing sites globally.”

“We work with our co-manufacturers to ensure consistency regardless of where our protein is being produced, so our LCA is an accurate reflection of our protein production process,” he added. “That being said, we do plan to conduct additional analyses to even more deeply understand how aspects like geography may impact how we are creating a kinder, greener tomorrow and how we maximize that impact.”

Transparency and GRAS

On a weekday in December, the Perfect Day offices, located in an industrial neighborhood in West Berkeley, are nearly empty. After giving a reporter a short tour of the laboratory and test kitchen, Geistlinger offers up a tasting of the surprisingly creamy Modern Kitchen cream cheese on crackers.

“We want to be very transparent,” he said. “We want people to understand what we do and how it’s very much building on what the food industry has been doing for over 40 years, but we’re taking the next step.”

Geistlinger also stressed the fact that Perfect Day is using the same percentage of protein that you’d find in traditional dairy. “We want it to be the same as what the animal is offering. Most vegan products are very low on protein—they’re mostly starches and gums—but we’re matching [dairy] on protein, because we don’t want customers to feel like they’re cheated on that,” he said.

That protein ferments in giant vats similar to the way beer does, but the process differs greatly from what most consumers think of when they hear the word “fermentation.” That’s because it involves genetically modifying a type of fungi similar to yeast (with genetic code from an online database) in a solution with sugar so that it excretes something called Beta-lactoglobulin. Then it’s spun in a centrifuge and dehydrated before combined with water and fats like coconut oil to create a “milk.”

Iles describes Beta-lactoglobulin as “a key part [but not the only part—perhaps 65 percent] of cow whey. It’s the milk skin that forms on top of a drink when heated.” But Iles and others we spoke to have some questions about the fact that the ingredient is allowed to be sold in food due to the FDA’s Generally Recognized as Safe or GRAS regulations, and it harkens back to debate about another ingredient in a meat alternative—the heme Impossible Foods makes using genetically engineered yeast.

“GRAS is now a way for food companies to quickly secure regulatory approvals of new food ingredients, as companies have more scope to make their own determinations and to provide the information they want to provide to the FDA. Plenty of food additives have been given GRAS status without real scrutiny; some may be quite safe for people to eat, but others might not be,” says Iles.

Perfect Day sent FDA a GRAS notice—essentially explaining why they believe their new form of whey protein is safe. Then in March of 2020, they were informed that the agency “had no questions,” meaning it wouldn’t contest the use of the ingredients.

“We’re giving a microorganism the instructions on how to make a protein it wouldn’t normally make,” said Geistlinger.

But not everyone sees it that way. “Their basic argument is that because fungus-made whey is chemically identical to animal-made whey, it should therefore be approved. This also seems to be the FDA’s reasoning, but it’s based on the company’s argument,” says Iles.

“They’re assuming that because the amino acid is the same, nothing else has changed,” said Michael Hansen, a senior scientist at Consumer Reports. “Could this product that they’re producing have a different impact on gut microflora, for example, compared to a whey protein from a cow? The answer is, we don’t know. At the DNA level, it’s different.”

For this reason, Hansen says, “It would seem appropriate that these products be treated like new food additives.” And yet, at the same time, he believes the fact that Perfect Day is submitting GRAS notices at all is worth noting. Because the GRAS process is voluntary, “there could be companies out there putting these kinds of products into their foods without letting anybody know.”

That’s why Hansen and others in the public health and food safety fields have concerns about the GRAS that extend far beyond Perfect Day. The Center for Food Safety and the Environmental Defense Fund sued the FDA over the GRAS rule in 2017, and a federal judge dismissed the lawsuit last October. Lawmakers have also introduced bills in Congress that would require the agency to study and reassess the chemicals used in foods.

The company acknowledges that allergies are a concern for those who might mistake the product for dairy-free. It has worked with the Food Allergy Research & Resource Program at the University of Nebraska and includes an allergen warning on the front of packaging, in addition to the mandated back of package warning.

“We do not plan to do human testing because our whey protein is bioidentical to traditional whey protein which has been a staple of diets for centuries,” Geistlinger said. “Additionally, precision fermentation has been used safely for over five decades to create the majority of food enzymes, like rennet used for cheese manufacturing globally, and other common food staples.”

Michele Simon, a public health attorney and the former executive director of the Plant Based Foods Association, compares the way companies like Perfect Day use terms like “precision fermentation” to earlier attempts seed and pesticide companies made to obfuscate the fact that they were using new, unknown technology to breed GMO seeds.

“In the Monsanto era, the biotech industry did a great job in getting the federal government to not require companies that use genetic engineering to label their products accordingly,” says Simon, “That’s been the history of the FDA for decades.” Last June, she penned a LinkedIn article examining Perfect Day’s “rush to market” with the Brave Robot ice cream and pointed to their use of the term “vegan friendly” despite the fact that it is made with whey. In it, she called out the brand’s narrative: “This messaging, attempting to justify a new form of biotechnology by comparing it to age-old food-making techniques should sound familiar,” Simon writes. “It’s from the Monsanto playbook.”

Replacing Factory Farming?

The market for plant-based alternatives is growing as more than 52 percent of Americans say they are eating more of these foods. But it’s not exactly clear whether new high-tech alternatives will actually lead to a reduction in overall consumption of factory farmed meat and dairy. In fact, overall U.S. meat consumption appears to have gone up slightly between 2020 and 2021. Overall dairy consumption has also increased more or less consistently since 2002.

“These companies will tell you they’re on a mission to displace dairy, but they can’t explain how putting out GMO protein products is displacing anything in the food system,” said Simon, who is an outspoken vegan. “Is Starbucks going to stop serving dairy now? The only way to save the nation from the damages of dairy production is to get a company to stop serving the harmful dairy.”

And not everyone wants to see all dairy displaced. For instance, Iles says that while the current model of industrial animal agriculture isn’t sustainable, that doesn’t mean it couldn’t move in that direction.

“Dairy has become very intensive, dependent on energy-consuming technologies, building much more massive cow herds than before, and using feed sourced from soybeans. At the same time, animals are central to sustainable agriculture. Not only can they contribute important inputs to a farm, they support a functioning farm ecosystem and help support a diversified farming system. So reducing—not eliminating—dairy milk would be a good idea.” He also points to the plight of farmers in places like Wisconsin, which lost 10 percent of its dairy farms in 2019 alone. “We need more support for those farmers to survive and to practice sustainable agriculture,” adds Iles.

“It’s important to not fall into a binary—that we have to choose between horrific factory farming or problematic GMOs,” says Dana Perls, the food and technology program manager at Friends of the Earth. “There are very sustainably grown, organic, plant-based proteins. There are also very well managed, pasture-based production systems that have been providing a very critical alternative to factory meat and dairy,” she added.

And while Perfect Day doesn’t make big health claims, it isn’t clear that most consumers see meat alternatives as the heavily processed products they are.

“In recent years, ultra-processed foods have emerged as a major concern for public health experts,” said Iles. “Even if the [dairy products] are not in the same category as, say, packaged meals, it still amounts to a model of food production that is in the same line as the industrial foods we’ve been eating for decades,” he said.

Looking to a Perfect Future

While Perfect Day has made itself at home in the dairy aisle, it’s also hoping to work with food manufacturers to include its whey in products typically found in a wide range of other parts of the store.

“We’ve already seen what our protein can do in replacing the equivalent of three eggs in cake mix and giving performance nutrition to athletes in protein powder, and our food team has created prototypes of everything from salad dressings to whiskey sour mixes to confectionary treats and beyond,” said Geistlinger. “We’re just getting started with whey.”

Many alt-protein brands have been acquired by large meat and dairy corporations in recent years —and Anna Lappé says that trend raises big questions about the potential for systems change.

“These products become a profit-generating portion of a portfolio for a company that can use that profit and invest it back into its highly environmentally destructive industrial meat and dairy production and expand those throughout the world as they continue to do,” says Lappé.

But that’s not Perfect Day’s plan.

“Our business model exists to help make other brands, big and small, kinder and greener,” Senior Corporate Communications Manager Anne Gerow told Civil Eats. “We aim to make our supply chain more resilient through partnerships with companies who want to use our protein or technology as part of their sustainability commitments, and [we] are not looking to be acquired by them.”

Nonetheless, Iles says he’s curious about whether the company plans to patent its manufacturing process. “A lot of the new technologies are more about creating valuable IP than anything else, if you look deeper,” he added.

And in the end, most of the critics we spoke to saw Perfect Day as representative of a much larger pattern: A reliance on new products and technology as silver bullets at a time when much larger change is needed.

For starters, that means relying less on dairy and meat as the basis of the American diet—regardless of how it’s made. “If Americans just ate—even if it was still terrible, factory-farmed meat and dairy—the amount of protein that was aligned with what our bodies can use and what science says is best for our health, there would be a dramatic reduction in the demand for meat in this country,” said Lappé.

It also means holding the companies that make our food to account rather than crossing our fingers that the next company will make better choices in a minimally regulated industry.

“We don’t need to hold out hope around being able to scale up a new technology,” said Lappé. “What we really need is the political will to take the kind of regulatory action needed and put pressure on corporations to clean up their supply chains.”

Tilde Herrera contributed reporting.

The post As Investors Bet on ‘Milk Without Cows,’ Questions About Transparency Loom appeared first on Civil Eats.

‘Right to Repair’ Advocates Petition the FTC to Investigate John Deere

Grey Moran — Thu, 03 Mar 2022 08:00:06 +0000

January 10, 2023 update: John Deere this week announced that it had signed a memorandum of understanding with the American Farm Bureau Federation to allow independent mechanics access to tools and software documentation to repair their equipment. In exchange, the Farm Bureau agreed to not advocate for any state or federal right-to-repair legislation—a caveat that has advocacy groups like PIRG calling for continued efforts to pass right-to-repair laws.

Update: On March 21, John Deere announced that it has made additional software available for farmers. However, farmers we spoke to said it costs around $4,000 and still doesn’t include a lot of what they would need to troubleshoot repairs.

Many U.S. farmers say they are locked into an increasingly costly, dependent relationship with John Deere, the $100 billion company that manufacturers about more than half the farm equipment in the U.S.

“To put that in perspective, that’s half of America’s farmers under the thumb and control of John Deere,” said Joe Maxwell, the co-founder of Farm Action and former Lieutenant Governor of Missouri, at a recent press conference. Yet farmers’ relationship with the corporation extends long after buying a tractor or combine—for the lifespan of their equipment when it inevitably needs repair.

Along with the equipment itself, John Deere controls the market for repairing that equipment, and in recent years it has actively prevented farmers and many independent dealers from diagnosing malfunctions or making many repairs. As we have previously reported, farmers and advocates have been increasingly calling for the “right to repair” their equipment as part of a larger movement that spans industries. They’ve often singled out John Deere’s restrictive practices.

Today, farmers and advocacy groups took their resistance a step further, filing a 40-page complaint with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), asking federal regulators to take enforcement action and investigate John Deere for engaging in “unfair methods of competition and unfair and deceptive trade practices.” The National Farmers Union, along with local farmer unions in some of the largest agricultural states—Missouri, Nebraska, Montana, Wisconsin, and Iowa—are petitioners, alongside Farm Action and repair advocacy nonprofits.

“Hundreds of thousands of farmers cross our proverbial fingers that nothing breaks because we can’t fix it, and we know it’ll take the dealership days or even weeks to get us running again.”

“After the investigation, there are a number of steps FTC can take but the biggest one would be to issue an order requiring them to do essentially what state and federal ‘right to repair’ legislation would require them to do: Make freely available the necessary diagnostic codes and software to diagnose problems, fix issues, and pair replacement parts,” Jamie Crooks, the lead petition author and an attorney with Fairmark Partners, told Civil Eats.

The complaint is the first to be filed against John Deere in response to the FTC’s call last July for complaints about this issue—as part of the commission’s broader pledge to ramp up enforcement of restrictive repair practices. This came shortly after the Biden Administration’s sweeping executive order aimed at breaking up monopolies, including within agriculture, and ordering the FTC to initiate a rulemaking process to improve access to repair across manufacturing industries. (The FTC has yet to publicly initiate this process.)

“There are hundreds of thousands of farmers growing our food and every time we get into this equipment, we literally cross our proverbial fingers that nothing breaks because we can’t fix it, and we know it’ll take the dealership days or even weeks to get us running again,” said Jared Wilson, a Missouri farmer at the press conference. Wilson described how it took him 28 days to have his John Deere fertilizer spreader fixed, while begging the dealer to repair it.

If the petition is successful, it could potentially make a big difference for the many farmers, like Wilson, who say that John Deere’s restrictive policies cost them both money and time during harvest season, undercutting farm businesses across the country. “Over the past five years, I have collectively lost months of time during those important parts of the years. I have no doubt that has cost my farm hundreds of thousands of dollars,” said Wilson.

Along with farmers, the restrictive repairs also put dealers in a position of being dependent on John Deere, while driving out independent dealers as John Deere expands its ownership of dealers. Case in point: Walter Schweitzer, the president of the Montana Farmers Union, recalled how he once could easily get his equipment fixed at one of the three family-owned dealers within an hour from his ranch. Now, there’s only one option in town and the next closest is nearly four hours away.

“The people that are managing and owning these dealerships are my friends. It’s not their fault. The equipment manufacturer is holding them hostage, too,” said Schweitzer, at the press conference.

John Deere’s dealership concentration is documented in a February report by U.S. PIRG, one of the petitioning organizations, which found that, “82 percent of Deere’s 1,357 agricultural equipment dealerships are a part of a large chain with seven or more locations,” which “further erodes farmers’ repair choices.”

If the FTC decides to investigate John Deere, then it would have the power to subpoena the company, accessing internal documents to understand the basis of its practices and licensing agreements that accompany its various high-tech machines. John Deere has maintained that the agreements are for the safety of farmers and environmental concerns. In a company statement last July 2021 it said, “When customers buy from John Deere, they own the equipment and can choose to personally maintain or repair the product.” It also maintained that less than 2 percent of all repairs require software updates, which means the majority of repairs farmers need to make, can be made themselves.”

Advocates say that the restrictive practices simply add to John Deere’s bottom line. “For the past several years, Deere’s margins on repairs have been three to six times more profitable than its margins on equipment,” said Crooks. “So, this is really a profit-driven decision. And we allege unfair method of competition under long standing very well-established Supreme Court and FTC precedent.”

Unlike the proposed legislation related to the broader “right to repair” movement, this order would only apply to John Deere.

In 2021, John Deere’s net profit margins reached a peak of 13 percent—as the upfront costs of farming continue to climb, requiring significantly steeper investments in both equipment and farmland.

The petition points to a Supreme Court case which determined that Kodak Cameras violated the Sherman Act, the nation’s oldest antitrust law, by making equipment that only Kodak could repair. “Our case is even a little bit stronger than Kodak because the company faced significant competition. It did not have a significant market power in the market for the copiers themselves,” said Crooks, in an interview.

Unlike the proposed rulemaking process and legislation on the table related to the broader “right to repair,” which would extend to a range of electronics makers, this order would only apply to John Deere. But the petitioners include many of the leading advocates and farmers in the broader movement, which has gained ground in recent years. They are also pushing for state and federal legislation, recently introduced by Senator Jon Tester (D-Montana). And they are supportive of a string of recent class-action lawsuits against John Deere for monopolizing repair services.

“There’s a realistic chance for this [petition] to lead to some timely relief for farmers,” said Kevin O’Reilly, director of the Right to Repair Campaign at U.S. PIRG.

Advocates and farmers intend to continue pushing across many avenues. “Every minute counts when it comes to raising your crop or bringing up livestock,” said O’Reilly. “We need to continue to push on all fronts until a solution is reached.”

The post ‘Right to Repair’ Advocates Petition the FTC to Investigate John Deere appeared first on Civil Eats.

Dust Is a Growing Problem. What Role Does Farmland Play?

Virginia Gewin — Thu, 06 Jan 2022 09:00:41 +0000

As hurricane force, record-breaking winds blew through eastern Colorado in mid-December, the skies took on an eerie sepia glow. Visibility dropped to almost zero as a massive dust storm roiled through the Great Plains states, impacting 100 million people. Two weeks later, high winds and severe drought led to the devastating Marshall wildfire in urban northern Colorado.

Dust storms aren’t unusual in these areas, but they typically occur in the spring and at a smaller scale. And yet, as a two-decade drought persists in the West, scientists are concerned that they could become even more prevalent. This is, after all, Dust Bowl terrain. “It was never easy land to begin with; climate change is just going to make it more difficult,” says Becky Bolinger, a Colorado state climatologist who shared a warning on Twitter about the possibility of a dust event the day before the storm.

As the percentage of dust in the air increases, so do hospital visits for respiratory complications, as well as dust-borne diseases such as Valley Fever and meningococcal meningitis.

Dust is a growing concern for a number of reasons. As the climate-fueled drought across the western half of the country continues and irrigation sources likely become limited on farms—resulting, potentially in the increasing the amount of bare, fallowed land—researchers are working hard to identify dust hot spots and how they are linked to agriculture.

As the percentage of dust in the air increases, so do hospital visits for respiratory complications, as well as dust-borne diseases such as Valley Fever and meningococcal meningitis. Traffic accidents are also a growing concern across the western U.S., where dust affects road visibility. In the last two decades, car crash victims and insurance companies have shown an interest in holding farmers accountable for poor practices that created dust sources—but their liability is hard to prove.

Importantly, many of today’s dust events are region-wide phenomena. All fall, throughout eastern Colorado, “it’s really been bone dry,” says Bolinger. “I’m not sure there was much that agricultural communities could have done to mitigate the amount of dust that was up in the air.”

At the same time, tillage has increased in the region in recent years as farmers work to combat a growing number of herbicide-resistant weeds, explains Eugene Kelly, a soil scientist at Colorado State University.

During the unprecedented December storm, satellite imagery captured dozens of sites in the southeastern corner of Colorado and the Oklahoma panhandle where the dust was first lofted into the air, a region known among dust researchers as an active source area. Eastern Colorado soils are 70 percent windblown loess, but cultivation, grazing, construction, and roads—anything that destabilizes the soil—can generate dust, says Kelly. “These episodic events are really damaging because they can move an awful lot of material,” he adds.

Still, scientists are working to understand “the chaotic cascade of dynamics that causes a dust storm to initiate a particular point in space and a particular point in time,” says Thomas Gill, a dust researcher at University of Texas at El Paso. Nevertheless, his research points to agriculture as an important source to watch.

Continued advances in modeling capabilities—and soon data from satellites to be launched in 2022 and 2023—not only promise to make pinpointing dust sources more routine, but also to enhance dust forecasting.

Gill co-authored a 2020 study using data from satellite imagery to characterize sources of dust in the Southern Great Plains. It showed that the Great Plains contained seven times more dust points than the Chihuahuan desert (over 1,200 compared to 187). Cultivated fields comprised 43 percent of them, while shrublands and grasslands combined contained 40 percent.

As the public’s interest in air quality grows, as evidenced by Purple Air’s network of over 10,000 air quality monitoring devices, researchers are eager to identify the dustiest sources to inform policymakers. And they will soon have new tools available. Continued advances in modeling capabilities—and soon data from satellites to be launched in 2022 and 2023—not only promise to make pinpointing dust sources more routine, but also to enhance dust forecasting. What that will mean for agriculture is harder to predict.

Monitoring Dust

Without a dedicated dust monitoring network, researchers have long relied on the two nationwide air quality sensor networks and happenstance satellite imagery.

One network was designed to monitor the particles that contribute to haze near national parks in order to maintain clear views. The other network, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Chemical Speciation Network sensors, are located predominantly in urban areas to implement the National Ambient Air Quality Standards.

“These were never designed to monitor dust,” says Jenny Hand, an air quality researcher at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. Notably, a small percentage of the ground-based sensors from both networks are located in or near agricultural areas.

Still, the data these networks generate has shed light on modern dust dynamics. Two sizes of dust are typically monitored—PM2.5 and PM10, shorthand for particle micrometer diameters. In recent years, regulatory effort has focused largely on the smaller PM2.5 particles, which can penetrate deeper into the lungs than PM10. While interest has shifted to the health concerns of PM2.5, PM10 is still a problem. Exposure can aggravate heart disease and asthma and damage lung tissue. Recent research shows that long-term exposure to PM10 can also increase the severity and mortality of COVID-19. For example, a recent study found the relative risk of hospitalization for a range of conditions significantly increased after a dust storm in El Paso.

In fact, the nationwide decline in PM 2.5, as a result of the regulation of combustion, is an often-overlooked success story. But particulate matter is an ongoing concern, for example, in several parts of farm country.

While we don’t have the ability to identify the exact sources of the dust, agriculture is likely the cause given the seasonality of the dust, which is often heavy during harvest time.

Hand co-authored a 2019 analysis of dust particles sized between 2.5 and 10 micrometers, called “coarse mass”, between 2000-2016. The study revealed that California’s Central Valley, along with southwest Arizona and parts of the central U.S.—all agricultural areas—are coarse mass hotspots. And while we don’t have the ability to identify the exact sources of the dust, agriculture is likely the cause given the seasonality of the dust, which is often heavy during harvest time, explains Hand.

Last year, Hand and colleagues used satellite imagery to detect a 5 percent increase in airborne dust every year in the Great Plains between 2000 and 2018. Not only has cropland coverage increased by 5–10 percent in the same region, but increases in dust have been found to coincide with the harvest and planting of dominant crops—notably, soybeans in Iowa and corn in the southern Great Plains.

“Marginal lands are the ones being developed [as farmland],” says study co-author Andy Lambert, currently a physical meteorologist at the Naval Research Laboratory. All the best farmland has long been in production and prices have been high for corn and soy crops in recent years offer a greater financial incentive than the programs such as Conservation Reserve Program, which pays farmers to leave the land undeveloped. As a result, adds Lambert, “Grassland is being developed at much higher rate than it used to be.”

Improving Technology

Scientists have been able to detect dust storms with satellites for over 55 years—but only if the satellites had the right sensors and were in the right place at the right time. For example, one of the most commonly used satellites for recording dust only takes one image at mid-day over the entire U.S. Yet dust storms often kick up in the late afternoon. When it comes to satellite imagery, there has long been trade-offs between the frequency of images, spatial reliability, and even the accessibility of the data, explains Gill.

But that is swiftly changing. NASA is upping its air quality monitoring considerably over the next year. The Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (dubbed EMIT), scheduled for launch to the International Space Station in May, will produce maps of the minerals transported from dust-producing regions. In December 2022, NASA is scheduled to launch a new satellite called TEMPO, which promises to further enhance not only the search for specific dust sources, but also other agricultural air pollutants, including nitrogen dioxide, ozone, and formaldehyde. TEMPO will make hourly observations and produce a new dust source map for North America, which will help scientists track dust plumes backwards to their sources.

Whether improved technology will alter land use policy or prompt more regulatory enforcement of dust-prone agricultural areas is yet to be seen.

And earlier this year, Gill and colleagues demonstrated how “CubeSats,” a constellation of over 200 nano-satellites orbiting close to Earth, can capture plume development in the Chihuahuan Desert. The images showed numerous distinct point sources, essentially 8 percent of the focus area was eroding.

Will More Science Bring More Regulation?

Whether all this improved technology will alter land use policy or prompt more regulatory enforcement of dust-prone agricultural areas is yet to be seen. For starters, little has been done in farm country to enforce the current air quality standards.

For example, California’s San Joaquin Valley is home to a great deal of the state’s farmland and is one of the primary areas that has experienced increased air quality standard exceedances since 2017. According to data obtained on the California Air Resources Board website, PM10 values in the district have steadily gotten worse over the last few years.

In 2020, 18 of the 21 PM-10 monitors in the San Joaquin Valley Air Basin exceeded the 24-hour maximum standard at least once, and often several times throughout the fall months that correspond to harvest—a typically dry period when the soil is disturbed. One site had air that exceeded the safety limit for a total of 36 days in mid-August through early November. On one day in September 2020, the PM10 reading topped 480—over three times the EPA standard.

The monitors gauging PM 2.5 in the air in the valley showed similar numbers. In 2020, 37 out of 45 PM 2.5 monitors exceeded the standards. In 2021, it was 28 out of 31.

“The San Joaquin Air Pollution District has a very hands-off approach in how it chooses to regulate agricultural sources,” says Brent Newell, senior attorney focused on food and farming at Public Justice, a national legal advocacy organization that works on civil rights and environmental justice. “When it does, the regulations are milquetoast.” For example, to comply with the rule, Regulation VIII, adopted in 1993, which governed directly emitted PM10 particles from agricultural operations and roads, farmers were only required to check boxes on a menu of actions that were basically what they were already doing, such as water or oil down roads or reduce the speed limit, says Newell.

Soil degradation is becoming a chronic problem, says Kelly. He argues that the amount of dust in the atmosphere offers a way to take the pulse of ecosystems.

Paul Cort, an attorney with Earthjustice who unsuccessfully challenged the agricultural dust control measures in the San Joaquin Valley in 2009, agrees. “To the extent any regulation has occurred, it’s been done in a way that is super flexible to the point of being almost toothless,” he says. If it’s dust, he says, the odds are good that it’s coming from agriculture.

“No one is arguing it comes from construction or road dust or from some other source,” says Cort. What’s more, there’s little public concern about PM10, which is often seen as simply airborne soil, and part and parcel of farming communities. “There’s some public perception that that’s not the pollution we need to be worried about. [That] it’s just dirt,” he says.

But soil degradation is becoming a chronic problem, says Kelly. He argues that the amount of dust in the atmosphere offers a way to take the pulse of ecosystems. “What’s happening now is we’re getting much larger events, not only in terms of the wind speeds, but over much larger geographic areas,” he says. And, he adds, it will take decades for the soils to recover from the ongoing drought.

Kelly suggests that a large-scale, multi-agency effort—one that combines satellite imagery, climate models, historical data, and new sensors is needed to identify the most vulnerable landscapes—and potentially stop farming them, at least for the time being. “We need to get to the point where we can identify these areas and say we cannot put these lands into production because they are too risky,” he says.

The post Dust Is a Growing Problem. What Role Does Farmland Play? appeared first on Civil Eats.

Op-ed: We Don’t Need a ‘Moonshot’ for Faux Burgers—We Need To Hold ‘Big Meat’ Accountable.

Sophia Murphy — Wed, 05 May 2021 08:00:06 +0000

In a recent New York Times opinion piece, Ezra Klein proposed a moonshot investment in “Meatless Meat.” Klein makes a cogent, fact-filled case for the government to spend a few billion dollars on public research to increase the commercial viability of plant-based and cellular (i.e., lab-created) meats.

Klein’s objective is straightforward: reduce the climate footprint of meat and dairy, reduce the suffering of animals confined in feed lots and barns, and prevent the next pandemic. He proposes use public funding to accelerate research and development—much like Tesla’s boost to e-cars or the Department of Defense’s boost to the internet—as the best way to move production and demand of alternative meats quickly and effectively.

The stakes are high. And Klein is not wrong. Cheap meat is a problem. The much-loved (recently mythologized) hamburger is brought to us by an extractive industry whose recent record profits come on the backs of disadvantaged workers, animal cruelty, mountains of manure, and a whole lot of public subsidies. But even the quickest, most superficial look at today’s U.S. food system shows the solution to the mess is not public subsidies for petri-dish proteins that will inevitably be produced (or at least funded) by a handful of large, vertically integrated food and feed companies.

Klein’s analysis forgets the first instinct of any investigator: cui bono, or, who stands to benefit? It’s not as if consumers ask for animal suffering, or excess greenhouse gas emissions. Sure, we like burgers—but we like fish and chips, too, and falafels and dumplings and pakora. The great thing about being an omnivorous species is that there is not much we won’t eat. Involve sugar or a deep fat fryer and we’ll eat far too much of it, sadly.

The problem with cheap meat is not that it should cost the consumer more (though it probably should). It is that what looks cheap to the consumer is in fact costing the public all the way down the production line. From unchecked pollution to uninsured workers, cheap meat makes a lot of money for a very few, while costing the earth—quite literally—for all of us.

The challenge is not how to save the hamburger by making an animal-free, lower-emission proxy, nor is it about generating enough chemical compounds to make soy and fungi taste like blood at an affordable price.

The problem is unchecked market power, enjoyed by a small handful of corporations. They often own all parts of the food chain—from the grain silos to the feedlots to the final brand that shoppers see on grocery store shelves. And they make a lot of money by selling unhealthy food, extracting profits from farmers whose livelihoods are squeezed in poorly regulated and noncompetitive markets, using a vulnerable workforce whose rights they violate. Market power is turned into political capital as these corporations use campaign donations to capture state and federal legislators, who have spent decades commissioning reports that document these harm and bemoaning the hollowing out of rural America in public speeches, all the while eliminating the funding for inspectors, enlarging legal loopholes, and handing out public money in support of those few highly profitable firms.

The part of the food system that really needs a moonshot is the human cost. The pandemic brought that cost home sharply: Meat companies such as Tyson, JBS, Cargill, and Smithfield openly put their workforce at risk, with nearly 59,000 meatpacking workers testing positive for COVID-19 to date. They did not provide PPE. At first, companies refused to test, and when they did, they refused to share the numbers. They denied workers paid sick leave and are now denying them disability.

To top it off, the Trump administration used the Defense Production Act to reopen closed or slowed-down meatpacking plant and offered to support meatpackers in any litigation brought by workers related to workplace exposures to the virus. Pandemic conditions aside, workers earn too little to live with dignity, and their earnings are so precarious that a day off work is not an option. Meat plants employ people from dozens of countries in the world—many of them new immigrants—and treat them as dispensable.

Factory farms run on cheap feed, lax environmental regulations, and disposable labor. We do not need rocket science to change that. We just need to enforce the existing labor, environmental, and anti-trust laws. We can stop emissions before they happen. We know how to protect animal welfare. We know how to protect public health, too—the burger is not so bad, nutritionally, just hold the cheese, the extra patty and the sugar-laden sauces that turn the average fast food burger into a high-calorie, low-nutrition meal.

The answer is not a moonshot. Instead we need a government and a public that stand up for workers and demands corporations and their investors obey the laws, pay their share of taxes, and pay their fines when their companies are found guilty of price-fixing, food safety violations, or grossly negligent pollution of the communities where they operate.

What else?

Enforce basic labor rights, legislate a living wage, enforce the right to collective bargaining, and protect the right to affordable and adequate health care. For all.
Fight structural racism in the food system. Keep the money going out to farmers excluded from the last 150 years of public funding. End the abuses encouraged by the U.S. immigration system, the loopholes for farm work that permit human rights violations, and the environmental injustice that pushes pollution onto communities of color and Indigenous peoples’ land.
Use and fund the Packers and Stockyards Act. Provide enough inspectors, make their job worthwhile and fine the operators who break the law. Ensure climate emissions are counted when issuing permits to factory farms. Do that math right—lesson one of climate change science is that cumulative effects matter.
Enforce anti-trust laws. Hundreds of thousands of independent hog and poultry producers have been bankrupted in the last 20 years; many now work on contract for global meat companies. Decades of legal challenges to the poultry sector have left the corporations untouched.
Control overproduction. U.S. land is exhausted, farmgate prices don’t cover the cost of production and high (and highly concentrated) profits accrue to grain traders and meat packers.
Make polluters pays. Fine the operations with practices that lead to excessive nitrogen fertilizer run-off that kills our waterways, and demand protection for biological diversity in farm systems. Insist factory farm permits factor in their climate costs, especially their monstrous sources of methane. Now, that owners of concentrated animal feeding operations (or CAFOs) want public money to turn their hogshit into factory farm gas, or so called “biogas.” The real solution is stopping the waste at the source by enforcing real manure regulation.
Invest in local and regional food systems. Alternatives to cheap meat exist—animal agriculture that is regenerative, supports farmers, and is kind to the animal, soil and water—but they provide only a small share of the market. Now is the time to shorten and diversify supply chains and use public contracts and institutional buying to leverage new revenue streams for producers that build in high standards. IATP’s experience with farm to school and childcare programs shows how well this can work to support an integrated food policy involving education, environment, health and agriculture departments in productive conversation and innovate policies. Create the space to diversify, experiment and reintroduce regional specialty foods.
Reward regenerative and agroecological practices. The U.S. has useful and effective conservation programs, including the Conservation Stewardship Program and Conservation Reserve Program. They are heavily oversubscribed and underfunded. Fund and improve them.

A sustainable, adaptive, and resilient food system is so much more than a low-emitting carbon sink. Animal agriculture must be regulated on a life-cycle basis, from the millions of acres of corn and soy the animals eat to the piles of manure that the industry now wants to convert and pipe like natural gas, in exchange for yet more public money. Nip too-cheap meat in the bud by making sure that at every step companies are held responsible for their own pollution, workers are paid, and animals are treated right.

Rather than asking for a moonshot, let’s shift power away from the small handful of megacorporations that control our food system. Let’s spend public money protecting the health of the whole ecosystem, people included. That way we’ll all win.

The post Op-ed: We Don’t Need a ‘Moonshot’ for Faux Burgers—We Need To Hold ‘Big Meat’ Accountable. appeared first on Civil Eats.

Automated Harvest is Coming. What Will it Mean for Farmworkers and Rural Communities?

Twilight Greenaway — Tue, 29 Sep 2020 08:00:34 +0000

It’s a misty morning near Salinas, California and the advanced.farm TX harvester—a lightweight, driverless tractor covered in canvas—is picking strawberries. Like a dot-matrix printer moving along a page, the harvester’s robotic hands move back and forth along the beds, scanning for signs of red. When it identifies a ripe berry, it dives down, gently plucks it from the plant, and places it in a crate.

At the same time, a crew of about two dozen farmworkers is also harvesting strawberries just a few hundred feet away, on an adjacent farm. As an energetic song blasts from a parked vehicle, the men and women stoop to pick berries straight into plastic clamshells that they tile, side-by-side, into cardboard trays. Once their trays are full, the workers take them back to one of several sorting tables spread out along the access road (to allow for social distancing). It’s clear by the speed at which they’re walking—and in some cases even running—to drop off each box that these men and women are getting paid by the piece.

I’ve trudged through the muddy, irrigated fields to watch both forms of harvest with Kyle Cobb, advanced.farm’s youthful, clean-cut CEO. The company was the first to mechanically harvest strawberries for commercial sales last year, and had raised just under $10 million by June 2020, including a $7.5 million Series A round in 2019. After building a robot that cleaned solar panels, Cobb and his team dove into agriculture, where they hope to put an end to the notoriously grueling, repetitive work of harvesting strawberries.

If things go as planned, and advanced.farm is able to scale up over the next several years, Cobb says, “You’d see the same crew, but instead of it being this big, you’d see about half the size . . . and they wouldn’t be doing the traditional picking like this. They’d be doing a combination of sorting and packing in a very comfortable ergonomic set up.”

Today, instead of the fleet of three or four harvesters that are typically picking berries, the TX is in the field prototyping, gathering data to be used by the company’s team of engineers at their office three hours north, in Davis. Prototyping is slow, exacting work, and the machine is accompanied by field operations manager Jorge Cava, who carries a tablet and watches patiently as the harvester moves along the rows, learning thousands of iterations of berry, stem, and leaf. “We should get several hundred more hours testing on it,” said Cobb, before it goes back into the field.

Compared to the hustle taking place on the next farm over, it’s a pretty low-key scene—boring even, to the untrained eye. And yet, Cobb, Cava, and others working to automate the harvest have been in the midst of their own hustle over the last few years. Now, the pandemic has ratcheted up the pressure.

For farmers considering investing in the automation, Cobb tells me in the field, he sees the pandemic as one of several factors that will breaks the camel’s back. “It’s the rising cost [of labor], it’s the already-dwindling supply, the aging of the workforce, the hard work. Add in a health pandemic that further limits the supply and complicates your daily logistics, and automated harvest starts to sound really nice,” he said. Hazardous conditions caused by this year’s wildfires may also be a factor, although they haven’t stopped many crews from harvesting this fall.

It’s not just growers who may soon embrace the technology. In California, most of the counties with the highest rates of infections are in the Central Valley, the state’s most productive agricultural region, and home to hundreds of thousands of farmworkers. And as farmworker communities around the country battle a growing number of coronavirus outbreaks, illnesses, and deaths, the discussion of automation across the food production spectrum has grown in the public arena as well. If the people doing the work on farms are getting sick, the logic goes, why not just replace them with machines?

The transition for the companies isn’t going to be fast or easy: Cobb estimates that it will likely take five to 10 years before it’s really complete.

“We’re working as hard as we can,” he said, as he details the many challenges companies like his face in the process to get the machines out in the field, working as fast as human pickers. For a good part of the summer, for instance, the strawberry plant’s leaves grow so large that they essentially block the harvester’s vision from above. And strawberry breeders have so many other priorities, that it could be a while before they start breeding plants that make it easier for the harvesters to do their job.

Of course if advanced.farm—or one of the other companies in its lane—succeeds, the shift won’t be easy for farmworkers either, nor for farm-centric communities such as Salinas, Watsonville, and Oxnard.

The strawberry industry employs about 55,000 people in on-farm jobs on an estimated 38,000 acres in California—making it one of the state’s more labor-intensive crops. And if automation successfully cuts that number in half it could mean the loss of over 27,000 jobs in that slice of the produce sector alone.

Illustration by Justin Limoges.

A Ripe Moment for Automation on Farms

For Sébastien Boyer, the shift toward increased automation in farming is an inevitable one. Boyer is the CEO of Farmwise, a company that launched its first autonomous weeding robots in early 2019, and has grown quickly in the year and a half since then.

FarmWise went from having a small handful of weeding machines in 2019 to 20 of them in 2020. It also scaled out from a startup in a garage in San Francisco to a 700,000-square-foot shop and headquarters in Salinas. And Boyer says he has seen an increase in interest from farms in California and Arizona.

“We see a kind of short-term positive shock in the attractiveness of what we do. But we are also seeing increased discussion around automation,” Boyer told me in his thick French accent. “By and large, what I think is going to happen during the crisis is a faster push for things that makes the overall supply chain less reliant on the uncertainty of manual work being done in the fields.”

Advanced.farm’s Cobb echoed this sentiment. “There are always early adopters, and they have been ahead of this trend for all kinds of reasons,” he said. “But now that second wave of people, the mass adoption . . . I think they’re moving faster. They’ve changed their mindset faster than you otherwise would have expected.”

Emily Reisman is an assistant professor in the Department of Environment and Sustainability at the University of Buffalo and a recent transplant from the University of California, Santa Cruz. As part of a larger effort to document and study the agtech industry with a group of other researchers, including U.C. Santa Cruz’s Julie Guthman, she has been attending agtech events—which have moved on online but not slowed down—since before the pandemic began.

“I think it’s unlikely that COVID will dramatically accelerate the development timelines of these companies, especially for mechanical devices,” said Reisman. “But this moment might allow certain technologies to gain legitimacy and potentially additional financial backing, institutional support, or broader public acceptance.”

Reisman is also concerned that COVID is being used as a way to depoliticize technology that displaces workers. She has spent the last few years studying the almond industry, where automation already allows for near-instant harvest thanks to mechanical tree shakers that can remove an entire tree full of nuts in around a minute. On those farms, the number of people needed per acre is minuscule.

“I found that the crop’s high level of automation is part of what makes it so attractive to financiers looking at land as an investment. Low labor means low risk,” she said. “So, I think automation is attractive not only to farmers or technology companies, but also people who are interested in land as a financial asset.”

Rather than selling their equipment, both Farmwise and advanced.farm contract with farmers to pay for the machines’ services—which allows the companies to send fleets of weeders and harvesters around the area.

“I found that [almonds’] high level of automation is part of what makes it so attractive to financiers looking at land as an investment. Low labor means low risk.”

And with new overtime laws for farmworkers going into effect in 2022, Cobb says the investment in automation is “more of a hedge for future cost inflation rather than a significant cost reduction.”

Indeed, automated harvesting will potentially do away with the limitations of the workday. It’s not typically safe to employ people to work on farms at night—but machines like the TX harvester don’t care about light or temperature, nor do they have circadian rhythms; they can conceivably run for 24 hours if needed.

“It’s filling the gap in two ways. One is just by supplying machines that can pick instead of humans, and two, improving quality of work for the humans who are left so that more people are attracted to the line of work than are today,” said Cobb, who envisions a transformed industry unburdened by the kinds of repetitive, body-ruining work that is so common in today’s fields.

Better Jobs—and Fewer Jobs?

When I spoke with Farmwise’s Boyer in April, right after the coronavirus hit, he told me his company was in a rare position to be hiring several people as they ramped up their customer base. “We’re paying significantly more than the average wage that fieldworkers make today. And that’s because we’re going to make every one of those workers drastically more productive than if we were asking them to do this work manually,” he said.

Jaime Eltit, Farmwise’s commercial operations manager, says the new, better-paying jobs created by companies like his are an important response to the farm world’s “shrinking and deteriorating labor force.”

“Probably the youngest people that you see out there right now are around my age,” said Eltit, who is in his 30s. “But the generation below them, those kids aren’t going out into the fields. This kind of work is hard; it’s not really desirable. And so there are going to be less people, but [a small number of] more skilled people doing the job of others.” And companies like Farmwise are “replacing the jobs at the bottom,” such as thinning lettuce, weeding, and harvesting, he adds.

In fact, nearly everyone I spoke to in the agtech industry preferred to focus on the “better jobs” aspect of the coming shift. When I asked Cobb about the fact that the future he and others envision could involve fewer jobs, he cautioned me to be careful about that phrase.

“Right now, one of the ways [farms] bring people to bridge the gap is through H-2A visas and immigration,” he said. “My hunch is that that’s always going to be a necessary part of the equation. But I think that we’re going to see less need for that type of solution. But I don’t think [automation] is going to take a bunch of domestic jobs.”

At Andrew and Williamson Fresh Produce, a large, multi-farm grower-shipper operation that works with advanced.farm, district manager Matt Conroy shares this sentiment. He points to automation as a way to fill what he says is a “10–20 percent gap in the workforce,” but adds that “our goal is never going to be to get rid of people.”

“At the end of the day, certain jobs may fall to automation. The goal is not to have that happen. But there’s always an uncomfortable reality in there.”

A few years back, Andrew and Williamson developed the brand Good Farms in partnership with Costco and the Equitable Food Initiative, a public-private partnership aimed at improving the lives of farmworkers. At its eight Good Farms locations, the company says it includes all its workers in planning meetings, employs them year-round, and provides benefits, among other things. And in an industry known for anonymous disregard at best, and wage theft and sexual harassment at worst, these efforts stand out.

And yet Conroy admits that, “at the end of the day, certain jobs may fall to automation. The goal is not to have that happen. But there’s always an uncomfortable reality in there. It’s like the photo booth people—that job went away when everybody went digital.”

Advanced.farm is the fourth robotics company Conroy has tried working with, and he likes that Cobb and his team are interested in grower feedback, rather than approaching automation purely as a technical problem. And he hopes some of Good Farms’ workers will be able to train to run the automated harvesters, a previously unheard of opportunity in a field that generally offers no opportunity to advance. “It’s about providing more skills to this person now and helping them be marketable in the future, so they can go outside of the scope of just picking from aisle to aisle,” Conroy told me.

Of course, while learning to operate the machine on the farm is one thing, really getting trained in the intricacies of the machinery would require that a worker and their family could relocate to Davis for several months—and he said finding that person could be difficult.

There has also been an effort to provide a pathway for the children of farmworkers to work in the agtech sector. In 2018, produce giant Taylor Farms invested in two centers, including one in Salinas, where existing workers can learn programming, engineering, and machine operation. And the Western Growers Center for Innovation and Technology—a Salinas agtech incubator—has a partnership with nearby Hartnell community college, where the children of farmworkers have been recruited since 2014 to train for computer science degrees. The idea is to provide a path toward a career in tech without having to leave their families behind.

That promise was one of the things that appealed to Eduardo*, a young man who went through the Hartnell program a few years back. After moving with his four siblings at age 10 from Oaxaca to the U.S. to join his parents, Eduardo (whose name has been changed to protect his identity) spent several years working the fields alongside his family—“cleaning lettuce, cutting onions, stuff like that.” He was good at math and got into the fast-tracked computer science program at Hartnell, but finding a job near his family hasn’t proved possible yet.

His first year out of school, Eduardo took an internship for a large ride-share company, learning it was in San Francisco just a few days before it started. Then, the internship turned into a full-time job, and he chose to stay on to learn what he could. He hoped to find work in agtech, but he wasn’t optimistic.

“A lot of my friends are jobless,” said Eduardo. “They’re still looking for a job a year or two after graduating.

When we spoke last fall, he was eating nearly all his meals in the company cafeteria, living in a surprisingly affordable room with other young tech workers an hour outside of the city, and sending money home to his family—a lifestyle entirely different from most of the other tech workers in San Francisco.

“It’s something that I can connect back to my parents,” he added about the prospect of working in agtech. “My dad doesn’t trust getting into a random person’s car. But if I build something for ag, he would trust it.”

Community Impact

Armando Elenes, a farmworker organizer and secretary treasurer of the United Farmworkers (UFW) is skeptical. “They’ve been talking about bringing robots into the field for over a decade,” he said. “I’ll believe it when I see it.” This year, protecting workers from the impacts of the pandemic—and expanding the union’s base, in part so that they have better access to healthcare—are much more pressing issues, said Elenes.

But Maria Cardenas disagrees. The executive director of Santa Cruz Community Ventures, and the founder of Undocufund Monterey Bay, was also neck-deep in her work to support undocumented farmworkers impacted by the pandemic when we spoke. She sees the move toward automation as inevitable, and potentially destructive. “Oh, it’s coming,” she told me. “I mean if you look at the millions that are being invested in things like identifying the right strawberry, those millions are not going to go to waste. It’s coming!”

In Salinas, as in other agricultural regions of California, Cardenas points to the fact that a whole generation of people have been working seasonal, high-skilled, low-wage jobs in the fields for two to three decades without benefits or any increases in pay. Most domestic farmworkers haven’t had access to much education in the last decade, and in recent years the existing population has been joined by a large number of migrants from Indigenous communities who speak neither Spanish nor English.

“Where do they go when these jobs are taken away? There are some young people, but a lot of them are getting close to retirement age, and they have no savings,” said Cardenas. “The employers in ag haven’t really invested in the workforce, and instead treat them as a piece of machinery in the fields.”

In that sense, it’s not surprising that a system that seeks to constantly replace its machinery with a more efficient model would be doing so with human workers as well. But Cardenas adds that most of the farmworkers she and her staff engage with are too mired in the work it takes to survive right now to track the progress of automation—let alone mount a response.

“[In Salinas,] they’re in households earning less than $50,000 a year living in a community that takes $94,000 to be okay. So, in many ways, their ability to work is subsidized by community programs and rental assistance,” she said. “And also by informal networks. The family takes care of the kids. You rotate. Or somebody is working in lettuce so they bring lettuce home and somebody is working berries and they bring berries home.”

Cardenas sees the value of a response from a union or a community organization, but she hasn’t seen one yet. And while the industry points to the opportunity for better jobs, she’s skeptical about the math, especially because a more efficient harvest won’t likely mean more money for the growers who pay the workers.

“All that does is lower your price per pound, with berries in particular. I don’t think a worker who is now running a machine is going to earn so much more . . . to make up for the lost household wages when three people are let go,” she said.

And yet, like many in the industry, Cardenas believes it’s likely that the pandemic will speed up the adoption of automation technology in the fields.

COVID has already made life difficult for farmworkers in many ways. “You have a political environment that makes it unsafe for workers to feel like they can get tested or get support. You have overcrowded conditions that makes it hard to isolate,” she said. “And poverty wages, which means that they can’t afford to not work—or access health care. All of that combined is a tsunami, quite frankly. And all of that combined in households that are already living in fear.”

Add the demand for produce outside the U.S. and consumer concerns about the stability of the food supply, and the drive to produce will likely take priority over other changes, she says.

“Even if the workers are sick, growers will still tend to want to produce. So, I don’t see the time allotted to change the industry,” Cardenas said. “But it will impact the agriculture communities where these workers are living. And the real strain will be felt by cities, which are facing tremendous deficits, and social safety net programs and nonprofits, which are also facing tremendous deficits.”

Getting Out in Front

Samir Doshi, a Race and Technology Fellow at Stanford University, is also concerned about the potential impacts of automation on Latinx immigrant communities in California and he’s engineering a plan to get out ahead of what could be an enormous wave of change.

Doshi did his doctoral research on developing regenerative economies for coal mining communities in Appalachia, and sees potential parallels with agriculture. When faced with questions around safety of miners, the companies turned to automation rather than creating safer jobs, says Doshi.

When faced with questions around safety of miners, mining companies turned to automation rather than creating safer jobs.

“It did make mining much more efficient; it saved a number of costs. And you had mining happening at all times of the day. It basically extracted the value of that industry completely for the owners and operators. You saw a huge drop in employment, and for a lot of mining communities, whether it’s in Appalachia, New Mexico, or other areas, there was no alternative economic pathway for a lot of those communities,” said Doshi. “They didn’t get other jobs within the industry, which is what is being promised in agtech. And they did not move up the career ladder.”

Instead, the mining companies, which tended to be based outside the communities where the mining takes place, have all moved their own higher-level employees in to run the machines.

Doshi is concerned about this pattern being replicated within agriculture, where immigrant communities play a larger role. “The consequences aren’t just people being put out of jobs. It’s people being pushed out of their homes, their country, their communities,” he said. “It is definitely possible to have dramatically cascading effects on communities and regions for what automation does.”

He has been tracking the rise of agtech outside the U.S., where it’s being funded by many of the same large foundations that have brought genetic engineering to the developed world. Doshi believes that, globally, investment in agtech is “going to be as pervasive as biotechnology,” using a similar narrative of food security and efficiency.

Doshi has spent time studying healthcare, education, and other industries that have been radically changed by technology, and hopes to bring a range of stakeholders—from industry representative to academic institutions, foundations, investors, and grassroots community organizers—into a single conversation about how to take workers and communities into account while adopting tech solutions in agriculture. The ultimate goal is a set of principles, or a code of conduct that can help guide the industry.

Doshi is looking toward other efforts like UNICEF’s innovation principles and the Digital Impact Alliance, which has created principles for digital development that helped shape investment in the space.

“I’m not trying to be predictive. We’re trying to be considerate and strategic about how to take care of our communities, how to take care of our food systems, and how do we look at sustainability and value across both of those domains over time,” said Doshi, who has also worked as a Senior Scientist at USAID, and for the San Mateo Food System Alliance and California Alliance for Family Farms (CAFF) in recent years. The goal, he says, isn’t to stop technology in its tracks, but to widen the conversation to include workers and smaller farmers who don’t benefit from the same kinds of tech.

“There are many technologies that can genuinely benefit small-scale, medium-scale family farms,” he said. “And if we can even the playing field in terms of the utility and efficacy and equity within these technologies and distribute the value that’s provided so that it’s not just large-scale investment into large scale applications that then [only] benefits industrial farming and agriculture.”

While the pandemic has slowed down Doshi’s process, he hopes to convene digital conversations about what it would take to develop a code of ethics in agtech—and get buy-in from investors and governments, using mechanisms like the Digital Impact Alliance, the World Economic Forum and other convening agencies and coalitions.

Farmworkers pick strawberries in 2019. (USDA photo by Lance Cheung)

A Monocrop of Movement

It’s hard to talk about replacing workers with automation without looking squarely at the very real physical cost of farm labor.

Flavio Carnejo, a family physician who works with strawberry and raspberry pickers in central California’s Pajaro Valley, described it well in a TEDxFruitvale presentation in 2011, in which he lists the types of pain, swelling, and spasms that occur in the worker’s wrists, shoulders, and backs, as well as longer-term effects, like compression in the sciatic nerve, degenerative joint disease, and arthritis, that farmworkers endure years before most other people do.

“Strawberries are picked stooped over, and our bodies are just not designed to do that for so long. You don’t have to be a physical therapist to realize there’s going to be a tremendous amount of damage that’s going to happen to the physical body,” he said. “You touch the back of some farmworkers and they feel like they have rods running up their backs—even years later.”

But it’s not clear that replacing people on the land is the best—or only—way to avoid these problems. And it’s hard not to compare the environmental challenges that come up in agricultural monocrops with the monocrop of movement we see in today’s produce fields. While science points to a diversity of crops as fundamentally better for the environment—it means fewer pests, healthier soil, and cleaner water, for instance—it’s also clear that a diversity of tasks and movement has benefits the human body and brain.

“There’s a lack of acknowledgment that the repetitiveness of the motion, which causes physical injuries and then allows for robotic interventions, is really symptomatic of the plantation structure of current agricultural practices,” said Emily Reisman. “Everyone acknowledges that this model is problematic ecologically and socially. And yet somehow we have no choice but to use the plantation to overcome it.”

If the industry weren’t trying to replicate what has been done in factories and other industrial settings on farms, she adds, they may find themselves asking, “what would it take to make economically viable agricultural work that fosters more diversity, or is more intellectually and creatively fulfilling? What would it take to make farm work a pursuit that enriches every life it touches?”

“We know that so many people are desperate for some kind of physical connection to the Earth—not only for their own health, but their psychological well-being, and a sense of place and purpose,” she adds.

Meanwhile, Eduardo, the son of farmworkers, is holding out hope that he’ll get to help make Salinas a place where he and his peers in tech can pursue their own sense of purpose. And if automation becomes the norm on Central Valley farms, it won’t be all that different than the changes that drove his parents to the U.S. in the first place.

“Immigrants—we don’t do one thing,” he said. “Farm labor is obviously a huge thing we do. But there are a lot of immigrants that work in restaurants and lot of different parts of the world. And we might just have to adapt.”

*His name has been changed to protect his identity.

Top image: The TX Harvesters from advanced.farm. Photo courtesy of the company.

The post Automated Harvest is Coming. What Will it Mean for Farmworkers and Rural Communities? appeared first on Civil Eats.

Inside the Race for Lab-Grown Meat

Nadra Nittle — Wed, 08 Jul 2020 09:00:14 +0000

July 16, 2020 update: KFC today announced it is partnering with a Russian company, 3D Bioprinting Solutions, to develop “bioprinting technology using chicken cells and plant material, allowing it to reproduce the taste and texture of chicken meat almost without involving animals in the process.”

Journalist Chase Purdy is the rare person who can say he’s tried chicken, foie gras, and a meatball—among other foods—all grown in a lab. Originating from animal cells in petri dishes and not from slaughter, this meat is colloquially known as “motherless,” cell-cultured, or cell-based.

Since 2013, cellular agriculture has seen the launch of at least 10 food tech startups, and more than $100 million in investments from billionaires and venture capitalists. In his new book, Billion Dollar Burger: Inside Big Tech’s Race for the Future of Food, Purdy writes about cell-based meat’s origins, taste, and benefits, while documenting how one startup—San Francisco-based JUST—has vowed to make lab-grown meat the next food fad.

According to Purdy, getting cell-based meat into restaurants and supermarkets is a tricky undertaking. For one, scientists have to get the taste and texture just right (it’s apparently much leaner than meat from animals). And though the consistency of ground meat is relatively easy for technologists to replicate, other cuts, such as steaks and filets, require complex methods to get muscle cells to grow as they would in animals.

Cost is also a factor, but not as much as it once was. In 2013, cell-cultured meat was priced at $1.2 million per pound. “Now it’s hovering around $50 per pound, a precipitous drop as the technologists behind it have pushed the science to new heights,” writes Purdy. But that’s still too expensive to make it the next Impossible Burger, the plant-based protein available for $12 per pound at grocery stores around the country.

As technological advances bring production costs down, however, cell-based meat has been touted as an innovation that could annually save the lives of millions of animals and reverse the effects of climate change, since factory farms are significant sources of greenhouse gas emissions. (Writing for Quartz, however, Purdy reported that it’s unclear how much good cell-cultured meat will actually do for the environment.)

Despite its would-be benefits, not everyone is a champion of lab-grown meat, particularly its competitors in the conventional meat industry. American food-tech companies also face regulatory hurdles about oversight. Last year, the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) announced that it will oversee the cells harvested for cultured foods and that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) will supervise development into the meat as well as the product labeling. Once that happens, the fact remains that many consumers will have no clue what cell-cultured meat is—and others might flat-out refuse to try it.

Civil Eats spoke with Purdy about lab grown meat’s perceived “ick” factor, its potential impact, and the startups angling to be the first to make it accessible to the public.

Let’s start with COVID-19 and how outbreaks at meat processing facilities have reportedly generated more consumer interest in plant-based meat. Do you think this might also make the public more interested in trying lab grown meat?

My general thought is that the people behind cell-cultured meat still have a lot of work to do to actually get the idea into the public imagination. It’s starting to get to that level, especially as these technologies and this food gets closer to the point of being ready for market. It is ready for market in simple terms and simple types of meat, but the regulatory hurdle is what everyone’s currently waiting to get over. But anytime you talk about alternative meats, whether plant-based or cell-cultured, they get connected to animal welfare issues and climate change. And COVID-19 and its impact on the meat system in particular adds an extra sense of urgency that a lot of alternative meat companies can use to make their case to the public.

There are something like 35,000 meatpacking plant workers who have been exposed at this point. That’s a shocking number and a major labor problem. And, sure, I think that is an extra bow in the quiver for the cultured meat companies.

Can you discuss where the USDA and FDA are now with regard to cell-cultured meat?

The USDA and the FDA have working groups going over this. They could be working more closely with each other but, all in all, they’re making progress. The cultured meat companies are basically having to compile and deliver all the important data that the agencies need to comb through to build a regulatory framework. They’re looking at their own production process, like you would at any food plant, and identifying the risks and talking about how they will address them.

Only about five cell-cultured meat companies around the world at this point have pilot production facilities or have announced that they’ve begun construction on a production facility. Among that group is BlueNalu, which makes fish; JUST, which is sort of the center of the book; and Memphis Meats.

Why did you end up making JUST CEO Josh Tetrick the focus of Billion Dollar Burger?

In the book, I make it pretty clear that all of these companies have different strengths and weaknesses. And not all of the food they’re making is equal. I have tried some of JUST’s cell-cultured meat, and some of it impressed me and some of it was . . . fine. But Josh was the center because he’s a known quantity. One of his company’s strengths is that he already knows how to sell food. He has relationships and supply chains already laid out, both in Asia and here in North America, and that’s going to help him out a lot.

Why did you name the book Billion Dollar Burger?

The title is hyperbolic, but what I wanted to convey is whether you are squeamish about cell-cultured meat or totally in love with the idea, there are enough billionaire investors and other people who are motivated to make it a reality, so people need to be thoughtful about it and to come at it with a critical lens. The book title was to emphasize to people the amount of interest behind this, including from Bill Gates, Richard Branson, and Li Ka-shing in Hong Kong. The working title of the book was The End of Meat, but that didn’t work because what I’m describing is a new kind of meat, not the end of it.

Tell me about your experience eating lab-grown meat. What was it like?

I’ve tried the meat a bunch of times. The first thing I was ever served was foie gras, which I wasn’t raised eating, so it was kind of hard to impress me with that. It tasted really rich and had a meat-ish flavor to it that I could imagine foie gras tasting like. Then, I was served duck chorizo tacos, fried chicken, a chicken salad, a meatball, a chicken nugget, and all of those were really good.

There’s a scene in the book [where I’m] trying a Memphis Meats chicken tender—taste is obviously something that people are really interested in, but one of the things that I’m interested in is the texture and how it looks on the inside. You can imagine cutting into chicken breasts, and you notice it’s pretty stringy and fibrous. It’s actually really hard to get cells to grow that way in a controlled setting overseen by humans. But Memphis Meats actually accomplished that. They gave me this chicken tender, I pulled it apart, and when I saw that they’d [made it look like real chicken], it made it so real.

What are your thoughts on the public’s willingness to consume cell-cultured meat? Michigan State University’s 2018 Food Literacy and Engagement Poll found that 48 percent of respondents aren’t willing to try it.

There’s obviously always going to be a subset of eaters who are like, “Gross—never trying it; not interested.” And there will always be a subset of people who are a little too enthusiastic about these kinds of food-tech creations. And there’s a middle ground, where people are curious and/or skeptical. Those people are the ones companies want to appeal to, the people who are willing to roll up to a restaurant, stop in the grocery store, select this product and try it.

That’s the shot that this little industry has. Most people that I encounter have been very interested in at least trying cultured meat. The New York Times wrote a review of the book and the reviewer focused on the “ick” factor, and everyone in the comments was basically like, “You need to get over it.”

There’s no doubt in my mind that all cultured meat companies are going to have to do a better job communicating to the public exactly how much better for the environment their process is. Most of the data shows that animal agriculture accounts for about 14 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. Think about the energy it takes to harvest crops, transport the grain to the animals, and raise the animals for slaughter. It’s not hard to imagine how that system could pretty easily be improved upon by a process that doesn’t involve an animal.

What are you hoping readers get out of this book?

I hope this book introduces people to a concept that they’re going to be confronted with in the near future. And I want people who are interested in learning more to be able to pick up the book, read it, and get a sense of the brands and motivations behind it and to better understand the political willpower that has fought against and supported it. I want people to, more than anything, just be thoughtful about it.

With climate change being as significant as it is, it would be disappointing to come across a tool that could be really promising, and to just sort of dismiss it out of hand. And I think that, hopefully, this book will give people a language to be able to talk about it, understand it, and to really dig deep and think about how they feel about it.

When I started this book, my main concern was that this meat is so far from nature, and my thoughts changed during the course of my reporting. It forced me to think more deeply about my own relationship with food and my preconceived notions about my own proximity to the natural world, and I hope it spurs others to dig deeper, too.

Edited for brevity and clarity.

The post Inside the Race for Lab-Grown Meat appeared first on Civil Eats.

Can UV Light Help Restaurants Stay in Business?

Virginia Gewin — Wed, 17 Jun 2020 09:00:10 +0000

Not long after COVID-19 erupted in New York City, Bobbie Lloyd, the chief operating officer of Magnolia Bakery, spent thousands of dollars to do a deep clean of their 5,000-square-foot production facility in Harlem. Ultimately, she decided she had wasted her money. “One sneeze, one touch. That’s all it takes,” she says, to reintroduce the virus.

Lloyd and her immunocompromised husband began researching other options to add an extra layer of sanitization to the bakeries, in addition to taking employee temperatures upon arrival, requiring face masks and gloves, and cleaning throughout the day. They decided on newly-developed technology by Florida-based company Healthe, which emits continuous, low doses of ultraviolet radiation, called far-UVC, or wavelengths around 220 nanometers.

Soon, their West Village and Upper West Side locations will have UV-emitting ceiling lights and air conditioning units as well as a step-through “Cleanse Portal” that customers walk through to sanitize themselves in far-UVC light upon entry. High doses of UVA or UVB (280-400 nm) can harm human skin or eyes, but far-UVC is a sweet spot—able to kill viruses and bacteria without the threat of causing blindness or skin cancer in humans.

At a fraction of the cost of the deep clean, Lloyd says the far-UVC installations will give customers and staff an extra layer of confidence. “This won’t take the place of proper cleanliness, wearing a mask or gloves,” says Lloyd. “It’s just another level of safety. The way I look at it, if there’s no harm, it can only do good.”

Lloyd isn’t alone in investing in UV technology. A number of food businesses around the country are incorporating it in their sanitization practices. From the Bay Area’s BambooAsia to Cameo Pizza in Sandusky, Ohio, eateries are advertising the use of UVC light treatments to keep patrons and staff safe. And James Marsden, former White House advisor who sits on Chipotle’s Food Safety Advisory Council, recommended its use.

Although President Trump was lambasted for suggesting UV light could be used internally to treat COVID-19 patients, the technology is appealing to restaurants in 43 states that have moved to re-open dine-in service around the country and keep dining rooms safe. But kitchens—which are often small, cramped, and poorly ventilated—pose an equally important set of challenges for restaurant staff.

UV lamps have been used to disinfect hospitals and the New York City subway and have proven helpful, so it is reasonable to assume they would also help in a restaurant environment, says David Welch, a researcher at the Center for Radiological Research at Columbia University in New York City. Their efficacy, however, hasn’t yet been thoroughly tested on COVID-19. And Welch and other experts say that while some of the many UV devices swiftly making their way onto the market have potential benefits, they may pose more harm than good if they’re not used correctly.

“We’re still learning more about how COVID-19 is spread, whether it be through surfaces or airborne routes, so it’s really tough to predict the specific effectiveness, but UV is an important tool that can be part of the overall protection plan,” says Welch.

An Extra Level of Cleanliness?

Before reopening Ciena Agaves, a chain of Arizona-based Mexican restaurants, manager Bob Shulken sent a 5-foot-tall robot on wheels in to the restaurant alone to emit UV light in 20-minute bursts in different parts of the building. In addition, an antimicrobial coating called Omni Shield, which is supposed to last between 60 and 90 days, was sprayed onto surfaces.

Like Lloyd, Shulken was looking for an extra level of cleanliness. “It’s about making sure your facility for serving people is completely safe,” he says.

While these aren’t bad practices, there are a few things to consider. “The problem with UV light is that it only travels in a straight line,” says Charles Gerba, a microbiologist at the University of Arizona. “So it won’t get under a table top, for example,” he says. Uneven surfaces also may not be uniformly sanitized.

There have been lots of studies to confirm the addition of high-powered UV rays in hospital settings, says Gerba. For example, it has been shown to effectively reduce microbes by up to 99 percent on hospital keyboards and it has reduced the presence four major drug-resistant superbugs by 30 percent. But, says Gerba, there has been no verification of how effective they are in restaurant settings. The same is true for antiviral coatings, he adds.

“I’m not saying it’s not potentially useful, but it hasn’t been verified in restaurants,” he says. He worries some restaurant owners could be overconfident in UV light’s ability to reduce the risk of COVID-19.

Welch says the overwhelming majority of UVC lamps available right now can cause eye and skin damage, so they should not be used when there is a danger of being exposed. “There are a number of falsely advertised products available right now, especially for products claiming to be far-UVC lighting,” he notes. “If the wrong lamp is installed or if UV lights are installed incorrectly there are potential health risks—not to mention they may not be effective.”

Warriner agrees. “Depending on the system, anything less than a 12-watt output is going to have limited effect,” says Warriner. “If the lamps are uncovered [exposing humans to the light] then you know for sure it is not legitimate,” he says.

When it comes to restaurants, making sure the air is free of COVID-19 may be of special concern. A CDC epidemiological study from a restaurant in Guangzhou, China, found that air currents moved by an air conditioning vent in a crowded restaurant helped spread the virus. The study showed that sitting in the direction air was flowing posed a significant risk, resulting in as many as eight diners contracting the coronavirus.

Gerba has no concerns with the use of UV light to sanitize air moving through heating, venting, and cooling (HVAC) systems. Warriner suggests that UV used with a high efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filter is an even better system. In an HVAC system, the microbes could pass over the lamp too quickly to be inactivated, but a filter system, such as HEPA, enables the microbes to be trapped and then inactivated, says Warriner.

Using UV Light Beyond Restaurants

Beyond restaurants, other food service businesses are exploring UV light for sanitation. The Summerhill Market in Toronto, Canada, recently tested the XGerminator, a new tunnel-like device to sanitize groceries in the checkout line. Using high-dose 254 UVC to kill any microbes before shoppers take them home, their tests revealed that lower doses would be sufficient. The XGerminator is being developed in partnership with Prescientx, an Ontario, Canada-based company that produces UV devices for the healthcare industry.

The eventual device, which they expect to be available first in Canada in about three months, will have multiple levels of safety to ensure that at no time the checker or bagger be exposed to UVC, says Keith McGlone, a vice president at Prescientx.

McGlone shares safety concerns about the bevy of products coming on the unregulated UV market at the moment, including a personal handheld device. “There’s a lot of strange stuff being thrown out there—like UV wands,” he says. He advises consumers interested in such products to deal with companies who have been in the UV business for a while and are members of the International UV Association.

“We’re still learning more about how COVID-19 is spread . . . so it’s really tough to predict the specific effectiveness,” says Welch. “But UV is an important tool that can be part of the overall protection plan.”

The post Can UV Light Help Restaurants Stay in Business? appeared first on Civil Eats.

Open Source Technology Could Be a Boon to Farmers

Aaron Orlowski — Mon, 02 Dec 2019 09:00:19 +0000

Robert Chang’s fellow small-scale farmers turn to each other when they need low-cost tech to stay organized as they plant dozens of varieties of vegetables each season and seek to consistently fill their community-supported agriculture (CSA) boxes each week.

Their collective solution? Pre-programmed, customizable spreadsheets that guide them through seed purchases and planting and harvesting schedules. The spreadsheets are free, hacked together, and open source, in a sense. But, Chang told Civil Eats, “it seemed pretty complicated to me, even though I’m an IT person.”

Chang, who started farming eight years ago and works full-time in information technology off-farm, searched for a different solution for his 14-acre organic vegetable and cut flower farm in northeastern Connecticut, finding software aimed at CSAs, which he doesn’t run, or marketing and sales, which he didn’t need. Then he discovered farmOS, a free, open source record-keeping software built on the web platform Drupal.

At a time when a dense field of ag-tech startups—1,600 of them, by one estimate—are vying for market share and a number of venture capital firms now specialize in agriculture technology, finding alternatives is no small task. In 2018, tech startups along the entire agriculture and food supply chain securing nearly $17 billion in funding, with farm management and sensing startups alone attracting $945 million, according to AgFunder. The total investment haul was the highest amount ever—and 43 percent higher than the year before.

This abundance of tech can solve any problem a farmer may have, but the upfront costs and ongoing subscription fees can bring expenses through the roof.

[newsmatch_box]

Want to use satellite technology and other data to make decisions on irrigation and fertilizer application? Try Cropio, which costs 40 cents to $2 per acre per year. Seeking a business management solution to measure revenue and analyze field-by-field profits? Harvest Profit’s software runs $1,500 per year. (A consulting package that includes personalized calls twice per month goes for $10,000.)

Need a full-service solution that manages everything from worker punchcards to spraying events to RFID harvest tracking? Croptracker offers a per-service pricing plan that starts as low as $5 per user per month, but can easily run to hundreds of dollars per month for more comprehensive packages. Major names such as Granular, Conservis, Agworld, and others offer only custom quotes.

In the case of farmOS, on the other hand, Chang says, “Nobody is mining it or monetizing it in any way. It’s yours. You can export it in whatever way you want.” And it is infinitely customizable, if you’re tech savvy. “Since it’s open source, you can change the code, if you want to do your own customizations.”

FarmOS isn’t the only option for those seeking open-source alternatives, but it reflects the recent iteration of the open source farming movement, which emerged 15 years ago with a website on which farmers shared designs for hand tools and tractor implements. The scrappy movement has since evolved into an online community seeking to make the most advanced digital technologies of precision farming available to everyone, and not just Big Ag.

If it succeeds, the future of farming could be much more democratic. But it has a lot of catching up to do.

An Open Source Operating System

The open source software movement coalesced in the late 1990s, with programmers sharing software source code rather than sealing it off from users and forbidding its replication. The movement is known most famously, perhaps, for the Linux operating system, which was created by a disparate group of users connected only by the internet—a direct contrast to the sealed-in software worlds of tech titans like Microsoft and Apple.

Those using open source software in agriculture are up against similarly powerful companies. Farmers who scrap their cherished binders and spreadsheets full of records in favor of off-the-shelf farm management software often run the risk of losing control of their data to tech companies—or losing their data entirely.

Don Blair, a consultant who works with farmers setting up their own open source-based systems, knows farmers who have gone through just that. “They’ve experienced more than once that they’ve collected these records for years and the company goes out of business and there’s no way for them to get that data in a meaningful way,” Blair told Civil Eats.

To be sure, it takes longer for tech hobbyists and hacker farmers to collaborate on the development and maintenance of an open source program than it takes for a venture capital-backed team of a dozen developers working around the clock to spit out a shiny new app. Mike Stenta, who first created farmOS in 2014, concedes that much.

Farmier satellite view.

But, in exchange, farmers can remain independent.

“They are running the software themselves. They’re not dependent on another company, because companies come and go,” said Stenta, who apprenticed on organic vegetable farms in Washington state and Maine after college then started a CSA farm in Connecticut with a friend.

FarmOS users can host their data on an on-farm server, or pay for a hosting service from companies, such as Stenta’s own, Farmier. The company hosts a couple hundred farmers’ farmOS sites; an unknown number more host their own versions.

Anyone can contribute code to open source technologies like farmOS, and it’s that kind of knowledge sharing and community spirit that may help give small farmers a better chance of survival in the face of farm consolidation and climate change.

“The core technology is communication and collaboration,” said Dorn Cox, the research director at Wolfe’s Neck Center for Agriculture & the Environment, a leader in the open source farming movement. “The rest of it changes, but the ability to have those conversations and collaborations is most important.”

Developers are building additional farmOS modules—which will become open source—to help farmers organize additional activities such as animal movement through paddocks. Enterprising farmers can even hack together their own “smart farm” by connecting low-cost soil moisture sensors, greenhouse humidity monitors and other hardware to $35 Raspberry Pi computer kits that can feed the data into farmOS.

Stenta sees the potential for a rich marketplace of software products to provide additional features on top of the central farmOS databased—everything from data visualization to processing, recommendations. An application programming interface (API) enables other software to communicate with farmOS.

[pico_box]

“If anything, farmOS allows for more competition and more innovation because the companies producing these solutions don’t have a monopoly on the farmer’s data itself,” Stenta said. “They have to work for their permission in order to keep access to the data. They have to prove they’re valuable. That’s different than if the farmer puts all their data in one platform. It’s going to be difficult for them to get out of that even if the company stops innovating.”

A Fully Connected Farm

Farmers adopting open source technology are now partnering with scientists who extend that collaborative ethos to their research projects.

OpenTEAM, a project Wolfe’s Neck Center announced this summer, will help make the vast array of open source technologies more usable for farmers by gathering that tech into an ecosystem. Farmers will collect data on farm activities, soil chemistry and other variables—then scientists will analyze it to find solutions for soil health and climate change mitigation. The project will push research out of the carefully controlled conditions of research sites and onto real farming landscapes. And farmOS will play an integral role in organizing that data.

OpenTEAM members, from left: Britt Lundgren of Stonyfield Organic, Dave Herring from Wolfe’s Neck Center, and Jeff Herrick, Research Soil Scientist, USDA. (Photo courtesy of Wolfe’s Neck)

“We can’t just keep doing research trials and [field testing] and then try to apply that across the landscape. We need to be doing research in place and that means working with farmers,” said Dorn Cox, who is also a coordinator of OpenTEAM.

Cox has blazed his own technology trail since he first started expanding his parents’ organic New Hampshire homestead in 2003. In 2004, he helped launch Farm Hack, a website on which farmers could share designs for physical tools, such as a drip tape winder, poultry plucker, and no-till seed drill. But as farming itself grew more digitized, Cox’s focus shifted to open source digital tools. He rigged up environmental sensors and devices on his farm, connecting them over a wireless network.

By 2018, a group of tech-oriented farmers had coalesced within Farm Hack. That year, around 50 of them, including Cox, got together at the Omega Institute in upstate New York for the first Gathering for Open Ag Technology, where they shared ideas and discussed the future of open source farming.

“We have really terrific research tools in isolation, and that includes everything from field measurements to modeling and remote sensing,” Cox said. “We have a lot of work to do to put it into a form that’s useful.”

The Ability to Compete

The open source technologies will help small farmers compete against the large operations that are currently showered with an abundance of technology options. At conferences and expos, such as the National Farm Machinery Show in Kentucky, the Farm Progress Show in Iowa and Illinois, and the World Ag Expo in Tulare, California, farmers can eye advanced machines with wonder, and then drain their wallets to bring the equipment home.

“Going to the [ag-tech] events, you’re definitely wowed by the technology that’s available. There are drones and self-driving tractors and software systems that integrate massive amounts of data,” Evan Wiig of the Farmers Guild and Community Alliance with Family Farmers (CAFF) told Civil Eats. “But the vast majority of tools that are being promoted at these events is geared towards bigger farms.”

CAFF is organizing the first-ever Small Farm Tech Expo in December to offer an alternative. The technology and tools at the event will be diverse: optimized hoes, complex software systems that track soil carbon content in fields, remote-controlled irrigation systems, complicated transplanting tractor implements, and sales software.

“We are moving into a very different age of technology in terms of online systems and online sales and the way consumers, both individual consumers and business distributors, are expected to do business,” Wiig said. “The days of keeping all your seeds in a shoebox under your bed and dealing in cash aren’t going to fly any more.”

Ryan Power, who grows 15 acres of certified organic vegetables and licensed cannabis in Sonoma County north of San Francisco, started farming with hand tools and horses a decade ago, but quickly upgraded to tractors, finger weeders, and power mulchers. Small farmers, he says, don’t need open source schematics to build their own hand tools, even though he has used a root washer based off a design from Farm Hack. Rather, small farmers need to use basic digital services to streamline management and track finances, such as Google forms and Slack to organize management and communicate with workers, and Quickbooks to manage accounting.

The innovation that would help Power the most would allow him to distribute his produce at a micro-regional level. Power has struggled to sell his vegetables to local grocery stores and restaurants in Sonoma County, where half a million people live, and he believes that halting the decline in small farms’ economic viability demands that technology seamlessly integrate those farms with distribution centers using trucks that never drive empty.

“The issue isn’t what creative ways I’ve made a special tool on my own,” Power said. “The issue is aggregation and distribution of the food I produce and how quickly I get food to the customer and how quickly that money gets into my bank account?”

Even though farmOS doesn’t yet have the ability to connect Power with his buyers, it could. Since farmOS is an open source project, anyone can contribute and write additional abilities into the platform. Stenta, the farmOS creator, said that an ecommerce module could be built into the platform using Drupal Commerce, or farmOS data could be pushed to third party ecommerce platforms.

Collaboration may be a slow process, but Stenta believes it often has more staying power.

“It’s kind of like the tortoise and the hare. The slow and steady tends to build a more stable product that outlasts the flash-in-the-pan products,” Stenta said. “I was raised into this ethos that code is sort of like a snowball and it helps to all work on it together. Why would you create one little thing when you can all make one big thing?”

Top photo: Clockwise from left: Some tools for open-source farming, including a double-rolling dibbler, a tilther, and a zipper. (Photos courtesy of Johnny’s Selected Seeds)

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