Antibiotics | Civil Eats

The US Weakens a UN Declaration on Antibiotic Resistance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Senator Cory Booker Says FDA Proposal Could Worsen Antibiotic Resistance

Lisa Held — Wed, 10 Jul 2024 09:00:11 +0000

A pending proposal from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) could “worsen the catastrophic impacts of antimicrobial resistance” if finalized, according to Senator Cory Booker (D-New Jersey).

On Tuesday, Booker sent a letter to commissioner Robert Califf expressing concerns about changes to “duration limits” in the FDA’s revised guidance on antibiotic use in animal agriculture. Continuously using drugs for long stretches is known to lead to antibiotic resistance. And just as antibiotics are now prescribed for humans for the least number of days possible, the FDA has long recognized the need to set limits in feeding them to groups of pigs, chickens, and cows.

However, in the proposal, Booker said, agency officials went in the other direction and eliminated a 21-day limit for the most critical drugs, replacing it with guidelines that allow courses to be determined on a case-by case-basis. “This will set a dangerous precedent by prioritizing the needs of the regulated industry over the FDA’s primary mission to protect public health,” Booker said. “I urge you to finalize Guidance for Industry that meaningfully protects medically important antibiotics from overuse.”

Antibiotic resistance is a looming public health threat that already directly causes the deaths of 1.27 million people (and contributes to the deaths of 5 million) globally each year. Overuse of important drugs (i.e., those that are also used to treat infections in humans, usually referred to as “medically important”) on industrial farms is a key contributor to the problem. As a result, a draft of a United Nations declaration expected to be finalized this September calls for completely ending the routine use of essential drugs in agriculture aside from the treatment of sick animals.

The meat industry in Europe has already taken significant steps toward that goal, but some of the biggest companies in the U.S. have recently been backtracking. Last week, less than a year after Tyson made a U-turn on its decision to eliminate antibiotics in its chicken production, Bloomberg reported the company is also cutting its antibiotic-free beef offerings.

While the overall volume of medically important antibiotics sold for animals is still down compared to a high in 2015, it has been rising in both pork and beef production over the past two years. The FDA is still not tracking exactly how those drugs are being used on farms. However, older U.S. Department of Agriculture data showed cattle feedlots routinely add antibiotics to feed for periods of several weeks or more to “prevent, control, or treat” disease. And in the most recent data collected, some pork producers reported using important drugs primarily for growth promotion, a practice that has been illegal since 2017. In that data, producers reported feeding chlortetracycline to nursery-aged pigs for an average of nearly 46 days.

Chlortetracycline is an active ingredient in several of the close to 100 important drugs approved for use in animal agriculture that still do not have defined duration limits. Since 2003, the FDA has required companies to define limits on how longs drugs can be used as part of the approval process, but many drugs still used today were approved prior to that change.

In its 2019 goals for antibiotic stewardship, the agency said it would “work over the next several years to establish targeted durations of use, so that veterinarians have clear labeling indications and instructions on how long to use a medically important antimicrobial drug.”

But Booker’s letter claims that in revising the documents it publishes to set guidelines for the industry, the FDA is doing the opposite. Booker says the FDA previously required safety precautions for the use of some antibiotics—those most critical to human health—in animals, including limiting overall use to 21-day courses. These new revisions, he says, will replace that limit with directions that say “duration of use will be revised on a case-by-case basis in light of, but not limited to, animal species, disease risk period, and animal management husbandry practices, etc.”

“They’re really letting the industry decide how long [antibiotics] need to be used,” said Steven Roach, the Safe & Healthy Food Program Director at the Food Animal Concerns Trust (FACT). “Our biggest concern is they’re putting animal health ahead of human health.”

Roach is also a senior analyst for Keep Antibiotics Working, a coalition of public health and environmental groups that fights to prevent the development of antibiotic-resistant “superbugs.” In March, a group of organizations in the coalition—including FACT, the Antibiotic Resistance Action Center at George Washington University, and the Center for Food Safety—sent a letter to the FDA laying out many of these same concerns. Booker’s letter amplifies their message.

In response to a request for comment, the FDA directed Civil Eats to a previous response to the Keep Antibiotics Working letter, in which the agency disputed the group’s characterization of FDA eliminating the 21-day duration limit in its revised guidance. “Twenty-one days is not intended to be interpreted as a standard maximum duration,” the agency wrote. The new language, it said, “was added to address the varying differences across animal production systems, and does not change the qualitative risk rankings . . . nor does it limit the Agency from considering additional use restrictions.”

Booker’s letter, however, lays out more specific questions for the agency to respond to—and many of the questions read like he’s looking for answers that could inform Congressional action. For example, he asks whether the agency feels it lacks the authority to suggest drug makers adopt a 21-day duration limit, something Congress could grant through legislation. He also asks what might enable the agency to take more definitive action to curb antibiotic overuse on farms.

“Given the slow pace of action to address the critical public health threat of antibiotic resistance, what additional resources or authorities does the FDA need to take prompt action to protect public health from antibiotic resistance?” he writes.

Of course, regulating animal agriculture is not a popular issue in Washington, D.C., and the current political climate makes it difficult for lawmakers to move any legislation. “Congress could pass legislation that would do this, but that’s really hard to get done right now,” Roach said. “But I think having them ask questions is helpful. Any pressure on them from Congress to do what’s right is helpful.”

Bye-bye to BVO. Last week, the FDA took definitive action on another front when it declared that brominated vegetable oil (BVO), an ingredient used in soda and other drinks to prevent liquids from separating, is no longer considered safe, effectively removing it from the food supply starting in August. Public health experts have been sounding alarms about the ingredient’s potential health risks for years, which prompted industry leaders—including PepsiCo and Coca-Cola—to remove BVO from their products in advance of the law changing. California also banned the manufacturing, distribution, and sale of foods and beverages containing BVO last year. But hundreds of drinks sold by major retailers may still contain the ingredient. “The FDA’s decision to ban brominated vegetable oil in food is a victory for public health. But it’s disgraceful that it took decades of regulatory inaction to protect consumers from this dangerous chemical,” said Scott Faber, senior vice president of government affairs at the Environmental Working Group, in a press release.

Historic Heat Protections. During a week when soaring temperatures threatened the health and safety of individuals in cities all over the country, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) proposed the first federal rule intended to protect workers from injury and illness caused by extreme heat. If finalized, the rule will require employers to evaluate heat risks, develop plans to control heat hazards, and implement solutions such as providing drinking water and rest breaks when heat is a threat.

While it applies to all industries, the rule has major implications for farmworkers, who die of heat-related causes at a rate that is 20 times higher than in other professions. As climate change intensifies heat conditions, some states have passed laws requiring farm operators to provide field workers with protections including shade, water, and breaks, while others have banned local laws that would protect farmworkers from heat.

“This is a bittersweet moment for farmworkers. Every significant heat safety regulation in America at the state, and now federal, level was written in the blood of farm workers,” said United Farm Workers president Teresa Romero in a press release. “Today, the federal government put itself on the right side of history by seeking, for the first time, to establish the precedent that every worker in America has the right to shade, water, and rest while working in temperatures that could kill them.”

Last year, 112 Democrats in the House and Senate called for the Biden administration to implement a workplace heat standard. OSHA has yet to publish the rule in the Federal Register. Once it is published, a public comment period will follow before the rule is finalized. Industry groups will likely mobilize to halt or weaken it, and a Trump administration would likely prevent the rule from being finalized.

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Medically Important Antibiotics Are Still Being Used to Fatten Up Pigs

Lisa Held — Wed, 12 Jun 2024 09:00:30 +0000

Because scientists have identified antibiotic-resistant infections as a serious public health threat that kills more than 35,000 Americans annually, regulators at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have been working to reign in the misuse and overuse of antibiotics in animal agriculture—which contributes to the problem—for more than a decade. Seven years ago, the agency announced the most significant step to date: ending the use of antibiotics also important in human medicine solely for “growth promotion.”

Putting drugs in feed and water to make animals grow bigger and faster, thereby increasing profits, had been a common practice in industrial animal agriculture for decades. While the FDA didn’t end the practice whole hog, the change meant that going forward, farmers would only be able to use specific medically important antibiotics to prevent and treat disease, not fatten pigs. In 2017, the change contributed to a significant, immediate drop in antibiotics sold for use in animals.

“It was really surprising farmers actually reported their primary reason was growth promotion. Obviously, something is falling through the cracks.”

However, new data released by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) suggests some pork producers may be flouting FDA’s regulations by feeding important drugs to pigs primarily to speed their growth.

The data comes from USDA’s National Animal Health Monitoring System (NAHMS), which collected information on production practices at hog farms housing 1,000 or more pigs between December 2020 and May 2021. At various facilities raising pigs at different points in their life cycle, a percentage of producers reported feeding chlortetracycline, oxytetracycline, tylosin, neomycin, and sulfamethazine primarily for “growth promotion.” All of these drugs are considered medically important by the FDA because they are used to treat infections in humans and are classified as either “highly important” or “critically important” by the World Health Organization.

Public health advocates have long maintained that some farmers would continue to use the drugs for growth promotion because many are still approved to be added to feed for disease prevention. A spike in sales of drugs classified for “therapeutic use” after the FDA ended growth promotion backs up that theory. Now, they see this data as possibly providing more evidence, although they were still confounded by the overt way the practices were reported.

“It was really surprising farmers actually reported their primary reason was growth promotion,” said Steven Roach, the Safe and Healthy Food Program Director at the nonprofit Food Animal Concerns Trust, who has been following the issue for years. “Obviously, something is falling through the cracks.”

An FDA spokesperson declined to provide an interview and instead emailed a statement that read, in part, “The successful implementation of GFI #213 in 2017 means that it is illegal to use medically important antimicrobials for growth promotion purposes in food-producing animals, and all approved uses of medically important antimicrobials in drinking water or animal feed require the authorization (via a prescription or veterinary feed directive) of a licensed veterinarian. The FDA is reviewing the findings and will evaluate them to further our understanding of this issue and assist in our mission to protect public health.”

In response to a request for an interview, a National Pork Producers Council spokesperson sent comments via email. “The pork industry continues to promote judicious antibiotic use of antimicrobials,” they said. “It’s also important to note that veterinarians were not surveyed, and they are the main decision-makers regarding pig health interventions.” The American Association of Swine Veterinarians did not respond to an interview request.

Without more specific details on what each farmer’s veterinary feed directive said and how the data was collected, it’s hard to know whether the statistics are pointing to a serious gap in compliance with FDA’s rules.

A USDA spokesperson said in an email that the agency’s field veterinarians work with producers to collect “nationally representative, anonymized, standardized data on animal health, biosecurity, vaccination, and antimicrobial use,” and noted that participation in National Animal Health Monitoring Systems (NAHMS) surveys is voluntary.

Roach, in analyzing the data, guessed at one explanation. Many of the medically important antibiotics are fed in combination with other drugs that are classified as “non-medically important” or are not antibiotics and therefore can be used for growth promotion. So, for instance, 10 percent of the sites reported feeding chlortetracycline with BMD for “growth promotion.” BMD is not medically important and therefore can be used for that purpose, so it’s possible farmers reported the duo of drugs that way even though one of them was indicated for something else.

USDA’s answers also noted the combinations but went a step further in explaining the practices. For each medically important drug identified, the spokesperson noted that while veterinarians are not permitted to prescribe the drugs “solely for growth promotion purposes,” producers were asked to provide the “primary reason for giving these medications in feed.” (Emphasis theirs.) By that reasoning, if a farmer wants to feed one of these drugs to fatten up his pigs first and foremost, it may be considered OK as long as the drug has a secondary disease prevention benefit.

For many public health advocates, it’s a clear indication that the dividing line between growth promotion and disease prevention is incredibly thin or invisible in many cases. “We’ve always suspected that for some growers the changes were nominal, not actual, that they said, ‘That’s fine, let’s just call it prevention,’” said Lance Price, the founding director of the Antibiotic Resistance Action Center at George Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health. “This provides some empirical evidence for that.”

“You have these drugs that are in current practice not important anymore, but as we become more and more desperate, other drugs become important,” Price said.

In fact, one of the other drugs the data shows pork producers have been feeding for growth promotion, tiamulin, is legal for that use since it’s not considered medically important. However, the FDA is currently reviewing comments on a proposal to move the class of drugs it belongs to—pleuromutilins—to “medically important” status as they’ve are now being used more often in humans. One reason? The drugs are unaffected by resistance that’s developed to other major antibiotic classes, such as tetracyclines and macrolides (which tylosin belongs to).

“We’re still using five times as many antibiotics to raise pigs in the U.S. as they do in the U.K. We could use a lot less.”

According to the experts, then, the only way to truly move all drugs off the conveyor belt toward no longer being effective is for FDA to go a step further and stop allowing the broader practice of putting antibiotics in feed as a prevention mechanism and only allow farmers to treat sick animals.

“We’re still using five times as many antibiotics to raise pigs in the U.S. as they do in the U.K. We could use a lot less,” Roach said. “I would like to see FDA take the next step—and hopefully it won’t take 10 years—to get rid of routine use for disease prevention as well.”

Price also said that given this limited data set that relies on voluntary participation and self-reported questionnaires points to a real issue, it bolsters the idea that federal agencies and researchers need better data overall. “This is an industry that can take thousands of pigs, kill them, package them, and ship them in a matter of hours, but they say they couldn’t possibly track actual drug use,” he said. “They do amazing stuff. They just don’t want to do this.”

PFAS Data Debate. The nonprofit organization Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) is demanding the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) retract a memo it released last year that reported the agency found no evidence of PFAS in its tests of commonly used pesticides. EPA initiated the tests after an environmental toxicologist found alarming levels of multiple PFAS in six out of 10 agricultural pesticides he tested.

Ever since the agency announced no evidence of contamination in the exact same chemicals, scientists and watchdog groups have been working to try to understand and explain the discrepancies. To that end, PEER submitted a FOIA request to EPA. The documents released showed the agency omitted the results of other tests that did find PFAS and left out a detail that could cast doubt on the validity of its tests. EPA maintains confidence in its results, telling PEER that the PFAS found in the other tests was attributable to “background levels” and that the detail on testing did not apply because of differences in testing sensitivity.

The debate over which tests should be relied on is likely to rage on, and the stakes are high given PFAS contamination on farms has already occurred due to other sources including sewage sludge.

Tackling the Tournament System. Farm groups including the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition and Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI) applauded the USDA for introducing a rule that could significantly change how contract farmers who raise chickens for big companies including Tyson, Mountaire, and Pilgrim’s are paid. “This rule from USDA is a landmark moment for poultry growers in their long struggle for basic fairness in their contracts,” Edna Rodriguez, RAFI’s executive director, said in a press release. The industry has long been known for its “tournament system” that ultimately leaves growers in the dark about how much money they’ll make on each flock and can require them to make expensive upgrades to their infrastructure without warning.

The new rule would require companies to set a fixed base price, change how they’re allowed to calculate performance bonuses, and require them to provide a detailed accounting of how and when a grower could reasonably expect to recoup investments made in infrastructure improvements, allowing them to more effectively evaluate their options. It’s the latest in a series of rules related to chicken farmers introduced by USDA as part of the Biden administration’s efforts to increase competition and fairness in the highly consolidated meat industries. The rules are intended to give the agency the tools it needs to enforce the Packers & Stockyards Act, which has been on the books, but with no teeth, for over 100 years.

Yesterday, however, House Republicans included language to overturn the rules in their fiscal year 2025 spending bill and said they were, “reining in harmful regulations that dictate how poultry and livestock producers raise and market their animals.”

Eating Well Is Also Better for the Planet. According to a Harvard study published this week in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, people who eat more vegetables, legumes, and whole grains and less meat, dairy, and sugar may significantly lower their risk of several diseases and live longer. Researchers used data from the Nurses’ Health Study I and II, which followed 200,000 participants for 34 years, to look at the impact of adhering more or less closely to the “Planetary Health Diet,” which came out of the EAT-Lancet commission’s 2019 report on the best way to align diets with both nutrition and climate goals.

They found that people whose diets were most closely aligned with the diet’s recommendations had a 30 percent lower risk of premature death compared to those whose diets were furthest away from the diet’s patterns, and that the Planetary Health Diet produced 29 percent lower greenhouse gas emissions. “Climate change has our planet on track for ecological disaster, and our food system plays a major role,” said author Walter Willett, professor of epidemiology and nutrition at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, in a press release. “Shifting how we eat can help slow the process of climate change. And what’s healthiest for the planet is also healthiest for humans.” Since the EAT-Lancet commission first published its recommendations, the diet has ignited significant controversies around meat eating, micronutrients, and cost.

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What Happened to Antibiotic-Free Chicken?

Lisa Held — Wed, 22 May 2024 09:00:07 +0000

Seven years ago, Tyson—one of the largest chicken producers in the world—made headlines with its commitment to “eliminate antibiotics in chicken.” Then, last summer, the company changed its policy: Instead of “no antibiotics ever” (referred to as NAE in the industry), Tyson’s farmers would go back to using antibiotics. They would refrain only from using drugs considered “important in human medicine.”

Given the company produces about a quarter of the chicken in the country, ripple effects ensued. At the Los Angeles United School District, school nutrition directors were left scrambling to find another supplier in order to honor a long-standing public commitment to get antibiotics out of student meals. Then, in March, Chick-Fil-A—which has used Tyson as a supplier in the past—also backpedaled on a 2014 commitment to serving antibiotic-free chicken, citing supply concerns.

Now, despite all the prior momentum, none of the four largest chicken producers are exclusively practicing “no antibiotics ever” production.

As the impacts came into focus, advocates and experts who had been pointing to the chicken industry as a model for how food corporations could make real progress toward improving practices that threaten public health looked on in dismay.

“When we first started working on this in 2015 and we were targeting McDonald’s, Chick-Fil-A was one of the players that we could point to as already doing the right thing,” said Andre Delattre, SVP and COO of programs at Public Interest Research Group (PIRG). “From that perspective, it’s especially a shame that they’re backsliding.”

Between 2014 and 2018, the percentage of chickens raised without antibiotics rose from 3 percent to 52 percent, and the amount raised without medically important antibiotics soared to more than 90 percent. The Natural Resources Defense Council called it “a stunning success story,” and allied organizations like PIRG shifted their focus to reducing antibiotic use in pork and beef, where medically important drugs are still used routinely in feed and water, at much larger volumes.

While Tyson and most of its biggest competitors still commit to avoiding drugs that are critical to treating deadly diseases in humans, its backpedaling on NAE is significant for several reasons. In chicken, the four biggest companies—Tyson, Pilgrim’s Pride (owned by JBS), Wayne-Sanderson Farms, and Mountaire—control more than half of the market.

Now, despite all the prior momentum, none of them are exclusively practicing “no antibiotics ever” production. And some emerging research suggests that a class of drugs these companies are regularly using may contribute to the development of resistant strains of bacteria that do threaten human health.

The story of the end of the industry’s steady march toward getting antibiotics out of chicken feed is complicated, involving other unmet commitments, including shifting to raising slower-growing breeds that require fewer medications.

And it illustrates the limitations of corporate commitments to more responsible practices, in this and any industry: When the rubber meets the road in achieving capitalism’s goal of maximizing profits, shareholders may prioritize cost savings, especially after consumer attention on any given issue has waned over time.

Tyson did not respond to repeated email and telephone requests for interviews.

What it Takes to Raise Chickens Without Antibiotics

Americans have an insatiable appetite for nuggets, tenders, and boneless, skinless breasts: In 2023, individuals ate an average of 101 pounds of chicken, up from 82 pounds in 2013. To consistently produce that much chicken for billions of people, companies created a system that relies on regular antibiotics in feed and/or water.

Birds bred to grow fast and fat in crowded barns where waste accumulates get sick easily. Antibiotics are an easy fix, since preventing disease is more effective than treating it, and regular doses of the same drugs speed up growth. However, the overuse of antibiotics in animal agriculture is one activity that has driven the development of dangerous antibiotic-resistant bacteria. In the U.S., 2.8 million people now contract hard-to-treat infections each year, and 35,000 die from those infections.

So, over the past decade, at the behest of consumer and public health advocacy groups, many chicken companies switched to NAE production.

At the heart of the issue throughout the industry is an overwhelmingly common poultry disease called coccidiosis, caused by a parasite that is almost universally present in chicken waste.

However, they did it while continuing to increase their production to a staggering high of more than 46 billion pounds in 2023. We’ll give you more chicken at lower prices, they said, while also promising better animal welfare, a lower carbon footprint, and less antibiotic use.

But each year, the percentage of chickens that got sick and died long before making it to a dinner plate ticked up. Now, about 11 million chicks die on farms per week, wasting all the resources that went into breeding, hatching, transporting, and feeding them along the way. A 2023 report from the U.S. Poultry & Egg Association found a direct link between the move away from antibiotics and rising mortality rates.

Multiple sources interviewed for this story said that many companies didn’t invest in changing the conditions in hatcheries and barns that made routine antibiotic use necessary in the first place.

“You shouldn’t ever just go in and pull antibiotics,” says Bruce Stewart-Brown, a senior vice president at Perdue Foods, which is the fifth-largest chicken producer in the country. “That’s not good for anything or anybody.”

Perdue, he said, started to transition away from antibiotics 20 years ago. And while it moved all of its chicken to NAE in 2014, he said his team is still continuously improving the techniques that make it possible.

At the heart of the issue throughout the industry is an overwhelmingly common poultry disease called coccidiosis, caused by a parasite that is almost universally present in chicken waste. When tens of thousands of chickens are crowded into a barn, waste accumulates, and the birds can’t escape it. The more they ingest through contaminated feed, dust, and litter, the more likely they are to get sick.

When infected, coccidiosis affects the birds’ gastrointestinal tracts, causing weight loss, diarrhea, and sometimes death. The intestinal damage it causes also creates conditions in which another common disease, necrotic enteritis, can thrive. Necrotic enteritis has similar effects but is much more deadly.

Stewart-Brown said Perdue starts with cleaner barns for its breeder flocks, which means eggs in the hatchery are less likely to carry the parasite from the get-go. Controlling for the disease on farms that produce meat chickens then involves a mix of vaccination, taking animal byproducts out of feed and adding prebiotics and probiotics (to improve digestive health), managing moisture in the litter that lines the bottom of barns, and using a class of drugs called anticoccidials (which are not classified as antibiotics) when all else fails. They also send chickens to slaughter earlier, which means the birds are smaller but have less time to get sick.

The Appeal of Antibiotics

On the other hand, putting antibiotics in feed can wipe out the need for all of those changes in one fell swoop, holding disease at bay and allowing the birds grow more efficiently. The class of antibiotics commonly used are called ionophores, and the drugs’ effectiveness using is what motivated Tyson’s decision to resume antibiotic use, company executives explained during an August 2023 investor call. In addition to plant closures, CFO John Tyson said the change in antibiotic policy was one of several “meaningful steps to get the cost structure back in balance” in the company’s chicken business. President and CEO Donnie King added that “data suggests the use of ionophores can lead to more uniform birds with consistent weight.”

Ionophores are not used in humans, which is why they’re classified as “non-medically important.” Experts generally agree their use is of less concern than medically important antibiotics like tetracyclines that are widely used in beef and pork; some say ionophores pose little to no risk of contributing to resistance that drives untreatable infections in humans.

“It’s just an attempt to compensate for poor animal husbandry, and those bad practices are not a good justification for taking chances with a cornerstone of modern medicine.”

However, other experts are concerned about emerging research conducted in Europe. Michael Hansen, a senior scientist at Consumer Reports, explained that the studies suggest ionophore resistance genes may be essentially carrying resistance to other antibiotics along with them as they proliferate, driving the spread of bacteria that are resistant to drugs humans do need.

“It’s through this mechanism of co-selection—of being physically linked on the same pieces of genetic material,” Hansen said. “What’s happened over the past 15 or 20 years is that as we’ve used more and more chemicals, not only antibiotics . . . resistance elements to different things are increasingly being clustered.”

This matters because ionophores are also used routinely in beef and pork production. In fact, across agriculture, more ionophores are given to animals than any other antibiotic.

At this point, the science is new and the risks are still unclear, but “our position is that we shouldn’t take chances, to the extent that we’re talking about the routine use of antibiotics,” PIRG’s Delattre said. “It’s just an attempt to compensate for poor animal husbandry, and those bad practices are not a good justification for taking chances with a cornerstone of modern medicine.”

After Tyson reversed course, the Perdue marketing team jumped on the opportunity to highlight the fact that they weren’t backtracking on antibiotics. They launched an entire “Know Better” campaign around the NAE label, complete with a website that casts doubt on the safety of ionophores, a cheeky commercial about “throwing antibiotics” at your problems, and a stunt snack product. (Shake Shack used similar tactics to throw shade at Chick-Fil-A, with a full-page ad in The New York Times offering free chicken sandwiches with this riff on its competitor’s slogan: “Eat More Antibiotic-Free Chicken.”)

But at the same time, Perdue has no concrete plans to meet another related promise it made: To switch to a breed of chicken that grows at a slower pace, is more active, and has a stronger immune system. And some advocates say this is the change that would make NAE truly sustainable while improving animal welfare.

Slow Progress Toward a Slower-Growing Breed

For many years, animal welfare groups have been pushing chicken companies to use slower-growing breeds. The commercial chickens common across the industry are bred to grow fast and fat, with all of their energy sent to breast meat, and as a result they often suffer from immobility and other issues. They also get sick more due to underdeveloped immune systems, which makes antibiotics like ionophores a crucial production tool.

“The idea that people are making headway with slower-growing breeds and reducing antibiotics is just rubbish. Growth rate is generally getting worse, not better.”

In 2019, a coalition of animal welfare groups created the Better Chicken Commitment (BCC) to push big grocers, restaurants, and especially chicken companies to commit to improving the lives of the birds in their supply chains.

Five years later, Compassion in World Farming’s 2023 ChickenTrack report on the BCC’s progress shows 52 companies have made a plan or changes of some kind. Many report improvements on metrics like welfare-improving lighting and “enrichments,” a term for things like perches and straw bales added to barns that allow birds to express their natural behaviors.

Julia Johnson, the leader of CIWF’s Compassion in Food Business in the U.S., pointed to the pandemic as interfering with progress companies might have made faster. This year, she said, she’ll be focused on getting companies to improve their BCC changes to litter, enrichments, and breeds. “We still have a long way to go, but I’m optimistic about the progress that we’ve seen.”

But only a few tiny producers have switched to breeds associated with healthier, happier chickens. Tyson has never committed to any aspect of the BCC, nor have the other big three companies that produce the majority of the country’s chickens.

“When I look at the report . . . there are two companies that have actually made progress towards breed. That’s very dispiriting to me,” said Andrew deCoriolis, executive director of Farm Forward. DeCoriolis said he appreciates that there’s a least a conversation happening on breed, and the other changes the BCC is pushing are certainly not bad for the animals. “But what I would like us to see is a laser focus on companies making progress on breed. The rest of it is, from my perspective, window dressing.”

One of the BCC’s biggest partners is the Global Animal Partnership (GAP), a third-party animal welfare label associated with Whole Foods. GAP commissioned a study of alternative breeds in 2020 and in 2021, and issued a list of approved breeds it found improved chickens’ lives and health outcomes. At the time, GAP said it would require farms certified at all five of its levels to switch to one of the approved breeds by 2024. That has not happened to date. Attempts to reach out to GAP revealed the executive director who was leading the project is now employed only by Whole Foods, not GAP.

Meanwhile, the ChickenTrack report singled out Whole Foods’ lack of reporting on breed progress, despite the company publicizing a roadmap to meet the BCC standards. “If it is not introduced, Whole Foods Market will be recognized as a weakened policy in 2025,” it read.

In 2017, chicken producer Bell & Evans announced it was transitioning all of its chicken to a slower-growing, BCC-approved breed by 2018. Sources told Civil Eats the company has since gone back to a typical commercial breed, but the company did not respond to requests for comment. Meanwhile, two companies that set out to challenge big industrial chicken companies by starting with better breeds and eschewing preventative antibiotics from the get-go—Emmer & Co and Cooks Venture—have both gone out of business within the past few years.

“The idea that people are making headway with slower-growing breeds and reducing antibiotics is just rubbish. Growth rate is generally getting worse, not better,” Matt Wadiak, the founder of Cooks Venture, told Civil Eats. “People are just going with the bigger birds, and those bigger birds absolutely require pharmaceutical inputs.”

Given his departure from Cooks Venture in 2023 and the company’s subsequent, dramatic downfall, Wadiak is unsurprisingly bitter when it comes to the chicken industry. He’s also right on this point.

In 2013, the average commercial chicken weighed 5.92 pounds at the time of slaughter. Last year, it weighed 6.54, after the same number of days. And when you look more closely at mortality numbers, the largest increases in deaths are happening among the heavier birds.

Cooks Venture’s breed, the Pioneer, was the first in a long time to represent a departure from that trajectory, and one that both farmers and animal welfare advocates were excited about. Wadiak said the company failed due to its an inability to secure capital in a wildly capital-intensive industry. He insists, though, that demand was strong and the price premium for his chickens was not that high.

“If Cooks could do that with a slower-growing breed, I don’t understand what is keeping Perdue from doing the same,” deCoriolis said.

“The fact that they’re still sticking with a no antibiotics policy . . . shows clearly that it can be done.”

CIWF’s Johnson insists consumers have not lost interest in better welfare for chickens. She points to sessions at chicken trade marketing events that suggest the companies believe the that they have to at least create the appearance of making progress based on Gen Z’s demands. “They’re talking about the next consumer for 2035, and animal welfare and sustainability are the top two and three concerns.”

On antibiotics, the average person on the street may not be aware of a problem, Delattre said, but “it doesn’t take more than 30 seconds to explain . . . and they understand that it’s a problem. Everybody understands the importance of antibiotics in modern medicine. And these days, almost everybody knows somebody who’s had a scare with a resistant infection,” he said.

In the end, two slightly different paths are emerging within industrial systems. While Tyson is putting antibiotics back into its production and other big players never eliminated them, Perdue is keeping them out. To help the birds survive without antibiotics, Perdue is vaccinating, keeping barns cleaner, and sending them to slaughter before disease risk spikes.

But while Perdue led the biggest pilot of slower growing, naturally healthier breeds to date, that trial run ended without changing anything across the company’s farms. Stewart-Brown said farmers loved raising the more active chickens, but argued that there “wasn’t much difference” in the chickens’ health and well-being compared to raising a standard, faster-growing breed. (Similarly, many independent farmers raising chickens on small farms choose standard breeds in pastured systems and say the chickens are healthy and active; it’s not a settled issue.)

Despite the ChickenTrack report classifying Perdue as “publicly committed to offering compliant BCC chicken,” Stewart-Brown said the company has no near-term plan to change its breed. The thing is: Corporate commitments are easy to make, and they’re easy to break.

And on the antibiotics issue, there are two ways of seeing how things have actually turned out so far. One is to conclude the larger industry will never be able to get routine drug use out of production until the entire system is overhauled, with slower-growing birds as an essential piece of the puzzle. “Our sense is that to truly solve the antibiotic problem, you have to both dramatically improve husbandry and improve genetics,” said deCoriolis.

On the other hand, advocates like Delattre look at Perdue, which has made smaller tweaks, and see a practical opportunity to solve at least one of the problems most pressing to public health.

“The fact that they’re still sticking with a no antibiotics policy . . . shows clearly that it can be done,” he said. “So why isn’t Tyson doing the same?”

The post What Happened to Antibiotic-Free Chicken? appeared first on Civil Eats.

The FDA Is Still Not Tracking How Farms Use Antibiotics

Lisa Held — Wed, 08 Nov 2023 09:00:53 +0000

When bacteria develop resistance to front-line antibiotics, health care professionals lose their ability to treat deadly infections, leading to more than 35,000 deaths annually in the U.S. and more than 1.2 million worldwide. For that reason, antibiotic resistance has been held up by the World Health Organization as one of the most pressing threats to global health.

Researchers see the potential overuse of those antibiotics in agriculture as a key driver of antibiotic resistance—but they’ve often struggled to access basic information about how many animals are receiving the drugs, for what purpose, and for how long.

Collecting that farm-level data is a critical missing piece in the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) five-year plan, launched in 2019, to improve “antimicrobial stewardship” in animal agriculture, advocates say. Now, the deadline is approaching. And while the agency has made other significant regulatory changes in the years before and since, the FDA is not regularly tracking or reporting how antibiotics are used on farms, nor does it have a plan in place to do so in the short term.

“The data is at the feed mills. If the agency really wanted this information, they could figure out how to get it.”

Instead, the agency funded a few small pilot projects that collected data in 2016 and 2017 and published one-time results in 2020. Then, in 2021, FDA commissioned an 18-month “stakeholder engagement” project run by a partner foundation to explore setting up a voluntary antibiotic use reporting system in collaboration with the animal agriculture industry.

Neither effort has proven very effective. According to multiple experts, however, FDA does have access to some important data that could be a game-changer if the agency chose to use it.

That’s because most antibiotics given to farm animals are mixed into their feed at feed mills, FDA-regulated facilities that are required to keep records on prescriptions and distribution. And although those records could begin to paint a picture of what antibiotic use on American farms looks like and help uncover ways to prevent overuse, FDA is simply not collecting them.

“The data is at the feed mills,” said Laura Rogers, deputy director of the Antibiotic Resistance Action Center at George Washington University. “If the agency really wanted this information, they could figure out how to get it.”

Data Sources

In an email, FDA spokesperson Veronika Pfaeffle emphasized that the agency “is committed to antimicrobial stewardship in veterinary settings,” and pointed to other steps it has taken on the issue.

For instance, since 2017, the agency has made at least three changes experts consider consequential: It outlawed the use of antibiotics solely to promote faster animal growth (although many of the same drugs now used for disease prevention also boost growth), gradually made veterinary prescriptions a requirement for all antibiotics also used in human medicine, and set new limits on how long drugs should be administered.

But efforts to gather basic data on how farms use antibiotics day to day—which Pfaeffle agreed “is important to help us understand what drives antimicrobial resistance in animal agriculture”—has lagged.

Every year, animal drug manufacturers are required to report sales data to the FDA, and the agency releases those numbers broken down by which animal species the drugs were sold for. After a large dip in 2016, when the FDA banned antibiotics used solely for growth promotion, sales in the pork and beef industries have gradually ticked back up. Chicken is the exception, as large swaths of the industry have eliminated medically important antibiotics entirely from their production based on consumer demand.

“Overall, the lack of creativity at FDA on this issue is so disappointing.”

When it reports on the overall quantity of antibiotics sold each year, the agency emphasizes that the sales numbers “are not indicative of how these antimicrobial drugs were actually used in animals.” In other words, the FDA tells the public that just because the drugs were sold, it can’t be assumed that they were administered to animals, because farmers could buy more than they end up needing and store or toss the rest.

That’s in contrast to how the data is reported in Europe, said David Wallinga, a physician who has been doing research and advocacy work on antibiotic resistance at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) for years. In Europe, it’s standard practice to use overall sales numbers and animal production numbers in calculations to estimate the volume of antibiotic use per animal.

Still, even if the FDA did start making those calculations, those numbers would only reveal the amount of antibiotics used per animal. Data that has more details on what the drugs are used for and for how long is universally understood to be of much higher value in preventing overuse. That’s what the feed mills have.

“The CDC [the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] has really been pushing on this point for the last several years and they’ve beefed up their efforts to track antibiotic use in hospitals and in clinics, figure out how much overuse is happening, and then take steps to address it,” Wallinga said. But CDC only has authority over human medicine, while FDA handles drugs given to animals. “That’s what’s missing on the animal side.”

At feed mills, when employees mix antibiotics into feed, they are required to hold onto the prescriptions for two years. Wallinga and others have long been lobbying the FDA to collect and share that data.

In her response to detailed questions from Civil Eats, the FDA’s Pfaeffle said that the agency does review some of those records during on-site inspections, but that it doesn’t collect them. She emphasized that the agency doesn’t believe collecting the feed directives would provide a clear or complete enough picture of antibiotic use, since distribution is also not the same as “use,” and that the agency would still need “to gather information on other dosage forms of antimicrobial drugs being used in food-producing animals (e.g., medicated drinking water, injectable, intramammary, other oral dosage forms).”

However, Laura Rogers at ARAC said that even if collecting the data would result in an incomplete picture, it would be a huge step forward. “Overall, the lack of creativity at FDA on this issue is so disappointing. If collecting the data from all the feed mills is too taxing, they could focus on three states: California for beef, Arkansas for chickens, and Iowa for swine . . . and analyze use,” she suggested. “It would not be the full picture, but it would be pretty good indicators of how and why the drugs are being used.”

Plus, the FDA’s own pilot studies on antibiotic use show that feed accounts for the majority of antibiotic use in the most important sectors. Based on 2016 and 2017 data from 22 cattle feedlots, nearly 80 percent of antibiotics were administered in feed. At the large hog facilities studied, that number was about 70 percent.

Steve Roach of the Food Animal Concerns Trust (FACT) and the public health-focused Keep Antibiotics Working coalition (KAW) has been working on the issue for 20 years and collaborated with Wallinga to push the FDA to collect feed mill records. Roach believes the agency is downplaying the value of the records and their potential to provide reliable estimates of how farmers are using antibiotics.

“I don’t believe that people are actually purchasing large amounts of feed and then just dumping it on the ground,” he said. “It’s really good data.”

Problems With a Voluntary Collection System

But the FDA believes it has a better plan: Partner with animal agriculture companies to get farmers to voluntarily provide data on how they’re using antibiotics. To that end, the agency commissioned the Reagan-Udall Foundation for the FDA, an independent nonprofit created by Congress to advise the agency and gather feedback from the many individuals and groups engaged in the issue to explore how that could happen.

Starting in January 2022, Reagan-Udall began the first fact-finding phase of the project. Public health representatives, including Wallinga at NRDC and Roach at FACT, were among the 30 stakeholder groups included in that process. But when the foundation released a report summing up the first phase, the advocates said they did not see any of the significant concerns they voiced reflected in the text.

Producers using antibiotics responsibly might be more likely to submit voluntary data, while those overusing might be motivated to opt out.

The project’s second phase is focused on designing the antibiotic use tracking system, and the Reagan-Udall team has shifted to meeting with industry groups, including the North American Meat Institute, the National Pork Producers Council, and the U.S. Poultry & Egg Association.

That shift was necessary, said Amar Bhat, the chief operating officer at Reagan-Udall, because his focus was on figuring out how to make the “public-private partnership” work. “For that, I needed to talk to those who would be contributing data,” he said. “It was about the mechanics.” In terms of whether the public health groups’ earlier concerns were considered, Bhat said, “I think we gave ample opportunity to them to share their views.”

One of the group’s biggest concerns, communicated in public comments submitted by KAW, was that it’s unlikely that enough producers would contribute data to a system that is entirely voluntary. And, they noted, the voluntary nature could hide overuse patterns rather than reveal them: Producers using antibiotics responsibly might be more likely to submit voluntary data, while those overusing might be motivated to opt out. “It will end up giving you a very distorted picture of how antibiotics are used on farms,” Roach said.

Bhat said Reagan-Udall didn’t consider other approaches to tracking antibiotic use data because the entire directive from the FDA was to evaluate how to create a voluntary system based on a public-private partnership. His team did look at the systems that agencies in California and Maryland—where state laws in recent years have mandated antibiotic use reporting—have set up as a point of comparison. “It was useful to know what they’re doing—what they’re succeeding at doing and what the gaps are,” he said.

For example, in 2022, the Maryland Department of Agriculture (MDA) sent notices to over 1,000 veterinarians asking them to submit information on antibiotics they prescribed that year. A total of seven submitted data.

That number may not be as minuscule as it seems, though, said Nancy Jo Chapman, who was assistant state veterinarian at the MDA when the antibiotic use law passed and helped implement the law’s provisions. For one, veterinarians are only asked to report if they prescribe antibiotics for the largest farms. In Maryland, there are very few cattle or pig operations that meet those size requirements.

And yet, even with only seven veterinarians responding, the report provides useful annual info that the federal government doesn’t currently collect. For example, veterinarians prescribed more chlortetracycline than any other medically important antibiotic in 2022. They wrote scripts for about 6,000 pounds, for intestinal infections in 1,000 cattle.

Still, in an email, MDA director of communications Jessica Hackett said that the low response rate was also “because the submission of the information from veterinarians is voluntary.”

Chapman agreed it had to be a factor. “I love my veterinarians, but I can’t say they’re all reporting, and there’s no enforcement,” she said, which she considers a good thing because she didn’t like the idea of policing veterinarians. In the end, she said, “it’s just not reliable data,” but added, “it would be better to get it from the feed mill. That’s the real number.”

The post The FDA Is Still Not Tracking How Farms Use Antibiotics appeared first on Civil Eats.

The Field Report: FDA Data Shows a Worrisome Increase in Antibiotic Use in Animal Agriculture

Lisa Held — Tue, 13 Dec 2022 09:00:03 +0000

Seven years after the federal government created a National Action Plan to fight antibiotic resistance, sales of medically important antibiotics in animal agriculture are still trending in the wrong direction.

Rather than a steady decline year over year, U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) data released yesterday shows that while overall antibiotic sales for livestock decreased about 1 percent across the board in 2021 compared to 2020, significant increases occurred in the systems that produce Americans’ favorite meats.

Globally, the World Health Organization (WHO) has pointed to antibiotic resistance as one of the biggest existing threats to public health and food security, and in the U.S., antibiotic-resistant bacteria cause about 2.8 million infections and 35,000 deaths annually. Animal agriculture is key to addressing the problem, since the industry uses far more antibiotics than human healthcare does.

“It’s just another nail in the coffin of a failed FDA approach to stewardship of antibiotics in the livestock sector,” said David Wallinga, a senior health officer at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) who has been closely tracking the issue for years. “Every data point underscores how clearly it has failed, especially since 2017.”

After a peak in 2016, regulatory changes and a consumer-driven shift away from the use of medically important antibiotics in chicken production led to a 28 percent drop in livestock antibiotic sales overall, but sales in cattle and pork have mostly stayed steady or increased slightly since (aside from a slight drop between 2019 and 2020). Somewhat surprisingly, this year’s data shows antibiotic sales for use in chicken shot up 12 percent, while sales for cattle were up 1 percent and sales for pork were up 3 percent.

But Wallinga said chicken is not the issue, given the differences in volume. For example, nearly 2.5 million kilograms (kg) of antibiotics were sold for use in cattle, compared to about 158,000 kg for chicken. And the bigger uptick in chicken only resulted in an increase in 17,000 kg, compared to an increase of 78,000 kg in pork. Plus, he said, the problem is rooted in the overall volume.

“If you’re looking across food production as a whole, that’s what really matters,” he said. “Overall numbers are what drive selection for resistant bacteria.”

In the past, industry officials have attributed increases in sales data to increases in the number and size of animals produced. But data from 2021 shows production of both pork and chicken actually went down in 2021 compared to the previous year, suggesting that more antibiotics were sold for use in fewer animals.

That squares with an NRDC issue brief published last month. In it, Wallinga and his team found that in 2020, the U.S. rate of antibiotic use was nearly twice as high as the overall rate reported in the European Union. And between 2017 and 2020, intensity of use went up in cattle, pig, and turkeys. Only in chicken did it go down.

Europe has also been more successful in reducing overall antibiotic use in animal agriculture, achieving a nearly 43 percent decline in overall sales between 2011 and 2020, compared to 27 percent in the U.S. To follow Europe’s lead, NRDC researchers say that the U.S. should begin more closely tracking antibiotic use on farms and set ambitious, measurable targets to reduce use. And advocates have long pushed for a policy change that would ban the routine use of medically important antibiotics for disease prevention in healthy animals, arguing that use should be restricted to disease treatment as it is in most cases in human medicine.

At the end of the day, Wallinga said another development last week points to the fact that the agency is dragging its feet and doesn’t want to “get into these issues.” The Reagan-Udall Foundation released its outside evaluation of the FDA’s food programs, which FDA Commissioner Robert Califf commissioned in July. But despite urging from NRDC and other groups, the evaluation did not include assessing the division within the FDA tasked with monitoring antibiotic use in livestock. “These are food animals, but somehow they’re not part of the food supply?” he asked.

Grading the FDA (on other fronts). In that report on FDA’s food programs, the expert panel concluded that issues with culture, structure, and a lack of adequate resources seriously hinder “the ability of the Human Foods Program to carry out its mission efficiently and effectively.” FDA Commissioner Califf commissioned the report after the agency was criticized for failing to prevent and efficiently address the infant formula crisis, which killed two infants and has resulted in ongoing shortages that affected millions of families. An April Politico investigation also found that the agency has been failing to maintain food safety and nutrition standards due to dysfunction within and inattention to the food side of its operations.

While the evaluation was presented as an outside audit, the Reagan-Udall Foundation is set up as independent organization but is closely linked to and partially funded by the FDA and receives funding from many of the country’s largest food, formula, and pharmaceutical companies, including Nestlé USA, Kellogg, and Pfizer.

To fix the problems identified in the report, the panel recommended multiple options to change the agency’s structure, from creating an entirely different agency for food separate from drugs, to streamlining divisions that currently handle different aspects of the food program, to appointing a new leader to run the entire food program. It also provided a list of specific ways that Congress could expand FDA’s authorities, including requiring companies to notify the agency when food shortages are anticipated, conducting a routine assessment of ingredients that qualify for the controversial GRAS (generally recognized as safe) designation, and monitoring the use and impacts of the term “healthy” on food labels.

Advocacy groups that have long pushed for changes to how FDA regulates food applauded the report’s release as an important first step and urged the agency to respond with fast action. “We need strengthened leadership and accountability at the FDA to implement a culture of prevention, respond more quickly to problems as they arise, and take timely action on proposed food safety rules and initiatives,” said Brian Ronholm, Consumer Reports’ director of food policy, in a press release.

Climate-Smart Commodities, Part 2. On Monday, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack visited Tuskegee University in Alabama to announce the second round of awards in the USDA’s Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities program. While the first investments announced in September were all large projects awarded $5 to $100 million each for a total of $2.8 billion, the second batch consisted of 71 projects with funding ranging from $250,000 up to $5 million each, for a total of $325 million in funding.

Vilsack described the follow-up as serving small-sized family farms and historically underserved producers, to “ensure full participation in this historic opportunity to transform American agriculture.” Projects highlighted at the event included a Texas initiative to help Hispanic farmers adopt agrivoltaic systems, a tribal project focused on buffalo production, and a Tuskegee-led effort to help small, underserved Southern farms implement agroforestry practices. In total, Vilsack said the climate-smart commodities program now includes 141 projects totaling $3.1 billion. The agency estimates 60,000 farmers will be involved and that the projects could lead to “60 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent reduced,” although how they came to that estimate is unclear.

The announcement came on the heels of an analysis posted by researchers at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) that pointed to a lack of transparency associated with the first round of investments. Since those larger projects each had multiple partners, UCS researchers said it will be impossible to tell who is actually receiving the allocated taxpayer dollars. That information is critical, they said, especially given the fact that many of the partners are wealthy corporations, including Coca-Cola, JBS, and Tyson. The researchers also said the USDA has not provided enough information on how it is defining “climate-smart,” the specific practices employed in each project, or how the agency will measure whether the projects result in real reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Some of UCS’ criticisms echoed those of incoming House Agriculture Committee Chair Glenn “GT” Thompson, Jr. (R-Pennsylvania), who has demanded more information from the USDA as to how the money is being spent.

Farm State Shake-Up. Another recent development has implications for farm-and-climate policy. For the past 50 years, the lead-up to presidential elections has started with the Iowa caucuses. But last week, the Democratic National Committee voted to support a Biden administration plan to kick off the party’s 2024 nomination process in South Carolina. While Republicans will still start their process in the Midwest farm state, many political insiders reacted to the news by commenting on how the change might impact federal agricultural policies, since Iowa’s political powerbrokers will likely now hold less sway.

Iowa voices have been particularly key in pushing for federal support for ethanol, despite growing evidence that suggests the biofuel’s climate impacts may be equal to or greater than fossil fuels. “We’ve enjoyed the opportunity to have the candidates here and help them get educated about agriculture and ethanol,” Monte Shaw, executive director of the Iowa Renewable Fuels Association, told the Wall Street Journal. (Of course, Iowa legislators are not the only ones pushing ethanol: Last Thursday, Representatives from Minnesota and Nebraska introduced a House bill that would boost ethanol sales.) If President Biden decides to run for a second term, the move wouldn’t mean much this year but would affect future election cycles.

Funding for Free Meals. At the state level, the growing fight to secure free meals for all public school students got a major boost last week with an infusion of cash from Tusk Philanthropies’ Solving Hunger. The nonprofit will fund public campaigns intended to drive state lawmakers in New York, Connecticut, Vermont, and North Carolina to make universal school meals permanent. Although free school meals provided at the federal level during the pandemic ended in September, the USDA’s Economic Research Service released data showing that since last March, the percentage of schools participating in federal meal programs fell from 94 percent to 88 percent. The share of schools reporting more than half of students were eating school meals dropped more significantly, from 84 percent to 69 percent.

While a direct line between the end of universal school meals and the decline in numbers is impossible to draw, the challenges that schools cited as preventing higher participation—including getting parents to complete applications for free and reduced meals—suggest a relationship. With action on universal school meals stalled in Washington, many advocates have shifted their energy to states.

The post The Field Report: FDA Data Shows a Worrisome Increase in Antibiotic Use in Animal Agriculture appeared first on Civil Eats.

Ads for Livestock Antibiotics Fly in the Face of FDA Rules. Will the Agency Step In?

Lisa Held — Tue, 25 Jan 2022 09:00:11 +0000

Antibiotic resistance—the development and spread of “superbugs” that can’t be treated with current medicines—is such a critical issue, public health experts say it represents “the next global pandemic.” They are also concerned that the current pandemic could undo some of the progress on the issue that the U.S. has already made. And since sales of medically important antibiotics to livestock producers are nearly double the sales of those used in human medicine, curbing overuse in agriculture is essential to reining in the rise of superbugs.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is responsible for regulating the use of antibiotics in animals, and for years, advocacy organizations have called the agency out for moving too slowly to address overuse.

Now, they say the agency is allowing a drug company to openly flout rules intended to protect public health in its marketing material. And they argue it’s just one example of multiple loopholes that allow producers to feed antibiotics to animals for dangerous lengths of time.

“It looks like the FDA is unwilling to tell this company to stop marketing [their] drug to be used off-label.”

In May 2021, the Keep Antibiotics Working (KAW) Coalition sent a letter to the FDA outlining how Zoetis—a global company that makes medicines for livestock—encourages producers to feed Aureomycin to cattle in repeated five-day “pulses” to prevent Bovine Respiratory Disease (BRD), which likely violates FDA rules for the use of chlortetracycline, a medically important antibiotic that is the key ingredient in Zoetis’ product Aureomycin.

Eight months later, nothing has changed.

“It looks like the FDA is unwilling to tell this company to stop marketing [their] drug to be used off-label,” said Steven Roach, KAW’s senior analyst and the Safe and Healthy Food Program Director at Food Animal Concerns Trust (FACT). “They set that ‘do not use for more than five days’ for a purpose, and if the company can ignore that, it just undermines any efforts at FDA to control how these drugs are used.”

BRD is a condition that commonly affects cattle when they arrive at feedlots, when the animals are under stress and confinement accelerates the spread of pathogens. “Almost all of our cattle, we pulse with Aureomycin,” ruminant nutritionist Tom Peters says in a video on “starting cattle” posted on the company’s main webpage for feed additives. On another Zoetis website dedicated to BRD, the company promotes putting the drug in feed in five-day pulses and offers the example of a producer who always does two pulses, and if needed, “will do a third five-day pulse.”

FDA regulations only allow chlortetracycline to be fed to cattle for up to five days. Advocates say producers are getting around the limitation by pausing for a day or two and then starting a second “pulse,” but that this off-label protocol still violates the limitation’s intention.

“Less use is always better,” said Matt Wellington, the director of public health campaigns at the national advocacy group U.S. PIRG. And even if a producer is obtaining a new prescription to restart the feeding each time, “Pulse feeding sounds like just another way to get around appropriate antibiotic use,” he said.

Zoetis declined to comment for this article.

Over the past five years, the FDA has taken several steps to reduce the overuse of antibiotics important to human medicine in animal agriculture, including requiring veterinarian oversight of all medically important antibiotics given to animals, banning their use solely for the purpose of faster growth, and working toward setting duration limits for each drug. But the use of medically important antibiotics for disease prevention is still routine and widespread in beef and pork production, and this isn’t the first time a drug company has been accused of marketing agricultural practices that go against the agency’s regulations.

In 2015, the FDA sent a warning letter to a Zoetis competitor, Elanco, because its marketing materials encouraged pork producers to give healthy pigs a combination of two drugs to fatten them up, rather than to treat disease.

This time, Roach said the FDA met with KAW to discuss the group’s concerns but agency representatives would not discuss whether they planned to contact Zoetis. As of this writing, the company’s marketing materials haven’t changed.

When asked whether the FDA had taken any action related to the situation, a spokesperson merely said, “The FDA acknowledges Keep Antibiotics Working Coalition’s positions as articulated in its letter.” The spokesperson also shared the agency’s own guidance on the practice of “pulsing” antibiotics in feed, which essentially says the practice would qualify as “an illegal extra-label use” if a veterinarian authorized more than one five-day course off the bat. But if a farmer went back to the veterinarian after a five-day course of the drug and got a new authorization for a second course, it would be legal.

Zoetis’ marketing suggests to farmers that they should be thinking about additional “pulses” from the get-go, but it’s unclear how veterinarians are authorizing the process.

Does the Length of Use of an Antibiotic Matter?

While farmers feeding their animals one drug for an extra five days may not be a huge issue on its own, the World Health Organization (WHO) identifies antibiotic resistance as “one of the biggest threats to global health” today. A 2019 Centers for Disease Control (CDC) report found antibiotic-resistant bacteria cause 2.8 million infections and 35,000 deaths annually in the U.S, and other estimates are much higher. A study published just this month found that in 2019, antimicrobial resistance played a part in 4.95 million deaths globally and directly caused 1.27 million of those deaths.

If we want to prevent those numbers from rising, the durations that antibiotics are administered for matter, said Sameer Patel, a pediatric infectious disease physician and Director of Antimicrobial Stewardship at the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago. “In human medicine, there is a huge push to essentially change our practice for a lot of conditions to use the shortest effective therapy to treat any infectious condition,” he said.

In the past, there was an accepted idea that antibiotics should be given for long periods of time to kill every bug and therefore eliminate the chance of a surviving bug developing resistance, he explained. And while that reasoning may still apply in certain cases, in the overwhelming majority of situations, physicians have learned that the shorter the duration, the better. This is because when antibiotics are given for longer, every organism in the body is exposed to the antibiotic, whether it’s the intended target or not, potentially creating “selective pressure,” which eliminates targeted bacteria but may give an advantage to non-targeted bacteria that already have resistance.

“It’s like evolution sped up,” Patel said. “They’ll be more likely to proliferate in the body and spread to other people. So the idea of the short duration is to remove that selective pressure as much as possible.”

The concept applies to both humans and livestock, since bacteria from animals can be passed to people through the air, water, and meat.

Chlortetracycline belongs to a class of antibiotics called tetracyclines that the WHO considers “highly important.” They’re commonly used in the treatment of Lyme disease in the U.S., and in other countries to treat respiratory infections, Patel said. While they’re not as critical as cephalosporins or penicillins, he explained, they are becoming more important in the treatment of infections caused by bacteria that have developed resistance to more common drugs.

“Essentially, they’re important back-up drugs for very resistant infections,” he said. “Having it as an option for those conditions when we need it is still very important.”

Setting and Enforcing Limits on Antibiotic Use

The FDA spokesperson said that “evaluating the potential for an antimicrobial drug to impact antimicrobial resistance in humans” is part of the process it undertakes to determine the appropriate amount of time each drug should be given to animals.

While the agency already determined Aureomycin should be fed to cattle for a maximum of five days, 30 percent of the medically important antibiotics currently used in agriculture have no “defined duration of use” or “duration limit.” In its current plan to combat the development of resistant bacteria, however, the agency has laid out a plan to set durations for the drugs that don’t currently have them.

For example, multiple versions of tylosin—a critically important antibiotic WHO categorizes as “highest priority” and which is sold by different companies—lack duration limits. Feedlot operators use it to prevent liver abscesses in cattle, and one study that evaluated antibiotic use on 22 feedlots between 2016 and 2017 found producers put tylosin in cattle feed for an average of 134 days at a time.

“We’ll keep having to play whack-a-mole . . . until the FDA addresses the root of it—overusing our life-saving medicines to prevent disease brought on by industrial farming conditions.”

Given numbers like that, public health advocates say the agency is moving way too slow. The FDA first announced it would work on “appropriately targeted durations” in 2016. In 2021, the agency published a “concept paper” that would be followed by “draft guidance.” According to its timeline, duration limits wouldn’t be completed until at least 2027. The agency said it would be “premature to speculate on a specific timeline for issuing the draft guidance,” noting officials are currently going through 38,000 comments.

“[Duration limits were] part of their five-year plan to address antibiotic resistance that they put out in 2018, and we still don’t have any significant progress to solve this problem,” Wellington said.

However, Roach at FACT says the Zoetis’ marketing of Aureomycin suggests that setting defined limits isn’t enough. The agency also has to have a system to enforce them, he adds.

In a response to a question about regulation, the FDA spokesperson deferred to “veterinary oversight” as adequate.

“We also need stronger regulation around veterinarians having to reevaluate any continued use,” Wellington said, which could address Aureomycin’s “pulse feeding” messaging.

And at the end of the day, Wellington sees Zoetis’ marketing as one of many small examples of how the federal regulatory system is only scratching the surface of regulating antibiotic use in animal agriculture rather than implementing larger systemic changes that would reduce the need for preventive antibiotics.

“Drug manufacturers and meat producers use semantics to bend [the rules around antibiotic use, and] the pulse feeding of chlortetracycline is another example of this,” he said. “We’ll keep having to play whack-a-mole . . . until the FDA addresses the root of it—overusing our life-saving medicines to prevent disease brought on by industrial farming conditions.”

The post Ads for Livestock Antibiotics Fly in the Face of FDA Rules. Will the Agency Step In? appeared first on Civil Eats.

Could a Rapid Test For Antibiotics Bring Transparency to the Meat Supply Chain?

Lisa Held — Tue, 23 Nov 2021 09:00:16 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Story Behind the Tech

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FoodID in the Future

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Twilight Greenaway contributed reporting.

The post Could a Rapid Test For Antibiotics Bring Transparency to the Meat Supply Chain? appeared first on Civil Eats.

Is the U.S. Doing Enough to Address the Meat Industry’s Role in Antibiotic Resistance?

Lisa Held — Tue, 27 Apr 2021 08:00:00 +0000

In December, as COVID-19 cases were spiking again, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released its annual report on the volume of “medically important” antibiotics sold for use in animal agriculture. Despite the distraction of a pandemic, experts and advocates who track a different public health threat—antibiotic resistance—took note. Although ag sales of antibiotics had been steadily dropping since a peak in 2015, the report showed that for the second year in a row, the trend had reversed. Overall sales were ticking up, driven by the pork and beef industries.

“I wasn’t surprised, but I was disappointed,” said Lena Brook, the director of food campaigns at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). “The beef and pork sectors have been the highest users since the FDA started releasing species-level data . . . and we haven’t seen any new commitments [to reducing use] from producers in either of those sectors.”

In response, in January, a coalition of organizations including the NRDC issued a call for “urgent action” from the incoming Biden administration, “to act on the antibiotic resistance crisis as swiftly as it will surely act on the COVID-19 crisis” by setting a national target to reduce medically important antibiotic use in livestock and establishing a system to track it.

The call turns up the flame on an issue that’s been simmering for years, with health experts and agencies warning that the overuse of antibiotics in agriculture is a leading cause of resistant bacteria. (For the purposes of this story, all references to “antibiotics” are to “medically important antibiotics” only.)

The danger is obvious: If antibiotic-resistant bacteria infects humans more often, once-minor health issues could become life-threatening. The World Health Organization (WHO) identifies antibiotic resistance as “one of the biggest threats to global health” today, and a 2019 Centers for Disease Control (CDC) report found antibiotic-resistant bacteria cause 2.8 million infections and 35,000 deaths annually in the U.S. The CDC’s numbers did show an 18 percent decrease in deaths over the six years since its initial 2013 report, as a result of actions that have been taken to curb overuse in both healthcare and agriculture. But other estimates of deaths attributable to antibiotic-resistant bacteria are much higher.

A 2015 National Action Plan to combat antibiotic resistance produced by the Obama White House identified curbing “misuse and overuse” of antibiotics in food production as a primary goal, and policies since have strengthened veterinary oversight and outlawed the use of antibiotics strictly for growth promotion. But agencies have not banned their use for disease prevention, so the majority of pork and beef producers continue to administer them to all of their animals regularly in food and water. “It just so happened that many of the medically important antibiotics that were approved for growth promotion are still approved for prevention in very much the same way, on a routine basis,” said Matthew Wellington, public health campaigns director for U.S. PIRG, a public interest advocacy group. “It’s basically like plugging one leak in a very leaky tub.”

To be clear, the FDA’s data shows sales of medically important antibiotics for use in animal agriculture have dropped 25 percent overall since 2010. But NRDC calculates that 65 percent of the antibiotics sold in the U.S. are still for use in animal agriculture. And while tracking has been vastly improved in healthcare, data on how livestock producers are using antibiotics is spotty and incomplete.

Industry representatives say meat producers only use antibiotics strategically for animal health and that overuse is a problem manufactured by anti-meat advocates. But the slight uptick in the last two years mirrors trends seen in European countries that banned growth promotion earlier, and other data clearly shows routine use in feed and water is still the norm in pork and beef production. According to public health experts, any widespread, routine antibiotic use presents a public health threat, and current levels are not sustainable. “The pace of change is too slow given how scary the antibiotic resistance health threat is,” Brook said. “It’s another global health pandemic that we’re living through . . . it’s just unfolding at a much slower pace than the tsunami that hit us with COVID.”

Antibiotic Use in Pork and Beef Production

Accurate, consistent data on medically important antibiotic use in animal agriculture does not exist, so the only option is to piece together numbers that add up to a partial picture. The FDA tracks sales data, and what we know is that overall sales rose between 2010 and 2015 and then dropped considerably in 2016 and 2017. Experts attribute that change to a confluence of two factors: a massive reduction in antibiotic use in poultry and the FDA’s prohibition of antibiotics used solely for growth promotion overall, which was in the works in collaboration with industry throughout 2016. While numbers did tick up in 2018 and 2019—3 percent compared to 2018 and 11 percent compared to 2017—they are still significantly below 2010 levels.

The sales increases were primarily caused by a 9 percent increase in pork production and a 1 percent increase in beef production. During that time, sales to the poultry industry continued to fall drastically, as companies responded to consumer demand for antibiotic-free chicken. In 2019, industry data showed nearly 60 percent of chickens raised for meat were raised without antibiotics.

And since the FDA started collecting species-specific data in 2016, antibiotic sales for cattle and pigs have dropped by 30 and 18 percent, respectively. In an email response to Civil Eats, Anne Norris, a representative from the FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine, said the more recent increase is “not necessarily noteworthy on its own,” in the context of the larger downward trends, and that it’s the third lowest number on record, after 2017 and 2018. “FDA’s actions over the last several years . . . have fundamentally changed the way animal producers obtain and use medically important antimicrobials in food-producing animals,” Norris said.

Lance Price, a professor at George Washington University, has been studying antibiotic resistance since 2003 and co-founded the Antibiotic Resistance Action Center. He said that, over the last several decades, the FDA has “made steady, incremental progress in terms of limiting which drugs can be used in animal production in an attempt to control resistant infections in people,” such as drastically limiting the use of cephalosporins, drugs critical to treating pneumonia, strep throat, and other common infections, in 2012.

On the industry side, Liz Wagstrom, chief veterinarian for the National Pork Producers Council (NPPC) also pointed to the longer-term decreases in pork since the “high point of 2015” and attributed the recent uptick to overall industry growth. “From 2018 to 2019, the number of hogs marketed in the United States grew by 4.5 percent and weights also increased,” Wagstrom said.

Neither the North American Meat Institute nor the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association agreed to comment for this article.

Wagstrom pointed to the fact that the FDA data only shows sales estimates, but producers are not required to track actual use. The FDA has worked with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) on limited studies using voluntary data. The USDA chose a sampling of cattle feedlots and hog farms and conducted surveys on those operations’ antibiotic use during 2016, and results from these two different projects provide some insights, although they were completed before the rules prohibiting use for growth promotion went into effect.

Overall, the reports show widespread routine antibiotic use in feed and and/or water. In its report on cattle, the agency found 56 percent of feedlots administered medically important antibiotics in feed; among large feedlots, 78 percent did. Drugs were used primarily for growth promotion, respiratory disease, and liver abscesses (which form because cattle are not meant to eat grain). The most commonly used drugs were tetracyclines, characterized as highly important for human medicine by WHO, and tylosin, which is in a class deemed critically important. The USDA also found that 41 percent of the feedlots that reported using antibiotics in feed never recorded the use. In its survey of pork production, the USDA found 94 percent of farms gave their pigs medically important antibiotics in their feed and/or water. Tetracyclines, penicillin, and other drugs were most often administered for growth promotion, respiratory disease, and/or diarrhea. In the pork industry, the agency found record-keeping was much better.

Separate FDA studies, published last year as a package of research looking at antibiotic use in agriculture, looked at 2016 and 2017 records from feedlots and large hog operations and found similar trends. Nearly all of the drugs were given in food and water, suggesting that treating individual sick animals accounts for a tiny fraction of use.

The NPPC disputes that characterization. “Medically important antibiotics are used when animals are sick or known to be at risk of disease outbreaks. This is done under the direction of veterinarians after careful consideration of the clinical history of farms and results of diagnostic workups,” Wagstrom said. “This is not a routine use but rather, when needed, antibiotics are utilized strategically to protect animal health and welfare to allow us to send healthy animals to market.”

Advocates say data like this—together with examples from other countries that have effectively ended routine preventative use in similar industrial systems—shows that producers are using antibiotics to address flaws in the system rather than fixing the system, which would cost more up front. They say that if cattle feed is causing widespread liver abscesses, for example, the feed should be changed rather than adding antibiotics to it. If pigs get infections because of exposure to waste in barns, the management style should be changed (to give animals more space or to add bedding to the barns, for example) rather than putting antibiotics in their water.

Finally, they point to the fact that the numbers show that the ban on antibiotics for growth promotion has not led to more responsible, targeted use of important drugs because of the prevention loophole.

“If your business model is to add low doses of antibiotics to animal feed to increase feed efficiency—and maybe also to fight off infections, but mostly to increase feed efficiency—and the prescriptions on the bag for preventing disease and for promoting growth are exactly the same for a third of the drugs, then you just change what you call it,” Price said.

Why Does Antibiotic Use in Barns and Feedlots Matter?

Like viruses, bacteria have the ability to mutate. As more antibiotics are used, especially for long periods of time in high volumes in animals, they can mutate to resist those antibiotics. That new bacteria, now resistant to the antibiotic, can then be passed to humans—in the meat itself, through workers on farms, or through the environment, when manure is spread on fields or scattered along highways as animals are trucked to slaughter.

Between 2005 and 2008, Bob Martin, the food system policy director at Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future, directed the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production, a comprehensive, independent assessment of the meat industry’s impacts on the environment, public health, and more. In addition to zoonotic viruses, the top veterinary experts and physicians involved in the commission identified antibiotic resistance as one of the biggest public health threats posed by industrial agriculture.

The commission was not concerned with targeted antibiotics given to sick animals, a practice most experts agree is responsible, just as it is in humans. They were concerned with “subtherapeutic” doses that are given to animals on a regular basis to prevent illness and promote growth. “The logical conclusion we reached was that this low-level daily use [of antibiotics] in farm animal production in these large operations was the main driver of antibiotic resistance in the country, and that there was evidence of it . . . causing resistant infections in people,” Martin said.

Methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), for example, can cause staph infections that are difficult to treat and is classified as a “serious threat” to human health by the CDC. In 2017, it caused an estimated 323,700 hospitalizations and 10,600 deaths. Many studies have found that pigs and pig farmers in industrial systems carry MRSA, but the prevalence varies considerably from study to study, and workers often carry the bacteria without falling ill. A 2016 analysis found multidrug-resistant staph bacteria in surface water near fields sprayed with waste from industrial hog farms in North Carolina; a March 2021 study that examined the same region found evidence of multidrug-resistant strains spreading between pigs, farmworkers, and residents there. Another study published in JAMA in 2013 looked at patients in a Pennsylvania health care system and found “proximity to swine manure application to crop fields and livestock operations each was associated with MRSA and skin and soft-tissue infection.”

The bacteria associated with urinary tract infections (UTIs) have also become increasingly resistant to antibiotics, and one 2018 study published by the American Society of Microbiology found that strains of E. coli that were causing UTIs in people matched those found in commercial poultry flocks. Based on the results, the lead researcher said “we can more confidently say that the E. coli went from poultry to people and not vice versa,” as a result of individuals eating contaminated meat.

Regulation and Policy Fixes

The 2017 rule change that ended the routine use of medically important antibiotics exclusively for growth promotion and moved other uses under veterinary oversight was the most significant action the FDA has taken to address animal agriculture’s contribution to antibiotic resistance to date. The issue, Price and others said, is that the rule did not go as far as banning the routine use for prevention (as opposed to treatment) and many of the drugs used in the two cases are the same.

Price pointed to one particular chart in the December FDA report to support the assertion that many producers likely continued using the same antibiotics but began characterizing the use as disease prevention only. In 2017, when the sales of drugs for growth promotion officially disappeared, the sales of drugs for “therapeutic indications only” doubled.

“There is an [overall] decrease, so we’ll give them credit for that,” he said. “But that jump in that purple line is, I think, just a business decision to continue doing what they were doing.” (NPPC interprets the graph as showing the portion of producers that were solely administering for growth promotion ended, but those that were also using antibiotics for both purposes—growth promotion and disease prevention—continued using them for prevention.)

Lena Brook and her NRDC colleague David Wallinga, the author of a 2020 NRDC report on antibiotic use in beef production, said it was telling that countries that had followed an earlier policy arc followed a similar path in terms of sales trends. When the Netherlands banned the use of medically important antibiotics for growth promotion, sales dipped but then slightly increased in subsequent years. But when the government then also banned routine use for disease prevention, sales were cut in half over the next four years.

Because the Netherlands and Denmark both have large industrial pork industries and are now operating with medically important antibiotics approved only for treatment, Wallinga said they provide illustrative examples for what is possible in the U.S.

“There is no reason to think that a lot of the best practices that they have come up with couldn’t be replicated here. The FDA and the U.S. industries like to say differently, but I just don’t think they have a leg to stand on from a scientific standpoint,” said Wallinga. But, he adds, “these enormously powerful companies would have to [stop] raising animals in ways that were designed for maximum economic output and not designed to optimize the health of the animals or to avoid antibiotic use.”

Wallinga and several others said that while there are still many European countries using medically important antibiotics in animal agriculture at high rates, the E.U. has made more progress in reducing use overall. (According to NRDC numbers, for example, beef producers in the Netherlands use an estimated 50 mg of antibiotics per kg of livestock, compared to 162 mg in the U.S. Pork producers in the U.K. use 183 mg per kg of pig vs. 338 kg in the U.S.) And next year, a new E.U. law completely prohibiting the routine use of medically important antibiotics for prevention will go into effect.

Price says a similar ban on preventative use should be top priority in the U.S. too. But that’s unlikely to happen anytime soon. Instead, the Antibiotics Off the Menu Coalition is calling for more modest—but still lofty—goals: the establishment of a true tracking system that accounts for all use at the farm level and a quantitative federal goal to reduce medically important antibiotic use in animal agriculture by 50 percent by the end of 2023.

In the meantime, U.S. PIRG and other groups are also working to push the FDA toward requiring drug companies to reduce the legal window when antibiotics can used in livestock.

“We know that typically, less is better,” Wellington said. Currently, there are 89 approved drugs that can be given to animals continuously, without time limitation. The FDA has started the process of establishing duration limits and is accepting comments on a draft of a potential framework for doing so until June 11. But many of the proposed changes give companies broad discretion and would not go into effect for six years or more. “The concept paper is incredibly disappointing,” he said. “We’re asking for a much quicker timeline and to have it be focused on real duration limits that we know will help curb antibiotic resistance.”

States are also moving forward with enforcing stricter laws within their borders. California’s law that eliminated low-dose use of medically important antibiotics for prevention and required veterinary oversight for all therapeutic uses went into effect in 2017. Maryland passed a similar law in 2017, and it was updated in 2019 to ensure that routine preventative use would be eliminated. Its Department of Agriculture is now collecting and reporting real data on farm-level antibiotic use in an unprecedented way.

In addition to the Netherlands and Denmark, these states could serve as proving grounds for what the next level of reduction would mean for producers and the meat industry. “People are doing it all around the world. The models exist. It’s just that our current model of production is not conducive to it,” Price said. “But if by design your system makes the animals sick, you should probably change the system.”

The post Is the U.S. Doing Enough to Address the Meat Industry’s Role in Antibiotic Resistance? appeared first on Civil Eats.

Can Cover Crops Save Florida’s Citrus?

Nano Riley — Wed, 22 Jan 2020 09:00:38 +0000

For the last couple of decades, a tiny insect called the Asian citrus psyllid has fed on the stems and leaves of the orange trees in Florida, infecting them with bacteria that cause a lethal disease called citrus greening. The bacterial disease, huanglongbing (HLB), originated in China and has destroyed 90 percent of the state’s groves, devastating its $9 billion citrus industry.

After years of seeking remedies—everything from antibiotics to GMOs to psyllid-sniffing dogs—with little success, Florida’s embattled citrus growers have discovered a new tool, thanks to the work of researchers at the University of Florida: planting cover crops amidst the orange groves. These crops, which can include legumes, brassicas, or clovers, are not grown for commerce, but instead to improve soil by adding nutrients, helping with water retention, deterring weeds and certain pests, and often attracting beneficial insects.

In the case of Florida citrus, greening affects the soil microbial community and nutrient uptake, decreasing many soil microbes important for the nitrogen cycling necessary for plants’ survival. When the psyllid attacks the trees’ roots, they can no longer absorb the water and nutrients the trees need to thrive.

Juanita Popenoe, agricultural extension agent for commercial fruit production at the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agriculture Science (UF/IFAS), is working with a few Florida growers who are using cover crops to combat citrus greening. She and her colleagues at UF/IFAS are cautiously optimistic.

“Cover crops show remarkable promise,” Popenoe says. “Right now, there’s not enough data available to recommend [cover crops] as a viable remedy for citrus greening, but it looks good.” If trees are healthy, they can still produce good fruit even if they have HLB, she added.

Danielle Treadwell agrees. A UF/IFAS advisor, Treadwell has done landmark studies on cover crops, testing a variety of these plants for use with citrus. Treadwell said cover crops work with other crops in the Corn Belt to conserve water and prevent soil loss.

“Cover crops are near and dear to my heart,” says Treadwell. “They’ve been a thing in the Midwest for a while, but we need more data to set policy for citrus growers.”

Although all these trees have greening, cover crops keep the root systems healthy enough to hold a heavy and good quality crop. (Photo by Juanita Popenoe)

Especially when used in concert with conservation tillage—low-till or no-till methods—cover crops improve soil, she says, “because a partial crop remains, causing less soil disturbance.” Remaining biomass contributes organic material and suppresses weeds, offering farmers considerable savings, she says. However, “farmers change [practices] at a cost,” Treadwell adds, “so we must create programs that county agricultural agents can easily implement.”

Success with Cover Crops for Tree Recovery

Ed James isn’t waiting. One of a few citrus growers who have already adopted cover crops, James has no doubts about their efficacy improving the health of his trees. In fact, he’s become the go-to expert on their selection and use in Florida citrus and regularly shares his knowledge with others. In November, he hosted a UF/IFAS gathering at his J&R Groves in Leesburg, Florida, to show his results improving soil with cover crops.

James has been in the citrus business since he landed his first job at a packinghouse in ninth grade. He studied citrus at Florida Southern College, and for years followed conventional farming methods, using commercial fertilizers and pesticides. Like the other citrus growers, HLB nearly put him out of business.

“I was ready to give up, switch to other crops,” James says. “I pushed over most of my trees, and decided to plant cover crops to get the soil ready for row crops.”

Juanita Popenoe and Ed James inspecting a crop that shows how cover crops can get quite tall and look messy, but that diverse ecology makes a healthy soil. (Photo by Maggie Jarrell.)

Then he noticed that as the cover crops grew, his remaining trees perked up, so he began to investigate cover crops.

As many citrus growers are selling out to developers or switching to alternative crops, James has recovered much of his 45 acres that succumbed to greening. Despite the presence of HLB, he says his trees look healthy and are producing normal fruit.

“A plant’s immune system is in the soil,” he says as he drives his tractor around his groves on a chilly Sunday. “Lots of my trees were sickly, and looked dead, but they’re now transformed.”

He notes that cover crops were popular prior to World War II, but that the rise of chemical fertilizers brought negative impacts. “Everything I’ve learned is about soil,” he said. “Chemical fertilizers leave salts behind and kill soil microorganisms. Combined with a lack of organic matter in the sandy soil, it’s depleted.”

Low- or no-till methods are vital to the method’s success, James has found. “There’s not enough organic matter in Florida’s sandy soil, and if there’s lots of tillage, it weakens the soil,” he says.

He recommends roller crimping rather than tilling for weed control because it doesn’t disturb organic matter built up in soil by cover crops.

“Tilling soil kills the roots of beneficial weeds, and bare soil can blow away,” he says. “We learned that in the Dust Bowl.”

Better Soil, Healthy Trees

Most citrus groves are in central Florida along the Lake Wales Ridge, where crops require extra organic matter to compensate for fine, sandy soil. For citrus, adding biomass through techniques such as cover cropping both increases the nutrients in the soil and also lowers irrigation needs by reducing percolation or drainage losses.

Sarah Strauss is a soil microbiologist for UF/IFAS based in Immokalee, in southwest Florida. While she doesn’t work directly with HLB or trees, Strauss works with a variety of cover crop mixes to improve nutrient uptake in different soils.

“Soil is a microbiome, much like the gut, and different varieties of plants supply different nutrients,” she says, noting all soils are different. “There are many beneficial bacteria that enhance plant health.”

“Anything we can do to improve the trees’ health is good, because they’re very stressed,” says Treadwell. “Being proactive and improving the soil theoretically makes trees stronger.”

A view down the row showing the cover crops early in the season and a good crop load. (Photo by Juanita Popenoe)

The University of Florida’s Popenoe says the polyculture created by adding cover crops beats the monoculture because different plants have different characteristics. “Daikon radish discourages root weevils, which lay eggs producing larvae that eat citrus tree roots,” she says. “Many [other] cover crops attract beneficial insects.”

“It’s not ‘one size fits all’ with cover crops,” confirms James, who uses at least five different crops in his groves: sunn hemp, hairy indigo, alys clover, and several brassicas, including daikon radish, weed radish, and mustard.

The micronutrients that cover crops contribute, adds Popenoe, can help combat citrus greening. “Some may be antibiotic if they have a higher manganese count, which decreases the titer [concentration] of the bacteria,” she says.

Strauss and her colleagues are conducting field trials showing some cover crops, such as sunn hemp, create more biomass and increase organic matter in soil. These trials also found the bacterial community differed significantly between soils planted with different cover crops and soils containing a no-treatment control group.

Strauss has looked at James’s work with cover crops and said he’s had “fantastic results.” In fact, she recommended growers check out their cover crop options by attending the field day at his grove last November.

Going Organic with Cover Crops

It’s 9 a.m. on a chilly December morning, and Ben McLean has already been out in his citrus groves to check the ground for frost. Most of his trees, in the rolling hills near Clermont in central Florida, succumbed to greening, but those remaining are doing better since he introduced organic soil amendments and cover crops.

“I had to see if they needed irrigation this morning, but it was about 34 degrees, so they were okay,” he says.

McLean knows citrus. His father (who they call “Ben I”) owned groves in Central Florida, and now two of his sons, Ben III and Matt, carry on the tradition. Matt founded “Uncle Matt’s Organic Orange Juice,” which is now a profitable family business, though much of their fruit now originates at organic groves in Mexico, where the orchards hav not been as widely affected by citrus greening.

Like most orange grove owners, McLean has been dogged by HLB. Because his farm is certified organic, they use no synthetic inputs, and McLean uses the two varieties of cover crop he can control without herbicides. Ed James, who is not strictly organic, uses pesticides occasionally on a target basis, and only on trees not near harvest. The McLeans also work with UF/IFAS researchers studying the success of cover crops.

“We grow cow peas and hairy indigo as cover crops between tree rows to fix nitrogen,” he says. “That cuts back on [nitrogen] fertilizer, but we still add manganese, which is expensive.”

McLean monitors the soil annually for zinc, boron, iron, and copper, important minerals needed in Florida’s sandy soil. He’s seeing positive results and stronger trees. So, while cover crops are still in a trial period among researchers, for McLean and others, the results are already in.

Top photo: UF/IFAS specialist and citrus growers scout the grove for insects. Beneficial insects are always around with the diversity of species and flowering in the cover crops. (Photo by Juanita Popenoe)

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