“Forever chemicals,” officially called per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, are incredibly persistent, widely used chemicals that are now present in soil, water, and human bodies. Some PFAS are now linked to cancers, reproductive issues, and developmental delays in children.

Concerns about those health risks are compounded by the fact that authorities have not identified all sources of PFAS contamination in the environment. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and other regulators have been trying to understand the scope and impacts of contamination from a wide range of sources, including firefighting foam, sewage sludge, and food packaging. Last year, the EPA proposed the first drinking water limits for four of the chemicals.

The new analysis, published today in Environmental Health Perspectives, represents the latest effort to understand how common PFAS are in pesticides, which are widely used around the country and directly affect food, water, and soil. The researchers, associated with environmental advocacy groups including the Center for Biological Diversity, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), and the Environmental Working Group, found that 66 active ingredients currently approved for use in pesticides qualify as PFAS, and eight approved “inert” ingredients—added to pesticides to help the chemical disperse, for example—also qualify as PFAS.

Most of the chemicals identified are referred to as “short chain” PFAS, which means they are likely less persistent and less toxic than the more common forever chemicals—like PFOA and PFOS—that the EPA has begun to regulate. But more research is needed on their impacts, the researchers say.

Plus, overall, they found that fluorination (a process that can create PFAS) is increasingly used by chemical companies in the manufacture of pesticides, to make them stick around for longer. While 14 percent of the overall active ingredients currently used in pesticides qualify as PFAS, 30 percent of the ingredients approved in the last decade qualify.

“What’s clear is that some of the most widely dispersed pollutants across the world are becoming increasingly fluorinated, which means that they’re becoming increasingly persistent, and we don’t really have a grasp yet on what the consequences are going to be,” said Nathan Donley, one of the paper’s authors and the environmental health science director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “What our research showed is that this issue is a lot bigger than many people have thought, and the trend is really worrisome.”

Of course, fluorination is not unique to the pesticide industry, said A. Daniel Jones, a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology and the associate director of Michigan State University’s Center for PFAS Research. Common medicines like Prozac and Lipitor, for example, meet some definitions of PFAS. “We could get rid of lots of really important drugs if we got rid of all of the organic fluorine,” he said. “At the same time, we do want to start moving away from non-essential uses of persistent organic chemicals. Any chemical that outlives me is probably not good to have moving around the environment.”

The study contributes to the still-developing picture of how significant of an issue PFAS in pesticides might be. In 2022, testing done by environmental groups found the chemicals in common pesticide products, which has since been partially attributed to leaching from plastic containers. The EPA took steps to address that contamination. However, an independent researcher also found alarming levels of the most dangerous PFAS in multiple pesticides that wasn’t attributable to plastic containers. EPA then did its own tests and announced no pesticides were found, but the agency is now facing allegations of misconduct related to that testing.

The EPA did not respond to requests for comment by press time.

Short-Chain PFAS Are More Common in Pesticides

One of the aspects at issue is the length of the carbon chain. All PFAS contain a chain of carbon atoms connected to fluorine atoms, and it’s widely understood that the longer the carbon chain, the more problematic the chemical, in terms of both environmental persistence and health impacts.

Most of the active and inert ingredients now being used in pesticides are short chain and are not from the class of PFAS that have been the focus of regulatory efforts so far, so a looming question is: Are they of serious concern?

“From my perspective, ultimately, it doesn’t matter whether you think these are PFAS or not,” Donley said. “They are forever chemicals, and the fluorinated parts of these pesticides will be around for the birth of your grandchildren’s grandchildren.”

While these chemicals are “certainly persistent,” Jones agreed, their impact across the board is unknown.

In terms of health, one of the reasons PFOS and PFOA are so dangerous is that they can stay in the human body for up to a decade, wreaking havoc all the while. “The longer they’re in us, the more opportunity they have to do harm,” Jones said. “Generally, we do know that shorter chain compounds don’t stay in your body as long as the longer chain compounds. So the short-chain compounds are probably not nearly as bad for us as the long-chain compounds, but that doesn’t mean they’re completely innocuous either.”

In the environment, their persistence is complicated, since even those that do degrade in a reasonable amount of time can break down into other compounds that don’t, Donley said. Of course, that doesn’t mean those other compounds are necessarily toxic. For example, Jones has extensively studied one of the compounds identified in the paper, trifluoroacetic acid (TFA), as a substance into which PFAS can break down. He pointed to a recent assessment of toxicity in mammals that found TFA doesn’t pose significant health risks.

In addition, because these chemicals are so widespread in other products, it’s hard to pinpoint how significant pesticides may be as a source of contamination. For example, research shows refrigerants and other non-pesticide chemicals are a much more significant source of TFA pollution.

While most of the chemicals identified in the paper are not the most common pesticides used, some have been used in high volumes in the past, and others are seeing increased use.

In the 1990s, for example, farmers annually sprayed about 25 million pounds of an insecticide called trifluralin, which the researchers identified as PFAS. While its use has since plummeted, in 2018, farmers still used 5 million pounds on crops including cotton, alfalfa, and fruits and vegetables. Use of the herbicide fomesafen—also identified as PFAS in the new study—has gone in the other direction, increasing from just 1 million pounds in the 1990s to nearly 6 million pounds in 2018, primarily on soybeans.

And some of the 66 chemicals identified in the study are used as the active ingredient in a much larger number of products. For example, Bifenthrin, a major water contaminant in the U.S., was an ingredient in 247 different pesticide products registered in Maine in 2022.

Regulatory Implications for PFAS in Pesticides

“When you start getting into breakdown products, the system falls apart pretty quickly, and they’re not getting a whole lot of information on what these breakdown products are doing in the environment,” Donley said. “There are just a lot of question marks there.”

He also questions whether the EPA is effectively evaluating and regulating the additive ingredients called “inerts.” Due to the way the nation’s pesticide law was written, those chemicals are considered confidential business secrets, so companies don’t have to list them on pesticide labels.

So while the paper’s authors were able to identify eight approved inerts that qualify as PFAS, four of which are currently used in products in the U.S, there’s no way to know which products contain them. One such chemical, for instance, is approved for use on food crops and is present in 37 products, according to the EPA. Since the agency doesn’t share the names of those products, we don’t know if they are in wide use—or hardly used at all.

In regulatory recommendations at the end of the new paper, Donley and his co-authors say the U.S. should require all pesticide ingredients, including inerts, to be disclosed on labels. They also recommend the agency evaluate all PFAS pesticides and the compounds they break down into for environmental persistence, expand environmental and biomonitoring programs for PFAS pesticides, and assess the cumulative impacts of all the pesticides and the compounds they break down into based on the “total organic fluorine load in the environment and food.”

Michigan State’s Jones called the goals lofty and said they’d require an enormous amount of resources—which the agency currently does not have. “A more circumspect approach might begin by prioritizing items that present the greatest risk to human health, but should also evaluate the health effects of any proposed alternatives,” he said.

Even before the study, in the absence of more aggressive EPA action on the issue, states have been stepping in. Maine, Minnesota, Maryland, and Massachusetts have all passed laws that specifically tackle PFAS in pesticides in some way. Maine and Minnesota have already begun the process of identifying PFAS in pesticides, with a goal of understanding their impact and eventually ending their use.

Pesticide companies now submit PFAS affidavits when they register their products in Maine. The Minnesota Department of Agriculture, which uses a broader definition of PFAS than even the OECD, issued an interim report earlier this year that identified 95 pesticides that qualified as PFAS. The agency also began looking at contamination in groundwater, rivers, and streams.

“There’s a lot coming out that’s going to make it easier to piece together, state by state, what’s happening,” said Sharon Anglin Treat, an environmental policy expert who has been working on PFAS contamination in Maine. “We’re only regulating the tip of the iceberg in terms of the federal EPA drinking water standard. The more we find out about PFAS, the more concerning they are.”

That’s why, Donley said, the overall trend of fluorinating pesticides to make them more persistent is something regulators should be paying attention to.

“In the ’70s, we were dealing with things like DDT and aldrin and chlordane, really persistent chemicals,” he said. “The EPA kicked that to the curb. Now, we’ve almost come full circle. Whereas the 1970s was the age of the organochlorine [like DDT], now we’re living in the age of the organofluorine, and the persistence is really nerve-wracking, because it wasn’t until decades later that we figured out the long-term consequences of using DDT. . . and we’re still dealing with the ramifications.”

The post Study Finds ‘Forever Chemicals’ Are Increasingly Common in Pesticides appeared first on Civil Eats.

First, the farmers embarked on a wagon tour. One stop showed off a soybean yield trial. At another, a scientist presented research on a new class of nitrogen-fixing inputs. During a demo of a drone spraying a pesticide over rows of corn, the operators laughed as a gentle breeze blew the mist toward the onlookers. “Don’t worry, it’s just water!” they yelled.

Back at the barn, companies that sell their products at The Mill had set up folding tables to talk to farmers and hand out swag. Land O’Lakes, the company known to most Americans only as a longtime purveyor of butter wrapped in bright yellow packaging, had two adjoining tables showcasing two of its more specialized businesses: pesticides and carbon markets.

At those tables, farmers could grab an Advanced Acre Rx hat from WinField United, Land O’Lakes’ seed and chemical company, and a water bottle emblazoned with the logo for Truterra, its carbon market platform, in one fell swoop.

The display exemplified how, as Land O’Lakes’ annual report laid out earlier that year, the agricultural giant is marketing enrollment in a climate-smart farming initiative alongside its biggest profit driver: pesticides and seeds.

Land O’Lakes’ Truterra is unique in some ways, but it also fits the mold of what agricultural carbon markets have come to look like across the country over the last few years.

Carbon markets were first created decades ago as a means for companies to offset their greenhouse gas emissions by paying to reduce emissions somewhere else. Think: planting trees that hold carbon in South America to balance emissions from a factory in South Carolina.

And over the last several years, policymakers, environmental and farm groups, and private companies began hyping the idea that specific markets could be created to pay farmers for adopting practices that could reduce emissions and hold carbon in soil. Flashy startups including Nori and Indigo Ag jumped into the game, Democrats included the idea in their 2020 plan to address the climate crisis, and a bitterly divided Congress passed the Growing Climate Solutions Act on a bipartisan basis in an effort to jump-start the markets.

As a result, a new era of paying farmers for carbon-holding practices became the talk of many farm conferences and climate panels, where the same points came up over and over. Spreading regenerative practices that build soil carbon across more cropland would produce so many other benefits, advocates said. Farmers would be able to hold water and nutrients in the soil, reduce pollution, and increase biodiversity. And over time, not only would they access a new source of revenue, regenerative practices would allow farmers to cut costs as they decreased the use of chemicals—including pesticides and fertilizer—producing yet another environmental win. In 2021, for example, The New York Times put that narrative in print by featuring a carbon-market farmer who had stopped tilling, diversified his crops, and planted cover crops, eventually building his soil health enough to completely eliminate the use of synthetic fertilizer.

However, while the highest-profile carbon markets are run by public entities like the state of California or New England’s Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), many of the agricultural markets that have made more recent progress are run by powerful companies—including Bayer, Corteva Agriscience, and Land O’Lakes—that are in the business of selling those same pesticides and fertilizers.

In addition, even the independent platforms are now working closely with the same companies. Indigo launched a partnership with Corteva in 2021. (Last month, journalists at Bloomberg reported that the company and other startups that set out to disrupt bigger, traditional agriculture companies have struggled to connect with farmers on their own.) Meanwhile, close to half of the credits Nori has paid out to date have gone to Bayer’s enrolled farmers. Seventy-five percent of the credits Nori currently has available for buyers are linked to Bayer’s platform.

“Partnering with Bayer allowed Nori to scale and accelerate the impact we’re able to make, compared to what we could have accomplished by enrolling individual farmers one by one,” Radhika Moolgavkar, Nori’s VP of supply and methodology, said in an email. “We believe that to foster large-scale adoption of these practices, programs like Bayer Carbon are required to help with the monetary hurdles to transitioning to regenerative practices.”

However, others are concerned about the influence pesticide companies are exerting within the growing landscape of paying farmers for carbon, especially as taxpayer money floods in to boost their efforts and farmer field data becomes more and more valuable.

“From their perspective, these are future clients, or they may be existing clients,” said Ben Lilliston, the director of rural strategies and climate change at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. “They’re getting a tremendous amount of data from the farmer-participants. It puts them in a very strong position to help farmers manage whatever they’re dealing with on their farm, beyond climate-related stuff. It’s kind of a win-win: Get a farmer in the program, get the information, and get to sell them seeds or pest control.”

Bayer, for example, has linked its carbon program to other data platforms that drive product sales. And while many practices shown to hold the most carbon—like agroforestry and organic systems—can reduce or eliminate the need for pesticides over time, companies in the business of selling the chemicals are unlikely to recommend them, environmental groups say.

In fact, the two practices that dominate current markets—no-till and cover crops—require herbicides to succeed in the way they’re practiced on most commodity farms. Farmers use herbicides to kill weeds that they could otherwise till under and to kill cover crops before planting a cash crop. And most soil scientists agree that the jury is still out on whether those practices can hold carbon at a depth and for long enough to create meaningful climate outcomes.

New (Carbon) Markets for Products

“Farmers place a great deal of trust in their seed dealers,” said Ryan. Those seed dealers, when they recommend products made by companies like Land O’Lakes WinField United, are uniquely suited to also convince farmers to sign on to programs that will pay them to adopt practices with environmental benefits, such as planting cover crops. And recommending the right products at the same time helps the farmers succeed at implementing those practices, he said.

The way Bayer engaged with the stores that sell its inputs was also what caught the attention of Jason Davidson, a food and agriculture campaigner at the environmental advocacy organization Friends of the Earth.

Davidson’s interest was piqued by a 2018 column published in a trade publication. In the article, journalist Paul Schrimpf wrote about a buzzy topic retailers were discussing at multiple industry events. Schrimpf explained that Monsanto (now owned by Bayer) had started including a data product called Climate FieldView in its rebate bundles, meaning retailers would have to also sell a certain number of FieldView subscriptions alongside seeds and pesticides to get company rebates they had long relied on. Many farmers, he wrote, still didn’t want to pay for the program, and he predicted retailers might consider eating the cost and enrolling them so they wouldn’t lose the rebate.

“That got us thinking, ‘Why, in this decade, are pesticide companies all of a sudden super interested in data?’” said Davidson, who later co-authored a report on the topic that was released last year. “I think it’s pretty safe to argue that Bayer and other pesticide manufacturers were interested in data because they saw it as a way to potentially increase sales.”

Bayer’s own documents seem to back that argument up. In its 2022 annual report, Bayer said Climate FieldView “enables us to use novel modeling to make custom product recommendations that are precisely tailored to each individual field. With these insights we can maximize the value of our seed and chemistry portfolio, help farmers expand participation in the carbon markets and food, feed, fiber, and fuel value chains, and lead Bayer toward digitally enabled business models and new opportunities for growth.”

In another presentation that year, the company reported that corn seed customers who used FieldView planted Bayer corn seeds at a higher seeding rate compared to the national average and those who opted for the premium FieldView Plus version generated 5 percent higher sales.

Today, farmers who want to enroll in Bayer’s carbon market have to first enroll in Climate FieldView. In an email, a Bayer spokesperson said its platform collects data that’s needed to calculate carbon sequestration and register carbon credits. “As with all Climate FieldView digital ag platform initiatives, the grower always owns their own data and controls who they choose to share that data with,” he said.

In addition to being the place where farmers input data that will allow them to get paid for carbon, the program recommends planting protocols and offers product discounts. In 2020, Reuters reported that Bayer offered farmers the option to get paid for their carbon in credits for more Bayer products. When asked if the company still offered that option, the spokesperson said Bayer pays growers in cash, “never in product credits.”

The spokesperson did not specifically answer whether farmers enrolled in its carbon program purchased more Bayer products but said, “While Bayer has a broad selection of industry-leading crop protection, seed and seed treatment products, growers are not required to purchase crop protection, seed, or seed treatment products to participate.”

Last year, the company outlined in a press release how it planned to “capitalize on opportunities presented by the shift to regenerative agriculture.” Carbon farming and digital platforms were on a list of market opportunities expected to generate more than $100 billion. “Importantly, by the middle of the next decade, Bayer envisions shaping regenerative agriculture on more than 400 million acres, built on the foundation of its leading agriculture input solutions,” it wrote.

A screenshot of an email sent to Bayer ForGround participants titled “Tips for Herbicide & Fungicide Applications” and with the sub-headline of “top tips and trends in reduced tillage, cover crops and carbon.”

That’s the rub, many environmental advocates and sustainable agriculture experts say: A market truly dedicated to helping farmers move the needle on climate would be grounded in helping farmers reduce fossil fuel-derived inputs over time, thereby reducing resource use, minimizing other environmental impacts, and saving them money.

“There’s a clear conflict of interest if you’re manufacturing a product and then making agronomic recommendations. We are really concerned about the idea that the companies that are manufacturing seeds and pesticides that are used together to make certain products—like neonicotinoid seed coatings—ubiquitous in industrial agriculture, that they are going to be collecting farm data and then using that data to make specific recommendations on how to farm,” Davidson said. “Even though the companies tout precision agriculture and data broadly as a way to reduce inputs, it’s really hard to imagine a world in which manufacturers of a product are going to tell their customers to buy and use less of their products.”

In response to a question about whether the platforms are used to sell farmers WinField United inputs, a Land O’Lakes spokesperson said that Truterra prohibits the use of farmer data for sales and marketing targeting. “Truterra’s programs focus on making practice changes that are best for the farmer and that means agronomically, economically, and environmentally,” they said.

Paying Only for Practices That Rely on Pesticides

“Part of it is just that your average farmer is not going to scream it from the rooftop,” said Aaron Shier, the government relations director at the National Farmers Union (NFU), and some of the markets likely come with confidentiality clauses. Still, Shier said that overall, not many NFU farmers are participating. The Iowa Farmers Union told Civil Eats the same. Both organizations, and other farmers we spoke to, said the main reason is the payments are still too low and unpredictable.

“It’s not worth my time,” said Josh Manske, who manages commodity grain fields in Iowa and Southern Minnesota. “Everybody’s getting a huge cut, and we’re left with the pennies.” And while Shier said he hadn’t heard any complaints around farmer data being used to lock in input purchasing or exert control over farmers, he said that “data privacy is very important to our members.”

The heavy lift involved in entering data was a big piece of conversations researchers at Hamilton College in upstate New York had with 17 row crop farmers—some conventional farmers participating in the markets and some certified organic farmers who weren’t eligible—in 2021.

In a paper published last fall, they shared major themes from those conversations, one of which centered on the farmers’ concerns around which practices are rewarded.

While the organic farmers were more worried that carbon markets would only support a small group of practices with climate benefits, both groups “raised concerns that carbon markets would inadequately support a full range of beneficial soil management practices,” the researchers wrote. “Some of these concerns focused on concerns that markets would incentivize activities that required heavy chemical inputs, which a farmer would have to purchase from a chemical company.”

Currently, Bayer, Corteva, and Truterra’s markets all pay farmers primarily to adopt no-till systems and to plant cover crops.

And there is a long history of companies using those specific practices to market pesticides linked to serious health risks. For example, as far back as the 1970s, Chevron Chemical promoted paraquat—an herbicide the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calls “highly poisonous” that is now linked to Parkinson’s disease risk and banned in dozens of countries—as a tool to convert to no-till farming. Farmers still use paraquat as an alternative to tilling for weed control in the U.S., and Syngenta’s website lists the chemical’s use in no-till systems as a key benefit.

For cover crops, standard practice is to kill the plants with a glyphosate-based herbicide before planting a cash crop like corn or soy. For example, on Corteva’s website, the company recommends its herbicide products that mix glyphosate with 2,4-D and lists “Don’t cut herbicide rates” as one key to cover crop success. While the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) maintains that glyphosate is unlikely to cause cancer in humans, the International Agency for Research on Cancer classifies it as a “probable carcinogen,” based especially on its potential link to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

CropLife America, the pesticide industry’s trade association, has dubbed no-till and cover crops “pesticide-enabled” farming practices. “Pesticides allow for sustainable conservation practices, such as no-till and cover crops, to successfully exist,” it says on its website.

Organic farmers who have long planted cover crops without chemical pesticides and some of whom practice no-till farming with a roller-crimper would disagree. But their practices, which have been shown to push carbon deeper into the soil, where it tends to stay put for longer, are typically not represented in these markets, which are designed to reward individual improvements to the standard row crop system.

And while cover crops and no-till practices both deliver multiple proven environmental benefits such as reducing soil erosion and nutrient runoff and holding water on farms, many soil scientists say their ability to meaningfully fix carbon in soil over time is not yet well-established due to questions around depth, permanence, and saturation.

Truterra is going beyond those two practices, and one of the new programs Tom Ryan, Truterra’s former president, was most excited to talk about last year was adding nitrogen management to the practices the platform would pay for. (Bayer also added nitrogen management to its program this year.)

In addition to harming health, rural economies, and wildlife due to water pollution, excess nitrogen applied to farm fields also creates emissions of nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas that has 300 times more global warming impacts than carbon dioxide. As a result, unlike the as-yet-unknown climate potential of cover crops and no-till, reducing nitrogen fertilizer application has clear potential to significantly cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Still, Truterra’s nitrogen management program allows farmers to either reduce fertilizer or add a “stabilizer,” another product that helps prevent nitrogen leaching. Given the choice of which to recommend, it’s hard to imagine a retailer telling a farmer to buy less fertilizer, because doing so could reduce their yields (although stabilizers can help reduce the amount of fertilizer needed). Land O’Lakes’ spokesperson did not share specific data on which path farmers are choosing, saying some “use one or the other or both to best meet the specific needs of their fields.” The spokesperson added that farmers can choose any stabilizer, not just one made by WinField United, to qualify.

Land O’Lakes is specifically marketing enrollment in Truterra in conjunction with WinField United’s Advanced Acre Rx, a product that involves using a farmer’s data to recommend specific seeds, nutrients, herbicides, insecticides, and fungicides and includes “season-long support from your local ag input retailer.” When a farmer is setting out to implement climate-smart practices, Ryan said, “We have to help them build that plan, which includes products.” Advanced Acre Rx is a prescription system that is sold as a way to target inputs for greater efficiency. Bayer also pointed to its resources that help farmers optimize and target inputs.

Impacting the Bigger Picture

But the Hamilton College researchers said the farmers in their study expressed concerns that chemical companies “could be involved in setting national government standards for carbon markets, which would then skew all carbon markets toward a specific style of farming and ignore other beneficial practices for carbon sequestration.”

One set of standards is already in the works, and the process is happening partially as a result of lobbying by pesticide companies and the wider agricultural industry.

Representative Abigail Spanberger (D-Virginia) first introduced the Growing Climate Solutions Act to initiate U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) oversight of carbon markets in 2020. It became a top priority for the industry, and in April 2022, CropLife America’s president and CEO Chris Novak praised the reintroduction of the act.

“The Growing Climate Solutions Act offers meaningful progress toward enabling farmer and landowner participation in voluntary carbon markets,” he said in a statement. “Regenerative farming practices such as no-till farming, conservation tillage, and the use of cover crops are made possible through the use of pesticides.” Bayer, Corteva, and Land O’Lakes all supported the bill, which Congress ultimately passed as part of a spending package at the end of 2022.

Now, the USDA is working to fulfill the requirements of the law. In October, it published a broad assessment of agriculture and carbon markets, followed by a February report explaining the next steps, including that it will evaluate the current carbon market protocols, determine which technical assistance providers are qualified to be listed by the agency, and create resources for farmers to navigate the landscape. At the end of May, the agency solicited public comment on those next steps as part of a larger Biden administration announcement around its policies and principles on voluntary carbon markets (which go beyond but include agriculture).

In an interview, Robert Bonnie, the Under Secretary for Farm Production and Conservation at the USDA, said the process for getting companies to share their specific protocols is still being worked out and public comments will help shape it. “Yes, we’re going to need information, we’re going to need to understand what’s behind them,” he said. “The critical part of all of this is that the public, consumers, investors, everybody has confidence that there’s going to be real gains to the climate as we undertake these practices and that the value in the marketplace is real.”

As to the various criticisms around companies that manufacture inputs running carbon markets, Bonnie said private sector investment is crucial to achieving climate progress on farms. “It’s really, really beneficial to have companies out there that are looking for ways to develop technologies and innovations that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions and maintain agricultural productivity. That’s a good thing. We want that,” he said. “I think it puts a very high priority on making sure that the work we do around protocols is transparent and that we do this in a way that maintains public confidence.”

Bonnie said that the agency’s work on carbon markets fits into the larger picture at the USDA, where the agency is using many different tools to support climate-smart practices. “We’re trying to create value for farmers, ranchers, and forest owners that undertake climate-smart practices,” he said.

The crown jewel of that picture is Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack’s $3 billion Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities Program. When the agency solicited input on how to structure that program, CropLife America submitted a letter once again emphasizing the connection between climate-smart farming and pesticides.

“Reduced or no-till soil management and the use of cover crops are two critically important . . . practices that are enabled by pesticide tools,” it read. “There have been significant climate and soil quality benefits from these . . . practices (enabled by pesticide tools) to date, but there is great opportunity for increasing the scale and impact of these practices.”

One company already working to realize that opportunity is Truterra, which the USDA awarded $90 million in Climate-Smart Commodities funds. In September 2022, when Vilsack attended a Truterra kick-off event, it was held at the WinField United Innovation Center. In its agreement with the USDA, Truterra emphasized the impact its connection to the company would have, noting that it is “the largest U.S. distributor of crop inputs” and that its crop input services reach roughly half of harvested cropland acres in the country.

In response to the question of whether, at the core, one goal of carbon markets should be to reduce farm inputs including fossil fuel-derived pesticides and fertilizers, Bonnie said in some cases it may make sense but that in others, beneficial new products could be a better answer.

“We want to keep our eye on the prize here, and it may be that there that there are systems where reducing inputs or changing the mix of inputs or using inputs that enhance efficiency . . . allow us to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while maintaining productivity. In many places, that’s part of the mix. But we’re not here trying to limit inputs per se, we’re trying to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

The post Are Companies Using Carbon Markets to Sell More Pesticides? appeared first on Civil Eats.

https://civileats.com/2024/06/11/op-ed-neonicotinoid-pesticides-keep-killing-pollinators-heres-how-we-can-help/ https://civileats.com/2024/06/11/op-ed-neonicotinoid-pesticides-keep-killing-pollinators-heres-how-we-can-help/#comments Tue, 11 Jun 2024 09:00:57 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=56455 As a bee veterinarian, I looked for answers. Where had the animals that had helped feed us so reliably gone? I learned that a wetland near our farm had been contaminated by insecticides, which kill pest insects, but they can also kill bees. I also learned that agriculture had been transformed in the last 20 […]

The post Op-ed: Neonicotinoid Pesticides Keep Killing Pollinators. Here’s How We Can Help. appeared first on Civil Eats.

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For years at our farm in central North Carolina, we fed ourselves from our gardens and orchard. We had plenty of food to share, courtesy of the native bees here. Our apple, blueberry, and squash plants all relied upon insect pollination to make fruit. Then, in 2017, our harvests were interrupted because the bees disappeared.

As a bee veterinarian, I looked for answers. Where had the animals that had helped feed us so reliably gone? I learned that a wetland near our farm had been contaminated by insecticides, which kill pest insects, but they can also kill bees. I also learned that agriculture had been transformed in the last 20 years. Instead of insecticides being applied when needed, the chemicals were being used most of the time on many row crops—and they were a newer, more persistent type called neonicotinoids, or neonics.

Neonics are the most commonly used insecticides in the world. They dissolve in water and can spread over the land, far from the treated fields. Although the poisoned wetland waters never touched our food plants, the pollinators that supported our farm were decimated. Our orchard was barren for years.

“Neonics are so potent that one treated corn seed contains enough insecticide to kill more than 80,000 honeybees.”

During my investigation, I followed the work of insect scientists and beekeepers who, for over 15 years, had raised the alarm that overuse of neonics was a major cause of insect deaths around the world. This startling decline in populations of pollinators and other insects led to the term “insect apocalypse.” Scientists’ work pointed the way to what had happened at our farm: An analysis of water samples from the wetland revealed a particularly persistent neonic.

Neonics are so potent that a single treated corn seed contains enough insecticide to kill more than 80,000 honeybees. If a bee doesn’t die right away, its ability to reproduce, gather food, and fight off disease can be damaged. Among bees, neonic exposure is cumulative: If a meal of contaminated nectar sickens a bee, additional feedings may kill it. Neonics infuse all parts of exposed plants and persist in the soil. They can poison native bee adults and their young as well, disrupting or eliminating whole family lines.

In 2022, a multi-year New York state study of native bee populations found that 24 percent of bee species were at risk of loss, and another 11 percent may have disappeared completely. New York officials took action. Last winter, New York became the first state to restrict the planting of neonic-coated crop seeds; the law will take effect in 2027.

Although 12 other states have restrictions of some kind on neonics, they haven’t controlled their largest use: as a coating on crop seeds. By restricting planting neonic-coated crop seed, New York’s law promises to reduce insecticides in New York’s waterways in future years. But cropland outside New York may remain a risky place to be a bee.

Critical Pollinators Under Threat

In the U.S. and Canada, honeybees kept for honey and crop pollination are all variants of one imported European species: Apis mellifera. But the same region hosts more than 3,600 species of wild bees that pollinate flowering plants and crops alike. Native bees are diverse in numbers, size, and function. Some are specifically adapted to a single species of flowering plant. And among these pairs, the loss of a bee species can mean the loss of the plant dependent upon it.

Because native bees are disappearing, I see every one as precious; each animal can contribute its unique genetic makeup to the greater population. We know from studies of other animal populations that size matters: A large population increases the odds for the genetic diversity required for animals to adapt to today’s environmental challenges. A small, inbred bee population is frequently a population in decline.

We’re already experiencing the consequences of bee loss. A recent global study published in Environmental Health Perspectives showed how inadequate insect pollination can reduce economic and food security through the loss of valuable foods such as fruits and insect-pollinated nuts and vegetables. Matthew Smith and colleagues estimated that worldwide, almost half a million excess deaths from chronic diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, and some cancers could be attributed to the loss of these nutritious foods.

With fewer bees to do the work, multiple countries now rely upon hand pollination for major crops. In the U.S., gardeners are advised to try hand pollination to grow squashes and pumpkins if they have poor yields.

People aren’t the only ones dependent upon bees. Entire ecosystems depend on them. For instance, at our farm, I witnessed the impact of the loss of small, native bees. Native, fruiting viburnum shrubs we’d planted for wildlife weren’t pollinated for years. Eastern carpenter bees, the first bees to return to the farm in 2020 after the barren years, couldn’t pollinate the tiny viburnum flowers because the bees are too big, and our distant neighbor’s honeybees weren’t interested in the musky-scented blooms. The smallest insect pollinators have yet to return, and the loss of wild viburnum fruits has led to fewer local birds.

Beside insecticide contamination, bees face other challenges, too.

High temperatures threaten native bee families in subsoil nests; sprawling development erases bee homes; and bees starve as the forests, meadows, and shrubland flowers that provide essential nectar and pollen are lost to other land uses.

“We know how to support healthy populations of native bees—and we need to act now.”

Varroa mites are parasites that attach to honeybees and transmit lethal viruses to their bee hosts. Mites are a major reason that approximately 40 percent of U.S. honeybee colonies have been lost each winter over the last decade. Mite-infested honeybees can spread viruses to native bees, sickening or killing them.

We have the information we need to slow bee decline. We know how to support healthy populations of native bees—and we need to act now.

How We Can Slow the Decline of Bees

If we grow food, have a yard or garden, and we must control pests, pesticides should be the last option―not the first.

We can choose organic food options to reduce bee exposures to neonic-treated crops. Organically grown foods don’t use neonics.

We can create or leave healthy spaces for bees to live, such as dead wood, bare soil for ground nesting bees, or clusters of undisturbed plants for bumble bees that like to nest in rodent tunnels beneath those plants. In warm years, these habitats may be particularly valuable if they’re located on a north-facing slope, as they provide bees a cooler place to raise their babies.

Even without a yard, we can plant more flowers to feed bees. Pots of flowers or herbs can support tiny families. Regardless of the size of a flower garden, choosing flowering plants free of harmful pesticides is crucial. Unfortunately, “pollinator-friendly” plants are not necessarily free of contamination. Plant consumers need to ask questions about how the plants are grown, as there are no rules or signs required to identify pollinator-safe plants. The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation offers resources for those who want to better support bees and butterflies.

Finally, beekeepers can prioritize timely Varroa mite control to keep honeybee colonies strong through the winter while also protecting native bees that share local flowers.

Today, our farm is recovering. More native bees are active, and more fruit trees were pollinated this year. But I fear that we may never enjoy the diversity of animals that used to live here. Native bees have small territories. When populations disappear, new bees must rediscover the land and settle to raise their families.

Join me in working to support the native bees who do the work of providing an abundant food future for us and for all the other creatures that depend upon them.

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]]> https://civileats.com/2024/06/11/op-ed-neonicotinoid-pesticides-keep-killing-pollinators-heres-how-we-can-help/feed/ 2 https://civileats.com/2024/05/06/changing-how-we-farm-might-protect-wild-mammals-and-fight-climate-change/ Mon, 06 May 2024 09:00:15 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=56115 But the crop-free plantings have had another effect, Farquhar explained. They have also increased the number of mammals on the farm. Strips of trees, bushes, grasses, or flowers around agricultural or pasture fields can house higher numbers of small mammals than cropland. Additionally, the diversity of Farquhar’s crops and the chemical-free nature of his farm […]

The post Changing How We Farm Might Protect Wild Mammals—and Fight Climate Change appeared first on Civil Eats.

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Tom Farquhar planted several large plots of beneficial flowers around his vegetable farm in Montgomery County, Maryland. Once a conventional corn and soybean farm, the idea was to control pests at the Certified Naturally Grown operation by increasing the number of beneficial predator insects and spiders. And the method worked: “We don’t have too many big insect problems,” he said.

But the crop-free plantings have had another effect, Farquhar explained. They have also increased the number of mammals on the farm. Strips of trees, bushes, grasses, or flowers around agricultural or pasture fields can house higher numbers of small mammals than cropland. Additionally, the diversity of Farquhar’s crops and the chemical-free nature of his farm also attracted and supported small mammals, he said.

“We see lots of rabbits, groundhogs, mice, and voles in our fields,” he wrote in an email to Civil Eats. “Also, raccoons, especially when sweet corn is ripening.”

Because small animals can damage crops, the farm fortunately also has predators such as foxes, hawks, and eagles helping keep them in check. “The coyote is now a resident in our area, and that was never true until recently,” said Farquhar. “Maybe in the last 10 years, [coyotes] began to come in, and they also will eat the small mammals. So, we got nature happening out there in a big way.”

While industrial farming feeds the multitudes, it is also a main driver of biodiversity loss across the country. More than 18 percent of North American mammals are decreasing in population, and nearly a quarter of the more than 400 mammal species in the U.S. are listed on the endangered species list.

In addition to every species’ inherent value, mammals are vital in the natural order. They play critical roles in their ecosystems, sustaining and keeping in check species higher and lower on the food chain. They disperse seeds, pollinate, and transfer nutrients across landscapes, supporting healthy plant populations, and they alter their environments in ways that enhance biodiversity. They even mitigate climate change.

“Maybe in the last 10 years, [coyotes] began to come in, and they also will eat the small mammals. So, we got nature happening out there in a big way.”

The burgeoning human population, however, means agricultural impacts are only set to increase. Agriculture already takes up over half of U.S. land, with cropland expanding by 1 million acres per year, fueling habitat loss for wildlife and mammals.

Yet these agricultural areas present a golden opportunity: What if farms could help other species, especially the charismatic, furred variety? While increasing the number of mammals on farms can create some challenges, losing the bulk of small and mid-sized mammals presents challenges that are even larger. And farming sustainably—with organic methods and techniques like agroforestry that encourage on-farm biodiversity—offers a ray of hope to slow the decline of our closest relatives.

The Impacts of Agriculture on Mammals

Though the changing climate, the spread of invasive species, and pollution all negatively affect wildlife, agriculture has had a massive impact on the world’s mammals.

First of all, farmland reduces mammals’ natural habitats and diminishes their ability to find shelter as well as food and prey, explained Koen Kuipers, a researcher at Radboud University in the Netherlands. For instance, agriculture can destroy forest habitats that certain bat species, like the endangered Indiana bat or northern long-eared bat, use for roosting and foraging.

Runoff from U.S. farms is also a main source of pollution for rivers, lakes, and wetlands. Excess nutrients from fields can wash into nearby waterways, one of the greatest threats for freshwater mammals including dolphins, otter, and terrestrial mammals that gather their food from waterways.

And that’s not the only bad news. Pesticides can harm or kill mammals and can also reduce prey and attract invasive species that compete with native mammals for resources, explained Gaurav Singh-Varma, a researcher at the University of British Columbia. For instance, mountain lions, deer, coyotes, foxes, and bobcats can die by ingesting bait meant for pests or by eating pesticide-contaminated prey.

“All the pesticides and fungicides or whatever type of management that big farmlands like to use can have a direct and indirect effect on the mammals in the area,” Singh-Varma said. “It affects the type of habitats that the animals can use.”

In addition, as the largest consumer of freshwater globally, agriculture pulls directly from freshwater habitats which, in turn, harms species such as beavers, rabbits, mink, otters, and water shrews.

How Mammals Help on Farms

Mammals are vital to the functioning of natural landscapes, including those devoted to agriculture.

For example, bats are voracious predators of insects that damage crops. By one estimate, these flying mammals save U.S. farmers $3.7 billion annually. Bats also pollinate plants such as bananas and guavas grown in Hawaii and Florida, agave in California, and coconuts in Puerto Rico.

Other mammals such as skunks, badgers, foxes, and coyotes also do their part to suppress insects, rodents, and other pests, as do wolves and deer.

Meanwhile, “beavers are natural hydrologists and so the dams they build allow water to pond in one place and you get more infiltration,” explained Daniel Rath, an agricultural scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). “And the water that’s stored in the soil is then able to be used by growing plants. It helps with resilience to extreme weather conditions such as drought and floods.”

An endangered Delmarva fox squirrel. (Photo CC-licensed by Brian Gratwick)

Even negatively viewed mammals can be beneficial. Deer, for example, help cycle nutrients and fertilize soil. In addition, burrowing mammals like mice and moles increase organic matter and water infiltration in soil, explained Rath.

In addition, despite concerns that the sustainable practices that support mammals may reduce crop yields, some indications point to the opposite conclusion.

“By diversifying the system, you provide a lot more habitat for these natural pollinators to pollinate crops,” said Singh-Varma. “And there’s research to suggest that in these diversified systems, you can have smaller plot levels, or farmland, but still have an equivalent amount of output that you would get with conventional pesticide-heavy agricultural systems.”

He explained this boost may come from increased nutrient cycling and an abundance of species both above and below ground including native pollinators, birds, mammals, fungi, microbiota, and earthworms.

Supporting Mammals With Biodiversity

Though agriculture represents a top threat to mammals, when carried out with an eye toward biodiversity, it can also be a force for good.

“Diversification is an important step in acknowledging that agricultural systems are part of wider, complex natural ecosystems that are deeply interconnected and provide numerous benefits to society,” said Rath. “A diverse landscape that has a variety of plants, a variety of inputs, and a variety of land-use types can really help with that [wildlife] diversity.”

For instance, adding natural elements like hedgerows, or uncultivated strips about 15 feet in width, alongside agricultural fields can greatly benefit mammals, because they supply food and shelter to a variety of wildlife, including hedgehogs, bats, voles, and mice.

Agroforestry, or adding trees and shrubs to crops or pastures, is also advantageous—supporting a diversity of mammals including deer, black bears, squirrels, and bats, along with a variety of birds and invertebrates. The patches of shrubs in agroforestry provide protection and food for mammals, supporting these higher levels of diversity.

“A diverse landscape that has a variety of plants, a variety of inputs, and a variety of land-use types can really help with that [wildlife] diversity. The idea that agriculture and biodiversity preservation are sort of inherently at odds is kind of outdated.”

A recent study led by Kuipers looked at the benefits of diversifying agricultural landscapes in the U.S. and around the world for several mammals including bats, rodents, opossums, and hedgehogs. “We found that when these natural elements were included in croplands, and also for forest plantations, that species abundance and species richness can be similar . . . to natural reference conditions,” said Kuipers. Conversely, without the addition of hedgerows, trees, and other uncultivated areas, the abundance and diversity of lactating critters was reduced by up to a third.

Agriculture can play another important role for mammals: connectivity. Wildlife-friendly practices like planting grassland or forest strips and diversifying crops on farms can help animals move across the landscape. In turn, this allows gene flow between mammal populations, migration between summer and overwintering habitats, dispersal of individuals into new areas, and range shifts north spurred by global warming. But the context of the diversity matters, Kuipers found. Mammals were more likely to move through agricultural areas surrounded by natural vegetation than development.

Still, some mammals may benefit more than others from diverse farm fields. In his study, Kuipers found that the composition, or the particular set of mammalian species, varied between cropland and natural habitat.

“Even though the average abundance and richness of species is similar in cropland and natural habitats, we also found that the species that do occur there are slightly different,” he told Civil Eats. “So, there is an impact.”

This difference may come down to the type of mammal considered.

Specialist mammals, which occur in only a few specific habitats, were impacted more by the agricultural sites than species that inhabit a variety of habitats, explained Kuipers.

While diversified farm fields have proven to help wildlife, organic agriculture also supports habitat for many species, as it prevents the emission of hazardous chemicals that harm wildlife, along with their prey and habitat.

A good example is Christina Allen’s 10-acre farm in Maryland. With development sprawling across her neighborhood, the property she runs with organic practices with her husband appears to be something of a refuge for mammals.

“We have other critters like skunks, woodchucks, lots of possums, foxes, and even coyotes on occasion,” Allen wrote in an email to Civil Eats. “With development pressure, we notice the poor critters come here as they have to move somewhere . . . but I don’t consider them farm animals; they are wildlife. As long as they do what they do naturally, we coexist with them.”

Fishers, small mammals resembling a cross between a bear and a cat, are another notable appearance on Allen’s farm. Once extirpated from Maryland, they were reintroduced in the 1960s and made a strong comeback in the western part of the state. The fact that Allen’s farm is in eastern Maryland and beyond the lines of their known range shows even rare mammals call their farm home.

A North American fisher. (Photo CC-licensed by Bethany Week, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service)

This bounty of mammals may have to do with some of their practices. They avoid using pesticides and heavy equipment that could compact the soil, plant flowers in their gardens to attract beneficial insects, and maintain meadows with native plants.

When Mammals Cause Damage

Despite their benefits, mammals can also cause headaches for farmers by eating their crops and farm animals. Organic farmers tend to have a more positive view of wildlife than conventional farmers, who often see them as a problem that needs to be controlled.

“Mammals and humans want to occupy the same landscape,” said Rath. “Because of agricultural expansion that’s increasing conversion of natural ecosystems to ranch land or farmland, we encroach on these natural habitats, and so these organisms come into conflict with us. One of the main examples is the wolf population in the American West—and you have in Montana, Idaho, and California issues with predation of livestock by predators.”

Even Farquhar feels some frustration. “You want to see the mammals thrive, but we’re happy that nature has its own predators for the mammals that would eat our little vegetables,” he said.

In Maryland, Allen had to add extra measures to protect her chickens from predators. “I did have to put huge aviaries up to protect my poultry from coyotes and sometimes a persistent fox,” she wrote in an email to Civil Eats. “The poultry get locked in their big open-air aviaries every night so the wild things can do their thing . . . hopefully, eat mice and rabbits!”

Singh-Varma echoed these sentiments about human-wildlife conflict. “It can directly impact animals through farmers often killing mammals that start to encroach on their agricultural land, especially big predators,” he said. “That’s a common phenomenon and a common problem all around the

There are better ways to protect livestock from predators, however. These include keeping guard animals such as dogs, maintaining areas with food and prey away from the farm, putting up fencing, and providing housing for farm animals as Allen did.

Rath also explained that nonlethal removal and relocation are also options for minimizing conflict.

Supporting Mammals

The world’s need for food is predicted to increase by 60 percent by 2050—and likely won’t stop there, as human population levels are expected to climb until 2080.

As mammals face ever-increasing threats to their existence, diversified agriculture could become increasingly relevant to their survival.

Farmers interested in supporting mammals are in luck. Agencies like the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resource Conservation Service promote sustainable agriculture practices benefitting both rural communities and wildlife.

A variety of nonprofit organizations, like the National Wildlife Federation and NRDC, also work with farmers to promote sustainable practices while maintaining and improving wildlife habitat.

“There are enormous benefits to the global environment associated with sustainable agriculture,” Farquhar said from his Maryland farm. “We love what we’re doing.”

The post Changing How We Farm Might Protect Wild Mammals—and Fight Climate Change appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2024/03/27/inside-bayers-state-by-state-efforts-to-stop-pesticide-lawsuits/ https://civileats.com/2024/03/27/inside-bayers-state-by-state-efforts-to-stop-pesticide-lawsuits/#comments Wed, 27 Mar 2024 09:01:15 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=55770 April 1, 2024 update: Two days after Civil Eats reported on this matter, a group of senators signed a letter addressed to Senate leaders opposing “all efforts to preempt state and local authority to regulate pesticides.” “To me,” she says, pointing at herself with both hands, her eyebrows raised, “Iowa’s farmers matter more than corporate […]

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April 1, 2024 update: Two days after Civil Eats reported on this matter, a group of senators signed a letter addressed to Senate leaders opposing “all efforts to preempt state and local authority to regulate pesticides.”

On TikTok, Iowa State Representative Megan Srinivas is angry.

“To me,” she says, pointing at herself with both hands, her eyebrows raised, “Iowa’s farmers matter more than corporate interests.”

Srinivas, a Democrat, posted the video on February 7 to draw attention to a bill that was just starting to make its way through the statehouse. If passed, the legislation could prevent individuals who use pesticides from suing manufacturers based on the argument that the manufacturer should have warned them the products could cause cancer or another illness.

Srinivas is a physician, and one specific concern added to her outrage. Less than a year earlier, the Iowa Cancer Registry released data showing Iowa now has the second highest cancer rate in the country, after Kentucky, and is the only state where rates significantly increased between 2015 and 2019. For the first time, researchers at the Iowa Cancer Consortium have a plan to evaluate whether the incredible volume of weed- and bug-killers used in the state is a contributing factor (although an annual report released at the end of February focused more on high rates of binge drinking).

However, while other states have seen a flurry of more than 100,000 lawsuits brought by individuals claiming Roundup—the most widely used commercial product that contains the weedkiller glyphosate—had caused their cancers, Iowa stands apart. Especially in agriculture, most people trust the safety of pesticides, locals say, and Roundup is the most common and coveted.

Chemical Capture: The Power and Impact of the Pesticide Industry

Read all the stories in our series:

• Overview: Chemical Capture: The Power and Impact of the Pesticide Industry
  How the agrichemical industry is shaping public information about the toxicity of pesticides, how they’re being used, and the policies that impact the health of all Americans.
• Inside Bayer’s State-by-State Efforts to Stop Pesticide Lawsuits
  As the agrichemical giant lays groundwork to fend off Roundup litigation, its use of a playbook for building influence in farm state legislatures has the potential to benefit pesticide companies nationwide.
• Are Companies Using Carbon Markets to Sell More Pesticides?
  Many programs meant to help farmers address climate change are now owned by companies that sell chemicals, which could boost practices that depend on pesticides rather than those that reduce their use.

“There’s still that culture of, ‘It’s only Roundup,’” said Rob Faux, an Iowa farmer and the communications manager for the Pesticide Action Network North America (PANNA). “They see it as low-risk . . . and there is a latent fear that glyphosate will be taken away. The standard response we get from legislators is, ‘Well, you know, those are frivolous lawsuits and glyphosate’s safe.’”

That’s a sentiment that Bayer Crop Science can use to its advantage.

Bayer purchased Monsanto, the maker of Roundup, in 2018. Ever since, the world’s now second-largest farm chemical company has been steadily executing a five-point plan to fight back against the aforementioned lawsuits.

Now, insiders say it’s using the outsized sway it holds among the public and elected officials in agricultural states to quietly execute a new strategy: Pass laws, state by state, that take away farmers’ and other individuals’ ability to sue if they get sick.

“I would argue that this is the sixth prong of their plan,” said Jonathan Oppenheimer, the government relations director at the Idaho Conservation League (ICL), where he’s been working with a coalition of groups to fight an identical bill that is also being pushed by Bayer. “It’s written in invisible ink.”

The bills introduced in Iowa and Idaho include some identical text, as highlighted here.

For example, when the Iowa bill was first put forward, “the only lobbyists who were paying attention were Bayer’s lobbyists,” Faux said, “so you can kind of put two and two together.”

Starting in the Iowa House subcommittee hearing that inspired Srinivas to take action, Bayer lobbyists Brad Epperly and Craig Mischo presented the bill to the subcommittee. There, Srinivas said their language on the kinds of studies that exist linking Roundup to potential cancer risk was misleading. “That subcommittee [meeting] had so much misinformation that people just believed,” she told Civil Eats. “To still have a bill [move forward] was very concerning.”

Insiders say Bayer is using the outsized sway it holds among the public and elected officials in agricultural states to quietly execute a new strategy: Pass laws, state by state, that take away farmers’ and other individuals’ ability to sue if they get sick.

In an email, Bayer Crop Science representative Brian Leake said the company maintains that “the overwhelming weight of science as well as the assessments of the EPA and leading health regulators and scientists worldwide” support the company’s position that the product is safe and non-carcinogenic.

While the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) maintains that glyphosate is unlikely to cause cancer in humans, the International Agency for Research on Cancer classifies it as a “probable carcinogen,” pointing to many animal studies and epidemiological evidence that link it especially to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. In court, judges and juries have repeatedly found the body of research presented to be convincing.

They have also been presented with reams of evidence documenting how Monsanto worked to influence scientific studies and discredit any research that found significant risks for years. “There is strong evidence . . . that Monsanto does not particularly care whether its product is in fact giving people cancer, focusing instead on manipulating public opinion and undermining anyone who raises genuine and legitimate concern about the issue,” U.S. District Court Judge Vince Chhabria said during one 2019 trial.

Now, in addition to Iowa and Idaho, similar bills have been introduced in Missouri and Florida. At the same time, the pesticide industry’s trade association CropLife America is working hard to pass a federal law that would bar states from passing their own laws that restrict pesticide use based on risks.

The multi-pronged strategy is just one example of how multi-billion-dollar global companies use their influence to change laws and keep pesticides on the market—and the stakes in this case are high.

The bills don’t name specific chemicals, the companies that make them, or individual illnesses. If passed, then, they could seriously curtail citizens’ ability to seek compensation for any health harms caused by any pesticide. Last year, for example, farmers in multiple states brought lawsuits against Syngenta, the ChemChina-owned company that makes the herbicide paraquat. Paraquat is banned in dozens of countries based on its toxicity and has been linked to Parkinson’s disease.

“We have Iowa farmers who have brought lawsuits recently for Parkinson’s and paraquat,” Faux said. “To emphasize that it’s all pesticides [that are included] would be a very quick way for the bill to lose any support. That’s why the messaging is glyphosate.”

In addition to Iowa and Idaho, similar bills have been introduced in Missouri and Florida. At the same time, the pesticide industry’s trade association CropLife America is working hard to pass a federal law that would bar states from passing their own laws that restrict pesticide use based on risks.

Bayer’s Leake declined a request for an interview and sent a statement that reads, in part, “We support state legislation alongside dozens of other agricultural organizations because the future of American farming depends on reliable science-based regulation of important crop protection products that the EPA has determined safe for use.”

A Syngenta representative declined a request for an interview and the opportunity to provide comments. On its website, the company maintains that “scientific evidence does not support a causal link between paraquat and Parkinson’s disease” and that the herbicide “is safe for its intended and labelled use.” In Iowa, Syngenta backed an early version of the bill, but its lobbyists have since registered against later versions.

Serving Constituents or Pesticide Companies?

On February 6, the day before Srinivas posted her video in Iowa, Idaho Senator Mark Harris, a Republican, began a presentation at a Senate committee meeting. His order of business was to present a bill that matched the Iowa legislation nearly word for word.

Harris represents Soda Springs, where Bayer operates a 540-acre processing plant to manufacture glyphosate. Rather than make his own case for giving pesticide companies’ immunity from claims of health harms, he turned his time over to James Curry, Bayer’s deputy director of state and local government affairs.

Curry led with Bayer’s history of mining phosphorus in Idaho to make glyphosate, which it had been doing since 1952. He argued that when used according to the label requirements, glyphosate was safe. Bayer’s legal costs were creating uncertainties, and according to the minutes, “he stated the industry needed help from the legislature to ensure its ability to mine.”

It was only a month into 2024, but the company had already reported spending more than $6,000 lobbying for the single bill in Idaho, compared to just $800 spent on any lobbying in the state the entire year prior.

Both nationally and in individual farm states, Bayer and other pesticide companies join and support overlapping associations and trade groups that involve industry peers and yield influence behind the scenes. In Idaho, for example, the Food Producers of Idaho have been involved in lobbying for the bill. Bayer is a voting member of the Food Producers of Idaho and one of the organization’s “platinum” sponsors for 2024. Other members include Idaho’s sugar beet growers, who have almost universally adopted planting beets genetically modified to be resistant to glyphosate.

Individuals representing the industry testified in support of the bill at the hearing. In emails obtained by U.S. Right to Know, Monsanto employees (before the Bayer purchase) listed “inoculate key grower associations” as one of a few important steps in a strategy to keep Roundup on the market after IARC’s carcinogen designation.

“The more layers of the onion you peel back, the more you realize how the system is just tilted toward industry,” said ICL’s Oppenheimer, who attended the Idaho hearing.

Back in Iowa, groups including the Agribusiness Association of Iowa and the Iowa Biotechnology Association have lobbied for the immunity bill. The Agribusiness Association of Iowa counts Bayer and all of the other largest pesticide manufacturers among its members and lists a Bayer employee as an “at-large director.” Bayer is also a member of the Iowa Biotechnology Association and holds a board seat.

Last year, the Agribusiness Association of Iowa hosted a “2023 kickoff fundraising reception” for Secretary of Agriculture Mike Naig and two members of the Iowa legislature, Representative Mike Sexton and Senator Dawn Driscoll, both Republicans. Sexton has received campaign donations from both Bayer and Syngenta during campaigns; Driscoll has received donations from Syngenta and the Agribusiness Association of Iowa’s PAC. Outside of the Senate, Driscoll works for an agribusiness consulting company that has worked with Syngenta as a client.

As chairs of the House and Senate agriculture committees, respectively, Sexton and Driscoll have helped move the bill forward in each chamber.

Neither Sexton nor Driscoll responded to requests for comment.

Secretary Naig’s communications director said the Secretary has not been involved with the pesticide immunity bills at all. But Austin Frerick, an Iowa-based agriculture policy expert and author of Barons, pointed to Naig’s resume as an example of how industry ties are commonplace and deeply rooted in Iowa’s state government.

Starting in 2000, Naig worked at CropLife America, the pesticide industry trade association, the Agribusiness Association of Iowa, and then the Iowa Biotechnology Association. From there, he went to work on government lobbying at Monsanto. In 2013, he was hired by the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship. When the top position became available in 2018, Governor Kim Reynolds, a Republican, appointed him.

That appointment “told me where real power is in the state,” Frerick said. “You’ve got to view Iowa as an extraction economy. The whole political class is in on it.”

When Naig had to run for re-election later, Monsanto handed him $10,000, his largest 2018 donation. In elections since, Bayer has donated thousands in most cycles, alongside the other biggest pesticide manufacturers, Syngenta and Corteva Agriscience.

The Fight to Stop the Bills

Still, the elected officials and coalition of public health and environmental advocacy organizations pushing back on the bills are succeeding in their efforts. The mounting lawsuits around paraquat and its foreign ownership are their weapon of choice.

In Srinivas’ TikTok video, her language is pointed, as she calls it out for being “Chinese-government owned.”

Her point? Since Syngenta is owned by ChemChina and makes paraquat, if any of the pesticide immunity bills pass, it would make it harder for American citizens to hold a Chinese company accountable for potential harms.

Plus, unlike Roundup and other products made with glyphosate, China, the European Union, and the United Kingdom consider paraquat dangerous enough to have banned it in agriculture. (A single sip can kill a human.) Despite decades of legal battles and dozens of new studies that link long-term exposure to Parkinson’s disease, the EPA recently reapproved its safety when used with proper precautions.

Whatever the pesticide, Bayer’s argument is that the warnings and precautions the EPA outlines on its labels are adequate. In his email, Bayer’s Leake argued that the bills would not prevent anyone from suing a pesticide manufacturer but rather would ensure the EPA’s labels are sufficient to satisfy health and safety warnings.

But those warning labels focus on acute risks, such as what will happen if you drink the chemical or breathe in the spray. And experts say that the agency’s process is not set up to assess long-term risks of lower-dose exposure.

“It will not warn you about frequent low-dose exposure leading to Parkinson’s,” said PANNA’s Faux, so if more studies are published in the coming years that offer further proof of the link, bills like these would prevent individuals from seeking recourse. Historically, there are countless examples where the risks of pesticides approved as safe came to light only years after they were in use; DDT and chlorpyrifos are good examples. “Iowa likes to say we value our farmers, that’s what we lean into,” he said. “Well, there are some farmers, some family farmers, who stood up and said, ‘We’re dealing with illness that we feel might have been caused by pesticides.’ You don’t abandon them.”

Federal Bills Also Threaten State Power to Label

While the state-level bills agrichemical companies are working to push through would make it harder for individuals to sue companies when they believe products have caused their illnesses, the companies are simultaneously working on federal legislation that would weaken states’ ability to warn residents of risks.

Last year, representatives Dusty Johnson (R-South Dakota) and Jim Costa (D-California) introduced the Agricultural Labeling Uniformity Act, which would prohibit states from putting their own warning labels on pesticides in addition to those required by the EPA.

For example, in California, Proposition 65 requires companies to put a warning label on all products that contain ingredients classified by IARC as “probable human carcinogens.” Since glyphosate fits the bill, Roundup and other glyphosate-based herbicides would have to carry the label (although a court ruling changed that in 2020). If the Agricultural Labeling Uniformity Act passed, it would make it illegal for California to put that label on those products.

Now, CropLife is using its political influence in D.C. to ramp up its campaign to get the language from the bill included in the upcoming farm bill. As the pesticide manufacturers’ membership association, CropLife pools funds from Bayer and other pesticide companies and donates to candidates through a PAC while also courting lawmakers.

For example, at its annual gathering last week, it hosted two receptions where company representatives could mingle with either Senator Jon Tester (D-Montana) or Representative Adrian Smith (R-Nebraska) in exchange for a campaign contribution. The organization also lobbies on Capitol Hill and works on messaging campaigns.

In February, the group ran ads in Politico’s Morning Ag newsletter, influential among policymakers and other key players in D.C, which framed the bill as necessary to protect American farmers. “U.S. farmers’ access to pesticides, which are critical for growing crops in an affordable and sustainable way, is in jeopardy because of misguided state regulatory efforts. . . . Over 360 agricultural and other groups support the bipartisan Agricultural Labeling Uniformity Act to help the U.S. correct course,” one ad read. To garner public support, the group has been running similar ads on Facebook.

What’s Next at the State Level?

At this point, Faux and Oppenheimer are working with a coalition of groups across state lines, and they’re optimistic that their messages are gaining traction.

In Iowa, after the bill failed to move in the House, it passed in the Senate Agriculture Committee but then stalled there. Then, last week, it was reintroduced in the Senate as an appropriations bill. This time, it included a new clause specifying that it would not apply to “any product made by a People’s Republic of China state-owned enterprise.” While the session is nearing its end,  Faux said there is still time for it to move further, since the legislature often goes beyond its posted scheduled.

“We’re sacrificing our future for the present,” said Brian Lenney, a Republican. “And lastly, I don’t think giving lifetime immunity to multi-billion-dollar pharmaceutical companies was on our constituents’ bingo card when they sent us here.”

But even if it fails, the groups are already looking to the next session in 2025. “If it looks like it’s going to go away quietly, we need to be ready for the next [session],” he said, because it could mean that “they decided to modify it based on the lessons learned and come back next year with it.”

In Idaho, the bill has already been modified three times. After the Senate committee narrowly voted it down, a new version of the bill was introduced in the House, with small tweaks meant to get some of the doubting lawmakers on board. However, it was scheduled to be presented in a House committee in early March, when, to everyone’s surprise, lawmakers deleted it from the agenda hours before the meeting started. Then, a slightly modified version was introduced in the Senate last week. Given the limited time remaining in the session, Oppenheimer believes it’s unlikely to pass.

But the bill’s future is still just as unclear as it was in the original Idaho hearing. There, on both sides of the aisle, lawmakers went out of their way to praise the agriculture industry. Some named Bayer specifically. But then, some who presented as supportive went on to say that they were still voting no, often citing family members who suffered through cancer diagnoses and discomfort with the idea that this would preemptively let powerful companies off the hook.

“We’re sacrificing our future for the present,” said Brian Lenney, a Republican. “And lastly, I don’t think giving lifetime immunity to multi-billion-dollar pharmaceutical companies was on our constituents’ bingo card when they sent us here.”

The post Inside Bayer’s State-by-State Efforts to Stop Pesticide Lawsuits appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2024/03/27/inside-bayers-state-by-state-efforts-to-stop-pesticide-lawsuits/feed/ 3 https://civileats.com/2024/03/27/chemical-capture-the-power-and-impact-of-the-pesticide-industry/ Wed, 27 Mar 2024 09:00:54 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=55763  In Mead, Nebraska, one company’s handling of discarded seeds coated with the most common insecticides in the country led to water, air, and soil contamination that killed bees and other animals. Researchers are currently studying how the levels of the chemicals found in area homes might impact residents’ long-term health. At the U.S. Environmental […]

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From Washington to Pennsylvania, farmers diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease have filed lawsuits against the maker of a popular herbicide, based on research that shows a potential link between the chemical and the disease. In California, researchers have connected insecticide exposure that farmworkers’ children experienced in the womb to a higher risk of behavioral problems into adolescence.

In Mead, Nebraska, one company’s handling of discarded seeds coated with the most common insecticides in the country led to water, air, and soil contamination that killed bees and other animals. Researchers are currently studying how the levels of the chemicals found in area homes might impact residents’ long-term health. At the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, officials found those same insecticides are likely to harm as many as three-quarters of the country’s endangered plants and animals.

Chemical Capture: The Power and Impact of the Pesticide Industry

Read all the stories in our series:

• Overview: Chemical Capture: The Power and Impact of the Pesticide Industry
  How the agrichemical industry is shaping public information about the toxicity of pesticides, how they’re being used, and the policies that impact the health of all Americans.
• Inside Bayer’s State-by-State Efforts to Stop Pesticide Lawsuits
  As the agrichemical giant lays groundwork to fend off Roundup litigation, its use of a playbook for building influence in farm state legislatures has the potential to benefit pesticide companies nationwide.
• Are Companies Using Carbon Markets to Sell More Pesticides?
  Many programs meant to help farmers address climate change are now owned by companies that sell chemicals, which could boost practices that depend on pesticides rather than those that reduce their use.

For most Americans, the 400,000 tons of chemicals used to kill weeds, bugs, and fungi each year are invisible. But as Civil Eats’ reporting has shown over the past 15 years, the impacts of those pesticides are profound and span the entire food chain—from threatening important organisms in soil to causing illness due to acute exposure during use.

Over the past few decades, attention to those risks has grown in some ways, as evidenced by the annual popularity of Environmental Working Group’s Dirty Dozen campaign, among others. However, as sales of organic food nearly doubled in the U.S., topping $60 billion in 2022, and attention to regenerative agriculture practices soared, pesticide use continued to increase.

In fact, in 2020, American farmers beat out every other country in the world in terms of the volume of pesticides applied, according to an analysis from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). And between 1990 and 2020, the amount of pesticides used per acre increased by 33 percent.

During that same time period, a series of mergers has made the top pesticide and seed manufacturers bigger and more powerful than ever. Four companies—ChemChina (which owns Syngenta), Bayer (which absorbed Monsanto), BASF, and Corteva Agriscience (formerly Dow and DuPont)—now control more than 62.3 percent of the world’s pesticide sales. In the U.S., that number is likely much higher.

And the strategies some of those companies have employed over the years to keep products linked to serious risks on the market are increasingly well-documented in court records.

There are countless questions to be asked, studied, and debated regarding when and where pesticides are necessary or appropriate, which Civil Eats’ regular reporting will continue to explore.

In this series, however, we will investigate whether consolidated corporate power may be contributing to the ubiquitous use of chemicals, making it difficult to sort facts from marketing or engage in rigorous cost-benefit analyses. We’ll report on how chemical companies use their influence to shape what we know about the toxicity of individual pesticides, how pesticides are used, and the federal and state policies that are intended to protect people from risks.

While the glyphosate taking up residence in Americans’ bodies and the neonicotinoids filling the country’s waterways may be invisible, the scale and urgency of the planet’s biodiversity crisis—and the ways in which research finds pesticide use contributes to it—are becoming more apparent.

Join us as we examine the potential role that pesticide companies play in all of this.

The post Chemical Capture: The Power and Impact of the Pesticide Industry appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2024/02/27/can-taller-cover-crops-help-clean-the-water-in-farm-country/ Tue, 27 Feb 2024 09:00:12 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=55400 Bedtka is in his mid-30s and working to raising a small cow-calf beef herd profitably. That requires cutting costs and labor, and he’d like to keep input-intensive corn and soy out of the picture if he can. Instead, he wants his cattle to harvest their own feed via managed rotational grazing, even in the winter. […]

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Under pewter-colored skies, Alan Bedtka tramps through the snow and past a stand of sorghum-sudangrass, its chest-high stems rattling in the harsh wind. The tall forage stands out in southeastern Minnesota’s corn and soybean fields, which this time of year have been reduced to stubble poking through the snow.

Bedtka is in his mid-30s and working to raising a small cow-calf beef herd profitably. That requires cutting costs and labor, and he’d like to keep input-intensive corn and soy out of the picture if he can. Instead, he wants his cattle to harvest their own feed via managed rotational grazing, even in the winter.

“Any day you can graze is better,” says Bedka.

It turns out a system that relies less on row crops isn’t just good for a time- and resource-strapped young farmer. A snowball’s toss away, a trout stream called Crow Spring snakes through the white landscape. Yet the bucolic scene belies an environmental problem roiling beneath the surface: The groundwater in this part of Minnesota is so contaminated with nitrates running off farm fields that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has recently called on three state agencies to take action to protect the health of rural residents.

The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency says 70 percent of the state’s nitrate pollution is coming from cropland.

That’s where the sorghum-sudangrass comes in. It works as both a cover crop and forage for the cattle, and it’s helping Bedtka build up organic matter in his soil. He was paid to plant it by the Olmsted County Groundwater Protection and Soil Health Program, a local effort that seeks to reduce overall fertilizer use by building soil—therefore cutting down on the nutrients that enter waterways—while helping farmers save money.

In its inaugural season, the program has already helped keep tens of thousands of pounds of nitrates out of area water. The initiative goes beyond pushing the establishment of an isolated practice to take a holistic, integrative approach. And its early success has conservationists and lawmakers hoping it can become a model for local, state, and federal farm conservation programs, and in the process serve as a way of disrupting the corn-bean-feedlot machine that dominates Midwestern agriculture.

Nipping Nitrates at the Source

In 2022, Olmsted County commissioners Mark Thein and Gregg Wright approached staffers in the local soil and water conservation district office and asked a seemingly straightforward question: How can we keep nitrates out of the groundwater? Thein, whose family runs a well drilling business, is troubled by the increase in contamination he’s seen over the past few decades in the aquifers he taps throughout southeastern Minnesota.

“It’s not in society’s best interest to look the other way,” he says. “I don’t think it’s fair to the next generation.”

Southeastern Minnesota is a hollow land—its geology is characterized by porous limestone that allows contaminants to easily make their way into underground aquifers. Nitrates are a particularly troublesome pollutant, given their ability to escape the surface and seep deeper into the Earth, often in a mysterious and unpredictable manner. High nitrate levels can cause a sometimes-fatal condition called “blue baby syndrome” and has been linked to colorectal cancer, thyroid disease, and neural tube defects.

The EPA has set the drinking water standard for nitrate at 10 milligrams per liter, or 10 parts per million. Recently, research has hinted at serious health problems associated with nitrate levels lower than that. Minnesota Department of Agriculture testing has shown that over 12 percent of the private wells tested in the eight-county karst region of southeastern Minnesota exceeded the EPA’s drinking water standard. More than 9,000 residents in the region have been or still are at risk of consuming water at or above the EPA standard, according to a letter the agency released in November 2023.

A winter view of Alan Bedtka’s sorghum-sudangrass cover crops during a soil health field day led by Olmsted SWCD staff. (Photo courtesy of Alan Bedtka)

The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency says 70 percent of the state’s nitrate pollution is coming from cropland. Corn requires lots of nitrogen, and it’s by far the most commonly used fertilizer in the United States. Iowa farmers, for example, apply it on 87 percent of their fields at a rate of 149 pounds per acre. Annual crops take up only about half of the nitrogen applied, and the rest often ends up polluting groundwater in the form of nitrate.

This doesn’t just create problems in local drinking water wells. Nitrogen and phosphorus escaping Midwestern farm fields are the major cause of the hypoxic “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico, which is about the size of Yellowstone National Park. The EPA’s latest National Rivers and Streams Assessment found close to half of the country’s waterways were in “poor condition,” and nutrients such as nitrogen are a leading culprit.

Southeastern Minnesota’s Olmsted County is a microcosm of agriculture’s dependence on nitrogen fertilizer. Since the 1940s, oats, wheat, hay, and pasture have been replaced by a duoculture of corn and soybeans. In addition, large concentrated animal feeding operations, which have become more prevalent there in recent years, add to the problem by disposing millions of gallons of nitrogen-rich liquid manure.

Olmsted County officials acknowledge that water in certain areas of the county will continue to see increasing nitrate levels as the contaminant moves deeper into aquifers. And when nitrates are present, it’s inevitable that other contaminants, such as pesticides, are also polluting the water. “We’re allowing this to happen,” says Caitlin Meyer, the water resources coordinator for the Olmsted SWCD. “But what can we do to prevent this in the first place?”

Dialing up Diversity

One standard approach to cleaning the water that runs off farms is planting cover crops. Indeed, studies have shown that when cover crops grow between the corn and soy seasons, they provide the kind of soil environment that builds natural fertility and cuts nitrate leaching by anywhere from 40 to over 70 percent.

Cover cropping has also gained a reputation as a tool for sequestering carbon and thus mitigating climate change. Since 2016, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has made available more than $100 million in funds to help farmers establish cover crops.

Despite the resources devoted to advancing the practice, however, only around 5 percent of U.S. farmland is regularly cover cropped. The cost can be prohibitive, and it can be tricky to fit them into a conventional row-cropping system. A 2022 Stanford University satellite study reported that although cover cropping reduces erosion and improves water quality, it also causes significant yield hits for corn and soybeans. And some scientists are concerned that cover cropping’s role in climate change mitigation has been overplayed.

For a time, the Olmsted County SWCD administered a traditional cover-crop program funded by the USDA that helped farmers with establishment costs. Angela White, a soil conservation technician for the SWCD, says the program was valuable in getting cover crops established in the region and showing that it could work, but it had limitations as far as producing environmental benefits. Farmers would often plow the cover under early in the spring before it could provide optimal soil health benefits, and USDA restrictions didn’t allow much flexibility.

Ray Weil, a University of Maryland soil ecologist who has worked with farmers in numerous states, says when farmers are paid to implement an isolated practice such as cover cropping, they can become too focused on the minimum needed to qualify for payments, and they don’t consider the overall soil health picture.

But Weil and other experts also say cover cropping can be a “gateway practice” for implementing the five principles of soil health promoted by the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service or NRCS: armor the soil, minimize disturbance (i.e., reduce tillage), increase plant diversity, keep roots in the soil as long as possible, and integrate livestock.

Plant diversity and covering the land has long been associated with more resilient soil. But experts say the integration of livestock via rotational grazing can also help reduce reliance on continuous plantings of fertilizer-intensive crops. And that’s where the Olmsted County Groundwater Protection and Soil Health Program enters the picture. The program pays farmers to plant cover crops, but it digs deeper to ensure that they get real results.

Research shows that allowing cover crops to grow to significant heights can dramatically reduce pollution. So, the program pays a farmer $55 an acre to grow their cover crops to at least 12 inches; at 24 inches, they receive an additional $20 per acre. Planting a cash crop within a living stand of cover crops, a technique called “planting green,” garners a farmer an additional $10 an acre. Farmers can also receive payments for growing so-called “alternative” crops such as oats and other small grains, and for converting crop acres to deep-rooted perennial systems like hay and pasture.

Each farm can qualify for a maximum of around $15,000 in payments per year. When Olmsted County SWCD staffers originally brainstormed with area farmers about setting up the soil health initiative, they considered a per-farm cap of $20,000 to $25,000. However, the farmers insisted on a lower cap so that more money could be spread around on more acres.

“I put $6,500 total expenses into seeding—the program paid back $3,500,” says farmer Logan Clark, who used the program to convert cropland to rotationally grazed pasture on his hilly, erosion-prone farm. “So, I’d at least be $3,500 more in the hole if I didn’t have the program.”

SWCD staffers say one advantage of the program is that because funding comes from the county—the commissioners agreed to set aside $5 million in American Rescue Plan Act funds for the program—rather than the USDA, they have more freedom to allow farmers to experiment and learn from their mistakes.

“I know farmers who have been cover cropping or strip tilling for decades … Now they are hungry for what’s next.”

Mark Stokes has been using no-till cropping for 26 years. Around five years ago, he noticed that even on his no-till acres he was seeing erosion, so he started growing cover crops utilizing traditional cost-share programs. He isn’t afraid to experiment—he’s grazed his beef cow herd on a mix of nine cover crops, and a few years ago, after seeing it being done on YouTube, mounted a seeder box on his combine so he can plant cover crops while he’s harvesting corn.

Stokes enrolled in the Olmsted SWCD program in 2023 to help cover the risk of yet another innovative practice. Through the contract, he agreed to plant his corn and soybeans into growing cereal rye green and terminate the rye after it hit 12 inches tall. It turns out the dry conditions made it a bad year to let a cover crop grow tall. On the other hand, the oats he raised in 2023 thrived.

When it came time to sign up for the 2024 round of the program, Stokes took advantage of its flexibility. “I signed up for more oats, so we don’t have to worry about the cereal rye so much, and if we have to, we can terminate it sooner.”

Not all participants in the program are going to check all five soil health principle boxes, but flexibility can serve as a seedbed for aspirational farming. Alan Bedtka wants to follow as many of the principles as possible. In 2023, he used the program’s funds to grow his cover crop to 12 inches. He also signed up to raise cover crops for seed production, which qualified him for the alternative crop portion of the initiative. Finally, his use of rotational grazing and the growing of forages on formerly row-cropped land qualified him for the haying and grazing payment.

“Protecting water quality is a perk, but the main reason I’m doing it is to try to be more profitable,” says Bedtka as he stands in a recently grazed cover-cropped field that he hasn’t had to add fertilizer to for two years. Nearby is an exposed limestone hillside, a reminder of the area’s vulnerable karst. Bedtka explains that his healthier soil absorbs and stores precipitation better. “So that means you’re growing more grass and more cows per acre. All the benefits are kind of tied up into one.”

Like Stokes, Bedtka is now able to take a more integrative, whole-systems approach with less financial risk.

“I know farmers who have been cover cropping or strip tilling for decades . . . Now they are hungry for what’s next,” says Kristi Pursell, who, when she headed up the watershed group Clean River Partners, supported farmers adopting practices to keep ag pollution out of southeastern Minnesota’s Cannon River. “The Olmsted SWCD program respects the knowledge that these farmers have of their land and their previous experience.”

Truckloads of Disruption

Soon after the Olmsted County program was launched as a pilot in 2022, 52 farmers signed up to grow tall cover crops—more than double what was expected. In total, they agreed to grow cover crops up to 12 inches high on over 5,300 acres and 24 inches on 2,700 acres. This year, over 70 farmers have signed up to raise cover crops under the program, representing almost 13,000 acres.

There are 240,000 acres of cropland in the county, so the majority of the area’s farmers aren’t participating in this initiative. But the program may be having an outsized impact on soil health. The SWCD estimates the environmental results of the program by combining the nitrate reduction directly observed on its own research farm with some of the wider research that’s been done. It estimates that in 2023, the program kept roughly 310,000 pounds of nitrates out of the county’s drinking water.

Surveys show that most farmers plant more cover-crop acres than they are getting paid for— something they can afford to do because the SWCD contracts pay so well, says Martin Larsen, a farmer and conservation technician for the district. When the SWCD includes those additional acres, the amount of nitrates being kept out of the water goes up to 560,000 pounds—or the equivalent of 23 semi-truckloads of urea fertilizer.

“The contracts are generating a nearly two-to-one payback in terms of soil health practices that are put in place on the farms,” says Larsen.

At the SWCD office, Caitlin Meyer, the water resources coordinator, points to a color-coded map that shows where farmers have signed up for the program so far; soil-friendly practices are being used in most areas of the county. “If we could get 30 percent in our subwatersheds put into cover crops, we’d be making real progress,” she says. One estimate is that some watersheds are approaching the 20-percent mark.

Larsen, who got his start using regenerative practices by planting cover crops a few years ago, then displays a chart showing what kind of acreage changes could occur if the program lives up to its potential over the next five years—9 percent less corn, 13 percent fewer soybeans, 417 percent more cover crops, 95 percent more oats, and 5 percent more pasture. If the effort succeeds, in other words, it could significantly disrupt the corn-soybean system in the region.

“For generations we’ve been telling farmers to do exactly what they’re doing. If we want them to change, we need to change.”

It might also serve as a model in other counties in Minnesota and beyond. Dagoberto Driggs, who coordinates the National Healthy Soils Policy Network, says the data from the Olmsted effort’s research farm helps determine an accurate estimate of the program’s benefits, ensuring public resources are being invested wisely. He adds that a program like this fits well with the current push on the part of regenerative agriculture groups across the country to create conservation incentives that are flexible enough to allow farmers to innovate and adapt. Driggs would like to see something like the Olmsted County program tried in other parts of the country.

“We really need a more holistic approach based on the soil health principles, which is what I find striking with this program,” says Driggs.

Mark Thein, the well-driller and county commissioner, hopes a cost-benefit analysis could show that such a proactive program saves taxpayer money by reducing the need for new drinking water infrastructure to deal with pollutants. It would be ideal, he adds, if the state would create a large-scale version of the program, taking pressure off local governments.

The timing could work in his favor. An analysis by the Star Tribune newspaper found that despite the fact that Minnesota has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to reduce nitrate pollution over the past few decades, the problem has not gone away.

When the 2024 session of the Minnesota Legislature convened in February, lawmakers began drafting legislation that would create a pilot nitrate-reduction program modeled after the Olmsted County initiative. Pursell, who is now a state representative, is working on the legislation. She’s frustrated with the lack of progress made to reduce ag pollution and blames federal policy such as the farm bill, which encourages farmers to grow little other than corn and soybeans.

If a local pilot is successful, Pursell says it could help farmers transition out of the corn-soybean duoculture in a financially viable manner—and give taxpayers a return on their investment in the form of clean water, a crucial public good.

“I want to make sure that when we are spending money, it’s for an outcome, and it’s not just to tick a box,” she says. “For generations we’ve been telling farmers to do exactly what they’re doing. If we want them to change, we need to change.”

The post Can Taller Cover Crops Help Clean the Water in Farm Country? appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2024/01/24/wic-shortfall-could-leave-2-million-women-and-children-hungry/ https://civileats.com/2024/01/24/wic-shortfall-could-leave-2-million-women-and-children-hungry/#comments Wed, 24 Jan 2024 09:00:41 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=55080 Yet Congress recently broke with this precedent in a move—or rather a delay in action—that could jeopardize those nutritional benefits for the most vulnerable families, following a year of record-high food prices and deepening hunger across the U.S. “Our country has always had a promise when it comes to WIC that it will be there […]

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Since 1997, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) has received consistent federal funding from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. Even during periods of gridlock, members of Congress have always been able to put aside their differences when it comes to funding nutritional benefits for low-income women and children. As a result, millions of women and children struggling with food insecurity have received healthy food, referrals to other social programs, and breastfeeding support at pivotal times in their lives.

Yet Congress recently broke with this precedent in a move—or rather a delay in action—that could jeopardize those nutritional benefits for the most vulnerable families, following a year of record-high food prices and deepening hunger across the U.S.

“Our country has always had a promise when it comes to WIC that it will be there to serve all eligible participants,” Georgia Machell, the interim president of the National WIC Association, told Civil Eats. “If you’re eligible for the program, you should be able to access it. If that promise is broken, it really puts families at risk.”

“We wouldn’t start to see waitlists until a few months down the road, but I think something that’s important to keep in mind is that it’s going to be different for every state.”

Last week, Congress passed a resolution—for the third time—that would keep the government open and fund WIC at its pre-existing level, or $1 billion less than what’s needed to fully fund the program. At least 2 million women and children  are at risk of being turned away by September if WIC is not funded to its full capacity, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. If that happens, women and children will likely be put on waiting lists for the first time in over 25 years, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

In 2022, a staggering 39 percent of all infants within the U.S. relied on WIC support. In total, the program served nearly 6.3 million pregnant and postpartum women and children under 5 in 2022, providing a consistent source of nutrition to many vulnerable families. Research has found that WIC improves birth outcomes, lowers infant mortality, reduces Medicaid expenses, improves cognitive development, and increases childhood immunization.

This shortfall comes at what would have otherwise been a celebratory time in WIC’s history. This month marks the 50th anniversary of the opening of the first WIC clinic in Pineville, Kentucky, in 1974. Yesterday, Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear gathered with national and local WIC staff and advocates and other program pioneers at Pineville’s original clinic to honor its legacy and fight for its future.

“Right now, we have a major responsibility to ensure that this program continues,” said Beshear, who is a Democrat, in a speech given at the gathering. “All that I ask is that Congress and our state legislature start not with what party they’re in, or what color they wear on their ties, but with the basic empathy that we are taught to have for one another. We’re taught the golden rule, that we love our neighbor as ourself.”

Since its launch, the WIC program has grown dramatically. It operates in every state and is administered through local health departments, across 10,000 clinics, nearly 2,000 local agencies, and 33 tribal organizations.

If there is a shortfall, it isn’t expected to hit all at once because WIC is so widely administered and depends on individual state policies. “We wouldn’t start to see waitlists until a few months down the road, but I think something that’s important to keep in mind is that it’s going to be different for every state,” said Machell.

According to WIC’s regulations, participants who are most medically at risk are prioritized in a budget shortfall. The waiting lists would first include postpartum women who are not breastfeeding, followed by children between ages 1 and 5, without high-risk medical issues, according to the USDA. However, the agency anticipates that waiting lists could extend even to the most vulnerable groups, including infants.

“Given the size of the funding shortfall, it is likely that waiting lists would stretch across all participant categories, affecting both new applicants and mothers, babies, and young children enrolled in the program who are up for renewal of benefits,” a USDA spokesperson said in an e-mail to Civil Eats.

As a last resort, “if other measures aren’t enough to close the shortfall, some states could be forced to suspend benefits for current participants,” added the spokesperson.

Beyond these drastic measures, budget cuts will probably affect the nearly 7 million participants and lower the quality of service across WIC’s offices. “States are also likely going to pull back in other ways. They’ll limit outreach. They won’t pursue cross enrollment efforts with other programs like SNAP and Medicaid. They’ll reduce their clinic hours,” said Katie Bergh, a senior policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. She notes that this shortfall would also likely deter eligible people from applying to WIC.

Bergh also said that the estimate of “around 2 million” that could be turned away for WIC benefits, if not fully funded, is an underestimate. It will likely be higher now in light of the recent resolution, which gives Congress until March to fund WIC in an appropriations bill and leaves states with less time to plan for a shortfall.

For months, the Biden administration has urged Congress to fund WIC, while seeking the support of community advocates. In December, the USDA warned that “a federal funding shortfall of this magnitude presents states with difficult, untenable decisions about how to manage the program.” And last week, the USDA and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) sent a letter to faith and community leaders to ask for their help in advocating for WIC’s necessity.

“We firmly believe that no child should go hungry in America and we ask that you amplify the importance of WIC among your faith-based community partners and congregations,” reads the letter.

“It would be a huge hit to our budget. We really appreciate that supplemental income on a monthly basis.”

The increased need for funding is partially the result of more eligible people signing up for the program, according to the USDA. This is in some ways a good thing, noted Bergh, as it indicates that WIC has become more accessible. The program used to require in-person appointments to enroll and receive benefits, but that stopped during the early COVID-19 pandemic when it began offering remote services.

The expansion in people signing up for WIC is also likely an indicator of just how desperately people need its services as food insecurity deepens. “We’re seeing the impacts of higher food costs. Families’ budgets have been stretched,” said Bergh. “In many cases, families who were receiving additional aid from other programs during the pandemic have now seen those pandemic measures expire.”

The ongoing uncertainty surrounding WIC’s future has left many of its participants worried and unable to fully plan for their families’ futures.

“On average, we’re talking about $80 to $100 a month as far as what that does for our food budget,” said Emily Church, a current WIC participant living in Ohio who also serves on the National WIC Association’s participant advisory council. She is raising a toddler and teenage son, while working and attending school. “It would be a huge hit to our budget. We really appreciate that supplemental income on a monthly basis.”

“I am fearful of how this is all going to shake out,” said Church, before pausing to check on her 3-year-old daughter. It’s her health and well-being, in her formative years of growth as a toddler, that concerns Church the most.

“I feel frustration and anger over the fact that this is even a question,” said Church, getting back on the call, as her daughter could still be heard in the background.

Meanwhile, lawmakers struck a deal to bring back the child tax credit, a pandemic-era support that provided relief for low-income families and ended in 2021. If the tax breaks are resurrected, it could go part of the way toward helping some families feed their children.

Read more:
Changes to WIC Benefits Would Cut Food Access for Millions of Parents
Do Regulations Designed to Promote Nutrition Make WIC Food Lists Too Restrictive?

Farmworker Women’s Rights: The next farm bill may shape the rights of women farmworkers. The sweeping, trillion-dollar legislative package, reauthorized every five years, has been extended for another year as Congress continues to debate the next version of the legislation. Historically, farmworker and labor rights have been excluded from the bill, but there has been a recent concerted effort among advocates to change that.

In mid-January, a group of women with Alianza Nacional de Campesinas traveled to Washington, D.C., to push for the inclusion of their rights within the large bill. They met with members of Congress to discuss their proposals. Those include: stronger heat protections, more resources dedicated to farmworker housing, guaranteed funding of SNAP benefits regardless of immigration or visa status, more research into pesticides, the development of a fully staffed farmworker office within USDA, and resources to assist farmworkers with transitioning to farm ownership.

“Our journey to Washington, D.C., underscores the urgency of necessary resources and acknowledgement of farmworker needs, particularly women and girls, in the upcoming farm bill,” said Alianza’s Executive Director Mily Trevino-Sauceda in a statement.

Read more:
The End of Roe vs. Wade Makes Reproductive Health Even Tougher for Farmworkers
Threatened by Climate Change, Food Chain Workers Demand Labor Protections
This Group Has Helped Farmworkers Become Farm Owners for More Than 2 Decades

Fertilizer Consolidation: The multinational giant Koch Industries recently acquired Iowa Fertilizer Co. for $3.8 billion, sparking outcry from advocates concerned about the increasing trend of consolidation within U.S. agriculture. Fertilizer prices have spiked in recent years due to inflation and rising gas prices, and the industry’s consolidation—furthered by this recent acquisition, advocates say—clamps down on competition that could drive down prices.

A recent letter, signed by 18 agriculture and environmental advocacy groups, called for a federal investigation into the acquisition. The letter notes that the fertilizer plant was first proposed in 2012 with the intent of lowering fertilizer costs and challenging the “Koch Industries dominance in the fertilizer markets,” while relying on substantial federal, state, and local funding to build the plant. “The unrestricted federal funds left the door open for Koch Industries to purchase the company just six years after the plant opened,” states the letter, delivered to the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission.

Read more:
Health Concerns Grow as Oklahoma Farmers Fertilize Cropland with Treated Sewage
Excess Fertilizer Causes a New Challenge: Low Crop Yields During Drought
Why Seed Consolidation Matters

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]]> https://civileats.com/2024/01/24/wic-shortfall-could-leave-2-million-women-and-children-hungry/feed/ 1 https://civileats.com/2023/11/07/congress-may-roll-back-pesticide-protections-farm-bill/ Tue, 07 Nov 2023 09:00:16 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=54186 Because children’s nervous, immune, and other bodily systems are still developing, acute and long-term pesticide exposures are more dangerous than they are in adults and can lead to learning disabilities, organ damage, and some cancers. One long-term study in California has found that children regularly exposed to agricultural chemicals had higher rates of attention deficit […]

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More than 4,000 elementary schools are located within 200 feet of farm fields. And while many states have acted to restrict farms’ ability to spray pesticides near those schools, Congressional lawmakers are considering multiple proposals that could block them from doing so in the future.

Because children’s nervous, immune, and other bodily systems are still developing, acute and long-term pesticide exposures are more dangerous than they are in adults and can lead to learning disabilities, organ damage, and some cancers. One long-term study in California has found that children regularly exposed to agricultural chemicals had higher rates of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms and more difficulty learning.

In Hawaii, when pesticide drift incidents sent middle school students to the hospital, schools and parents responded, galvanizing a growing movement. In 2018, the state became the first to ban chlorpyrifos. In 2021, the EPA banned chlorpyrifos nationwide, but a federal appeals court last week overturned that ban, sending it back to the agency for further consideration.

“States know that pesticide spraying is a risk to students,” said Senator Cory Booker (D-New Jersey), at a press conference announcing the results of new analysis on the topic from researchers at the Environmental Working Group (EWG). “Despite all of that . . . some members of Congress are proposing to preempt all of these laws, stripping states and localities from being able to do what’s necessary to protect their children.”

The proposal that would almost certainly curtail states’ ability to impose buffer zones and other restrictions around schools was first introduced in 2022 by former House Republican Randy Davis, who at the time said he was concerned that local communities were trying “to usurp some of the federal rules and regulations that we fought so hard to put in place.” The bill had strong support among groups that represent the agriculture, landscaping, and pesticide industries.

Now, according to Booker and policy staffers at EWG, lawmakers are planning to reintroduce the bill as part of the upcoming farm bill (or as part of a separate spending package). And it’s just one of three proposed bills that EWG and its allies are concerned would constrain state and local efforts to regulate pesticide use.

In June, in anticipation of farm bill negotiations, Representatives Dusty Johnson (R-South Dakota) and Jim Costa (D-California) introduced the Agricultural Labeling Uniformity Act, which would prevent states from putting their own warning labels on pesticides that differ from the ones the EPA has already approved.

For example, in California, Proposition 65 requires companies to provide warnings on products that are “known to cause cancer, birth defects or other reproductive harm,” which is beyond what the EPA requires. And a federal appeals court just blocked the state from applying to labels to glyphosate, the key ingredient in Roundup.  “State labels . . . threaten public confidence in the agency’s authority and science-based regulation and undermine the critical role pesticides play in sustainably feeding a growing world,” Tom Haag, president of the National Corn Growers Association (NCGA), said in a press release. NCGA is one of 360 agriculture and pesticide trade and advocacy organizations that are backing the legislation.

Finally, while ranchers and meat industry groups have been battling over the Ending Agricultural Trade Suppression (EATS) Act, it could also impact state pesticide laws. The EATS Act was introduced as the next chapter in the long saga over California’s Proposition 12 animal welfare law.

When the Supreme Court declined to overturn Prop. 12, lawmakers created the EATS Act to prevent other states from regulating how animals are raised on farms. Now, they’re working to get it included in the farm bill. However, the bill could have much more far-reaching implications. An analysis out of Harvard Law School identified more than 1,000 state laws that could be overturned as a result of the broad language in the EATS Act and found that it “also could affect certain state and local regulations on pesticides and fertilizers.”

In September, a coalition of more than 180 public health, agriculture, and environmental organizations sent a letter to federal lawmakers urging them to oppose all three bills. “These efforts serve only to limit the ability of the EPA, states, and localities to protect their people and environment from the harms of pesticide use, while shielding companies from liability for their products’ harms,” they wrote.

EWG’s new analysis is in support of that larger push, and it included two maps—one of schools across the country that are situated near crop fields and another that shows the state and local pesticide laws that it sees as threatened.

“I will be one of these people taking every measure possible not to let this . . . happen,” Booker said, emphasizing that because federal rulemaking moves so slowly, other entities that can move faster should be able to step in on behalf of public health. “States and local communities being able to act is a vital tool in the toolbox in protecting Americans,” he said.

Read More:
Hawaii Shows States’ Power to Regulate Pesticides
California Takes a Step Toward Restricting Bee-Killing Pesticides
When Seeds Become Toxic Waste

A Flurry of Food-and-Climate Reports. As the chance to spotlight food and agriculture at the upcoming global COP28 climate conference approaches, organizations are rushing to release reports to inform the conversation.

The Global Alliance for the Future of Food took a look at fossil fuel use and estimated that the food system accounts for about 15 percent of use around the world, with the most use occurring during processing and packaging and retail consumption and waste.

Meanwhile, the German Research Institute of Organic Agriculture, (Forschungsinstitut für biologischen Landbau, or FiBL), evaluated nitrogen use in agriculture and found that 85 to 95 percent of the nitrogen fertilizer used is wasted—at which point it enters the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas or pollutes nearby waterways. FiBL concluded that there is plenty of room to reduce the overuse of nitrogen while maintaining food security.

Ceres, a group that targets investors to move the needle on climate and other issues, also published a report that outlines how food companies can drive agricultural innovation. And As You Sow, a shareholder advocacy group, released a scorecard grading how much progress the 100 largest U.S. companies have made on climate goals. According to the scorecard, while the majority of companies are now disclosing greenhouse gas emissions and many are setting clear targets to reduce them, very few have demonstrated real progress on reductions. In the food and agriculture sector, As You Sow gave Bs to grain giant Bunge and PepsiCo; Walmart, Coca-Cola, and McDonald’s received Ds; and Costco got an F.

Read More:
Will a Food and Ag Focus at COP28 Distract from the Fossil Fuel Economy?
Walmart’s ‘Regenerative Foodscape’

Roundup on Trial. Courts ruled against pharmaceutical and agrochemical giant Bayer in two separate cases last week that involved men who claimed Roundup use caused their non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Juries awarded $332 million in damages in California and $175 million in Pennsylvania. Bayer acquired Monsanto, the maker of the country’s most widely used weedkiller in 2018, at a time when thousands of lawsuits were being filed based on the company’s failure to warn of the cancer risk associated with glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup.

On a related note, a documentary following the story of the first successful case against Monsanto will be released on streaming services on December 8.

Read More:
Inside Monsanto’s Day in Court: Scientists Weigh in on Cancer Risks
Community-Led Efforts to Ban Glyphosate in Public Spaces Pick Up Speed
The Man Who Fought Monsanto Will Leave a Lasting Legacy

Biden Courts Farmers. President Biden traveled to a corn and hog farm in Minnesota on Halloween to announce more than $5 billion in new investments in agriculture and rural development. The money includes extra funding for oversubscribed conservation programs intended to help farmers implement environmentally-friendly practices. The administration injected extra funds earmarked for climate-friendly practices into those programs last year, but some lawmakers are attempting to use the farm bill to reallocate it to other farm programs that don’t focus on climate outcomes.

Read More:
Why Aren’t Conservation Programs Paying Farmers More to Improve Their Soil?
Climate Change Is Walloping U.S. Farms. Can This Farm Bill Create Solutions?

Goodbye to BVO. Less than a month after California banned five food additives from its food supply, the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) proposed banning one of those—brominated vegetable oil, or BVO, often found in sports drinks and sodas—nationwide. FDA’s proposal is based on animal studies that show thyroid toxicity and other potential health risks, and it’s open for public comment through January 17, 2024.

Read More:
Michael Moss on How Big Food Gets Us Hooked

Rural Energy Boost. Climate Breakthrough awarded Jane Kleeb, founder of Bold Alliance, $3 million to fund her efforts to increase clean energy development in rural America. Kleeb is known for her successful efforts to fight the Keystone XL pipeline by building alliances of farmers and ranchers, indigenous leaders, and climate activists.

Read More:
For Democrats to Win in 2020, Invest in Rural America, Says Jane Kleeb

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