Lisa Held | Civil Eats

Can Trump and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. ‘Make America Healthy Again’?

Lisa Held — Wed, 09 Oct 2024 09:00:54 +0000

Marion Nestle watched, deeply surprised, last month as bits and pieces of her long-time efforts to sound alarms about food industry influence on research and government trickled out of a Capitol Hill roundtable hosted by Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin) and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the former presidential candidate now stumping for Donald Trump.

Skyrocketing rates of chronic disease connected to unhealthy food production? Conflicts of interest between business and government? “This is an old story—for me, anyway,” Nestle—who is a member of Civil Eats’ advisory board—explained. But she added that it’s not one that typically gets much airtime in Washington, D.C., and the people communicating the message were not the same experts typically tapped by lawmakers.

“They all feel like they’re unheard, when they have some of the largest health and wellness platforms in the country.”

Participants at the roundtable included physician Marty Makary, a gastrointestinal surgeon at Johns Hopkins University who talked about a lack of research on why pancreatic cancer rates have spiked; activist Vani Hari, who railed against food companies using ingredients banned in other countries in ultra-processed products like Froot Loops; and podcaster Mikhaila Fuller, who told a personal story of an all-meat diet curing her chronic illness.

Nestle disagreed with many of the finer points and thought the opinions at times came across as anti-nutrition science. Even so, she said she understood the frustrations and broader concerns. What irked her is the fact that her fellow nutritionists, who have plenty of scientific know-how, are not doing more to push the government to do something about chronic disease.

“I’d rather see mainstream nutritionists screaming bloody murder that we’ve created a food supply that’s making people sick,” she said. “Seventy-four percent of Americans are overweight. There is something seriously wrong.”

It was not the only D.C. gathering tackling connections between food, environmental exposures, and health last month. A formal Senate subcommittee hearing on chronic disease prevention and treatment featured three physicians and a food and addiction psychologist. Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle there expressed a surprising amount of bipartisan concern and collaboration, according to reporting from Food Fix. And last week, U.S. Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Robert Califf acknowledged ultra-processed foods’ potential harms with new, stronger language, which Food Fix also reported on.

But Sen. Johnson, who has been advocating for “healthcare freedom” since he became a loud opponent of vaccine mandates during the pandemic, hosted a different kind of event. With none of the bipartisan questioning that would happen in an official hearing—and with recent presidential candidate Kennedy sharing the spotlight—it came across as a campaign event for Kennedy’s super PAC and its larger movement, Make America Healthy Again (MAHA). Less than two months ago, Kennedy—who runs a controversial nonprofit that works on reducing children’s chemical exposures and has been a primary disseminator of vaccine misinformation—dropped out of the race and launched MAHA to help elect Trump.

It’s unclear how many of the panelists have formally signed onto that effort (most have not publicly endorsed Trump), but many have become regular guests on conservative media. Hari also spoke at a MAHA rally organized by Kennedy’s super PAC later in the week. And last night, two of the panelists, Makary and physician Casey Means, were scheduled to appear at a virtual MAHA town hall alongside Kennedy and Trump. (The town hall was postponed due to Hurricane Milton’s approach; Means said by email to Civil Eats that Vice President Kamala Harris was also invited to participate.)

Regardless of the panelists’ stated allegiances and while many are quick to dismiss MAHA as a fringe coalition, these advocates are tapping into dissatisfaction with the food-system status quo and are feeding into a new energy around food and health as an issue the right is ready to take on. As the election quickly approaches, many voters who care about healthier food are paying attention, and Instagram and X comments on the Johnson–RFK, Jr. roundtable were filled with MAHA enthusiasm.

While presenting themselves as silenced by mainstream media, they are reaching tens of millions of people daily through podcasts, best-selling books, and social media. “They all feel like they’re unheard, when they have some of the largest health and wellness platforms in the country,” said Melisse Gelula, who co-founded the publication Well+Good in 2008 and was one the foremost chroniclers of and experts on the growing culture around “wellness” in America. (She is no longer affiliated with the publication.)

Johnson’s opening statements invoked COVID-era fears about vaccines, and that made sense to Gelula: At the height of the pandemic, she saw many popular food and wellness gurus move rightward as misinformation around COVID vaccines and treatments spread. It confounded her because, in her mind, many of the bigger issues the Democrats focused on—like healthcare and climate change—could impact American well-being in even deeper ways. “Can we have abortion rights? Can we have LGBTQ rights? The protection of humanity locked down? Those are really under threat, too,” she said.

But the thing that both Gelula and Nestle emphasized is that while the Biden administration may not have done enough to advance research on how processed foods are impacting Americans’ health or reducing very real chemical exposures, there is ample evidence that a second Trump presidency would turn back the clock further on these issues.

“Why would anybody think anything else?” Nestle said. As to whether a Trump administration might tackle conflicts of interests between business and government, “They’re absolutely not going to do that. We know, because it didn’t happen during the first Trump administration. The opposite happened.”

To sort fact from rhetoric, here are a few key examples of how the Trump administration’s track record is in opposition to the MAHA movement’s goals.

Industry Influence on Government Agencies

Industry has long held significant influence in the government agencies that are responsible for regulating them—a phenomenon often referred to as corporate capture, and one that Civil Eats has covered at length. Kennedy’s MAHA materials reference it constantly, but this trend accelerated during the Trump administration.

Pesticide industry operators have always had an inside line to U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) officials, but their influence ballooned under Trump.

For instance, pesticide industry operators have always had an inside line to U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) officials, but their influence ballooned under Trump. Rebeckah Adcock moved from CropLife America, the industry’s powerful trade association, to a position as senior advisor to Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue and continued to meet with her industry peers. Trump also gutted the Economic Research Service, a subagency tasked with publishing objective research on farming, food consumption, and the environment that is often understood to be one of the only independent arms of the USDA.

At the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Trump appointed Alexandra Dunn as assistant administrator of the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention. Dunn is now the president and CEO of CropLife America. In his first few months leading the agency, Scott Pruitt met with dozens of industry groups—including CropLife America—but just five environmental groups.

At the Food & Drug Administration (FDA), the administration installed Mindy Brashears, a Texas Tech University professor who had a number of research projects funded by the cattle and pork industries, as the top food safety official.

Chemical Exposures From the Food Supply

That influence contributed to significant deregulation of food and agriculture chemicals, a concern that is central to supporters of MAHA.

In response to direct pressure from the agriculture industry, Trump’s EPA chief rejected his own scientists’ recommendation to ban chlorpyrifos, a pesticide Kennedy has called attention to for its ability to cause brain damage and reduce IQs in children. Trump’s EPA also weakened safeguards for atrazine, an herbicide that is banned in Europe and is linked to birth defects and cancer, and for pyrethroids—a class of insecticides used in bug sprays, pet shampoos, and on fruits and vegetables—that are linked to learning deficiencies in children.

Under Trump, the EPA also proposed weakening safety protections for farmers and workers that apply pesticides, and a recent whistleblower report detailed a culture of rushing through chemical approvals. Scientists who spoke up about safety concerns were “encouraged to delete evidence of chemicals’ harms, including cancer, miscarriage, and neurological problems, from their reports—and in some cases, they said, their managers deleted the information themselves,” according to ProPublica.

Trump’s FDA denied a petition filed by environmental groups to ban perchlorate, a chemical that can be dangerous for children and developing fetuses, in food packaging, and it dismissed concerns from outside scientists about levels of toxic chemicals known as PFAS in food.

Trump signed an executive order directing the USDA, FDA, and EPA to make it easier for companies to get genetically engineered crops approved and cut cost-share payments for organic certification.

During a 2020 interview with pro GMO advocate Jon Entine, Sonny Perdue dismissed Americans who worry about the effects of pesticides as having an irrational fear of technology and agreed with Entine as he equated organic farmers’ techniques to “sprinkling organic fairy dust over crops.”

Ultra-Processed Foods and Metabolic Health and Nutrition

Growing concern over the health impacts of ultra-processed foods is also fueling the MAHA movement.

Like all presidents to date, Trump didn’t do anything of note to address ultra-processed foods or metabolic health. His USDA did try to roll back school meal standards to cut whole grain requirements in half and reintroduce flavored, sweetened milks and tried to weaken rules meant to keep junk food out of schools.

In the end, Trump’s 2024 platform does not mention any of these issues, but it does promise to “reinstate President Trump’s Deregulation Policies,” which would most certainly result in fewer safeguards against chemical exposure and more unhealthy foods entering the U.S. food supply.

Scott Faber of the Environmental Working Group summed it up this way in 2017: “Thanks to Trump, it may soon be harder for Americans to feed their families, build healthy diets, and eat food free of dangerous pathogens and pesticides.”

In response to an emailed question about why, given his past actions, she is supporting Trump, physician Casey Means said, “We need to be discussing the critical issues of chronic disease, the toxic food system, and misaligned incentives in our healthcare, food, and agriculture systems. These are fully bipartisan issues.”

But while the issues cross party lines, MAHA is an extension of MAGA, and that conversation is now happening in the middle of a politically charged and consequential moment. “It will get worse,” Marion Nestle said, if Trump gets into office. “We already know that, because we just had four years of that.”

(Disclosure: Held worked at Well+Good as a reporter and editor from 2010 – 2016, where Gelula was her boss.)

No-Spray Zone. Relatedly, on October 2, the EPA announced it had finalized regulations intended to prevent farmers and farmworkers from being exposed to pesticides during and after they’re sprayed. After the Trump administration attempted to weaken the rule, the agency revisited the text and reinstated some of the original, stronger protections, such as establishing a protective zone of 100 feet for some chemicals. Farmworkers, especially, lack critical protections from pesticides and are often harmed in the fields due to breathing in and having their skin exposed to the chemicals.

Climate-Friendly Farms. USDA officials announced nearly $8 billion will be available to farmers in fiscal year 2025 through conservation programs that pay for a range of practices with environmental benefits. It’s a record amount of funding for popular programs that always have many more applicants than recipients. Because it comes from Inflation Reduction Act funding, $5.7 billion from that pot is earmarked specifically for practices that have climate benefits, and the agency recently updated the list of practices that qualify. In addition to planting cover crops and establishing pollinator habitats, some of the new practices include prescribed burning, wetland restoration, and silvopasture—or farming with trees—which has been gaining traction in recent years. Separately, the agency also announced it funded 300 clean energy projects to the tune of $104 million, many of which touch the food system, including building solar arrays on oyster farms and poultry houses, new refrigeration for small meat processors, and digesters on dairy lagoons.

So Goes the West Coast . . . Because of California’s outsized population and massive agricultural industry, its food and agriculture policies often have effects far beyond the state’s borders. And last week, a flurry of bills with national implications for the food system landed on Governor Gavin Newsom’s desk. Newsom signed bills that ban six controversial chemicals from being used in public school food, standardize food packaging expiration dates to reduce waste, and review the use of paraquat, an herbicide linked to Parkinson’s disease. He vetoed bills that would have put health warnings on new gas stoves and made it easier for farmworkers to file heat-related worker’s compensation claims.

The post Can Trump and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. ‘Make America Healthy Again’? appeared first on Civil Eats.

For Contract Farmers, the Election Could Change Everything—or Nothing at All

Lisa Held — Tue, 08 Oct 2024 09:00:44 +0000

A version of this article originally appeared in The Deep Dish, our members-only newsletter. Become a member today and get the next issue directly in your inbox.

This spring, Minh and Nhu-Hai Ngo were so stressed out by being at home on their farm in Vienna, Georgia, they made plans to visit family in Vietnam. When they spoke to Civil Eats, Nhu-Hai was already there. Minh, a soft-spoken farmer, was getting ready to join her. He sounded defeated.

“I go outside, look at the [chicken] houses, and it’s just empty,” he said. It was the first time in nearly eight years that the houses weren’t packed with birds owned by Tyson, a $21 billion company.

Minh started raising chickens in 2016, when he and Nhu-Hai took out a federal loan to purchase a farm with eight long metal barns built for housing poultry. Every few months, Tyson employees dropped off chicks and feed. They came back six weeks later to fetch fattened birds ready for slaughter.

After five years, in 2021, Tyson demanded that Minh install new fans and controllers in the houses, even though the old ones worked just fine, said Nhu-Hai, who handled the finances. So, despite the debt they still had from the initial farm purchase, the couple took out another loan. Less than three years after that—in October 2023—a Tyson production manager sent a letter with an ominous heading: “RE: Expiration and subsequent non-replacement of Broiler Production Contract.” Tyson was ending its relationship with the Ngos, effective January 26, 2024.

In 1992, the top four chicken companies controlled 41 percent of the market; today, they control 60 percent.

Ever since, Minh and Nhu-Hai have been fretting over how to come up with the money to pay back the bank. They put the farm on the market, but Nhu-Hai said it’s now nearly worthless, without an accompanying contract to grow chickens. (There is little else, after all, that one can do with eight windowless metal barns, each longer than a football field.)

“They give you just enough to survive every day—that’s it,” Minh said, of Tyson’s approach to compensation. “And then they make sure you spend any money on the houses.” Tyson did not respond to a request for comment.

For the Ngos, the situation is uniquely and intimately distressing. However, it’s a common story among America’s chicken farmers, because companies set up the system to place the risk of capital investments on farmers, while they control pretty much everything else. And as the industry has become more consolidated, their power has grown.

Over the past three decades, under both Democrat and Republican administrations, concentration across the meat industry has accelerated. In 1992, the top four chicken companies controlled 41 percent of the market; today, they control 60 percent. In pork, those numbers are 43 vs. 67 percent. In beef, 71 vs. 85 percent.

Economists predict market abuses are likely to occur when control by the four top players in any sector exceeds 40 percent. “What a monopoly does . . . is it uses its market power to raise prices for consumers or to raise prices in a stealthy way by reducing quality,” explained Christopher Leonard, author of The Meat Racket, while moderating a virtual Farm Action event called “Justice for America’s Poultry Growers” in July. “At the same time, on the other end of the ledger, they suppress what they pay producers . . . and they capture the profits that are in the middle. It’s a pretty simple playbook.”

Now, as the election approaches, many experts and farmers say the outcome could determine whether the farm economy continues toward consolidation and monopoly, or whether—if the next administration enacts policies to restore a more competitive marketplace—it shifts power away from corporations and toward farmers.

They’ve got good reason: Upon taking office, the Trump administration immediately scrapped rules meant to protect farmers and was generally passive on antitrust enforcement. Meanwhile, shortly after being sworn in, the Biden Administration announced it would tackle consolidation with an executive order on “promoting competition in the American economy.” The order included a long to-do list for Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack to, among other goals, “address the unfair treatment of farmers” and a directive for the chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to “address the consolidation of industry in many markets across the economy.”

Some farmers and advocates say the Biden administration has delivered on an impressive number of those priorities, while others see its passionate rhetoric as disguising a lack of meaningful progress. Many predict that as president, Vice President Kamala Harris is likely to advance efforts to confront consolidation in meatpacking, but without a formal policy document, it’s hard to know exactly how. Most say that despite Trump’s populist language and popularity among commodity farmers, his focus on deregulation and actions during his first term point to a future with more power for meatpackers and less for contract farmers.

Industry groups that represent the biggest companies, including the National Chicken Council and the Meat Institute have repeatedly pushed back on the characterization of consolidation and harms to contract farmers as an issue, calling the Biden Administration’s efforts “a solution in search of a problem.”

However, experts like Austin Frerick—author of Barons and former co-chair of the Biden campaign’s Agriculture Antitrust Policy Committee—say the problem of consolidation and its multiple impacts on Americans represents a real opportunity for candidates. “The piñata is so big, and it’s saying, ‘Hit me, hit me,’ especially in meat markets,” he said. For example, recent reports show that some of the largest meat companies including Tyson and JBS USA have used their power to skirt child labor laws and to fix prices, raising the cost of groceries. “Someone’s eventually going to latch onto this. The politics are just too good.”

A Century of Regulatory Inaction

“(The companies) say we’re independent, but we’re not independent,” said Jonathan Buttram, a former contract chicken farmer who is now president of the Alabama Contract Poultry Growers Association, during the Farm Action event. “How can we be independent when we have the debt, we have all the dead chickens, and that’s basically all we have? They own everything else. They make you feel like a sharecropper.”

Americans have been here before. Worker abuses perpetrated by turn-of-the-century meat barons prompted Congress to pass the Packers & Stockyards Act in 1921, in part to “assure fair competition and fair trade practices, to safeguard farmers and ranchers.”

Meatpacking workers in Chicago circa 1905. Photo from the Library of Congress.

More than 100 years later, however, after a mind-numbing series of false starts, there were still no rules on the books to enforce the law when President Biden took office. Former President Trump is partially responsible: During the Obama administration, Secretary Vilsack got some rules started, but Trump immediately threw them out when he took office. Trump then went a step further, dissolving the office that was set up to enforce Packers & Stockyards and moving oversight of the law to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS).

“AMS’s job is basically promoting the largest corporations, including meatpackers and grain traders, so to say, ‘You have to hold these companies accountable, but your bigger mission is to promote those companies,’ that gave us a lot of concern,” said Angela Huffman, president of Farm Action.

When Vilsack came in with a directive from Biden to restart work on Packers & Stockyards, he didn’t reverse that decision. However, under his watch, the USDA has finalized or proposed multiple rules that have earned the support of a wide range of farmer groups, including the National Farmers Union and the American Farm Bureau Federation. “We’ve been really happy that the Biden administration has taken this up,” Huffman said, and she’s been surprised by how vigorously they’ve pursued it. “Our big concern is just with the pace.

A USDA spokesperson said the agency used maximum resources to expedite the pace but that the rulemaking process is complex.

Huffman sees two pending rules as the most important for contract poultry farmers, and notes that if they’re not finalized before the election, an incoming president could throw them out immediately. Given that’s what Trump did the last time around, there’s reason to believe he would do it again, while Harris would likely let them stand. However, support of the rules doesn’t always break down along party lines: Some Republican lawmakers have attempted to roll back progress on the rules by attaching policy riders to legislative packages, while a few Democrats have made requests to slow down the process in ways that echo meat industry requests.

Others are frustrated by the fact that the rules seem to flit around the edges of deeper reform. For example, one of the most controversial aspects of contract farming in the chicken industry has long been the “tournament system,” so called because wages are turned into a competition, with farmers paid based on how fat their chickens are compared to those at neighboring farms. If implemented, the rules could set minimums for base pay and require companies to provide more information on how their pay rate is calculated. The fundamental structure of the tournament system, however, would remain.

Experts at organizations like the Open Markets Institute say that while the rules would help, the system itself is unfair and therefore violates the law and should be banned outright.

The National Chicken Council, on the other hand, says the Packers and Stockyards Act already prohibits anti-competitive practices and that some of the rules would increase costs, including to farmers.

Another rule would require companies to provide more details on the purpose and costs of upgrades when they demand farmers make expensive improvements to chicken houses, like Tyson did with the Ngos in 2021. But Nhu-Hai said there’s only one thing that would really make a difference for farmers: if the pay covered the upgrade. “Otherwise, you still have to be more in debt. It’s not worth it.”

Still, some farmer advocates see big potential in small tweaks to regulations, and Biden’s USDA did deliver on another major priority of independent cattle ranchers: In March, the USDA finalized a new “Product of USA” rule so that meat carrying that label will now have to come from animals born, raised, and processed here. It’s a change that comes after years of work, to ensure American farmers don’t face unfair competition from cheaper imports that carry the USA label.

The Consolidation of Agriculture

During Trump’s presidency, Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue famously told a group of struggling Wisconsin dairy farmers that “In America, the big get bigger, and the small go out.”

Secretary Vilsack’s language couldn’t be more different. Since the USDA released the 2022 Farm Census data earlier this year, statistics on consolidation and the loss of small and mid-size farms have been a fixture in his regular speeches. At a recent Field Day at the Rodale Institute in Pennsylvania, for example, he shared the fact that in 2022, the largest 7.5 percent of farms took in 89 percent of overall farm income, “which means that 1.7 million farms had to share 11 percent.”

“How can we be independent when we have the debt, we have all the dead chickens, and that’s basically all we have?

He also noted that 544,000 farms have gone out of business since 1981. “If you took every farmer today in North Dakota and South Dakota and added them to the ones in Minnesota and Wisconsin and those in Illinois and Iowa, as well as those in Nebraska and Colorado and those in Missouri and Oklahoma, you’d have roughly 544,000 farmers,” he laid out, for emphasis.

One of the key actions his USDA has taken to save small- and mid-size farms has been to invest in slaughterhouses and processing plants that work with farmers at that scale. The reasoning is simple: If there are more smaller, independent plants to buy and process animals for small farmers, competition will increase and the big packers will have less power.

In January 2022, the USDA announced a plan to invest $1 billion in competitive meat infrastructure. In July of this year, the agency said it had already distributed $700 million to that end.

But many experts say that because the big packers have already gotten so big, new, smaller plants will never be able to compete. “The reality is that the meat markets got more concentrated these last four years. JBS made a purchase. Tyson made a purchase. Cargill got back into the chicken industry,” Frerick said.

A spokesperson for the USDA emphasized that many of the smaller plants have not even opened yet, and that reversing decades of concentration will require a long-term commitment to a whole-of-government approach.

“From the very first days of the Biden-Harris Administration, USDA has been working to promote competition in agriculture by making landmark investments that diversify agriculture processing and support small and rural businesses, modernizing the rulebook under the Packers & Stockyards Act, and implementing wide-ranging policies to address the harms that market concentration poses to farmers and consumers,” the spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “These unprecedented actions will help to bring transparency, choice, and integrity back to the markets and serve the interests of farmers and small- and mid-sized independent processors alike.”

The USDA’s actions on other fronts have strengthened large companies: Vilsack’s USDA, for example, gave Tyson a $60 million Climate-Smart Commodities Grant. Under Trump, Brazil-based JBS, the largest meat company in the world, got the largest pork contract in a program meant to compensate American farmers for trade deficits, netting nearly $78 million. (In both cases, the administrations have said that the money is passed through to farmers.)

Where Frerick thinks real change could happen to reign in consolidation is in antitrust regulation, which the Biden administration has also been pushing forward after appointing antitrust crusader Lina Khan to chair the FTC. Kahn has met with Iowa farmers about consolidation in the fertilizer industry, and in 2023, she led a significant update to the government’s merger guidelines. “The FTC and DOJ [Department of Justice] now have much stronger guidelines. Over time, I think that’s going to make a big difference, regardless of who’s president,” Huffman said.

Looking to November

As to the two candidates angling to move into the White House next year, neither has said much or published detailed positions on meat industry consolidation.

However, Harris recently said she plans to crack down on food industry mergers, and the 2024 Democratic Party Platform mentions concentration and notes the Biden administration’s work to “make livestock and poultry markets fairer and more transparent.” Her past actions also provide some clues: Huffman said that when Harris was a senator, she voted in favor of checkoff reform, another big priority for groups working on curtailing corporate power in the food system.

Frerick said it will all depend on who Harris appoints to lead the USDA. Because while he is emphatically disappointed in the Biden Administration’s performance on corporate consolidation, he thinks much of the failure lies in Vilsack’s ties to industry. If Trump wins, on the other hand, based on the former president’s last term, “everything bad will get turbocharged,” he said. While farmers have become a sort of emblematic picture of a typical Trump voter and many support the former president this time around, across a diverse agricultural landscape, there are also many who agree with Frerick’s opinion.

Carlton Sanders has been advocating for farmers since his Mississippi farm went into foreclosure in 2017, after, he said, the company he grew chickens for drove him out of business using discriminatory practices (which were later documented by the USDA). During the Farm Action event, he told a story of going to D.C. to meet with Trump during his first term. “He checked my case and my records, and he said I should get back to Mississippi and be proud that Koch Foods is providing jobs for the Mississippians. He said he won’t help with nothing, and he did not,” Sanders said. “Donald Trump is definitely not gonna help the chicken farmers.”

The 2024 Republican Party Platform does not mention corporate power, antitrust issues, or farmers in the meat industry.

As for Minh and Nhu-Hai Ngo, at the end of the day, they’re not sure it matters who is in office in Washington. They are desperate to get out of the chicken business altogether, and Minh is thinking about going back to driving a truck. But they also just heard that Tyson sold its local operations to a smaller company that may be offering new contracts to farms in the region. So, they waver as they reason it out: If they can’t sell the barns or make loan payments and a company comes along offering a contract, will the least terrible option be to get back in?

In August, after half a year of empty barns, they were increasingly anxious about their financial predicament. It seemed, Nhu-Hai said, that as long as companies like Tyson could amass unlimited wealth and power, elections would do little to change the course of their future. “Sometimes, I don’t feel like it makes a big difference,” she said.

The post For Contract Farmers, the Election Could Change Everything—or Nothing at All appeared first on Civil Eats.

The US Weakens a UN Declaration on Antibiotic Resistance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post The US Weakens a UN Declaration on Antibiotic Resistance appeared first on Civil Eats.

Labor Protections for Immigrant Food Workers Are at Stake in the 2024 Election

Lisa Held — Mon, 16 Sep 2024 09:00:00 +0000

A version of this article originally appeared in The Deep Dish, our members-only newsletter. Become a member today and get the next issue directly in your inbox.

In her five years as an attorney for the U.S. Department of Labor, Shelly Anand litigated cases against companies violating workplace safety protections, including in the food industry. Then, at the end of 2020, Anand helped launch Sur Legal, a worker-rights nonprofit focused on the Deep South—so she was well-positioned to help when a liquid nitrogen leak in January 2021 killed six workers at Foundation Food Group in Gainesville, Georgia.

“We knew OSHA was going to show up; we knew a lot of different law enforcement agencies were going to show up; and we knew that the workers were going to be undocumented, intimidated, and terrified,” she said.

Sur Legal hosted a Facebook Live gathering to educate workers on their rights and began talking directly to individuals who worked at the plant, many of whom had witnessed the incident and were now traumatized. Ultimately, Anand and her colleagues were able to help about two dozen workers from the plant access what she calls a “life-changing” pathway: they were temporarily granted protected status so that they could help federal investigators identify conditions that might have contributed to the incident—which ultimately represented violations of the law.

In the past, federal agencies have occasionally granted what they call “deferred action for labor disputes” at their own discretion. However, in January 2023, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) formalized the process for the first time to encourage undocumented workers, who might otherwise stay silent due to fear of deportation, to report violations of labor laws on the job.

“We knew a lot of different law enforcement agencies were going to show up, and we knew that the workers were going to be undocumented, intimidated, and terrified.”

“It came out of DHS, but we look at it as a labor and a worker-rights policy,” said Jessie Hahn, a senior labor and employment policy attorney at the National Immigration Law Center (NILC). “It’s very much based on the perspective that the Biden administration has, about how best to enforce labor and employment laws and what is going to facilitate that.”

Between January 2023 and August 2024, according to DHS, more than 6,000 workers—many working in the food system—have been granted this temporary protection, which can last up to four years. They include the Georgia poultry workers, guest workers picking strawberries in Florida fields, and tortilla factory workers in Chicago, among others.

However, as the presidential election approaches, it’s one of several immigration policies that are at risk—and that would reshape the legal landscape for food and farm workers.

Both Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump have used strong rhetoric about stemming the influx of new immigrants at the U.S.–Mexico border. But how they might treat the immigrant workforce that powers America’s fruit and vegetable harvests, meatpacking and food processing plants, and restaurant kitchens—a large percentage of which is undocumented—is more complicated.

Harris is currently serving in what some experts say has been the most hardline Democratic administration on border policy in modern history, especially since President Joe Biden’s June executive order limiting asylum claims. As vice president, she was specifically tasked with addressing the root causes of migration in origin countries.

During her years as a district attorney and then as the attorney general of California, her record was nuanced. She was tough on immigrants when they committed crimes, but expressed support for those who did not. Throughout, she has specifically defended the labor rights of immigrant workers, including introducing pro-farmworker legislation, and has been endorsed by multiple labor groups.

The Trump administration—and the 2024 Trump campaign—have taken a harder line on immigration and immigrants living in the U.S. In 2017, Trump implemented a “zero tolerance” border policy for families at the border and ended the deferred action policy, which previously gave the children of immigrants, called “Dreamers,” a path to citizenship. (Harris, a senator at the time, supported the Dreamers.) In addition, the second bullet point in the 2024 Republican Party Platform is to “carry out the largest deportation operation in American history,” with a goal of expelling millions of immigrants. During the recent debate, Trump repeatedly demonized immigrants using sweeping generalizations filled with misinformation about crime. ( Research shows immigrants do not commit crimes at higher rates than U.S.-born Americans.) “We have to get ’em out,” he said. “We have to get ’em out fast.”

People close to the issue told Civil Eats that, given the unspoken reality of how deeply farms and food businesses rely on undocumented workers, they’re more worried about worker abuse increasing under Trump’s leadership than about mass deportations.

“I think they want people to be scared,” Antonio De Loera-Brust, communications director for the United Farm Workers (UFW), said of the deportation threats. “They’re going to push [undocumented workers] more into the shadows, where they’re more vulnerable and exploitable.”

Empowering Immigrants to Report Labor Abuses

On the same day that she announced her candidacy for president, Harris received an enthusiastic endorsement from UFW. UFW President Teresa Romero called Biden “the greatest friend the United Farm Workers has had in the Oval Office” and said she expected Harris “to continue the transformative work of the Biden-Harris administration.”

Deferred action is one piece of that work UFW has embraced; its organizers have been assisting farmworkers with applications, while the UFW Foundation has been working with the state of California to inform farmworkers about the option. To date, De Loera-Brust said UFW has helped more than 100 fieldworkers apply.

Farmworkers pick corn in the heat. (Photo credit: Hill Street Studios / Getty Images)

To be eligible, workers must get a letter called a “statement of interest” from a labor or employment agency. For example, if fieldworkers have reported safety violations to Cal/OSHA, California’s worker safety and health agency, Cal/OSHA must then send a letter to DHS indicating interest in launching an investigation before DHS will grant deferred action status. Groups like UFW often help facilitate that process.

Once they are granted the status, workers may be asked to provide information on labor violations they’ve experienced or witnessed. In Gainesville, for example, the nitrogen leak resulted in two federal investigations into what caused the incident and its fatalities.

“Several of these workers came forward to the Department of Justice, which has never been an immigrant-friendly agency, so that was 10 times scarier for them,” Anand said. “But they want to do everything they can to hold folks accountable for those deaths.”

As a result, OSHA investigators concluded Foundation Food Group and three affiliated companies “failed to implement any of the safety procedures necessary to prevent the nitrogen leak, or to equip workers responding to it with the knowledge and equipment that could have saved their lives.” The agency cited the companies for nearly $1 million in fines and a total of 59 violations. Foundation Food Group was acquired by another chicken processor, Gold Creek Foods, in September 2021.

“Several of these workers came forward to the Department of Justice, which has never been an immigrant-friendly agency . . . but they want to do everything they can to hold folks accountable for those deaths.”

In a later, more detailed report produced by the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board that workers also helped with, investigators again found the deaths had been “completely preventable.”

While it was too late to save the workers who died, one of the affiliated companies that leased the faulty equipment said it developed new safety protocols as a result of the report, and the investigators recommended OSHA issue a new national standard to address the hazards of liquid nitrogen, with specific emphasis on poultry processing and food manufacturing.

It’s an example of how the deferred action policy’s impact extends far beyond the individuals who receive the status, Hahn said. “We are trying to address the chilling effect that occurs in a workplace when people are too afraid to speak up about labor violations,” she said. “When those workers feel protected because they’ve received deferred action, then everyone in the workplace benefits.” In other words, supporters believe the policy makes workplaces safer for all Americans, immigrant or otherwise.

Participants at a clinic Sur Legal co-hosted with the Georgia Asylum and Immigration Network (GAIN) and Centro de los Derechos del Migrante (CDM). (Photo courtesy of Sur Legal)

At Centro de Los Derechos del Migrante (CDM), which has headquarters in both Maryland and Mexico, staff members have been documenting the abuse of migrants who come to the U.S. through guestworker programs to work in agriculture and food processing for nearly two decades. Lucy Thames, CDM’s outreach project manager, said the deferred action process has also benefited those workers over the past year.

One challenge for workers in the H-2A program, which is for farms, and the H-2B program, which is for food processing, is that their legal status in the country is tied to their employer, making it difficult for them to report or escape abusive situations. But when guestworkers are granted deferred action, Thames explained, they are able to seek employment with any U.S. employer. “They’re able to leave a situation in which their rights aren’t being respected and identify an employer who might be a better fit for them,”she said.

That’s significant because in recent years, as farms have struggled to find enough workers to plant carrots and harvest tomatoes, the H2-A program especially has ballooned in size. CDM has been particularly focused on helping shape a recent Biden administration rule to expand protections for workers in that program.

Thames said the new rule contains many provisions CDM has advocated for, including allowing protection from being fired without cause, banning retaliation against workers who engage in union organizing, establishing transportation safety requirements, and ensuring support and advocacy organizations are able to visit workers in employer-provided housing.

The Post-Election View

Advocates expect Harris to support the H-2A rule changes, since they came out of the Biden administration. As a senator, she also introduced a bill that would have extended minimum wage and overtime protections to farmworkers.

On the other side, while Trump has not mentioned this H-2A rule since it was proposed, Republican lawmakers have been pushing back on many of its provisions. At the end of August, a federal judge sided with 17 Republican-led states in a lawsuit brought against the Department of Labor, blocking the Biden administration from implementing the provisions.

And at the end of Trump’s presidency, his administration published a different H-2A rule, which drew strong opposition from farm labor groups because it weakened worker protections. At the time, his Department of Labor said the rule would “streamline and simplify the H-2A application process, strengthen protections for U.S. and foreign workers, and ease unnecessary burdens on employers.”

The political ping-pong over the H-2A rules shows how, since immigration is so politicized, even small changes to labor policies that primarily impact immigrant workers are often the result of years of back-and-forth that span multiple presidential administrations.

“A lot of the developments that we’re seeing are many, many years in the making,” Thames said. “I think that’s often what we’ve seen in the farmworker movement.It’s decades of work done by advocates and workers themselves.”

Throughout that time, regardless of who’s in charge in D.C., U.S. food production has depended on immigrant workers. Multiple farmers who spoke to Civil Eats laughed at the idea of finding enough U.S. citizens to harvest kale and squash.

One organic vegetable farmer said she pays nearly $17 an hour to her H-2A workers but has still never had a domestic worker apply. (The law requires farmers to post the jobs for U.S. workers before bringing in guestworkers.) Originally, she relied on mostly undocumented workers living in the U.S., but recently has had to bring in more temporary guestworkers on H-2A visas. She’s hoping for a more long-term solution that recognizes the contributions of the immigrants who have powered her farm—some for more than a decade—and that would allow them to live and work without fear.

But with election rhetoric focused on border security and the recent failure of even the most middle-of-the-road legislation, unions and immigrant rights groups are zeroing in on the things that make a difference day-to-day.

Deferred action is “a Band-Aid on a big problem,” said Sur Legal’s Anand, since it doesn’t do anything to resolve longstanding questions around whether the country’s millions of immigrant food workers should be granted long-term legal status. But it has had a real impact on the Gainesville workers’ lives. “Some of these workers have left the poultry industry and found better paying, safer jobs, and they feel really empowered,” Anand said. “Now, they’re speaking up.”

“We don’t know what’s going to happen with this program,” she added, “but by and large, most of our folks that we’ve worked with are like, ‘If it gives me a few years of peace, of being able to be safe and to live my life without fear, I’ll do it.’”

The post Labor Protections for Immigrant Food Workers Are at Stake in the 2024 Election appeared first on Civil Eats.

A New Book Dives Deep Into the Climate and Health Impacts of Gas Stoves

Lisa Held — Wed, 14 Aug 2024 09:00:09 +0000

Each year, 100,000 Americans die from coal and car pollution. And each year, 20 percent of deaths worldwide are attributable to fossil fuel use. Rob Jackson, Stanford climate scientist and chair of the Global Carbon Project, keeps a long list of statistics like these—on the devastating health impacts of fossil fuels—ready to share.

“That’s 10 million senseless deaths [due to fossil fuels] when we have cleaner fuels available,” Jackson explained to Civil Eats as he prepped for the launch of his new book, Into the Clear Blue Sky: The Path to Restoring Our Atmosphere. “One reason I push the intersection between health and climate is because it reaches people who won’t otherwise pay attention to climate.”

That intersection hits home in about 40 percent of U.S. kitchens, where Americans still cook over flames powered by natural gas. The week of Jackson’s book launch, many of those cooks were probably drenched in sweat, too: July 22 was the hottest day ever recorded on Earth.

In the book, Jackson tells stories of measuring both the staggering greenhouse gas emissions gas stoves produce and the dangerous levels of air pollutants home cooks breathe in as they sauté and roast (even long after the burners are off).

Last year, some of those measurements, published in research studies, contributed to public awareness that quickly spiraled into what multiple media outlets branded “gas stove culture wars.” (Just last week, Senator JD Vance told his supporters Vice President Kamala Harris “wants to take away your gas stoves,” which is entirely false.) But Into the Clear Blue Sky is a solutions book written by a scientist, and Jackson approaches the phaseout of gas-powered home appliances with the same steady, measured urgency he applies to exploring decarbonizing steel and electrifying vehicles—two other important solutions in his book. Also, early on, he establishes a throughline: that the impacts of the climate crisis are unequally felt, and solutions need to be accessible and applicable to all.

Jackson spoke to Civil Eats about his groundbreaking research, the pushback against policies that could speed electrification, and how writing about climate solutions—gas stove phaseouts and otherwise—has left him angry and afraid, but also hopeful.

You set out to write about climate solutions, and you allotted two chapters to the food system—one on gas stoves, one on beef. Considering all the ways that climate change intersects with the food system, why those two?

For a couple of reasons. In the book, I highlight the opportunities for reducing methane concentrations in the atmosphere as probably our best short-term goal for climate action. And the two largest sources of methane in the world are food: primarily cows and rice paddies, and gas appliances in our homes and buildings.

We did the first studies looking at emissions from water heaters and have spent the last five years studying gas stoves—initially, purely for their greenhouse gas emissions, to see how much methane leaks into the air. We found that the leaks from gas stoves alone in the U.S. were responsible for pollution equivalent to half a million U.S. cars.

But as we were going into hundreds of homes measuring methane, we started measuring indoor air pollutants like NOx [nitrogen oxide] gasses, which triggers asthma, and benzene, which is carcinogenic. That opened a whole new field of study for me, because I realized every time I turned on a burner on a gas stove or started the oven, pollution levels shot up above health benchmarks, even when I had the ventilation hood on in my house.

You wrote that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) doesn’t include methane leakage from gas appliances in their greenhouse gas emissions estimates. Is that still true, or has your research changed things?

It’s still mostly true. They do now include some emissions from gas stoves, but they don’t include the full set of emissions, including leakage. I began measuring methane from appliances in homes and buildings because it was the least-studied part of the gas supply chain, and I wanted to fill a fill a research gap there. Our research has drawn a lot of attention to the issue of gas appliances in our homes.

The largest source of emissions indoors is the furnace, because it burns so much more gas. But the furnace and the water heater are required to vent directly outdoors through a chimney or a pipe. I focus a lot on gas stoves because there’s no vent. Or there’s a hood that most people don’t use—and that surveys show often isn’t effective.

The levels of air pollutants you’ve measured in people’s homes are unbelievably high. In the book, you talk about how the industry knew about the health concerns more than 100 years ago, to the extent that their own experts said gas shouldn’t be used in homes without requiring hoods that vented to the outside, which didn’t happen. How much of this evidence on indoor air pollutants and the health implications is just emerging now and how much is new?

It’s a fascinating question. For example, there’s 50 years of measurements on NOx pollution indoors. There were meta-analyses done in the 1990s showing that stoves increased indoor NOx levels and that the likelihood of asthma and wheezing and different health outcomes increased if you lived in a home with a gas stove. So, that knowledge was well known 30 years before I ever thought about measuring gas stoves.

I think our instruments are better now, and we have a finer-scale resolution. And until we did it, no one had measured benzene emissions indoors from gas stoves. So, we’re still learning about the full set of pollutants that are generated indoors.

And I think we’re learning more now about not just the emission rates but the concentrations that people actually breathe. That’s the tricky part, because what you need to know for predicting health outcomes is how high the levels are—not just in the kitchen but in the bedrooms down the hall where people spend their time and sleep.

That was the biggest surprise of our studies for me—the fact that concentrations of pollutants rose so quickly in bedrooms down the hall and stayed above health benchmarks for hours after the stove was off. When you think about cooking meal after meal, day after day, month after month and these concentrations just recurring all the time in our homes . . . sometimes I think we would never willingly stand over the tailpipe of a car breathing in the exhaust, but we willingly stand over a gas stove and breathe the same pollutants.

Have you done any of this research in restaurants?

We are doing that right now, literally. I have a part of my lab up in Pittsburgh doing measurements. We’ve done some in the Bay Area. We’re doing some in the Midwest, and we’re going to go to Washington, D.C. this summer and do some more.

Generally, [commercial] kitchens have industrial hoods, which are much better. However, they also have many more burners. And they have pilot lights, which are the most inefficient way that we burn. So, I worry about exposures where the concentration is building up at night after the restaurant closes and the hoods are off and these pilot lights are burning. I worry more about small kitchens . . . somewhere where maybe the ventilation is not so good.

We’re really trying to understand the risks in kitchens and, frankly, to do it more positively. We’re trying to work with chefs to promote the benefits of electrification. There’s an increasing number of chefs willing to speak out and say, “Yes, I can cook with electricity and there’s no reason not to switch now.”

In terms of electrification, you talk a lot in the book about how climate solutions need to be accessible to everyone. Switching to induction from gas can be really costly. How do you see the transition becoming possible for people at all income levels?

I do think the cost will come down over time. But I think of climate solutions [as having] two flavors: One is to use less of whatever it is that emits fossil fuels. The other is to decarbonize whatever infrastructure is left. And we can’t really cook less, so that’s not a realistic solution set for our homes.

So, I think we need to favor reach codes that require future construction to be all electric.

Governor [Kathy] Hochul and the Assembly and Senate in New York passed the country’s first state-level bill requiring new homes and buildings be all-electric by 2026. Those bills make sense to me, because every time we plumb a new house or new building with gas infrastructure or fossil fuel infrastructure, we lock in greenhouse gases for decades to come.

I don’t suggest that we need to go into every home and rip people’s stoves off the walls. We need an orderly transition, and the place to do that is when our stoves reach the end of their lifetime, to switch them out. Since I am fortunate and relatively wealthy, I chose to replace my gas stove with an induction stove before the end of its lifetime because I could. But the hundreds of homeowners we sample in Bakersfield and lower-income neighborhoods, they don’t have that option, and even if they can afford it, they rent. So, I worry the most about people in lower-income communities.

There’s also been a lot of pushback. Are you optimistic about these electrification laws moving forward?

The industry is powerful. The reach codes that Berkeley passed have been overturned. There were 100 cities and counties in California that had passed similar reach codes, and most of those are now moot. States like New York have taken a different approach, and I’m optimistic that states that want to act will find a way to incentivize the transition to electric appliances. But there have now been a couple of dozen states that have passed preemption laws to make such codes illegal. Though there’s tremendous pushback, I think induction stoves will win eventually, because they’re a better product. They’re more efficient. A child can’t burn their hand. But [with climate], winning slowly is the same as losing, as Bill McKibben likes to say.

On that note, my editor suggested I ask you about what gives you hope, and I felt myself having an emotional reaction. Like, “I don’t care about hope! I care about what’s possible. Brass tacks. What can be done—or not—to move the needle?” But you use the word hope a lot in the book, so I thought I should ask: Why?

I would say that hope and optimism are muscles that we need to exercise. My first homework assignment in any class is for students to go home and research things in the environment that are better today than they were 50 years ago. That list is long. It’s lifespan and childhood mortality. It’s water and air quality. It’s a decline in global poverty, despite the injustices that remain. Then there’s a long list of targeted regulations that have saved us money and made us healthier.

The phaseout of leaded gasoline has literally made us smarter and made lead levels in our kids’ blood drop 95 percent. There’s the Montreal Protocol that saved billions of cases of skin cancers and cataracts. And there’s my favorite example—the Clean Air Act—that saves 100,000 American lives a year, a bipartisan bill at a 30-fold return on investment.

So, I think by acknowledging past successes we make future successes in climate more likely, because we can see a path to a better future. And I guess I believe strongly that it’s very easy in my world to sink only into the latest statistics of drought and disasters—but it doesn’t seem to motivate people.

So, it’s a sort of hope grounded in facts and history.

Yes, but the undercurrent is there, which is, you know, I’m afraid and angry, because we’ve wasted decades. We’ve sprinted right to 1.5°C—something that people thought was unfathomable 20 years ago—and we seem to be sprinting towards 2°C. So yes, I’m hopeful, but I’m also angry and afraid for all of us.

Given the urgency, do you think that this upcoming election could partially determine whether catastrophic outcomes are locked in?

I’m an environmental scientist, and at this point in my life, there’s only one party that seems to take climate and the environment seriously. It wasn’t always that way. My biggest regret is how politicized and polarized the environment has become. Republican administrations created the EPA and signed the Montreal Protocol. Even Margaret Thatcher, she once said something like, “We have treated the atmosphere like a dust bin.” She of course backtracked later in her career, but she was a chemist and scientist, and she understood.

I regret the fact that we are in a place where a Republican who mentions climate gets defeated in a primary by someone farther to the right. I don’t want to pick parties, but I’m deeply concerned about this election. We can’t afford another administration undoing climate rules. It isn’t just for the climate. It’s killing millions of people around the world and hundreds of thousands of Americans. Let’s be frank about it.

$2 Billion for Farmer Discrimination. On July 31, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack announced that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) had successfully distributed more than $2 billion to 43,000 farmers who had experienced discrimination while attempting to secure USDA loans.

The announcement marked a historic moment in a long saga. Farmers have alleged discrimination in the agency’s loan programs for decades, and multiple lawsuits have been filed over the years by women, Indigenous, and Black farmers who said they were treated differently when applying for loans, driving many out of business.

In 2020, lawmakers set aside $4 billion specifically to compensate Black farmers for race-based discrimination, but the program was thrown out in the wake of lawsuits, many of which were filed by Republican officials who alleged discrimination against white farmers. So when Democrats passed the Inflation Reduction Act, they authorized a new, race-neutral fund that would compensate any farmer who alleged discrimination based on race, ethnicity, gender, and other factors.

During a press call announcing the news, Vilsack said the agency received 58,000 applications and ultimately approved 43,000. While the agency could not compensate farmers for losses or pain endured, he said, “I think it represents USDA acknowledging and responding to reported discrimination.”

Vilsack could not provide statistics on how many of the individuals who received funding were Black farmers, but said that analysis may become available in the future. He also pointed out that the states with the most farmers awarded funding were Mississippi and Alabama.

In addition to the payments, he said the agency has been working to root out and prevent future discrimination and break down barriers to access within its loan programs with, for example, “new processes that reduce the need for human discretion in loan decision-making.”

Many Democrats in Congress and advocacy organizations released statements applauding the USDA’s progress on the issue. “Today marks an important milestone for USDA and for our collective efforts to hold the Department accountable in addressing a history of acts of discrimination against perpetually marginalized agricultural producers and their communities,” said Michelle Hughes, Co-Executive Director of the National Young Farmers Coalition, in a press release. The coalition was one of the cooperating organizations, along with others like the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, that helped the USDA get the word out to farmers about the application process.

Dangerous Drift. According to a report published last week by the Midwestern Prairie Rivers Network (PRN), herbicides sprayed primarily on row crops in Illinois are drifting far from targeted fields, damaging trees and other plant life. Researchers at PRN monitored symptoms of pesticide drift—such as curled leaves—and collected tissue samples from plants over six years. They found symptoms of drift during 677 out of 679 total visits to nearly 300 sites. Of 127 tissue samples taken from trees and other plants, 90 percent contained herbicide residues. Herbicides detected included 2,4-D, atrazine, dicamba, glyphosate, and seven others.

Many of the sites where researchers documented incidents of drift were more than 500 feet from the likely source of exposure, suggesting the chemicals are drifting significant distances. “Our monitoring and tissue sampling program indicates that current legal safeguards/protections and regulatory efforts are inadequate at protecting people and the environment from herbicide drift,” the researchers wrote.

At a press conference for the release of the report, co-author Kim Erndt-Pitcher said the results pointed to the fact that herbicides are playing a significant role in the decline of tree health across the state, and residents and farmers expressed concerns about potential risks to animals and their families’ health.

Patsy Hopper, an organic farmer and landowner south of Urbana, Illinois, said her land long produced a bounty of fruits and vegetables. At one point in time, she remembered harvesting 50 gallons of cherries in a season. “In the past few years, we’ve hardly had a harvest because of pesticide drift. The trees are dying,” she said. “This year, we had enough cherries for one pie.”

Farm-State Veep. On August 6, Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris chose Tim Walz as her running mate, catapulting agriculture and other food issues into the 2024 presidential election in a new way.

As a member of the House of Representatives, Walz served on the Agriculture Committee. There, he played a role in three farm bill cycles, sponsoring various proposals focused on expanding on-farm conservation efforts and supporting beginning farmers and ranchers.

As Governor of Minnesota, Walz has advocated for biofuels, a key priority of commodity ag groups, and local advocates for small farms say he fought consolidation to keep more farmers on the land. He also championed and ultimately signed into law a universal school meals program in the state.

The post A New Book Dives Deep Into the Climate and Health Impacts of Gas Stoves appeared first on Civil Eats.

Hunger Doesn’t Take a Summer Break. Neither Do School Food Professionals.

Lisa Held — Mon, 29 Jul 2024 09:00:58 +0000

At the end of May, Samantha Figueroa sat at her desk counting the number of sites where Caroline County Public Schools would distribute free food to children this summer. Behind her, color-coded meal plans filled the wall.

“People think, ‘It’s almost summertime; you must get a vacation!’” said Figueroa, the food operations manager for the small district in eastern Maryland. “But I am running around like a maniac.”

That’s because while cafeteria workers serve meals in nine Caroline County schools during the school year, they would be operating 24 sites between June and August. In addition to serving meals at camps and other places children gather during the summer, at 17 of those, her team would be sending applesauce cups, baked ziti, and milk cartons out into communities in a whole new way. Other districts and nonprofits all over the country are doing the same thing this summer.

Vegetables like baby carrots have to be packaged into individual serving sizes before they’re added to meal bags. (Photo credit: Colin Marshall)

Driving it all is a policy change members of Congress, led by Senators Debbie Stabenow (D-Michigan) and John Boozman (R-Arkansas), quietly tucked into a December 2022 spending bill. In addition to authorizing a program that would put extra funds into low-income parents’ pockets for summer groceries, the lawmakers changed a longstanding provision that required schools to serve summer meals communally, eliminating the requirement for rural areas.

While it may seem like a tiny detail, school food professionals and child hunger organizations have long argued that in the past, requiring children to show up and sit down to eat had prevented them from reaching many food-insecure households during the summer months. That was especially true in rural areas, where families are spread out and transportation options can be limited. In low-income districts like Caroline County—where all kids eat free during the school year—they argued, kids were likely going hungry as a result.

This summer, then, marks a turning point.

“It truly is a historic moment. We have the opportunity to do something that folks have been trying to do for a very long time,” said U.S. Deputy Secretary of Agriculture Xochitl Torres Small at No Kid Hungry’s Summer Nutrition Summit in January. “By giving kids the nutrition they need, we’re giving them a foundation of well-being that can—without exaggeration—change the trajectory of their lives.”

But while the policy tweak may be simple, the 400 professionals at the conference were there to talk about the hard part: logistics. It’s profoundly complicated to find hungry kids who are out of school, prepare, pack, and deliver meals to them—and to do it all while following U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) rules that come with unwieldy paperwork. In short, they were laying the foundation for what Figueroa and countless other school food professionals are now working on every week this summer.

Packing Meals to Go

By early July, on a morning when hot air hung heavy over the crisp, browned grass outside Lockerman Middle School, Figueroa had worked through many of those details.

Inside the school, which had been transformed into the district’s summer meal command center, staff members worked in an assembly line packing plastic bags. They opened up boxes of breakfast burritos, Pop-Tarts, and personal pizzas. They reached for individually packed bags of fresh broccoli, cherry tomatoes, and loose oranges. There were chicken patty and potato wedge platters packaged to be easily microwaved, and plenty of milk. Cardboard boxes filled with roasted chickpea snacks, Craisins, and Blueberry Chex were stacked throughout the cafeteria.

A produce delivery arrives at Lockerman Middle School. (Photo credit: Colin Marshall)

It might have felt more chaotic if they hadn’t done this before, but they had. “We have PTSD from COVID,” Figueroa said, “but we learned the rhythm and the way to set this up and make it efficient.”

The USDA calls this kind of meal service—which doesn’t involve kids sitting down next to each other with trays—“non-congregate.” While hunger groups had been advocating for the approach for many years, the pandemic provided the test case for the power of the practice. With emergency waivers in hand, schools and nonprofits were freed up to feed students—now learning in their homes all over the place—however they could manage it.

Figueroa’s team sprang into action in 2020, with bus drivers delivering meals, Parks & Recreation employees donating vehicles, and volunteers from the community helping out. While it was born of necessity, it showed them the possibilities and where, exactly, the need was.

The team of women who unload boxes, prep meals, preserve vegetables, and package bags of meals to be distributed all summer long in Caroline County. (Photo credit: Colin Marshall)

“We were going into neighborhoods, apartment complexes, mobile-home sites,” she said. “Those are the places we went during COVID, where there was a need. Now, we know where those kids will be.”

At Feeding Southwest Virginia, a nonprofit that runs summer meal programs in multiple counties, Director of Children’s Programs Brandon Comer said she saw the scramble to get food to families during the pandemic as a sort of pilot program for non-congregate meal service. Plus, the challenges her team handled during that time made her feel like now they could do anything.

“It couldn’t get any worse than that. Literally, in 2021, USDA made a decision to approve some of the waivers, and we were already halfway through the summer, but we made it work,” Comer said. “COVID just about killed me, but we made sure we fed kids.”

At the peak of her pandemic service, she had 42 meal sites running. This summer, she has 67, 35 of which are adopting the non-congregate option. Many sites are in the arrowhead-shaped span of far southwest Virginia that juts between Kentucky and Tennessee, where rural poverty runs deep.

And now that the change has become law, the USDA issued more specific rules around it, one of which has had huge implications for Comer’s operations. In January, the agency tweaked how it defines “rural,” a change that more than doubled how many Virginia schools qualified this year—up to 120 from 50 last year.

“Some of the areas we were feeding congregate before, but now we can turn them into non-congregate, which enables us to get more kids fed because we’re not spending an hour and a half at a feeding site and then driving 45 minutes and spending an hour and a half at a feeding site and then having to come back,” she said. “We can do three, four, or five in a day now.”

In Craig County on the state’s western edge, for example, a librarian called to propose distributing meals last year, but the area did not meet the definition of rural. This year, it did. When Comer added the site to her routes, the library estimated they’d feed 150 kids. Once word got out, she began upping the number, which is now around 350 kids a week.

Meeting the Need

Back on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, Figueroa didn’t have to worry about that change. “We’re 100 percent rural, so we’re going everywhere,” she said.

Samantha Figueroa checks her timeline of multiple meal delivery routes while boxes of incoming produce are stacked behind her. (Photo credit: Colin Marshall)

While her team fed plenty of kids last summer, the biggest difference this year is “it’s a lot more food,” said Liz Alley, a member of Figueroa’s team who runs the Lockerman operation. Alley pointed to print-outs she had taped to an easel, where below the different locations and routes planned for each day, she was tallying meal counts. By the end of the day, they’d send out 1,400 meals.

Mid-morning, van driver Meghan Hewitt pulled up with her helper, a high-school student fulfilling community service hours. As the two rearranged bins filled with bags of food so that cartons of milk jugs wouldn’t fall over in transit, a tractor trailer pulled in. “Produce is here!” one of the cafeteria employees yelled, as a delivery worker began moving pallets of grapes, apples, peaches, and honeydew melons from his truck into a stationary refrigerated truck used for storage.

Meghan Hewitt drives the van slowly through the neighborhood, tapping her horn to alert families of the arriving meals. (Photo credit: Colin Marshall)

In the meantime, Hewitt set out, and after a quick distribution at a small condo complex, she drove north.

The van, decorated with colorful images of fruits and vegetables, passed a warehouse where zucchini, squash, and green beans from local farms was stored. The Lockerman cafeteria team has recently blanched and vacuum-sealed the vegetables to be used for lunch service during the upcoming school year . It passed corn and soybean fields stretching out on either side of the highway.

Then, Hewitt arrived at the destination: a mobile home park that housed many of the immigrant families who harvest the fruits and vegetables grown in the county’s fields.

Left: A little boy holds up his fingers to indicate how many children are at home. Right: Kids follow their mother inside carrying a bag filled with free meals. (Photos credit: Colin Marshall)

As she pulled into the neighborhood, she began gently, repeatedly tapping the horn outside homes where she had identified—a few weeks earlier—that children were present. It was no ice cream truck, but mothers ushered their children out to greet her at the sound of the arrival.

Sweat dripped off her forehead as she carried bags of food and milk jugs to their doorsteps, tallying each on a clipboard with a smile. Families expressed their thanks and then hurried back inside trailers plagued by disrepair as the sun bore down, the strained hum of rusted, aging air conditioners filling the air.

Adding Sun Bucks to Summer Programs

Much further south, in Florida, Sky Beard directs her state’s No Kid Hungry campaign, which provides grants to schools and nonprofits running summer meal programs. She said that last year, even though most schools weren’t able to get the non-congregate programs off the ground in time, she had already heard how the rule change was helping expand efforts to curb child hunger.

“What we heard last year is that this meets the needs of their communities like nothing else,” she said. In her state, it’s even more critical, she said: Despite new survey data showing one in five kids in the state live in food-insecure households, Governor Ron DeSantis’ administration chose not to participate in Summer EBT, the other program that came out of Congress’ 2022 changes. DeSantis also rejected earlier, COVID-related summer food aid dollars for kids and is one of more than a dozen governors, all Republicans, who have rejected the latest federal funds.

Summer EBT, which the USDA has rebranded as “Sun Bucks,” is an extra benefit of $40 per month provided to families whose children qualify for free meals during the school year. In places where the two changes are being rolled out and adopted at the same time, advocates say the combination is a powerful one-two punch.

“With summer EBT in conjunction with our summer feeding programs, it’s an opportunity to make up for the loss of meals that a child will experience” when school is closed, said LaMonika Jones, who runs Maryland Hunger Solutions and D.C. Hunger Solutions, both initiatives of the Food Research & Action Center (FRAC). “We know we had greater participation with non-congregate meals during the pandemic. So, this is an opportunity for us to extend that and for us to continue to make improvements to the summer feeding program.”

In Maryland, Jones has been helping rural districts implement non-congregate meal programs while also helping families access summer EBT benefits. In Washington, D.C., her focus has been on those latter benefits, since the region is entirely urban.

“I’ve been sharing with my staff for the last couple of months as an FYI: ‘Be on the lookout and listen up. Parents may be calling,’” she said. While many students will automatically be enrolled in Summer EBT through other nutrition-assistance programs, there are always cracks people fall through, and each state’s system for distributing the benefits is slightly different. Jones’ group communicates how the program works so that families know how and when to expect benefits—and what to do if things don’t work the way they’re supposed to.

For example, she said, a benefit card might be mailed in an unlabeled envelope, which gets accidentally thrown away. “That’s another question that I get,” she said. “‘I was waiting for a summer EBT benefit to arrive, but I never got it. What do I do?’”

Jones and her team keep information on hand to direct families to the right offices where they can get help and access resources they’re eligible for.

Challenges and Paperwork

That’s the thing about federal meal programs: While the work of feeding children is as elemental as survival, sustenance, and good health, the most challenging parts of the work often involve administrative headaches and paperwork.

Improved nutrition standards in school meals, for example, have successfully moved the needle on improving the health of low-income students. But for Figueroa’s team showing up to chop broccoli, those standards can make the job harder and often feel like red tape, because the rules are incredibly specific. And what each meal contains during the school year is different than what it must consist of in the summer.

“We’re receiving federal funds, and we want to do it right. We have to do it right. We get reviewed, we get audited, we get inspected all the time, but we also want to feed our kids,” Figueroa said. “Sometimes all of the politics and rules make it hard to just feed a kid a hamburger.”

One of her biggest challenges, which Brandon Comer in Virginia echoed, is monitoring all the different sites, especially as the non-congregate option takes off. The USDA requires that the districts and nonprofits running summer meal programs provide oversight of all the locations at which they distribute meals. Depending on how new the site is, it may mean a member of the management team will have to go to that site multiple times to evaluate its performance.

Another is staffing. “Ever since COVID, we have not been able to [fully] staff,” Comer said. Finding truck drivers is especially difficult, so the team ends up using smaller vehicles, which requires more trips and therefore more time. Still, she is making it work and expects her meal numbers to be 25 to 30 percent higher than they were last summer.

Meghan Hewitt marks each meal distributed on her spreadsheet so that meal totals can later be reported to USDA. (Photo credit: Colin Marshall)

While COVID taught her she could make anything work, both she and Figueroa said they’re hoping these recent policy shifts stick around so that they can ultimately build systems that last, rather than having to figure out new plans as June approaches. “I feel like every year is a trial run,” Figueroa said, “but I’m hoping this is the year where next year, I won’t have to write a million different menus because hopefully we’re in a final rule that we can stick with.”

Whatever happens, each week this summer until school starts, the staff at Lockerman will be unpacking boxes and packing bags of meals over and over, while Meghan Hewitt and others drive their vans around Caroline County, beeping to let families know they’ve arrived.

“It’s not always easy for them to get to us,” Figueroa said. “We’ve got to go to them.”

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Study Finds ‘Forever Chemicals’ Are Increasingly Common in Pesticides

Lisa Held — Wed, 24 Jul 2024 13:00:11 +0000

More and more pesticides approved for use on U.S. farm fields qualify as “forever chemicals,” new research shows, raising questions around their long-term environmental and public health consequences.

“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.

“What our research showed is that this issue is a lot bigger than many people have thought, and the trend is really worrisome.”

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

Complicating the issue is that thousands of PFAS exist, and there are multiple ways to define them. Some fluorinated chemicals are PFAS, some are not. The EPA uses a narrow definition, and therefore does not consider many of the chemicals the researchers identified in the new study as PFAS. However, they do qualify using a broad definition adopted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

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.

“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.”

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

Regardless of how the chemicals are categorized or how widely they’re used, one of Donley’s primary concerns is that the EPA’s process for evaluating pesticide safety may not be set up to properly examine what the impacts might be when short-chain PFAS break down in the environment.

“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.

“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.”

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.

Republican Plans for Ag Policy May Bring Big Changes to Farm Country

Lisa Held — Mon, 22 Jul 2024 09:00:43 +0000

David Andrews’ farm is about nine miles away from the small, aptly named Iowa town of State Center. The 160-acre farm has been in his family since 1865, and Andrews grew up there.

Despite the landscape’s signature flatness, his land “rolls a little bit,” he said. So, 30 years ago, he decided to plant 60- to 100-foot strips of tall grasses within and along the edges of fields to prevent erosion. To pay for it, he enrolled a total of 14 acres, made up of those strips, in the federal government’s Conservation Reserve Program (CRP).

Through CRP, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) pays farmers not to farm on less-productive parcels of land, often in areas that are corn and soy fields as far as the eye can see, to be left alone to reduce runoff, improve biodiversity, and hold carbon. “It’s a great program, and a lot of these farms have some marginal ground on them that would be better off in CRP than growing crops,” Andrews said.

Project 2025 proposes eliminating CRP. The Republican Study Committee proposes ending enrollments in the program, as well.

As of March 2024, the most recent month for which data is available, more than 301,000 farms had close to 25 million acres enrolled in CRP; that’s a lot of acreage, but it represents less than 3 percent of U.S. farmland.

Project 2025, a conservative Republican presidential transition blueprint spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, proposes eliminating CRP. The Republican Study Committee (RSC), an influential caucus of House conservatives, proposes ending enrollments in the program, as well.

It’s just one of several cuts to federal programs serving commodity farmers that Republican operatives and lawmakers have recently proposed in policy documents. Project 2025 also proposes reducing crop insurance subsidies and “ideally” eliminating commodity payments altogether. The RSC’s budget, meanwhile, proposes putting new limits on commodity payments, reducing crop insurance subsidies, and ending enrollment in another popular conservation program called the Conservation Stewardship Program.

While cutting government spending may seem like a run-of-the-mill party goal, many of these programs have long been politically sacred in farm states. If implemented, the plans could transform the nation’s safety net for farmers growing corn, soy, and other row crops.

Most Washington insiders say that’s unlikely to happen and point to the RSC-heavy House Agriculture Committee’s recent farm bill draft, which puts more money than ever into commodity programs and leaves crop insurance intact. Plus, the most powerful groups representing commodity crop interests—the American Farm Bureau and the National Farmers Union—both typically lobby hard to keep farm payments flowing.

But while conservative advocacy groups and far-right Republicans have unsuccessfully proposed similar cuts in the past, Republican politics have shifted further right in the age of Trump, and fiscal conservatives wield increasing power within the party. More than 83 percent of House Republicans are now members of the RSC, compared to about 70 percent in 2015. Former RSC chair Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) is still a member—and is now the Speaker of the House. On a 2018 panel, he said the RSC is “now mainstream.”

“I don’t think we’re going to go to a ‘no government intervention in agriculture’ approach. It’s just not likely, but it’s certainly the dream of every conservative agriculture prognosticator.”

In early July, Trump attempted to distance himself from Project 2025, but many of its architects are former Trump administration officials and have worked on the party’s 2024 platform. The Heritage Foundation claims that during Trump’s last term, he embraced two-thirds of their policy proposals within his first year in office. A spokesperson for the Heritage Foundation declined a request for an interview on Project 2025.

“I think it’s more likely that [elected Republicans will] just do what the commodity groups and Farm Bureau want,” said Ferd Hoefner, a policy expert who has worked on nine previous farm bills and is now a consultant for farm groups. “I don’t think we’re going to go to a ‘no government intervention in agriculture’ approach. It’s just not likely, but it’s certainly the dream of every conservative agriculture prognosticator.”

With so many competing interests at play, the party’s true plans for agriculture are as muddy as an unplanted field in spring. And with Trump leading in the polls after a shocking few weeks of politics, anything now seems possible.

Cuts to Conservation Programs

Andrews got out of farming in 1999. His own operation had been diversified, with cows, pigs, and various grains and alfalfa grown in rotation. But when he hung up his hat, he rented the land to a farmer who was—for better or worse—following the crowd.

“He put it all in corn and soybeans, which is natural. That’s what everybody does nowadays,” Andrews said. But CRP had worked so well for him in creating the erosion control strips, he decided to enroll nearly all of his acres for a time. “When I moved back to the area, I told him that I thought the farm needed a rest, because continuous corn and soybeans is very hard on the organic matter. I told him I was going to put it in CRP, and he said he didn’t blame me. That’s what I ended up doing.”

CRP enabled Andrews to preserve the land, restore its fertility, and sequester carbon, because instead of a farmer paying him to rent the cropland, the government paid him—less, but enough—to fallow it. But the program has long been a target of conservatives as an example of wasteful spending. Project 2025 proposes eliminating it entirely, while the RSC would prohibit new enrollments in both CRP and the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP).

CSP pays farmers to implement conservation practices on land they are actively farming. The program is so popular that even after the Biden administration added money to the pot through the Inflation Reduction Act, only 40 percent of applications were funded in 2022.

Jonathan Coppess, the director of the Gardner Agriculture Policy Program at University of Illinois, said that while he doubted Republican lawmakers would be able to eliminate CRP altogether, they could slowly gut the program in the same way that some have weakened CSP over the last decade. Initially, CSP was capped based on acres, and lawmakers began cutting the acreage cap. Then, they changed the structure to a funding cap, which further shrank enrollment. The changes effectively cut funding for the program in half between 2008 and 2023.

Most conversations about conservation funding right now are focused on Republicans’ efforts to strip the focus on climate-friendly practices from extra conservation money provided by the Inflation Reduction Act.

“It can be kind of a death spiral type thing, where fewer farmers can get the funds, so the Congressional Budget Office projects less spending, so the baseline shrinks,” said Coppess, who previously worked on federal farm policy as a Senate legislative assistant and as administrator of the Farm Service Agency at the USDA. “Eventually that becomes self-defeating for the program, because farmers are angry because they spend all this time signing up and they don’t get in. So, the farmers turn on it and you can slowly kill off the program over time that way, because it loses its political support.”

The current House draft of the farm bill includes some small tweaks to CRP, but it’s unclear what the impacts of those changes would be. Instead, most conversations about conservation funding right now are focused on Republicans’ efforts to strip the focus on climate-friendly practices from extra conservation money provided by President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.

Changes to Commodity Programs

The Republican plans to cut environmental funding—especially for climate projects—are to be expected. But nowhere is the tug-of-war between fiscal conservatism and farm support more apparent than in their proposals for the future of commodity programs, which essentially pay crop farmers when prices fall beneath a certain level. Those programs primarily benefit growers of corn, soy, wheat, cotton, and a few other commodity crops. But because so much acreage is devoted to those crops, the groups that represent their interests, like the National Corn Growers Association and the National Association of Wheat Growers, hold considerable sway in D.C. And most Republicans (and Democrats), especially in farm states, generally try to court them.

However, over the past few decades, progressive Democrats and farm groups such as the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, Farm Action, and the Environmental Working Group (EWG) have called attention to the fact that the largest, wealthiest farms have received close to 80 percent of the nearly $500 billion paid out between 1995 and 2021. As a result, they’ve fought for payment caps within the programs as a way to limit spending and distribute funds more fairly.

Surprisingly, the RSC budget does something similar by proposing that only farms with an adjusted gross income below $500,000 receive payments. “This was a policy proposed in the FY 2021 Trump Budget and would ensure that commodity support payments are going to smaller farms that may struggle obtaining capital from private lenders,” the RSC budget reads. Project 2025 goes even further and proposes “ideally” eliminating commodity programs altogether.

But when House Republicans released their latest farm bill draft, it included increases to commodity payments, at a projected cost of an additional $50 billion. In other words, they veered in the exact opposite direction.

In response, the Heritage Foundation has been pushing back on the spending bump, in conjunction with other conservative think tanks, as well as the progressive EWG.

The unlikely policy alignment is politically convenient on this one point, but in the end, the two sides have differing goals. The progressive groups want policymakers to shift funding away from commodity programs into more funding for conservation, research, local food, and specialty crops; the conservative groups just want to cut spending, period.

“Every farm bill, hope springs eternal that there will be a left-right coalition that can win some major changes,” Hoefner said. “There have certainly been many tries at that,” he added—and they haven’t stuck yet.

Another issue that’s kept those groups far apart is ethanol, which many progressive groups see as a false climate solution. Traditional farm groups, on the other hand, fight like hell to keep in place the Renewable Fuel Standard—the policy that sets a minimum amount of ethanol required in gas and other fuels. The RSC budget proposes eliminating the standard altogether.

“There’s way more interest in that issue among commodity groups than what happens in the farm bill,” Hoefner said. It’s been a sticky issue for Republicans in the past. Florida Republican Ron DeSantis once supported eliminating the standard, until he tried to run for president. Trump boasts often of his support for ethanol, but his administration exempted more than 30 oil refineries from the standard, allowing them to avoid selling ethanol, angering commodity groups.

Crop Insurance Complications

Some of the disconnect between Republican ideals that point toward farm program cuts and what gets into policy may simply be attributable to the reality of politics, Coppess said.

“There’s the cognitive dissonance kind of challenge that we see with any heavy focus on budget issues,” he said. “So, we wanna cut spending, we wanna balance the budget . . . and that always is easy to say and sounds good, but it is really difficult to do in practice, because every one of those items has a constituency. It is a difficult governing reality.”

As the weather has become more unpredictable due to climate change, for example, crop insurance has become a bigger political priority for farm groups and also the most expensive farm program, outpacing commodity spending.

During farm visits, Johnson said, “the most common thing we heard from producers was, ‘Don’t screw up crop insurance.’”

Both Project 2025 and the RSC budget propose reducing the portion of premiums paid by the federal government so that farmers shoulder more of the cost, while the RSC budget proposes a crop insurance subsidy cap of $40,000 per farmer. Project 2025 says farmers should not be allowed to get commodity payments if they get crop insurance subsidies.

All of those cuts are at direct odds with the powerful National Farmers Union’s 2024 policy book.

And at a panel on the National Mall hosted by the Association of Equipment Manufacturers in May, House Ag Committee members Dusty Johnson (R-South Dakota) and David Rouzer (R-North Carolina) both seemed to be reading from that policy book, despite the fact that both are members of the RSC.

During farm visits, Johnson said, “the most common thing we heard from producers was, ‘Don’t screw up crop insurance.’” Rouzer described crop insurance as one piece of a strong farm safety net. “If you want to preserve green space and rural areas, [then you need to] have a good, strong, safety net in place so that our farm families can continue to make ends meet and continue to do what they do best, and that’s feed and clothe the world,” he said.

Neither Dusty Johnson nor David Rouzer’s offices responded to requests for interviews.

An Opaque Future for Farmers

Time will tell if elected Republicans will act on the farm program cuts proposed by the most conservative members of their party. While some of the dynamics of farm-state politics are longstanding, others are changing.

Hoefner points out that in the 1980s and 1990s, Democrats and Republicans both represented many districts with commodity interests. Today, it’s nearly all Republicans. But rural areas are also being hollowed out as farms disappear or get bigger, which could one day shift power away from those farm states.

Consolidation in seeds, pesticides, grain trading, and meat (which most commodity crops funnel into) has also shifted power to commodity groups. These, in some ways, represent row-crop farmers, but they are also dominated by the ag industry. As a result, some conservative lawmakers from farm states have told Civil Eats they hear from industry, not farmers.

That’s one reason both Coppess and Hoefner said what will likely happen is what usually happens: Lawmakers will put out budgets and proposals that bolster their fiscal conservative credentials but then will govern in a way that bucks those policies to keep the support of ag industry players with deep pockets. “They would never dream of saying any of those things when they’re meeting with their farm constituents,” Coppess said.

In Rep. Dusty Johnson’s case, when asked about conservation programs at the May equipment manufacturers’ panel, he answered with political dexterity, praising conservation programs but indicating he may in fact be on board with the RSC proposal to eliminate CRP.

“Conservation is critically important,” he said. “I think this farm bill is gonna acknowledge the importance of working lands conservation even more than past farm bills have. That’s not to say there’s never a role in idling acres, but, listen, we can do some incredible things with soil health, water quality, habitat, while working those lands.”

Back in the middle of Iowa, one of the outcomes Andrews is most excited about when it comes to how CRP has impacted his farm is that its effects didn’t end at the borders of his fallow fields. On his own farm, he’s reduced soil loss, built organic matter, and watched wildlife return. But it’s also improved the sustainability of the surrounding farm landscape, where most farmers are doing plenty of planting and harvesting.

“I’ve got two or three farms that their water drains onto my farm, and some of that water is carrying chemicals and nitrogen, and my land is really cleaning up their water,” he said. “I think it’s a great program . . . but there’s not as many CRP acres around as what there used to be.”

If the conservative budget hawks get their way, there could be even fewer.

The post Republican Plans for Ag Policy May Bring Big Changes to Farm Country appeared first on Civil Eats.

Senator Cory Booker Says FDA Proposal Could Worsen Antibiotic Resistance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Senator Cory Booker Says FDA Proposal Could Worsen Antibiotic Resistance appeared first on Civil Eats.

Are Companies Using Carbon Markets to Sell More Pesticides?

Lisa Held — Tue, 09 Jul 2024 09:00:54 +0000

September 10, 2024 Update: Nori, one of the leading startup carbon market platforms for agriculture, shut its doors on September 9. On LinkedIn, co-founder Alexsandra Guerra said “the challenges of a stagnant Voluntary Carbon Market and tough funding environment proved too great.”

Last summer, two men shouted friendly greetings from golf carts as they zipped around a field-turned-parking lot, fetching farmers at pick-up trucks and dropping them in front of a barn. It was the annual field day at The Mill, a popular Mid-Atlantic retailer of agricultural products including seeds, fertilizer, and pesticides.

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.

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.

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.

In this screenshot from Land O’Lakes’ 2022 Annual Report, the company describes how its “teams at Truterra and WinField United worked together to blaze a trail for farmers to improve their soil health and potentially become eligible for future market opportunities.”

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.

While the highest-profile carbon markets are run by public entities like the state of California, many of the agricultural markets that have made more recent progress are run by powerful companies that are in the business of selling pesticides and fertilizers.

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.”

“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

When Land O’Lakes launched Truterra in 2016, the company set it up to leverage the power of its network of 60 agricultural retailers, which altogether have about 1,000 locations across the country, said Tom Ryan, Truterra’s former president, in an interview last year.

“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

Despite years of buzz about agricultural carbon markets, it’s hard to find farmers willing to talk about the experience of actually enrolling and participating.

“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.

CropLife America, the pesticide industry’s trade association, has dubbed no-till and cover crops “pesticide-enabled” farming practices.

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

Outside of the carbon markets run by pesticide companies, there are other platforms working to reward a wider swath of practices that provide climate benefits while also reducing crop inputs. Nori has one organic farmer enrolled in its market, for example, while Carbon Harvest is setting up a market to pay small farms to implement agroforestry projects.

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.”

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