Calvosa Olson grew up with a Karuk mother and an Italian father on a homestead in the Hoopa Valley Reservation, near California’s northern edge. She spent a great deal of time during those formative years outside, learning about her plant and animal relatives and eating a combination of commodity foods and the foods her parents grew, gathered, hunted, and bartered for. “Family celebrations and special foods were formative to the way I now show love and connect to my identity as a flourishing matriarch,” she writes in the introduction to Chími Nu’am.

Although Calvosa Olson moved to the Bay Area, she stayed in touch with the Karuk community and continued to nurture the food traditions with which she was raised. She writes:

“When I had children of my own, I wanted to connect my sons to these family recipes and to being Karuk, as we were living away from Karuk community and traditional lands. By intentionally establishing this connection, I discovered a love for developing new and colorful recipes based on our old family recipes and traditions. Gathering wild foods, sharing, teaching, cooking, and tending have all been an opportunity to grow and heal in the nurturing way I didn’t know I needed.”

Chími Nu’am, which translates to “Let’s eat!” in the Karuk language, is in many ways a record of that process in addition to a compendium of recipes. Organized by season, the book guides its readers in gathering, processing, and cooking with Indigenous foods in hopes of helping us begin to integrate more traditional ingredients into our oversimplified modern palates.

Its recipes range from creative takes on familiar foods—blackberry-braised smoked salmon and elk chili beans—to dishes that will be entirely new to many readers, such as nettle tortillas, miner’s lettuce salad, and spruce-tip syrup. And it includes recipes for nearly a dozen foods made with acorns, including crackers, muffins, crepes, and hand pies, as well as a rustic acorn bread that calls for one cup of acorn flour and two cups of wheat flour.

Calvosa Olson has written a book that will speak to multiple audiences. But whether she’s guiding Indigenous readers to embrace more of their cultural foods or making recommendations for non-Indigenous readers interested in decolonizing their diets in an ethical way (hint: it’s about reciprocity), her voice and philosophy come through clearly on the page.

Civil Eats spoke to Calvosa Olson recently about the book, how she hopes it will reach those very different audiences, and her urgent call to all of us to begin reconnecting to the natural world through food.

How did the recipes in the book take shape, and how did you decide what to include and what to leave out to protect or preserve specific cultural foods and traditions?

I think we can all agree that Native people have lost so much, and so much has been taken, appropriated, and diluted. There are still some cultural foodways that are very similar to the foodways that we have always eaten. And because there are so few, I didn’t feel like it would be appropriate to put those in a book for everybody. Even in the work that I do for my own family, there’s a difference between what is for us in ceremony and what is for us to incorporate in our everyday lives or to maintain our connection to our stewardship.

We are all colonized, our palates are colonized. And it’s kind of impossible to raise children who don’t love Fruit Snacks and other processed foods. But I really wanted them to develop a love for foods that are bitter or fishy—those types of things that we shy away from in Western culture.

Different audiences will experience this book differently, but as a non-Indigenous reader, I felt invited in—invited to take part and understand more of the cultural experience behind these foods rather than merely follow recipes. That said, gathering and preparing these ingredients is also going to be a learning curve for some readers.

We all need to develop relationships with our foodways, and our lifeways, and what’s going on around us. Nobody can turn on the news and disagree with that. We need to at least develop some relationships with the rhythms of the world around us right now. So, I want the book to be a warm welcome in to do that.

But also, how you do that is very important. And I love that people are asking: How do I do it ethically? You have this opportunity to go forward intentionally and choose the lens that you want to view this work through, and you can center Indigenous people, and our traditional knowledge and our relationship-building and community-centered lifeways, as you go forward. Which means that you are also building relationship and building community with Indigenous people and we’re all working together.

And how do you interact with Native people who have been deliberately othered in the state, and deliberately made invisible? Growing up in the U.S., we don’t hear from Indigenous people, and that’s what causes a lot of the mystic Indian tropes. And you can see that in the [U.S.] education system, which ignores Native people, and refers to us in the past. But we are still here, and we are safeguarding so much of the world’s biodiversity.

We’re also at the forefront of environmental science; we have incredibly sophisticated people working in our environmental departments. We have climate action plans, we have stewardship plans, we have everything we could possibly need to go forward to rehabilitate the land except power and influence. Even if I only reach one person at a time, and they went about things in a different way and began to understand the value of [traditional ecological knowledge and Indigenous foodways] in a new way, that would be a success.

You recommend that non-Native folks contact their local tribal representatives when they want to learn how to gather acorns and other Indigenous ingredients. What do you say to people who worry that they’d be bothering them in asking for their services?

There are non-Native people out there who run foraging classes and you have the choice to either pay them or you can call or email tribal peoples or tribal entities and say, “Listen, I’m interested in learning more about this. And I can pay non-Native foragers, but I would prefer to put my resources with you. I want to center your knowledge. Do you offer any classes to the public for gathering or know of anybody willing to show us how to gather?”

I realize it’s uncomfortable! Because, again, [people are used to] othering of us, and don’t know how to interact with us. They feel like they’re going to bother us. But that just keeps people going to foragers who are non-Native. But overcoming that awkwardness is important because the worst thing that can happen is that they can say, “Yikes, we don’t know anybody.”

You share strategies for decolonizing your diet gradually by adding, for example, a cup of squash to frybread or a cup of acorn flour to bread to replace processed white flour. Can you say more about that approach?

Because our palates are all colonized, to some degree, we have to reintroduce these foods gradually. There’s a dilution that occurs. But I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing. Because we can’t all go rushing into the forest right now to completely decolonize our diets. It’s impossible. We would we need to set up new food systems that are as robust as the ones we have now before we could do that. This is a gradual change.

One cup of acorn flour instead of one cup of white flour is still one less cup of white flour. In [Indigenous] communities that really matters. We are all suffering from diet-related diseases. It’s terrible. And it’s so difficult to right that ship for many reasons. There’s so little food education, no access to healthy foods. People are still reliant on commodity food and subsistence gathering. And often when you go out to gather your traditional foods, they’re not there anymore. The fish are gone and the fires have burned the mycelium mats, so the mushrooms aren’t coming back the same.

Anything that we can do to start turning this ship around is important. And it’s about eating and nourishment, yes. But it’s also about connecting to community and connecting to our role as people for the environment—and waking up to our obligations to everything around us.

You recommend that readers start to expand their worldview and their approach to Indigenous foods slowly, but you also go on to write, “I want to impress upon everybody the urgency with which we must act to keep our ecosystems healthy.” How do you balance that desire to move slowly and build deeper connections to ecosystems against that larger sense of urgency?

“Hurry up! And go slow”—that’s what I’m telling people. Connecting to this approach requires you to go slow in the beginning, but as you develop your own connections and your own relationships it’s like a snowball; it will start to build on itself exponentially. And you will become more attuned to these issues and more connected to the activism that Indigenous people are engaged in. And then, in a year, you will have so much more knowledge and it will be an exponential leap to the next year. And it goes on from there. If you go too fast, and you’re not developing relationships or practicing reciprocity, then you’re just perpetuating the same cycles of settler colonialism and extraction that got us into this mess in the first place.

You worked with the California Indian Museum and Cultural Center teaching cooking to Indigenous elders during the pandemic. Can you speak to how that work helped shape this book?

Indigenous readers were really the first and only audience that I was considering at first. This whole book took a lot of checking in with community and gut-checking constantly about how to go forward and be inclusive, because I really, genuinely believe that we need everybody together to do this. And I don’t think that Indigenous people alone can do this. But I do want to prioritize the health of our communities first, because I want us to be healthy and ready to keep it up.

As lost as [non-Native people] might feel sometimes about how to go forward and who to ask about Indigenous foods and practices, we often feel the same way. Many Native people are disconnected from family and community, and they’re spread out or flung all over the place. For instance, I’m on Coast Miwok land, but I’m not Coast Miwok, so I’m still a guest on this land. How do I go forward here in a way that centers reciprocity? And we’re all asking these kinds of questions.

Most of our foodways were not documented in California because it was considered “women’s work.” We just have smoked salmon and acorn soup. I know we had a massive variety of foods, and it was vibrant, colorful, nuanced, and delicious. And yet, if you were to read documentation about the Karuk tribe, you would see that we only ate two things.

We are reclaiming that history and knowledge, and we have to teach it to our children. And sometimes I teach it to older people who were sent to boarding schools or whose parents were sent to boarding schools and didn’t want to have anything to do with their indigeneity when they returned. It is complicated for all of us. There are not very many people doing this work in a way that is engaging all people. And that’s mainly because there are so few of us and the first focus has to be on fortifying the people in our own communities. But I’m a white Indian, so I want to be able to leverage my whiteness to speak to a non-Native community, and to engage them about how to go about this in a good way. I’m like a liaison.

I have a whole half of me that isn’t Native, and it’s a challenge to reconcile these two sides. But I don’t have to reconcile them right now. What I can do is use what was good on [my Italian side]—the things I learned about family and community and how to show my love through food and laughter and storytelling—to uplift the Native people in my communities.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Acorn Pumpkin Muffins

Muffins are such a forgiving bake, so this is a great place to mess around with some dried fruits and toasted nuts if you like a little extra something in your morning nosh. Muffins are also very easy for little hands to make! Get the niblings involved with this one.

Makes 12 muffins

Ingredients

1½ cups all-purpose flour 1⁄2 cup acorn flour
½ cup chocolate chips (see Note)
¼ cup maple sugar
1½ teaspoons baking soda
1½ teaspoons baking powder
1½ teaspoons pumpkin pie spice
½ teaspoon salt
1⅓ cups whole milk
1 large egg
1 tablespoon pure vanilla extract
1 cup cooked squash puree

Note: This is a very forgiving recipe, so you can add more or fewer chocolate chips or substitute them with dried fruit and/or nuts.

Directions

Preheat the oven to 375°F.

In a large bowl, mix together the flours, chocolate chips, maple sugar, baking soda, baking powder, pumpkin pie spice, and salt.

In another large bowl, mix together the milk, egg, vanilla, and squash puree.

Stir them together to form a batter. Do not overmix. Fill the cups of two 6-cup muffin tins three-quarters of the way full.

Bake for 20 minutes, until a toothpick inserted into the center of a muffin comes out clean.

This recipe is excerpted from Chími Nu’am: Native California Foodways for the Contemporary Kitchen by Sara Calvosa Olson. Reprinted with permission from Heyday © 2023.

The post This Indigenous Cook Wants to Help Readers Decolonize Their Diets appeared first on Civil Eats.

Instead of stopping at the flavors, service, and ambiance, their columns often aimed to broaden readers’ awareness of everything from the intention behind the business and the way it treated workers, to the role it played in preserving or pushing cultural boundaries.

Although Ho—who founded Racist Sandwich, a podcast that delved into the politics, race, and identity within the broader scope of food and restaurants, before moving to the Chronicle—has had their gaze firmly fixed on the Bay Area the whole time, their influence has been felt beyond the region. For all these reasons, we figured they’d have some interesting things to say about the future, and the present, of the restaurant.

What made you want to work as a restaurant reviewer for the Chronicle, and what has made you want to expand that role to write other forms of cultural criticism in the last year?

I never planned on becoming a restaurant critic. It was just this thing that happened. From 2016 to 2019, I was really interested in meta-narratives about food. Having been involved in food media and in the restaurant world to a pretty big extent, I was really curious about how we talked about food and restaurants. And I certainly included restaurant criticism in that bucket.

I applied for the job at [the Chronicle] for the experience. I was surprised that they wanted to hire me, and I accepted the job because it seemed to be a really exciting opportunity to see how far I could go in setting certain guardrails for how I wanted to write about restaurants. I was asking: How do you do it in a consistently equitable way? And in a way that de-centers a lot of the a priori assumptions about who goes to restaurants and who’s interested in food media.

It was based on this idea that restaurants and food could serve as cultural texts worth decoding. A wide range of choices being made at all kinds of levels—from governmental to individual—manifest in food culture, and it says a lot about what we want as people, but also what we are told are the limits of aspiration.

So, all of that was included in my vision for the role. And I think it naturally expands to other things, because from the beginning, I was appropriating an analytical lens that has been more readily applied to other types of media and other kinds of material culture. I was zooming into foods, and applying other sorts of principles of analysis to something that had hitherto been maybe underexamined, in my view.

Now you are back to using that wider critical lens. How will your work continue to intersect with restaurants?

It will still intersect with restaurants on occasion. I recently wrote a piece about the first lab-grown meat being served at a restaurant in the United States, which happened to be at a spot in San Francisco, so I went and tried it. And I spent a lot less time writing about the service and the flavors and more time on the big questions about lab-grown meat, like why its funders aspire to recreate animal flesh.

I am still curious about the idea that a restaurant, or really any small or medium-sized enterprise, can be a vehicle for cultural change. Because I think that’s something that many people in food media have to take as an assumption. There’s so much coverage that centers around the restaurant as a locus for change, or as the canary in a coal mine.

We saw that a lot with COVID and how we talked, and continue to talk, about the way people adapt. I’m interested in playing with that idea and problematizing it and finding new ways to talk about alternative modes of empowerment and sovereignty when it comes to food and economic and financial stability for people who generally are the most vulnerable in our economic system. I danced around it a lot when I was a restaurant critic, and I’m hoping to be more explicit in really thinking about the restaurant as a concept—not just restaurant concepts.

I often have thought of the food system—and restaurants as the most visible aspect of the system—in the same way that I’ve thought about real estate bubbles or tech bubbles. So much of the true costs are externalized—from the workers often needing to rely on SNAP to the costs of environmental destruction caused by conventional ag falling on the taxpayers. COVID was kind of like a bursting of the bubble in some ways. But I wonder if that bubble was going to burst anyway. Do you have thoughts about that?

This newfound or reinvigorated labor movement in the U.S. was so informed by COVID. I don’t think we would have had a hot union summer without COVID. Broadly, and then also in the food industry, I think people were fed up with being put at risk for, essentially, burgers and fries. I feel like the pandemic is so inextricable from how we understand labor and food now.

People have written to me, saying that if they had a choice, they wouldn’t think about labor. So, it’s through the efforts of people who are advocating for food workers and writing about food labor that readers have been reminded about the people behind the plate.

Given the rise in the number of fast-casual restaurants, and the shortage of people interested in working in restaurants after the pandemic, I’ve wondered: Is the idea of being served as it once existed an outdated concept? Or will it always be a product of the (growing) class divide?

I think it is very much a product of class. And, at least if TikTok and Yelp are any indication, we still have a lot of vocal people who care about service. But I wonder if the backlash to tipping, for instance, and automation are going to add to this sort of deterioration of old service models that require a human who wants to be tipped?

Eating in restaurants has gotten much more expensive than it was before the pandemic. Are you seeing more people get priced out? 

In the Bay Area, we saw a lot of restaurants close early in the pandemic. Some were older restaurants that were near the end of their long-term leases and I think they were kind of lucky for getting out when they did, because things are so hard now. I’ve heard from so many restaurateurs and cooks that raw ingredients are now so expensive. And there are so many ways in which that trickles down. Prices are crazy, and I eat out maybe once a week these days. For a lot of people though, the more relevant thing is grocery stores. Restaurants are a budget item that’s optional, but buying food for your home is not. And that’s the tough thing. There was such an apex of restaurant culture in the past 10 years, and I think that’s over. I think we’re going to see a major compaction in the industry that is only going to continue.

What do you see as the best-case scenario for restaurants in the next decade?

Part of what will enable restaurants to thrive is a reduction in the overall number of them. There are just too many. And too many that were opened by people who just thought they were making easy money. It does feel like we’re headed towards more austerity, and maybe the positive thing is that more restaurants are going to have to have a clearer vision of what they’re supposed to be. I think that’s good for restaurants, because any sort of project that is done half-heartedly is pretty disappointing to experience.

Do you think restaurants can act as important third spaces as we’ve lost many other of those kinds of spaces?

There’s this really interesting tension there around whose obligation it is to provide third spaces. Restaurants have filled a gap because public infrastructure has been inadequate in the United States. Do third spaces where you have to pay admission count? Is that actually respecting the definition of the phrase? I don’t know. One of the virtues of a third space is it allows a place’s residents to rub up against each other. And I feel like restaurants can homogenize the people that are in the space, just by virtue of the culture they set and the price point. I think there should be more free third spaces. Private enterprise shouldn’t be the only option available.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

The post Critic Soleil Ho: Are We Asking Too Much of Restaurants—or Not Enough? appeared first on Civil Eats.

On a warm afternoon in June, 1,500 7-week-old hens had come out to mill around—lured by feed and water stations—but many were hard to find.

“There’s an eagle that comes around here,” says Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin, the farmer and visionary behind the operation. “It has flown over a few times, and it just keeps going.” Soon, he adds, the trees and other perennials will be tall enough to provide cover for the birds, but the grass will suffice in the meantime.

Salvatierra, which was a conventional corn and soy operation until Haslett-Marroquin bought it three years ago, is in the midst of a wholesale transformation. He has planted more than 8,000 hazelnut trees there, created a water catchment pond, begun managing the forest that frames it on two sides, and leveled the land where he plans to build a home for his family.

This summer, he also raised the first flocks of chickens there. As it comes into maturity, Salvatierra stands to become a central hub around which a growing network of farmers, scientists, nonprofits, and funders will rotate—all in the name of regenerative poultry farming.

Regenerative is a complex term with many interpretations. Haslett-Marroquin’s approach combines what he learned growing up in Guatemala—where chickens thrive in multi-story jungles—with a deep understanding of the Midwest’s native ecosystems. Unlike the pasture-based model of poultry production which typically uses mobile barns and is sometimes also referred to as “regenerative,” it involves raising the birds in one spot, alongside trees and other perennial crops as a way to build soil that is rich with organic matter and carbon, capture and store water, and make the land on which it takes place more resilient in the face of the climate crisis.

At the core of the effort in Minnesota is Tree-Range Farms, the company Haslett-Marroquin co-founded, and a growing network that includes more than 40 farms in the region. The Regenerative Agriculture Alliance (RAA), the nonprofit he founded and now sits on the board of, also plays a key, ongoing role in developing the infrastructure behind the network and has plans to scale it up to extend across the upper portion of the corn belt.

But the grand vision doesn’t end there. There are also farms using Haslett-Marroquin’s approach in Guatemala, Mexico, and in several Native American communities, including the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. And if its advocates have their way, the core practices and the philosophy behind it could be replicated in many parts of the world in the years to come.

And at a time when Americans eat more than 160 million servings of chicken every day and industrial poultry farming is known for polluting ground water, air, and waterways, as well as causing health issues for people who live nearby, it could be a welcome change.

How the Model Works

For years, he collaborated on research and development on his first farm, Finca Marisol, and on a nearby farm called Organic Compound in Faribault, Minnesota, to establish a production standard with very specific parameters.

Each poultry flock or “unit” includes 1,500 chickens, a barn, and 1.5 acres of land divided into two fenced in areas, or paddocks. The birds spend every day outside—where they eat a combination of dry grain, sprouted grain, bugs, and plants—in one paddock, and when the plants there have been sufficiently grazed down, they’re moved to a second one. Farms typically start with one unit, but they can also opt to start with half a unit if land is scarce.

Each flock in the Tree-Range system is made up of 1,500 birds on 1.5 acres of land. Most farmers raise more than one flock. (Photo courtesy of Wil Crombe/Organic Compound.)

“Everything that is part of the standard was tried and tested, from breeds to how long you feed them, to the right kind of welfare aspect to consider in the coop construction,” says Diane Christofore, the current executive director of the RAA, which brought in the funding for the research and development behind the standard. The organization recently launched an online course to train farmers in the practices and philosophy behind the standard; it is also making a number of scholarships available and will release a version in Spanish soon.

In addition to trees, farmers are encouraged to plant other perennials such as grasses, elderberry bushes, and comfrey. And if they grow corn and soybeans on the property, they are invited to diversify their rotations by adding oats for soil health. In eight to 12 weeks, farmers can take the birds to the small-scale processing plant that the RAA runs in Northern Iowa.

If they opt to sell them under the Tree-Range label, storage, distribution, and marketing are all taken care of, as the birds make their way to consumers in the Minneapolis-St. Paul region. Soon, Tree-Range plans to expand its reach to add retailers in Madison, Milwaukee, and Chicago.

The hope is to provide a relatively easy point of entry for beginning farmers looking for a way to start earning capital quickly. With their short lifecycle and relevance across many cultures, chickens allow farmers to get onboard and join the network—or the “ecosystem,” as RAA refers to it—while renting land and/or working other jobs. Once the barn has been built—or adapted from an existing structure—the required labor is concentrated in the mornings and evenings, making it a relatively easy lift for new farmers.

“We’re creating this for the people that don’t have access to the [resources to engage in large-scale agriculture], but you’re also working with people who are still engaged in conventional ag, watching this, and asking, ‘How could I transition?’” says Christofore.

Many of farms raising birds for Tree-Range are run by immigrants, such as Callejas Farm, where Jose and Erica Callejas, formerly from El Salvador, raise multiple flocks of chickens each year with their daughters. Or Carrillo Brother Farms, where Jesus and Aldo Carrillo—who immigrated from Mexico—raise one flock a year alongside a wide array of fruit and vegetables.

Feed the People Farm Cooperative is another interesting example. There, Cliff Martin has been raising two flocks a year on land that his dad owns as part of a collective with three other young farmers, including Helen Forsythe and Bec Ersek (who also works at the RAA’s business administrator).

They see the farm as part of a larger collective movement and the money they earn from the flocks goes toward maintaining the land, holding trainings and events for other young community organizers in the region. They’re also working on adding a composting processing site, neighbor approval pending. “We simply wouldn’t be doing this if it weren’t for the RAA’s infrastructure and support,” Forsythe said during a recent farm visit.

Haslett-Marroquin says there are more interested farmers than the RAA has the bandwidth to support at this point, so he’s confident that the network will continue to grow.

For one, he says, the modular approach to adding flocks to farms makes it relatively simple to replicate. After years of prototyping the system at Finca Marisol, he says everything fell into place very quickly at Salvatierra Farms, where he is starting with three units and plans to add three more in the coming year.

“There was no guesswork,” he says. “This thing happened as if I had done it a million times. And we could take 1,000 acres, 10,000 acres, or 1 million acres, and we’d know exactly what to do. That’s the difference between farm-level thinking and system-level thinking. And at the end, it’s that large scale that makes it truly regenerative, not the farm itself.”

Feed conversion ratio—or the relationship between the feed that goes into the animals and the final product—is a common metric for measuring financial success and environmental impact in meat production. But the RAA’s definition of regenerative turns that equation on its end.

The chickens in that system eat more grain than chickens raised solely in a barn because they move around much more. But the farms have an overall smaller footprint, because the added chicken manure boosts the productivity of the hazelnuts and other companion crops, without synthetic fertilizer. On 1.5 acres, mature hazelnut trees will produce around 800 to 1,200 pounds of nuts.

“Once you add up the output of meat, the output of hazelnuts, the large-scale sequestration of carbon,” Haslett-Marroquin says, “you can’t even compare it to a confinement model. It’s not apples to apples.”

At the core, his approach to food production is one that places productivity within a larger context of a balanced living system. It’s about “stewarding the transformation of energy from non-edible forms to edible ones,” and it’s a process that isn’t new, but on the contrary, quite old.

“We are unleashing the original Indigenous intellect that makes us so powerful as human beings. It is the one thing that all capitalistic, extractive, destructive systems hate. That’s why they will go and massacre Indigenous communities at mass scale, because they know that that intellect is so powerful that it can overcome the extractive system. And it can, in the end, save the planet,” he says, adding, “If you restore the people to the land, you can’t exploit them.”

The Science

Beth Fisher, a soil scientists and assistant professor at Minnesota State University, Mankato, is part of a team of scientists in Minnesota that started measuring the health of the soil, water, and the emissions released from farms in 2021.

Fisher says she was approached by Haslett-Marroquin, who asked her to gather evidence to add validation to what he had long observed and understood intuitively about the way regenerative practices work on the ground. She was interested in the approach, but it was the visit to Finca Marisol, the first farm where birds and trees had been raised side by side for almost a dozen years, that sealed the deal.

“The soil structure is beautiful—you pull up a scoop and how it holds together on its own, is held together by the ooey gooey stuff that organic critters put into the soil,” she says. “Water infiltrates beautifully. It has a wonderful collection of organic matter.”

Since then, she and the undergraduate students she works with have been gathering samples of soil on a handful of farms in the network, as well as conventional corn and soy farms that neighbor them.

“At Finca Marisol, the comparison farm is considered reduced-till better practice. And it’s night and day; the [water] infiltration is way slower on the reduced till practice, the carbon storage is way less, and that farmer has been doing it for decades, really trying to do better in his practice. And the effect on his soil is negligible,” she says.

“At The Organic Compound, where they’ve raising chickens using regenerative practices for six years, they’re already in better shape than the neighboring conventional farm,” adds Fisher, who is hoping to start publishing some preliminary data soon.

“We’ll be disseminating the results, both in the academic peer-reviewed literature, but also, I think it’s so important for it to find its way into the context where farmers can hear about it.”

Carrie Jennings, who is research and policy director at the nonprofit Freshwater, and an adjunct professor and researcher at the University of Minnesota, is another scientist engaged in the research. She points to the fact that the Cannon River, which runs through Minnesota and down to the Mississippi River, is one of the bodies of water that is most polluted by agriculture chemicals in the nation.

And she has seen strong initial evidence that regenerative poultry system is sending water down into the aquifers below, rather than adding to that pollution. This is rare in Minnesota and other the parts of the corn belt, where the water on millions of acres drain directly to waterways due to the ceramic pipes, or drainage tiles, that were installed below farmland over the last century. The roots of the trees and other perennial plants on the farms in the RAA network, however, often break up and clog the tiles, preventing runoff and sending the water into the aquifer below.

Jennings is closely tracking the funds Minnesota is directing toward regenerative practices. “We want to make sure they’re funding the right practices; we don’t want them throwing away tax money on things that aren’t going to improve water, soil, and climate,” she says.

Jennings also wants to provide hard evidence for farmers looking to change their practices. “Farmers notice that their lives and waters are degrading over generations, and even within a generation. They’re not exactly happy about it, either. They know that they’re spending more than they should on chemicals. So, if someone like Regi[naldo], who is innovative and experimental entrepreneurial, can show that this works then it’s more likely to be adopted.”

She also points to the fact that General Mills has been funding the research for the first two years, as evidence of the potentially influential nature of Haslett-Marroquin’s approach. “They need to make sure [crops] can continue to be grown in this rapidly changing world. It’s important to the companies and the consumers of those products,” she adds.

In addition to the research, General Mills is also funding the RAA’s farmer training and the establishment of its demonstration farm. “We have been inspired by the RAA’s thought leadership and continue to learn from the deep and holistic way they approach regenerative agriculture,” said a company representative in a statement to Civil Eats.

RAA collaborated with Oatly, General Mills, and number of other nonprofit and research entities in the region, on a $5 million climate-smart commodities grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) aimed at “support[ing] poultry producers who follow diversified, regenerative, climate-smart grain production methods incorporating small grains such as oats, no-till, and cover crops, integrated agroforestry practices.”

“It’s an opportunity now to start to produce grains within [the regenerative] system, because 70 percent of the cost to farm business is feed,” says Christofore.

Rethinking Processing and Growing the Network

A relatively small building in Northern Iowa—just over an hour south of Northfield—the facility was acquired in late 2021. That first year, the small staff processed 1,000 chickens. In 2022, it processed 50,000, and manager Arnulfo Perrera says he hopes to reach 80,000 to 90,000 birds this year.

After attending agricultural school in Honduras, Perrera came to the U.S. to work as a manager for Smithfield Foods, the nation’s largest pork producer. “That was not really like my calling—raising hogs in barns in the conventional systems,” he says of the experience.

A decade later, with a long-awaited green card, Perrera was able to leave Smithfield to take a role managing the RAA processing plant in 2022. Since leaving what he calls “the dark side,” he has staffed it up 14 people, despite its isolated rural location and the challenge of competing with larger companies in the region that can offer higher pay.

But, ultimately, Perrera hopes to help create a new model, in an industry where ever-faster line speeds, crowded facilities, underage workers, and resistance to protecting workers’ health have become the norm. “I believe strongly that if the food is going to be sustainable and regenerative, it needs to be that way throughout [the food chain]. On the farm side, as well as the processing,” he says.

For Jose Morales, who has been at the plant since the RAA took ownership, the difference is palpable. The facility he worked at previously slaughtered 13,000 chickens every day of the year; 2,000 workers arrived in three shifts and worked 24 hours a day. He felt like one small cog in an enormous machine.

At the RAA facility, Morales says, he has had a say in shaping the workday and he’s helped train other employees. “We came up with a plan. Each person will be doing each job for two, maybe two and a half hours. So, you’re not doing the same thing all day.” It’s less repetitive motion, which is less difficult on everyone’s bodies, and all the workers at the plant are trained to work in all the roles. “It’s harder in the beginning, but then it’s better. When somebody’s calls in sick, or they don’t have a babysitter, we have somebody to call.”

Nonprofit meat processing plants are very rare, but Christifore, Haslett-Marroquin, and the rest of the team see the fact that they don’t have shareholders to appease as key to their approach.

The goal is to enable the proliferation and growth of the network of farms, and provide better jobs than many meat processing facilities. “If you’re doing it with integrity, there is not a lot of money to be made at that level of the supply chain,” says Christofore.

In stepping down from leading the RAA, Hasslet-Morroquin hopes the network moves toward a collective model of leadership based on a Mayan diagram that looks more like a circle than a pyramid. The idea is to create a strong system wherein everybody leads and follows at the same time, a reciprocal form of relationship-based accountability. “And if you do that, you unleash the energy of the people, and it is unbelievable. That’s why we call this an intellectual insurgency.”

Christofore echoes that idea. “We expect a certain level of participation, from those who want to commit to the ecosystem. And that’s when you start to care about things; it’s when you start to have ownership. It comes with a lot of responsibility and does require risk. But what comes with it is an opportunity to be a part of a culture and a community that’s growing.”

Hasslet-Morroquin has his sights set on reaching 250 farms on 50,000 acres in Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin. From there, he can see the network expanding to five or six other regions around the U.S. until it reaches 500 million chickens. That type of growth sounds enormous, but it would still only be 5 percent of the total chicken raised in the U.S. And at that point, he says, a truly regenerative system would have some real leverage.

“At that point, we’ll look at the industry—the USDA, investors, markets, everybody, and say, ‘OK, folks, why should we only do 5 percent of the total poultry system this way when we can do 100 percent?’” says the visionary farmer. “I may not get there myself, but somebody else could get us there. It doesn’t matter how long it takes. We don’t plan for the next year to two; this is about the seven generations in front of us.”

The post This Network of Regenerative Farmers Is Rethinking Chicken appeared first on Civil Eats.

https://civileats.com/2023/05/18/this-community-garden-helps-farmworkers-feed-themselves-now-its-facing-eviction/ Thu, 18 May 2023 13:45:37 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=51887 Nava and Contreras are the community coordinator and an elder advisor with Tierras Milperas, a community garden collective group that operates seven gardens in this and other Central Coast farming communities. The garden in question is the largest; it occupies 1 acre of land on the larger grounds of the All Saints-Cristo Rey Episcopal Church […]

The post This Community Garden Helps Farmworkers Feed Themselves. Now It’s Facing Eviction. appeared first on Civil Eats.

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On a recent weekday, Hugo Sanchez Nava and Augustin Contreras were hustling to get the word out about the Watsonville, California, community garden they were trying to protect. When they’re not working in the fields, the farmworkers have been spending time corresponding with other food and land access advocates, speaking to reporters, and soliciting signatures for a petition to save the garden.

Nava and Contreras are the community coordinator and an elder advisor with Tierras Milperas, a community garden collective group that operates seven gardens in this and other Central Coast farming communities. The garden in question is the largest; it occupies 1 acre of land on the larger grounds of the All Saints-Cristo Rey Episcopal Church and serves 51 immigrant farmworker families. In late April, its members had been served a two-week lease termination notice, and although the end date had come and gone, Tierras Milperas members haven’t stopped gardening.

“We all come from farming backgrounds, and this is our tradition.”

The gardeners were first sent a letter terminating their lease in June 2022. At the time, the church claimed that neighbors in the surrounding neighborhood had made multiple complaints about suspicious activity on its property. After a series of tense negotiations, the gardeners have managed to stay on the property for the last 10 months. Now, however, the future of the garden is in jeopardy again.

This time the threat of eviction has gained attention throughout the food sovereignty community, and the gardeners have received a growing groundswell of support. That’s largely because Tierras Milperas’s spaces—like the other rare but crucial gardens created by farmworkers—are more than your typical community gardens.

“The space is for growing organic vegetables, and when we come out of the fields where we work, it’s a place to be more tranquil,” says Contreras. “We all come from farming backgrounds, and this is our tradition.”

In addition to providing an important opportunity to farm, Tierras Milperas is also a community gathering place. In recent years, it gained fiscal sponsorship from the Community Agroecology Network and has increasingly focused on expanding its efforts, and on working as a collective through an assembly, a group of elders, and a working group.

Crops growing at Tierras Milperas in Watsonville, California. (Photo courtesy of Tierras Milperas.)

Many of its members are Indigenous, and they focus on growing and sharing knowledge about traditional cultural foods while using chemical-free farming and seed-keeping practices. The goal, says the group’s website, is to “put our health decisions and community social fabric in our hands rather than in an agrofood and health care system that sicken us with diabetes, stress, individuality, and labor exploitation.”

The garden on the Church’s property has become all the more important this spring, as one of the group’s other gardens was damaged when a broken levee led to devastating floods and mass evacuation in the nearby town of Pajaro.

“The garden serves as a lifeline to communities of farmworkers who live in a part of the state that produces an immense amount of produce, but they can’t afford [to buy] it themselves and so they have to grow it,” says Neil Thapar, the co-director of Minnow, a group working for land tenure for farmers of color and Indigenous land stewards that has been collaborating with Tierras Milperas for several years to help them secure their own land. “They’re growing food because they need to support their families. And that should be a right that’s afforded to anyone who wants to do that,” adds Thapar.

“The garden serves as a lifeline to communities of farmworkers who live in a part of the state that produces an immense amount of produce, but can’t afford to buy it themselves and so they have to grow it.”

“The church broke our contract,” Nava says. “Now, we’re asking for reasonable time to harvest everything we’ve planted. We can give them the land, but we’re asking to wait until February 2024.”

All Saints-Cristo Rey Episcopal Church did not respond to a request for comment by press time. In a statement to a local news outlet last summer, Bishop Lucinda Ashby of the Episcopal Diocese of El Camino Real wrote, “The gardeners have not been evicted, but the lease with Tierras Milperas is being terminated.” At the time, Ashby said “calls to police have been made frequently by surrounding neighbors due to suspicious activity on the property.”

The initial letter from the church mentioned drug paraphernalia left on the property and the death of a groundskeeper, who garden members say had been living in his car on the property at the time and suffered from alcoholism.

“They got false information and are unwilling to analyze it,” says Nava.

“It seems to us that they don’t like what we do when we come together as a community and have meetings,” added Contreras. “Many families come to the garden and women and children enjoy it and see it as a safe space.”

“Since then they haven’t wanted to [communicate] to us, just our fiscal sponsor—and even then they didn’t actually want to speak with them,” says Nava. “After we had such a big public outcry locally, the bishop agreed to have the pastor have dialogues with us and come to a different agreement.” That agreement didn’t last.

Photo by Sarai Bordeaux.

“There are a lot of negative statements being made about a community, that work racist dog whistles about the members of the Tierras Milperas community,” says Thapar. “If the church had these concerns, the assumption would be that you’d discuss this with your tenants of 13 years. Instead, their approach was to accuse and make assumptions, when there never had been any such situations.”

Thapar points to the power held by institutions such as churches, as well as the fact that a primarily Latin American and Indigenous population in an agricultural region is already at a disadvantage culturally.

“That social inequality is tied to property ownership. This situation is an example where that tension is very apparent, because while the gardeners had access to the lease, it’s clear that it can be taken away in an instant,” Thapar adds.

At this point, Tierras Milperas has gathered more than 600 signatures in an online petition that calls on church leaders to stop the eviction.

“We’ve received support from many people from here but also from around the country, and around the world. [Author, professor, and filmmaker] Raj Patel visited the garden recently. That has helped a lot in the last two weeks,” says Contreras.

Photo courtesy of Tierras Milperas.

“One of the most important things that community gardens can cultivate is community,” Patel, who is also on Civil Eats’ advisory board, explained by email. “With the church’s permission, those communities have flourished, turning soil into food, land into a schoolyard for children, and into a center for care in which seniors can be part of a community, not segregated away. At heart, Tierras Milperas’ fight is a struggle against segregation. Affluent white suburbanites don’t want ‘those people.’ But Tierras Milperas’ communities are vastly inclusive. With its eviction announcement, the church betrays its own principles, and I’m struggling to understand what they gain instead.”

The group’s struggle to stay on the land in Watsonville is just one of several similar situations. In Los Angeles, Compton Community Garden is working to raise $600,000 to buy the land it occupies while its fate lies in the hands of a developer.

In Saint Louis, Missouri, urban farmer Tosha Phonix told Civil Eats that several urban farmers in the city are being turned down in their attempts to buy previously vacant land, despite the fact that the city has “close to 12,000 blighted or vacant properties.”

“Thirty percent of our community is Indigenous people who have already been displaced from their lands. It is these forces that continue to try to erase us.”

When asked about whether he sees the fight for the Watsonville garden as part of a larger trend, Nava says, “It is a process of pricing people out, or gentrification. The people who do this act like they’re the majority, but they’re the minority. We’re in a predominantly immigrant community and there has been a lot of pricing out of our immigrant families in this region. Thirty percent of our community is Indigenous people who have already been displaced from their lands. It is these forces that continue to try to erase us.”

Regardless of how the scenario plays out, the gardeners intend to continue growing food together as a community. And for now, Tierras Milperas is raising funds for a plot of land through GoFundMe.

“We’ll continue what we’ve been doing for the last 5 years, working as collective,” says Nava. This is the part they don’t like—we’re organized.”

The post This Community Garden Helps Farmworkers Feed Themselves. Now It’s Facing Eviction. appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2023/02/27/once-scorned-birds-are-returning-to-farms/ Mon, 27 Feb 2023 09:00:49 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=50688 A version of this interview originally appeared in The Deep Dish, our award-winning, members-only newsletter. Become a member today and get the next issue in your inbox. Executive director Jo Ann Baumgartner has been with WFA since 2001, and she’s a passionate advocate for what she and WFA call “bringing nature back to the farm.” […]

The post Once Scorned, Birds Are Returning to Farms appeared first on Civil Eats.

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

For more than two decades, Wild Farm Alliance (WFA) has provided just that—an alliance—between farmers and wildlife advocates. Based in California, the group is focused on finding common ground between two groups that have often been at odds in an effort to address the biodiversity crisis while helping farms benefit from adding more wildlife to their operations.

Executive director Jo Ann Baumgartner has been with WFA since 2001, and she’s a passionate advocate for what she and WFA call “bringing nature back to the farm.” Baumgartner spoke with us about the one of the group’s core efforts in recent years: building awareness about the value of birds on farms.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Why focus on birds?

Jo Ann Baumgartner

We have a goal of [adding] a million nest boxes and perches on 10 percent of farmland in the U.S. Our audience is mainly growers, and so we want to show them where they can see the benefits, but we also want to educate them about the need for nature to be supported. There are so many species in decline and so many ways that farmers can help, because agriculture comprises almost 60 percent of the landscape [in the U.S.] when you count all the grazing lands, and it’s a huge footprint. With farmers’ help, we can do a lot to reduce the biodiversity crisis, and they can benefit from it.

Some readers may be more familiar with how birds can eat farmers’ crops than the ways they can interact with farmlands positively. How are you working to shift the narrative?

Well, a few years ago, we published this booklet called Supporting Beneficial Birds and Managing Best Birds [that detailed ways farmers can reduce their pest-control costs by hosting more songbirds during their nesting season]. And before that, most of the growers I talked to—even growers that were finding lots of creative ways to support biodiversity—the first thing they wanted to tell me was about how birds had wrecked something on their farm. But I don’t hear that so much anymore. There are a lot more people we need to reach, but growers are starting to learn that there are so many beneficial things that birds do related to pest control, and different kinds of birds offer different kinds of pest control.

It’s just like some people think all insects are bad. But really there are beneficial insects, and there are insects that can be harmful, but most of them are good. And with birds, there a few that are bad for farms some of the time.

It seems like both need to be kept in balance, and when they get out of balance is when it’s a real problem for farms?

Yes! We’ve collected around 120 avian pest-control studies and broken it down into different crops in different temperate climates; 90 percent of the studies showed that birds were important. And, not all researchers did the exact same study. Some of them were asking, “Is habitat nearby important?” Yes, it is: The more habitat you have, the more pest control benefits you get. And some asked, “Is it important to have nesting boxes?” And yes—you get more pest control benefits with nesting boxes.

Five percent of the studies showed that while birds were helpful, they also were harmful. So, for instance, in the spring, blackbirds eat all kinds of [harmful] insects when they’re feeding. But later in the year, they may potentially harm, say, a sunflower crop because they’re flocking birds. It’s really the big flocks of birds that can be a problem and there are very few species that do that.

There’s some research that looked at monoculture strawberries and then strawberries that were growing in more diverse farmscapes, and the researchers found that a diversity [of crops] supported a diverse community of birds, and that’s when you have more pest control coming from that community and less damage or less food-safety issues.

And the food safety issues really are coming from birds that are associated with concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), where we’ve created a mess and they get into it. Birds go looking for spilt grain and get into the manure and then it’s not good for them to come onto your farm.

When we talk about this to growers, they inevitably tell me stories about how they’ve seen birds help. For example, we just had an event in Livingston, California, in the heart of the Central Valley ag region, where we had helped an almond grower put in a hedgerow and he told me he has seen crows clean off the mummy nuts [almonds that stay on the trees after they’re shaken, and often can carry insects and diseases that impact the following year’s crop].

Growers are paying attention, and I’ve heard lots of stories like that. Farmers, especially the ones who are already managing for diversity, are really curious about birds, and some of them are putting in lots of nest boxes. There’s a grower at Spring Mountain Vineyards in Napa who has 800 nest boxes in their vineyards. Most growers don’t do that, but a lot of vineyards are putting in nest boxes, because there are some really great studies about how they increase bluebird presence in vineyards tenfold.

A bird box at Ridge Vineyards. (Photo credit: Jerry James)

When the researcher put out experimental prey, bluebirds ate almost three times as many insects near nest boxes versus far away from the boxes. And it’s not just bluebirds that use these boxes, there are other really good insectivorous birds that use them—like tree swallows, which are aerial foragers, meaning they’re cruising around in the air and catching moths, flies, and flying insects. There’s chickadees, titmice, and ash-throated flycatchers, violet-green swallows, and a couple of different kinds of wrens and nuthatches.

I’ve read that the drought has greatly impacted migration, as many of the wetlands and bodies of water where migrating birds used to stop and refuel have been drying up in recent years. Are some birds looking to farms to fill that gap?

I’ve heard that, too, and those birds aren’t really helping with pest control on farms. Some farmers are working with conservationists to flood some of their lands when they can, but that tends to attract waterfowl and shorebirds and the raptors that eat them.

But water is important and lots of birds are stopping at farms. Maybe they’re just coming through and need some food and cover or maybe they are going to stop and nest. We created a chart and an assessment tool to help farmers (and others) find the best native plants to attract beneficial birds and identify other opportunities, like where you might put in hedgerows, change other management practices, or add flowers or pastures as habitat for birds.

You’ve talked about making the case for more birds on farms to growers. Are there other folks who you’re trying to convince, particularly at the policy level?

It’s super important for policy makers to understand that birds are in decline, and we need to do everything we can to support them. And while we’ve been talking about all of their benefits, they also have intrinsic value.

A barn owl sits on a fencepost overlooking a farm. (Photo credit: Sue Cro)

Rachel Carson talked about how if we’re not careful we might wake up to a silent spring. And years ago, when the Migratory Bird Treaty Act was implemented in 1918, there was a whole bunch of pushback from industry. But it turned out that the Supreme Court said, “Look, birds are really beneficial and we can’t ignore that fact. We have to support them.” And back in the 1880s, the U.S. Department of Agriculture created a Division of Economic Ornithology and Mammalogy.

So we have known how important birds are for pest control for all these years. And now there’s a resurgence. I see it in my own backyard, because over the years, I’ve put in lots of native habitat, and more and more birds show up and it’s just lovely to see them and know that you’re supporting them. Everybody can do this, not just farmers.

The post Once Scorned, Birds Are Returning to Farms appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2023/02/13/could-this-mobile-solar-powered-livestock-barn-reshape-the-corn-belt/ Mon, 13 Feb 2023 09:00:51 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=50751 The shift took place nearly three years ago as Smith—who was working off the farm for a fertilizer company at the time—was talking with the Minnesota-based farmer Sheldon Stevermer. “Corn was $2.75, beans were $7.25. We’re small farmers who don’t have a lot of acres. [We were asking ourselves,] ‘Is it worth staying in business?’” […]

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Last August, Zack Smith welcomed a group of farmers, agricultural researchers, and investors to his mid-sized farm just south of the Iowa-Minnesota border for a field day. It was warm out, shorts weather, and around 35 people sat on straw bales listening as the young, fifth-generation farmer—who has gained a devoted audience through Twitter and YouTube and welcomes curious visitors to his farm every year—spoke about a critical turning point in his thinking.

The shift took place nearly three years ago as Smith—who was working off the farm for a fertilizer company at the time—was talking with the Minnesota-based farmer Sheldon Stevermer. “Corn was $2.75, beans were $7.25. We’re small farmers who don’t have a lot of acres. [We were asking ourselves,] ‘Is it worth staying in business?’” Smith recalls. The two were exchanging ideas and Stevermer asked a third farmer, Lance Petersen, what he thought. “He bounced it off Lance and he said, ‘What about putting a pen of sheep in between the rows?’”

The hope isn’t just to build a new type of farm equipment—it’s to help farmers build soil health, cut down on water pollution, and usher in a new approach to farming in the Corn Belt.

Stevermer has an engineering background and he and Smith decided to run with Peterson’s idea. They got to work designing a farming system that involved growing alternating rows of corn and strips of pasture that were wide enough to move a mobile barn through. The plants in those rows also get exposed to more sunlight than a standard canopy of corn or soy, resulting in higher yields per plant. They called the result—a solar-powered barn that separately housed eight sheep in the front, 10 hogs in the middle, and a 125 chickens in a trailing chicken tractor—the ClusterCluck 5,000. They coined the term “stock cropping” for the larger idea to have, as Smith puts it, “plants feeding animals, and animals feeding plants.”

Since then, Smith has dedicated 5 acres on a plot of land Smith rents to trialing the stock-cropper system. And he has worked with Illinois-based Dawn Equipment to design a second, much lighter and more nimble iteration of the barn: The ClusterCluck Nano runs on solar energy and can be moved with a phone app. Now, Smith and Dawn Equipment CEO Joe Bassett are working on a third iteration and actively pursuing outside investment.

The hope, says Smith, isn’t just to build a new type of farm equipment—it’s to help farmers build soil health, cut down on water pollution, and usher in a new approach to farming in the Corn Belt.

Iowa is famously home to more hogs—25 million—than people, and a sizable number of concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs. As a result, massive quantities of manure get spread on the same farmland repeatedly, typically during the cold months when there are no roots in the soil to absorb it. That often leads to nutrient pollution in the waterways (and dead zones in places like the Chesapeake Bay and the Gulf of Mexico).

Stock cropping, on the other hand, involves rotating crops with pasture strips so that a smaller numbers of animals leave behind just enough nutrients on the land to help corn grow there the following season—replacing the expensive, leaky fertilizer systems used by most commodity farmers. Meanwhile, the animals themselves live in less confined spaces, eating the plants and insects in the pasture strips. Smith has calculated that if there were 1.4 million ClusterCluck Nanos operating on about 1.9 million acres of forage strips within 15 of Iowa’s 99 counties full time, they could theoretically replace that state’s CAFOs.

“What is progress in ag?” Smith asked the crowd at the field day last August. “If you go down to the Farm Progress show in Boone, [Iowa,] you’re going to see one version of progress, and that’s big, wide, fast farm equipment that’s designed to do more with less people involved,” he said. But Smith, whose somewhat flat speaking affect belies his deep knowledge of agronomy and a stubborn dedication to farming, has other ideas. He points to the fact that even though corn and soy prices have gone back up over the last year, so have the prices of the inputs most commodity farmers rely on, such as synthetic nitrogen fertilizers and pesticides.

“It’s the same thing that’s happened three other times in my career. We get a pop and the machine responds, and the pop becomes not very fun anymore. But the concepts we have out here could be very useful as we move ahead into whatever is going to be next. [It’s] not going to be next year or the year after that, but the pattern always comes where [farmers] drain the tank and come back to a break-even proposition.”

Instead of this familiar boom-bust cycle, Smith hopes to see a network of farmers across Iowa, Minnesota, and beyond that can afford to stay on the land while farming at a smaller scale by cutting their input costs radically and selling higher welfare, grass-fed meat into local markets and directly to consumers. And while doing so will require more than just a grassroots effort, these farmers are hoping that their out-of-the-box ideas gain traction with investors who can help them scale up.

The ClusterCluck 5000 needs to be moved twice a day. The newer iterations are automated and can be moved with an iPhone app. (Photo by Zack Smith)

‘Escaping the Dead-end, No-win Ag Treadmill’

During the first Stock Cropper field day three summers ago, Smith started by pointing to the land next to his home farm and naming all the farming families that had sold or lost their land. The land hand been consolidated into a few larger farm operations, he told his audience, and as a result, his community had changed. Like in many rural areas, there were fewer schools, fewer neighbors to farm alongside, and it now requires a much longer drive to get to the grocery store or hardware store.

Even with an automated barn, he says, the stock-cropper system still requires farmers who are more hands-on than most other modern commodity farming, a fact that, if it were widely adopted, would result in a reversal of the population loss so many rural counties have seen.

“The whole idea of this system is that it will require a lot more farmers,” said Smith during a phone call last fall. “Because even though the barns are going to move themselves, somebody still needs to chore them, somebody still needs to do the daily husbandry. And you don’t have to try to farm half the state of Iowa to make a reasonable living.”

“The whole idea is that we want to increase the amount of biodiversity in the field within this system and build resiliency that way.”

Ricardo Salvador, the senior scientist and director of the Food and Environment Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists (and a Civil Eats advisory board member), had Smith as a student when he taught at Iowa State University in the ‘90s. He has attended two of Smith’s field days and sees the work as potentially transformative.

“He wants to escape the dead-end, no-win treadmill [agricultural] situation where all that you can do is choose from a very narrow range of options, which always make the farmer the person who takes the ultimate risk, earns the least, and is dependent on government [subsidies] in order to make ends meet,” says Salvador. By selling the highest-value final product—the meat itself rather than just the grain to feed the animals—Salvador adds, he’s found a way to do something that has “become out of reach for farmers that decades ago bought into the idea of specialization.”

The hope, says Smith, is to create a system that’s more resilient in the face of climate change because it relies on fewer inputs.

Eventually, he says, “we could probably cut nitrogen use by 75 percent compared to a conventional corn acre. And I think we could completely eliminate the [added] phosphorus and potassium and use the animals to cycle it back into the soil.”

He is also looking at other crops that might make good animal feed, like barley and field peas, which would diversify the operation further.  “The whole idea is that we want to increase the amount of biodiversity in the field within this system and build resiliency that way.”

Dawn Equipment’s Bassett got on board with stock cropping and started collaborating with Smith several years ago. Bassett had been making small-scale farm equipment targeted specifically at those cutting down on tillage and planting cover crops after he took stock of the nitrogen problems—and resulting regulations—in the Chesapeake Bay and the Des Moines Waterworks lawsuit.

“At that time, [it looked like] the government was going make farmers start doing something to preserve water quality and topsoil, “ he said. “I thought, ‘Surely, there’s going to be a groundswell of momentum that sort of gets farmers to change their practices.’” And while didn’t happen right away, he says that part of the business has grown in recent years.

Bassett sees much of the recent wave of ag technology as furthering, rather than solving, the most pressing problems with commodity agriculture—and he wants to do something different, even if it can mean a slower ramp-up to profitability.

“A lot of people just want you to come in and do this and then flip it in three years and sell it to Cargill. I’m not interested in that.”

“Agriculture is very high-tech now, but it’s not actually any different,” he says. “We have high-tech tractors and combines, but what they’re doing is exactly the same. Now [farmers are getting] robot tractors to plow the fields, so they’ll just plow even more.”

Bassett is personally motivated by the climate crisis and believes having animals on the landscape are key to sequestering carbon in the soil. “A stock-cropper system of intercropping, where you are rotationally grazing in between rows of cash crops, will probably be the most regenerative farming system possible. And it will produce the highest yield per unit of fertilizer of any system.”

Dawn Equipment is working on more prototypes, and the company’s ability to manufacture its first round of commercially available ClusterCluck barns will depend on the level of investment Bassett and Smith are able to attract. Together they have bootstrapped the project so far, and they are hoping to attract venture capital to keep scaling up the project. But Smith isn’t interested in the typical model.

“A lot of people just want you to come in and do this and then flip it in three years and sell it to Cargill. I’m not interested in that. We need to find the right investor that is bought into the merits of what we’re trying to build and is going to give us the rope and the leeway to get there,” he says.

And while the barns were developed for corn and soy operations, Bassett hopes to see them reach orchardists and vineyard owners interested in grazing animals as a way to build the soil between their rows in other parts of the country.

Chickens in the stock cropping system eat bugs, break up the soil, and leave behind manure that adds fertility. (Photo by Zack Smith)

A Processing Bottleneck

While Smith hasn’t had a problem finding a market for the meat he’s produced so far with the stock-cropper system, the lack of meat processing infrastructure for small scale producers is a well-known challenge.

Keaton Krueger, another Iowan who is farming with his wife on 80 acres purchased from her family, while working full time in the field of precision agriculture (most recently for WinField United), has been following Zack’s progress and says he’s very impressed with what he and Bassett have done in the last three years. The focus on soil health aligns with his approach and, on paper, the system promises the kind of steady income that would allow him to gradually transition to full-time farming.

“Right now, farming is like a second job, but it would be great someday if a system like the stock cropper could allow us to make a living farming without having to become a giant consolidated grain-farming entity. I think there are a lot of people like he and I, who are still in agriculture professionally, that probably could access a few hundred acres of land and would be happy to go home and work hard on that land to make a living.” But working at that scale isn’t possible within the current system, he adds.

And yet Krueger hasn’t committed to buying a barn because he says the meat processing infrastructure isn’t there yet. The Kruegers raise hogs for themselves and their family members, and he says, “We have to schedule a year in advance for just a few hogs a year.”

So far, Smith has been able to find a market for the hogs he’s raised, but the lack of meat processing options in rural Iowa is one potential barrier to scaling up the stock cropping system. (Photo by Zack Smith)

But he’s optimistic that more demand could help pave the way for more processing. “I think that will probably be an area that gets solved either through the stock-cropper vision or through somebody that’s supporting the vision,” says Krueger.

Krueger, Smith, and Salvador all point to Jason Mauck’s work as an inspiring example. The Muncie, Indiana-based, self-described “maverick grower” farms row crops in strips to collect optimum sunlight like Smith and raises hogs that he sells himself through Munsee Meats, the meat processing plant that has been in his family since the 1950s—with the recent addition of automated self-serve meat lockers.

“[Mauck] is trying to retain as much of the food dollar as possible, which means that he’s in charge of production, processing, and distribution,” says Salvador. “He’s got this small USDA-certified meatpacking plant. But then his sales are through what are essentially these high-tech vending machines. And he controls the whole thing.”

At the field day in September, Mauck bought a ClusterCluck Nano and brought it home to Indiana, where he has been sharing photos of it in action.

And when Smith envisions networks of producers working together to build a supply chain using stock cropping, he thinks the region around Mauck’s processing business is probably the most logical place to start.

“It’s going to take regional hubs outside urban areas, and then farms positioned around those hubs rather than, for instance, growing pork here in Winnebago County, Iowa, and shipping it to Sioux Falls to be killed, and then shipping it to Washington, D.C., after that. We’ve got to do a better job of nesting the production around where the people are.” He also sees pasture-based systems as inherently easier to locate next to cities—because, unlike CAFOs, urban dwellers “can actually come out and see and participate in it, and it’s 100 percent transparent; the farmer has nothing to hide.”

The USDA is also in the middle of rolling out a sizable grant program that is intended to support small-scale meat processing infrastructure—as part of the Biden administration’s response to consolidation in the meat industry—but it’s not clear whether those grants will work in tandem with efforts like Smith’s.

Corn in the system grows in narrow rows, received more sunlight, and produces more a result. (Photo by Zack Smith)

Swimming Against the Tide

It is far from easy to envision and follow through on building an alternative to commodity agriculture, in part because the companies behind it wield so much power in the Corn Belt.

The depopulation of rural areas—and the sheer number of miles it has put between people—hasn’t helped. But social media has done a lot to help outliers like Smith and Mauck build networks that have bolstered them in the face of the status quo. “Maybe 10 percent of farmers are open to these ideas,” says Smith “That’s the community space that we’re aiming for and trying to build a coalition around right now.”

At the end of the day, Smith is clear-eyed about the fact that what he’s doing may struggle to gain traction because it threatens the powers that be in the commodity agriculture industry.

“You’re not going to see John Deere, Corteva, or Bayer supporting something like this. I come from that world,” he told his field day audience. “I was a Pioneer seed rep and chemical dealer.” Enabling farmers to work in a closed-loop way that harnesses the power of nature isn’t good for those companies’ bottom lines, he added.

“Changing the arrangement of the use of plants and animals in this way, it is a significant threat [to the existing industry],” he added later on the phone. Not only does the stock-cropper system require much less synthetic fertilizers, but “it’s going to take us less seed. We’re getting more yield per seed, and that flies in the face of everything I’ve done up to this point. . . . It’s a potential threat to significantly reduce the things that we’re told we have to farm with in order to survive.”

“A lot of farmers just wouldn’t dare try this, because the fear of looking strange,” says Salvador, who adds, “the people who will pooh-pooh it or make it sound like it’s strange are the industry and the folks who want to be comfortable just farming corn and soybeans, and getting checks from the government when they can’t make ends meet.”

“But,” he adds, “I see a slow-brewing, quiet revolution out there.”

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]]> https://civileats.com/2022/11/21/farm-fridays-for-the-future-a-young-food-and-climate-activist-to-watch/ Mon, 21 Nov 2022 08:59:49 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=49774 A version of this article originally appeared in the October issue of the Deep Dish, our monthly newsletter for members. Become a member today to receive the next issue. In Uganda, 23-year-old activist Vanessa Nakate has urged world leaders to leave the oil in the ground as a way to safeguard food and water supplies […]

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]]> A version of this article originally appeared in the October issue of the Deep Dish, our monthly newsletter for members. Become a member today to receive the next issue.

Young climate activists have done an impressive job of claiming the spotlight and making their voices heard in recent years—and for good reason: The climate crisis is already impacting their lives and shaping their futures.

In Uganda, 23-year-old activist Vanessa Nakate has urged world leaders to leave the oil in the ground as a way to safeguard food and water supplies in Africa, the continent most vulnerable to climate change. In Canada, 17-year-old Anishinaabe activist Autumn Peltier has fought for clean water for First Nation communities and has made “We can’t eat money and we can’t drink oil” her catchphrase. And Greta Thunberg—whose Fridays for Future campaign has helped embolden youth across the globe and points to farmer suicides due to rising climate strife as reason to strike—worked with Mercy for Animals on a video that reached 1.5 million people, imploring her audience to look critically at large-scale animal agriculture and eat plant-based diets.

But here in the U.S., aside from the Sunrise Movement’s focus on the Green New Deal and its brief mention of agriculture, few young activists appear to be drawing a direct line between the climate crisis and the food system.

That’s what makes Ollie Perrault one to watch. The 15-year-old activist is growing up on an organic community supported agriculture (CSA) farm in western Massachusetts, where she and her family have spent the last two years responding to extreme weather. In June and July 2021, the farm saw 16 inches of rain—“more rain in the first two months of harvesting than we normally get in an entire season,” recalls Perrault. “And then this year, we experienced a level-three emergency drought throughout most of the summer.”

At age 11, Perrault attended a Youth Climate Summit through Mass Audubon’s Youth Climate Leadership Program that catalyzed a shift in her worldview. “I realized that if I want a shot at a livable future, and if I want a future for my family’s farm, I need to act, I need to get involved, and take a leadership role in my community,” she says.

Perrault, who has been home-schooling since second grade, has spent the last few years focusing much of her energy on climate activism—a kind of full-time version of a Thunberg school strike. Then, last year, she founded her own local organization, Youth Climate Action Now, which her parents see as a key element of her education. The entirely youth-led group fluctuates from seven to 20 members, depending on the meeting, and it is focused on organizing, building power, and providing a place for youth to commiserate about what it’s like to grow up in the face of a massive global crisis.

“I realized that if I want a shot at a livable future, and if I want a future for my family’s farm, I need to act, I need to get involved, and take a leadership role in my community.”

“We were looking for a space to be loud, and a space to let others know that we are angry and that our anger is powerful,” says Perrault. “We wanted to make a ruckus, spark social change, and feel accepted and safe while doing so. Also, we wanted to feel like we had a community of other young people who have our backs.”

And while her group is focusing on influencing state-level legislation, supporting local farms in the region, and building a composting program, its members are also clear that they want the adults around them to start thinking big and finding ways to work toward radical systems-level change.

Their thinking aligns with a recent journal paper written by 23 youth climate activists about their hopes and feelings at this pivotal moment. Young people “are often unfairly portrayed as the world’s ultimate saviors” and “seldom given platforms by their governments or corporations to share their ideas, feelings, and hopes,” the paper reads. However, it adds, “their creativity and unique perspectives, along with their limited vested interest in the status quo, mean they can be catalytic in helping societies to mitigate and adapt to the climate crisis.”

Between farm work and homework, Perrault is still learning about the finer points of things like carbon sequestration, but points to agriculture’s sizable contribution to climate change, as well as the potential solutions it can bring if done right. “I really believe that agriculture can present a solution to the climate crisis,” she said. “It should be an integral part of our steps to move forward toward energy efficiency, carbon sequestration, eating locally, composting, etc.—there are so many levels of change that can come through working with sustainable agriculture.”

The post This Young Climate Activist Has Her Hands in the Soil and Her Eyes on the Future appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2022/10/17/pollinator-friendly-certifications-pesticides-sustainable-farms-food-product-labels/ Mon, 17 Oct 2022 08:00:36 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=48790 Those plants—and the pollinators they feed—have been there since long before Far North’s owners Mike Swanson and Cheri Reese took over Swanson’s family farm and built a distillery in 2013. But this year, they decided to start making their presence known to their customers by applying for a Bee Friendly Farm designation from Pollinator Partnership, […]

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Far North Spirits, the northernmost farm and distillery in the contiguous United States, grows the rye for its whiskey and distills it on the farm. Just 25 miles south of Minnesota’s border with Canada, the farm’s fields of golden rye and heirloom corn are interspersed with highbush cranberry shrubs, bushy crabapple and plum trees, native grasses, and a growing number of bees, butterflies, and other pollinators.

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

“Pollinated foods are some of our most nutrient-rich foods, some of our most colorful, and flavorful.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Planting pollinator habitat at the Jordan Winery Estate. (Photo courtesy of Pollinator Partnership)

The Certifications

The Bee Friendly Certification began as a local initiative in northern California’s Sonoma County that helped beekeepers find farms where it was safe to store their bees. Pollinator Partnership acquired it in 2013, but Miles Dakin, the current Bee Friendly Farming coordinator, says it wasn’t a big part of the organization’s work until around 2019, the year the Almond Board of California—the group that represent 7,600 almond farms on an estimated 1.6 million acres—reached out to the organization and initiated a partnership.

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

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

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

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

“We were already above and beyond the certification standards, so it wasn’t hard at all for us.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Changes on the Farm

For some farms, achieving pollinator-friendly certification is mainly a matter of documenting what’s already taking place. For instance, Klickitat Canyon Winery in Lyle, Washington, has long invested in planting native wildflowers and grasses throughout its vineyard and owner Kiva Dobson had already received organic certification prior to adding Bee Better certification to the list. “We were already above and beyond the certification standards, so it wasn’t hard at all for us,” says Dobson. Plus, “for every bottle [of wine] we sell, a percentage of that goes towards buying native plants, so [the cost] is integrated into our business model.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dialing in on Pesticides

Research has found that adding habitat, cover crops, and more plant diversity overall to large monocrop operations can—over time—reduce the need for insecticides and other pesticides. And that appears to be the idea that both pollinator certifications are working with, albeit to different degrees. But asking farmers to intentionally spray fewer pesticides in the process is another thing altogether—and can be seen by growers like Allbright as an assault on their very viability.

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

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

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

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

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

“Having worked with many, many farmers over the years, it’s like people are on this pesticide treadmill and can’t get off; they can’t see their way out of it.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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