In lieu of something so ethically dubious, Bunchek and the other crew members first responded to a survey created by Stahn in November 2020, prior to their departure for Antarctica. This established a kind of baseline. Since arriving at the station, they have completed the survey on a monthly basis, answering questions like: How much time they spend in the greenhouse each month; what kind of activities they do there, be that planting or harvesting or cleaning; how the plants make them feel; and whether they enjoy eating the food that is harvested. After they return and Stahn has the before-and-after brain scans, he’ll look at patterns of change and to what extent they correlate with the overwintering crew’s survey responses.

Anecdotally, the greenhouse has already proven hugely beneficial to the overwintering crew. The other team members, including those researching geophysics, hydroacoustics, meteorology, or climate, are reportedly eager gardening assistants.

“Whenever [Bunchek] needs help, she reports she has no problem getting volunteers from the crew,” Nugent said. “They tend to want to come into that space and be around the green plants, because everything else is just snow and steel.”

“Personally, I have enjoyed how working in the greenhouse daily stimulates all of my senses,” Bunchek wrote in an email from Antarctica. “It’s a warm, colorful, fragrant environment…and the smell of fresh peppers, cucumbers, basil, mint, tomatoes, parsley–all the crops–is simply wonderful!”

She adds: “More than anything, I enjoy eating the produce raw. Anything we eat here that isn’t grown in the greenhouse is pre-packaged as either frozen or dried, so having the chance to eat fresh, raw produce is a treat!”

The greenhouse is a standalone structure about 400 meters from Neumayer Station III. Like the station itself, EDEN ISS is raised on stilts, which are necessary to avoid the fate of Neumayer Stations I and II—warped under heavy snowdrifts and shifting ice.

As with all indoor or vertical farms, this method of farming is called controlled environment agriculture, because all the growing conditions—light spectrum, temperature, humidity, nutrient delivery, watering, even carbon dioxide levels—are indeed carefully controlled. However, EDEN ISS is supposed to emulate the challenging conditions of space, which are far greater than those for indoor farms on Earth.

In addition to cucumbers, basil, mint, tomatoes, parsley, Bunchek is also growing varieties of peas, beans, broccoli, cauliflower, and new pepper and mustard green cultivars, all of which were selected either because of their size, shape, or other physical characteristics, or for their nutritional value.

“So often in space, we’re constrained by power, volume, mass, things like that,” said Wheeler. “We try to look for shorter growing species, maybe dwarf varieties within those species. Growing sugarcane that’s 12 feet tall just isn’t a good match.” They also want varieties that grow quickly and have high yields.

In addition to size and shape, they’re looking at the nutritional content of plants, and specifically for nutrients that can be difficult to deliver by other means, or that degrade over time, like Vitamin C and Vitamin B1.

“You’re not going to get a lot of nutrition out of lettuce,” Wheeler explains. But: “Choose a colored variety, then you can get anthocyanin. That’s a pigment that has some antioxidant qualities.”

Even though there’s gravity in the EDEN ISS, one of the technologies NASA is testing this season is a plant watering system that can function in u-gravity, as on the International Space Station.

Another key factor being closely monitored and tracked is operational time. While Bunchek and the other crew members enjoy spending time in the greenhouse, the goal is to keep hands-on time to a minimum, because the astronauts who eventually use this system won’t have a lot of excess time. (The working hypothesis is that hands-on gardening time is less important to mental well-being than spending time near the plants or knowing that they’re there.)

There’s a lot riding on this greenhouse, whose name evokes the garden of Genesis and the beginning of new life. It can be hard to lose track of in the minutiae of seed varieties, LED lights, and watering systems, but the ultimate goal of EDEN ISS and other similar projects—like the micro-garden on the International Space Station called VEGGIE, described as the size of a piece of carry-on luggage—is to support long-term space travel or even colonization.

“Food has been foundational to human exploration for centuries,” said Nugent. “We often talk here in the halls about Shackleton and Franklin, the great explorers…sometimes I really feel this is all in support of the great human adventure and exploration and expanding horizons, and food is a foundational aspect of that.”

Beyond providing nutrients and sustenance, Wheeler points out that at a certain volume, plants can help sustain life in other ways.

“When you get to a sufficient scale, you’re now generating oxygen, and enough oxygen, then it’s beginning to have an impact in terms of your life support systems,” Wheeler said. According to the most recent research, Wheeler said, 20-25 square meters of plants growing continuously under white, high-intensity light can generate about enough oxygen for one person.

If indoor farming ever did become a pillar of the astronaut’s life support system, there would be no room for error.

“As soon as we want to say that we are being reliant on this food source, as part of the nutritional needs of the crew…it can’t fail,” said Nugent. “If you’re going to assume that it’s going to fail, and taking backup food to support a failure, you might as well not even have had it. Then it just becomes a toy or an experiment.”

Finally, I ask about the state of astronaut salad dressing, to make fresh greens even more palatable and pleasurable.

“Once we get this down,” said Nugent, “convincing the astronaut office to pack packets of something in there I think would be a wonderful marker for us. It shows that we’re producing enough salad.”

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]]> https://thecounter.org/epa-phase-out-commercial-refrigerants-supermarkets-montreal-protocol-kigali/ Fri, 07 May 2021 18:43:54 +0000 https://thecounter.org/?p=58645 This week the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) took the first step in phasing down the use of hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, common refrigerants that also happen to be greenhouse gases thousands of times more potent than carbon dioxide. It’s a significant step towards reducing the import and production of HFCs by 85 percent over the next […]

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EPA took steps this week to dramatically reduce the use of hydrofluorocarbons, a move that will ultimately reshape the grocery industry.

“We can replicate any climate in the world,” he said. “We actually replicate Genoa, Italy, for growing our basil. And it’s not any part of the year—it’s the month of June, in 1997.”

According to Musk, June 1997 was a banner season for Genovese basil. Why settle for good growing conditions when you can have the best there ever was?

“That was the perfect year,” Musk continued. “That’s how precise you can get it to. And you can get the humidity and oxygen levels, carbon dioxide levels to, you know, within half a percent.”

As indoor farms have proliferated in recent years, so have claims like these. The promise of these facilities—which are part of a larger category of food production called controlled-environment agriculture—is being able to create the optimal growing conditions for plants throughout their life cycle by manipulating the temperature, humidity, carbon dioxide level, nutrient mixes, and light spectrum and intensity. This is in contrast to conventional crops, which are still subject to the vagaries of weather, good, bad, or disastrous. Inside Square Roots’ growing containers, nothing is left up to chance.

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“It’s just amazing what we can do,” Musk elaborated in a follow-up phone interview in January. “You can actually design the lights to, say, I’d like the leaf of this to be a little bit bigger, or a little smaller, or I’d like the softness of the leaf to be a little softer or a little crispier, or I’d like the oils to increase or I’d like the oils to decrease, depending on what you need.”

Square Roots is far from the only indoor farming company making total environmental control a part of their marketing pitch. The CEO of Bowery Farming told CNBC that his company can grow kale with a softer leaf or a more peppery arugula. The chief executive of 80 Acres Farms told The Washington Post he can grow two types of basil from the same seed—a sweeter herb for the grocery store and a stronger version for chefs—simply by tweaking environmental factors. Fresh Impact Farms’ business model—before the pandemic, at least—was growing customizable herb and flower garnishes for restaurants. The company’s website features an indicative tagline: “Harnessing the power of technology to invigorate the emotion of flavor.”

These claims about the links between climate and taste may sound fantastical, but science backs them up—to a point. Changing light color, intensity, and duration has been shown to influence plant growth and development, as well as shape, size, and color. Different light recipes can even increase the volatile compounds that determine how plants smell and taste.

Still, fact-checking specific claims—for instance, whether Square Roots’ basil tastes anything like basil grown in Genoa in June, 1997, or even whether the growing conditions really approximate Genoa in 1997—is difficult, if not impossible. Indoor farming companies keep their cards close, reluctant to let any bit of intellectual property slip out, or to open themselves up to outside scrutiny. Some companies won’t even allow press on site or share photos of their farms with the media in order to protect their intellectual property. And then there’s the fact that many of the wildest claims revolve around flavor or taste, which is still not fully understood by sensory scientists. It’s hard to know where the science ends and marketing begins.

That hasn’t stopped money from flooding the indoor farming space. Newark, New Jersey-based Aerofarms, which claims it’s setting “a new culinary standard” with greens grown in peak-season conditions all year round, has raised $238 million. Plenty, a San Francisco-based startup which claims its greens have “unparalleled flavor,” has raised $401 million, and counts Jeff Bezos and Google co-founder Eric Schmidt among its backers, puts it simply: “By giving plants exactly what they want,” the company writes on its website, “we can make them taste how they should.”

The implication is always that a more flavorful future is on the horizon. But is it?

—

The shipping container is parked along with nine others in the lot next to the Pfizer building, a former chemical plant in Brooklyn where Square Roots is headquartered. When I visited on a brisk January afternoon, Paul Berry, Square Roots’ head of engineering, gave me a brief tour of one of the company’s shipping container farms, which it calls “climate farms” for their ability to fine-tune the environment enclosed within. He opened a door to the basil container and we peered through a protective veil of glass.

Dark green herbs covered the walls, sprouting from vertical planters. The basil on one side was lush and full, almost ready for harvest, while the rest needed more time. A center divider housed a bank of lights, but they were dark; Berry said night and day are reversed in the containers so that farmers don’t have to work under a harsh glare. He explained that a mixture of water and fertilizer periodically drips down through the planter towers and soaks the basil roots in their soilless growing medium—simulating rain, or something like it. While we stood there talking, a smaller set of lights flickered on over a tray of seedlings in the back, in the plant nursery. Indoor farms mostly use light from the red and blue spectrums, which promote photosynthesis, so the light had a bright pink hue.

Square Roots controls every condition within that shipping container: the temperature, humidity, carbon dioxide levels, nutrient mix, and light spectrum and intensity. While greenhouses rely primarily on sunlight, sometimes supplemented with growing lights, indoor farms are lit entirely by artificial lighting. This kind of agriculture has largely been made possible—and financially viable—by the increased efficiency and plummeting cost of light emitting diodes (LEDs) over the past decade.

Although recreating sunlight with electricity comes with significant financial—and environmental—costs for indoor farms, it does open a number of possibilities. Square Roots can grow summer crops like basil year-round, and by simulating peak-season conditions has managed to greatly decrease growing times: Berry said the complete lifecycle of Square Roots’ basil is a mere 30 days from seed to harvest, which is very fast. For comparison, grown outside, basil can take up to 30 days just to germinate, or sprout.

But is it really like 1997 Genoa on the other side of the glass?

Not exactly. Musk’s cofounder, Tobias Peggs, later told me that Genoa is really more of a “baseline.” He said Square Roots will talk to chefs or look online to see where in the world the best basil is grown, and when in the last few decades the herb was “really, really fantastic.” Then they’ll look at the climate data from that season—at the temperature, the time the sun rose and set—and try to replicate that environment inside the containers.

“But that’s just the start, right, because from there you then improve,” said Peggs. So while Square Roots may have started with Genoa, it has since iterated on what nature and history provided.

Those iterations turned out to be modest. During my visit, Berry said that they were growing basil at two different temperatures, one significantly hotter than the other, to see what happened—amounting to a basic A/B test. Musk had described these efforts in more dramatic terms, suggesting that each container added to the company’s research and development capacity.

“In Brooklyn, we have 10 farms, which really means we have 10 experiments going on at any one time, at least,” he said.

Even if Square Roots could conduct ten experiments at once, scientists say there are limits to that approach. Just like conventional fruit and vegetable breeders, indoor farmers may find that changes that improve taste have a negative impact on yield or shelf-life, or that making plants grow faster lowers nutrient levels. In other words, promoting one desirable parameter may have unintended consequences for another key trait.

“Maybe a certain light source or certain light recipe could increase the pepperiness or the bitterness or whatever they’re looking for,” Erik Runkle, a professor in the Department of Horticulture at Michigan State University and project director of OptimIA (Optimizing Indoor Agriculture), a Department of Agriculture-supported Specialty Crop Research Initiative, told me in a phone interview. “It’s just whether or not other things that change at the same time would still be desirable. So you can steer it, of course, but only to an extent. You can’t, you know, you can’t turn a banana into an apple.”

Harry Klee, a horticulturalist at the University of Florida who studies why fruits and vegetables taste the way they do, said it even more plainly: “If someone is telling you it’s all about light, they’re probably on drugs.”

—

In imitating Genoa, Musk and Peggs are trading on what wine producers call “terroir,” or what the American wine writer Matt Kramer has called its “somewhereness.” They are not alone in this: The vertically farmed strawberry company Oishii, for instance, seeks to recreate “the ideal natural ecosystem of Japan’s most distinguished strawberry-producing regions.”

Terroir is often assumed to be the earth itself—the soil in which the grape vines grow—but there are other factors too, from altitude to humidity to airflow, some of which could possibly be quantified and replicated indoors. (Flavors that are derived from soil are probably off the table; virtually all indoor farms use a soilless growing medium.)

Whether terroir is even “real” or not is a passionate and ongoing debate among winemakers. But indoor farming companies want to have it both ways: To assert that there are superior regions and climates for growing specific produce, and also that those conditions can be replicated in a box. It’s one thing to suggest that the Italian coast imparts certain qualities to basil. But then shouldn’t the inside of a sealed shipping container taste like something too? Can an herb’s “somewhereness” be convincingly faked? Or will it yield instead a kind of “anywhereness”?

Then there’s the question of empirically evaluating taste, or flavor. Who is in charge of determining if and when one of Square Roots’ experiments results in better-tasting basil?

“This is a classic issue with sensory science,” said Beverly Tepper, a sensory scientist at Rutgers University. “You have somebody in the organization who makes a decision about whether something is good or bad and whether it should be packaged and shipped without actually having, I would call it evidence-based information about what exactly does it taste like.”

“You can’t modify too many variables with too many treatments, because it becomes impossible, particularly when you’re doing sensory experiments,” Tepper explained. “There’s only so many things people can taste at one time.”

Tepper signed a confidentiality agreement with AeroFarms, so she couldn’t go into detail about the experiment design, but she did say that “we had long discussions about balancing how many samples the panel can taste, how many variables…to modify at one time.”

For example: If Rutgers and AeroFarms are looking at light treatments and how different light recipes increase or decrease the presence of glucosinolates, it is difficult to also look at the role of temperature or different fertilizer mixes or carbon dioxide levels. For every variable tested, the group will need to have a control, otherwise it will be impossible to say whether any resulting changes in the plant are due to one variable or the other, or the two in concert.

Because there are countless variables to manipulate, these experiments can grow in complexity quickly, spawning endless permutations that take time and cost money. And that’s when a company has the benefit of a university research team and a giant research grant, which most do not. Of course, as Tepper points out, “you can do one set of experiments that focuses on one aspect and then come back and do another set of experiments that focus on a different aspect,” but the process remains arduous.

Do indoor farming companies really have the capacity to tweak light recipes and other growing conditions, then rigorously track how those tweaks manifest in the plant? In other words, do they really have the ability to grow finely-tuned, better tasting produce? Is it a science, an art, or just artifice?

While it might be relatively easy to see if herbs grow faster or slower, or bigger or smaller, greener or redder—subtle changes in flavor are much trickier to track, and not just for indoor farms.

“Whether the average consumer is going to be able to differentiate, ‘oh, that arugula tastes extra special,’ I really don’t know,” said Runkle.

And again, while AeroFarms and Rutgers will eventually publish some of their research in this area, most companies do all this work (or not) behind closed doors. We may always need to take their word for it.

“I hear about companies, indoor farming companies doing tasting studies,” Runkle said. “But the data is usually not shared or made available.”

“A lot of greenhouses, warehouses, vertical farming folks, it’s very kind of in the black box,” said Jon Friedman, the chief operating officer of the container farm company, Freight Farms, which supplied Square Roots with its first 10 containers. “And then you look and you’re like, it’s just lettuce, you’ve just grown lettuce, and you won’t tell anybody how you’re growing lettuce? Cool.”

—

On a muggy July afternoon at the tail end of a heat wave, I took the subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan to pick up a $50 box of strawberries at Farra, a restaurant in TriBeCa. They’d been grown indoors in New Jersey by Oishii, the fruit company I mentioned earlier that models its farms on Japan’s strawberry-growing regions. (Oishii is a Japanese word that translates roughly to “delicious” or “tasty.”)

While the vast majority of indoor farms in the U.S. produce leafy greens or herbs, which are easy and fast to grow, tomatoes and strawberries have been bandied about as possible—and lucrative—future offerings. Musk said he thinks strawberries could be “the one that will blow people’s minds,” and his cofounder, Peggs, said he had researched strawberry production on a trip to Japan earlier this year.

Until I brought it up in conversation, neither Musk nor Peggs seemed aware that Oishii got there first—and have been selling vertically-farmed strawberries to restaurants since 2018.

The company says it is the only vertical farm growing strawberries on a commercial scale in the United States. John Reed, the company’s director of strategy and finance, said it is aiming to be the country’s largest strawberry producer within 10 years.

I wanted to taste the future of fruit.

Oishii sells boxes of eight larger or 11 smaller berries; I opted for the box of 11, so each berry cost a little over $4.50. They come nestled in individual cups, kind of like an egg carton, but suspended in plastic hammocks. They were a paler orangey-pink-red than I expected, with deep pockmarks but no seeds. They come chilled and should be stored chilled, but Oishii recommends bringing them to room temperature to fully enjoy their flavor and aroma (which was so potent I could smell it through my mask while riding the subway back home). While at Farra I also picked up a bottle of sparkling wine to go with the berries—not a true Champagne, but one made with grapes from an adjacent region; the bottle cost half as much as the fruit.

My tasting notes from that night were as follows: “Very sweet, like strawberry but more so, essence of strawberry, strawberry infused with strawberry, distilled strawberry.” But what was even more notable than the sweet taste was the texture, which was very soft, with a melt-in-your-mouth quality. My boyfriend described them as “light, smooth, and fluffy.” They were certainly superior to the commercial organic strawberries we later bought at the grocery store, but it was impossible to do a side-by-side comparison with the berries we might get in our CSA or at the greenmarket because the strawberry season had ended weeks ago.

Like Square Roots with its Genovese basil, Oishii says its indoor farms replicate the ideal environment for strawberries.

“By recreating the ideal natural ecosystem of Japan’s most distinguished strawberry-producing regions in a controlled indoor environment, Oishii is able to consistently grow the world’s best strawberries year-round and pesticide-free,” the company claims on its website. “Oishii’s groundbreaking approach to vertical farming enables bees—nature’s pollinators—to thrive, ensuring optimal strawberry quality.” (Yes! Bees—and other indoor farms, including Square Roots, also introduce beneficial insects like ladybugs to help manage pests.)

In a video call, Reed declined to elaborate any more about Oishii’s farms or its growing conditions. “We manage our facilities in a dynamic way,” he said. “I can’t go into the details, but the facilities are—you know, everything is tailored to the plants.” Reed also said he could not divulge the specific variety of strawberry, which Oishii markets as the Omakase berry, after the chef-led dining experience. Omakase translates roughly to “I leave it to the chef,” Oishii’s co-founder told NPR. As with the dining experience, we have to trust the grower.

According to the company’s website, it is “a unique Japanese variety characterized by its beautiful aroma and exceptional sweetness. It was developed through years of breeding the best Japanese strawberry cultivars, resulting in its signature seedless appearance and creamy texture.”

Oishii has taken a very different approach to marketing than other indoor farming companies. Instead of making the technology a centerpiece, it downplays the fact that the strawberries are grown indoors. Reed said the company does not share pictures or videos of the farms in order to protect its intellectual property. Instead of LED-bright, futuristic farming images, the company’s Instagram page is filled with sumptuous food photography, mostly—though not entirely—of strawberries, as well as other aspirational lifestyle content. It’s refreshing, in a way, that Oishii doesn’t celebrate the technology more than the unknown variety of fruit, because genetics remain the primary driver of flavor and texture.

But it’s also a reminder of an uneasy contradiction. At the same time vertical farming companies invoke a traditional growing heritage and the specificity of place, they tightly control the narrative about their own breeding practices and growing technologies. Since one can’t visit—or even see pictures of—the farms where Oishii’s berries are grown, and since one can’t know anything about the genetics it’s actually using, it serves the company to emphasize something else: time-honored agricultural practices honed in a different time and place. Maybe it’s a way to humanize the cold, technologized reality of indoor farming. Or maybe the stories are a way to compensate for a different anxiety: That these products are a kind of tabula rasa, blank-slate foods that could be from anywhere, or be anything to anyone.

—

Before light recipes and controlled environment agriculture, there was plant breeding, or the science of emphasizing desired traits through crossbreeding or hybridization—think Gregor Mendel and his peas. To ignore the role of breeding and focus singularly on light recipes or even the controlled environment more generally is to miss at least half the equation.

“In plant breeding, there’s two things we’re trying to work with,” explained Michael Mazourek, a vegetable breeder at Cornell University, in a phone call earlier this year. “It’s a genotype by environment interaction, and that really drives everything. There’s all the genetics of a species or forms within the species—cultivars or breeds. And then there’s everything in the environment—the fertilizer, the light, the growing season, rainfall or water supply. So it’s that interaction that’s going to determine a lot.”

The role of breeding, which is how farmers and scientists have historically developed fruits and vegetables with specific characteristics, is often downplayed by indoor farming companies. That, or they only mention the negative outcomes of breeding, like flavorless tomatoes that can travel long distances and still be red and firm—if watery and mealy—after weeks in transit and on the shelf. But plant breeding isn’t always as bad as all that.

In his work at the University of Florida, Harry Klee studies how sugars, acids, and up to 20 different volatile compounds interact in tomatoes and other fruits and vegetables to produce what we perceive as flavor. For example, the volatile hexanal is characterized by a green and grassy odor; 1-nitro-2-phenylethane is musty and earthy; phenylacetaldehyde has a floral/alcohol scent; 2-phenylethanol is nutty and fruity; and methyl salicylate smells like wintergreen. Videos about Klee’s work show giant test tubes filled with jewel-toned tomato chunks ready to be analyzed using gas chromatography. Klee’s goal is to identify the primary genes that govern these volatile compounds and therefore the “flavor” of heirloom varieties and to use that information to help build (breed) a better-tasting commercial tomato.

I asked Klee to what extent light recipes can change the way fruits and vegetables taste, and how much control indoor farmers really have.

“While I’m sure light will have an effect on flavor, I don’t believe that anyone has really quantified it,” Klee wrote in an email. “Lots of growth factors do influence flavor. Salt, fertilizer, amount of sunlight, water . . . I don’t think anyone has systematically set out to define the variables.”

As Musk told me: “You can adjust [the light] spectrum by the minute, you can change the heat, you can create climate that is perfectly controlled.” If perfectly-controlled climate is the commodity indoor farms are selling, maybe the reason it’s so compelling is because the actual climate—the one we live in—is anything but.

It’s not enough that in an apocalyptic future, humankind will have indoor farming to fall back on. In the techno-utopian vision of indoor farming companies, their strawberries and basil will be as good as the best—almost no matter what befalls the earth. In this future, consumers don’t have to lose or sacrifice anything when climate change wreaks havoc on agriculture. If it’s too hot for strawberries to grow in Japan, that’s okay, because we can grow them inside in New Jersey, yours for just $50 a box. Even if you had to cancel your summer vacation to Italy because of a global pandemic—now increasingly likely due to climate change—you can still make pesto with basil grown in a “climate farm” inspired by Genoa.

It doesn’t matter, in this telling, if the science behind these flavor claims is still emerging. It doesn’t matter if we know little about what growing methods were used. It doesn’t even matter if, in the course of “improving” upon the conditions of 1997-era Genoa to grow better, faster basil, the indoor farm loses whatever tenuous connection it had to the “somewhereness” of the Italian countryside.

Genoa makes for a better story.

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]]> https://thecounter.org/covid-19-albertsons-safeway-sued-price-gouging-toilet-paper/ Thu, 11 Jun 2020 16:46:51 +0000 https://thecounter.org/?p=44751 Remember March? That was when the coronavirus pandemic forced offices across the country to close and companies told their employees to work from home—if they didn’t fire or furlough them instead. Facing a public health crisis with an unknown trajectory, people prepared for the worst, stripping grocery stores of hand sanitizer and disinfectant, but also […]

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Where is the line between basic laws of supply and demand and predatory price hikes that hurt poor shoppers the most?

Let’s do the math. We, the public, will need to buy 50 million six-packs of Pure Gold for Michelob to give $1,000,000 to Contract for Change. Given that the purchase of each six-pack is intended to help convert six square feet to organic, that means Michelob will help convert up to 300 million square feet of farmland. That sounds like a lot.

But consider that figure in the context of the almost 900 million acres of farmland in the United States. There are 43,560 square feet in an acre, so 300 million square feet is really only about 6,887 acres, or less than .003 percent of the total U.S. barley acreage. 

“This is likely about Michelob wanting to increase supply of organic grains so it can source cheaper ingredients for its beer,” Amanda Zaluckyj, an attorney and blogger, opined for AgDaily. “Anheuser-Busch is only looking out for Anheuser-Busch.”

But a case of faux-lanthropy is not the whole story here. Whether Michelob is responding to or driving consumer demand for organic products—or both—the Super Bowl commercial put organic agriculture at the center of the conversation. While the ad reignited a mostly one-sided Twitter debate about the value of organic, others were grateful for the attention. In conversations with The Counter, growers, agriculturalists, and craft brewers celebrated the campaign for its potential to educate the public.

“I thought it was incredibly exciting, the commitment to organic and the thoughtfulness in terms of the challenges that new organic farmers face,” said Erin Silva, who leads the University of Wisconsin Organic and Sustainable Agriculture Research and Extension program. “Just to have a well-known company like Anheuser-Busch be able to so publicly, in a Super Bowl ad, state that commitment and bring consumers on as partners in that process was just really, really encouraging.”

In 2016, Idaho grew 14,544 acres of organic barley. As the spokesperson pointed out, increasing that total by 6,887 acres would increase the organic barley acreage in the state by more than 45 percent. But you could frame the same statistic another way: Michelob’s program will transition only 1.25 percent of Idaho’s 550,000 acres of barley to organic. 

Even if Michelob can make a difference in Idaho, what about the rest of the country? The reality is, not all of the impediments to going organic are structural or financial.

“It would be nice to see more farmland transition to organic,” said Schwarz, who works with growers as well as the industry. “At least in North Dakota … [barley] is prone to a disease called scab or Fusarium head blight. That disease produces a mycotoxin on the grain and in our area virtually everyone has to apply fungicide to meet quality specs.”

Right now, Idaho is largely free of Fusarium head blight. The fungus thrives in wet environments, and it is thought that dry southwesterly winds coming off the High Plains desert help prevent infection in the southeastern part of the state. That explains why Idaho is one of the top states in organic barley production, and why Michelob is building up its organic supply chain there. That said, the regional climate is changing, and warmer, wetter conditions are predicted in the near future, which could make Idaho barley more susceptible to the disease.

All things considered, Michelob’s ad campaign could be more valuable in the culture wars than in actually changing … what was it the commercial’s narrator said? Right: “If every football fan picks up a six-pack, we could change America’s organic farmland forever.” What does that even mean?

It’s a Super Bowl ad. We expect the claims to be hyperbolic, to appeal more to our emotions than our intellects. Still, you almost have to admire the sleight-of-hand Michelob pulls off here: The company manages to sounds like it’s pledging to change America’s farmland forever, while also managing not to say anything of the kind.

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]]> https://thecounter.org/misbegotten-promise-anaerobic-digesters-cafo/ Tue, 03 Dec 2019 14:30:43 +0000 https://thecounterorg.wpengine.com/?p=20392 At a glance, anaerobic digesters seem like the perfect solution to one of society’s many messes: They take the waste from cows, pigs, and chickens raised en masse for human consumption, and from literal shit generate energy to power our cars, homes, and electronics. What could be more renewable than manure? To that end, last […]

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Federal agencies and state governments are spending millions on anaerobic digesters to wring renewable energy from animal poop. But critics say “cow power” from factory farms is neither clean nor green.

The thing is, digesters are expensive: expensive to build, expensive to maintain. They can sometimes generate enough energy to power an entire farm, reducing one big bill and offsetting the cost of the digester, but the excess energy isn’t usually so excessive that selling it back to the grid nets the farm significant profits. Without outside funding, it simply doesn’t make financial sense for most farms to build or operate a digester. The question is, do the environmental benefits justify significant—and ongoing—public investment?

Critics say absolutely not. While biogas from digesters may be renewable, it is hardly “clean” or “green” in the way most people understand those concepts. The biogas produced through anaerobic digestion is a mix of methane, carbon dioxide, and other trace gases. Burning biogas for energy converts methane into carbon dioxide, and also produces carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, and other hazardous air pollutants. The carbon dioxide generated during anaerobic digestion and during the combustion of methane is released into the atmosphere. 

The only reason that anaerobic digesters can be considered a “green” technology is because methane is calculated to be 25 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, so burning it for fuel and releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere instead is still considered to be a greenhouse gas “reduction.”

But are digesters even necessary? Around 80 percent of digesters in the U.S. are on dairy farms, but methane emissions from manure deposited on fields from pastured cows are virtually nil. Manure releases methane only when it decomposes in oxygen-free (anaerobic) conditions, like a pit or lagoon. Most of the livestock farms that store manure in pits or lagoons are large concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) where animals are confined for more than 45 days of the year. So, critics say, anaerobic digesters are solving problems only created by large-scale factory farming in the first place, problems that are avoided in more sustainable systems, especially pasture-based ones. 

This purportedly green technology has divided environmentalists into two camps: The first, which includes organizations like the World Wildlife Fund and the Environmental Defense Fund, are those who think that anaerobic digesters make the best of a bad, but inevitable, situation. The second group, which includes Food & Water Watch, says the government is greenwashing and subsidizing factory farming at the expense of sustainable producers and genuinely clean, renewable energy like wind and solar.

***

Every day, a 1,400-pound dairy cow will generate about 120 pounds or 14 gallons of feces and urine. At larger dairies, that can really add up. Take Fair Oaks Farms in Indiana, for example, home to 38,000 dairy cows. One of Fair Oaks’ on-site digesters takes in 650,000 gallons of manure from 15,000 cows every day—and that is less than half of the manure the farm produces. It is an almost unfathomable amount of cow crap. Without a digester, disposing of it all is tricky, and the more you have, the harder it is.

There are two options for most farms—spreading and storing, or some combination of the two. Daily spreading is exactly what it sounds like: Collecting the manure, loading it into a mechanized spreader, driving out, and spraying it on cropland and pasture. Manure is rich in essential soil nutrients—nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium—so it can be a good fertilizer, and as long as the spreading is done quickly, it emits very little methane. However, daily spreading has some downsides, especially if one has to spread when conditions are poor: Spreading on saturated ground can compact and degrade the soil, and spreading too heavily or in the winter when the ground is frozen can result in manure run-off. While nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium can be beneficial for cropland, excessive amounts in streams, rivers, and lakes can cause toxic algal blooms and hypoxia, leading to aquatic “dead zones” where marine life can’t survive.

The alternative to spreading is to indefinitely store the manure until it can either be spread on the ground or hauled away. Smaller farms might stockpile dry manure under a tarp or in a three-sided structure with an impervious floor, to prevent the manure from contaminating the water table, or they might compost it with straw and other organic waste.

Larger farms are more likely to build giant pits or lagoons to store liquid manure. Like digesters, these giant swimming pools of liquid manure are oxygen-free environments, and manure stored in them releases methane, carbon dioxide, and other noxious gases that can be fatal to humans and animals. They are also vulnerable to structural failures and extreme weather events, which can cause storage pits to overflow or leak. 

After Hurricane Florence in 2018, millions of gallons of hog manure flooded North Carolina. In 2013 alone, Wisconsin farms spilled more than one million gallons of manure. These accidents pollute the environment with nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium, but raw manure can also contain hormones, antibiotics, and bacteria like E. coli. And then there’s the smell.

Anaerobic digesters were supposed to help with all that.

***

With only 400 cows, Wagner Farms is an unusually small dairy to have an on-site anaerobic digester, and the smallest in New York to own and operate one. Less than 15 miles from Albany, the surrounding area is surprisingly suburban, with single-family homes set into neatly trimmed lawns.

Keith Wagner, the farm’s anaerobic digester operator, says their location restricts how much the third-generation family farm can grow: Fields are smaller and harder to come by near Albany than they are in the western part of the state. That was one reason Wagner Farms invested in an anaerobic digester a decade ago.

“The idea was, instead of growing larger, you know, we wanted to grow vertically instead of horizontally,” Wagner says, although the payoff hasn’t been as high as they hoped. Wagner would like to see New York institute something like Vermont’s Cow Power program, which pays farmers for the energy generated, plus an additional four-cents per kilowatt-hour “for the environmental benefits.”

Even just 400 cows produce a lot of manure. It’s collected in an enormous vat housed in an outbuilding with red siding and a sloped roof. The manure is scraped directly from the surrounding barns into the pit with a skidsteer, which is kind of like a snow plow, but used here for cow poop; the rest is hauled in with a dump truck and unloaded “right here where we’re standing.”

At our feet is a semi-circular hole at least eight feet wide, with an open metal flap like a giant’s toilet seat cover. The lid, rim, and floor are splattered with dark brown muck, and the adjacent walls are caked up to the ceiling. Inside the pit, a grayish, greenish-brown soup swirls, moved by submerged blades. The pit beneath our feet can hold 12,000 gallons of manure and Wagner says they get about that much every day. Periodically, unseen pipes empty their contents into the cauldron with a splash. A giant bubble of gas rises to the surface and bursts, thickly. The stench is momentarily overwhelming.

The shit slurry in front of me is the first step to converting manure into biogas through anaerobic digestion. Once in the pit, propellers agitate the manure so that it isn’t too clumpy or thick to pump. Wagner Farms sometimes adds food scraps to the mix, which both increases the amount of biogas produced and brings additional income to the farm in the form of “tipping fees,” or payment from towns or companies for disposing of food waste. The manure is pumped into the digester twice an hour, Wagner says, five to eight minutes at a time. The digester itself can hold up to 265,000 gallons of manure.

Inside the digester it’s basically like “one giant heated swimming pool,” says Wagner.

Bacteria eat the organic matter in the manure, producing methane, carbon dioxide, and trace amounts of ammonia and hydrogen sulfide. Those gases rise to the ceiling of the soft-top digester. The biogas is then piped from the digester to a generator that produces the electricity that powers the farm; any excess electricity is traded back to the grid through remote net metering and the Wagners get a credit on their next electricity bill.

The remaining effluent from the digester is separated into solids and liquids: The solid digestate is like fibrous compost, dry and fluffy to the touch when I crumbled a handful between my fingers. It smells earthy, but not unpleasantly so. Wagner Farms uses this as bedding for their cows. The liquid digestate flows into a pit lagoon to be later spread over the 1,000 acres on which Wagner Farms grows forage crops.

Sometimes, the digester produces more biogas than the generator can handle. When I visited, excess methane from the digester was being regularly flared off—burned, but not for energy—so that the digester wouldn’t explode from being too pressurized. Essentially it was like watching money and energy disappear into the wind—greenhouse gas emissions with no benefit to Wagner Farms, or the energy grid. When asked how much methane is flared off, Wagner said he didn’t know because there wasn’t an incentive to monitor that.

***

Investment in anaerobic digesters in the United States first peaked during the energy crisis of the 1970s, when fuel shortages prompted many Americans to start thinking about energy alternatives. But enthusiasm waned in the ‘80s for several reasons: The price of oil dropped, digesters had a high rate of failure, and they became prohibitively expensive to fix and maintain. Around 85 percent of anaerobic digesters shut down, and by 1994 there were only 25 operating in the country.

Interest ticked back up again in the late 1990s, in part because of a growing awareness of the greenhouse effect and in part because communities near livestock farms were demanding something be done about the smell. A significant boost came during the Obama administration, when then-Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack announced that U.S. dairy farmers would cut greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent. But some advocates for family-owned and operated farms had a problem with how Vilsack planned to achieve that.

To understand their frustration, it’s important to note that the past few decades have been especially difficult for small dairies, and many have been forced to shutter. The number of dairy farms in the United States has steadily fallen over the past half century, from 648,000 in 1970 to just 75,000 in 2006. In 2018, more than 2,700 dairy farms closed, bringing the total number of dairies in the country to just 37,468. But this drastic contraction has not affected all dairies equally: Between 2000 and 2006, the number of farms with 30 to 200 cows fell by 30 percent; in that same time period, the number of farms with at least 2,000 cows more than doubled.

At the same time, greenhouse gas emissions from the agricultural sector have increased by 8.8 percent since 1990, and the primary driver of that increase has been manure management. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) cites a 57.1 percent increase in combined methane and nitrous oxide emissions from livestock manure management systems.

Greenhouse gas emissions have increased largely because of farm consolidation, because farms over a certain size have virtually no other choice but to store liquid manure, which emits more greenhouse gas emissions than other manure management systems. When the Obama administration announced that they would reward those mega-dairies with lavish grants for anaerobic digesters, it irked the small farmers raising dairy herds in environmentally sustainable ways. As Paris Reidhead reported in 2010 for The Milkweed, a dairy news publication, the $20 million in funding for digesters was made available only for farms with at least 1,000 animal units; an animal unit is 1,000 pounds of animal flesh, or about 700 dairy cows.

“I was in Copenhagen at the event where Vilsack was promoting manure digesters as a solution to greenhouse gas emissions,” says John Peck, the executive director of Family Farm Defenders, a nonprofit organization in Wisconsin. “He admitted then that only 10 percent of U.S. farms will qualify.”

Curt Gooch, senior extension associate at the Cornell PRO-DAIRY program—which has a contract with NYSERDA to provide support to the digester industry—thinks it’s entirely natural for government agencies to fund anaerobic digesters only on the biggest farms. “We know the economics of digesters will basically never work on a 500-cow dairy in New York,” he said. “So why would we put them on a 50-cow dairy?”

An alternative would be to put in place environmental regulations that compel agricultural producers with high greenhouse gas emissions to fund their own manure management solutions. Instead, the government forks over millions earmarked for addressing environmental problems to the very farms that create and profit from the pollution in the first place.

“It’s like a classic problem,” says Peck. “We’re going to subsidize the worst actors to clean up their mess.”

Bankrolling the worst actors with public money has, in at least one notable case in Wisconsin, backfired spectacularly. In 2010, Dane County contributed $3.3 million for the construction of an anaerobic digester to combat manure pollution in the local watershed and regional lakes. The digester failed again and again.

As Jim Eichstadt reported in a 2015 issue of The Milkweed, in a five-month period in late 2013 and early 2014, there were three separate liquid manure spills totaling 435,000 gallons. In 2014, a fire and explosion blew the cover off one of the digesters, rendering it inoperable. On top of that, there were “numerous” air quality violations, Eichstadt wrote.

But even if all goes as planned with a digester, there are still likely to be negative environmental impacts from large operations. And it’s not just greenhouse gas emissions: Water pollution from manure management is also a huge issue. Nutrients like phosphorus don’t simply disappear in the digester, Peck points out.

Phosphorus pollution is a serious and growing problem, and contributes to those nasty algal blooms that can kill fish and other aquatic life, according to a 2018 study in Water Resources Research, a journal of the American Geophysical Union. And it’s not the only potential pollutant still present in digester effluent.

“The nitrogen that is in the manure to start with doesn’t magically go away in the digester,” says Brent Newell, Food Project Senior Attorney at Public Justice. “It’s either going to go up in the air as ammonia, or it’s going to be on the ground as, you know, excess nitrogen. It’s going to pollute groundwater.”

A monitoring report prepared for the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board in California found alarming “groundwater impacts” from confined animal facilities throughout the region, essentially everywhere they looked. Many of these facilities used anaerobic digesters to deal with their waste. The report came to a sobering conclusion:

“A growing body of evidence has suggested that currently available and feasible agricultural technology and practices cannot be expected to eliminate discharges into groundwater from dairies, nor alter volume or character of those discharges so that they are at or below some applicable water quality objectives. Likewise, currently available and feasible technologies and practices are not expected to result in returning groundwater quality to drinking water standards in many aquifers.”

***

Breese Hollow Dairy is 30 miles from Wagner Farms in Hoosick Falls, New York, a few miles shy of the Vermont border. The foothills of the Green Mountains frame a picturesque vision of 60 Jersey cows at pasture. The scene could have been ripped from a milk carton.

Chuck Phippen used to work on aircraft engines at Pratt & Whitney in Connecticut, but he wanted to be a grass-based dairy farmer, so 25 years ago he and his wife bought some land in Ilion, New York. When they moved the farm to Hoosick Falls 16 years ago, the 170 acres were half corn and half alfalfa. They converted everything that had been corn to a pasture mix: perennial ryegrass, orchard grass, and red clover.

Twice a day, Phippen brings the cows in to be milked, and then lets them back out to pasture. He does rotational grazing, meaning he’ll fence off part of the pasture for the cows and after a while move them to a different part of the pasture, so that the grass in the first area has time to recover and regrow.

Manure isn’t a problem in Breese Hollow. The cows go where they go. If they happen to be in the holding area, waiting to be milked, the manure is shoveled outside. There was a modest heap by a tractor, no more than knee high, waiting to be spread on the fields. Manure deposited at pasture emits negligible amounts of methane, and there is a growing body of research that responsibly grazing cows can help sequester carbon.

When the environmental benefits of anaerobic digesters are calculated, they are generally compared to the environmental costs of keeping manure in long-term storage, something that happens only on large farms with confined animals. They aren’t generally compared to the kind of grass-based system that Phippen practices. Pasture-based systems can be harder to scale, but farmers also get a premium price for milk from grass-fed cattle that can help make up for that.

Phippen points out that there are other environmental costs to keeping animals permanently confined, and these aren’t always accounted for when adding up the benefits of anaerobic digesters: You need to bring in grain that was grown far away in vast, unsustainable monocultures, so there is the financial and environmental toll of growing the feed and hauling it in by truck. Cows kept in confinement need more antibiotics to keep from getting sick, and chemicals to stave off hoof-rot from standing on concrete all day, every day. And then of course, if you need to build a digester to handle manure, that’s expensive, too.

Phippen observes that sustainable, pasture-based dairies don’t make a lot of money for the larger agricultural industry—the feed producers and the antibiotics producers and the chemical companies and the anaerobic digester designers—which could explain the lack of investment in pasture-based systems that are better for the environment as a whole.

“I totally agree with soil health, and that might be a great thing,” says Phippen. “But who makes money off of that?”

***

Anaerobic digesters have received little critical coverage from the press. Local news outlets readily promote the “Save the farm, save the environment” storyline, and even national outlets uncritically describe biogas and methane as “renewable” or even “clean” energy sources. Just this weekend, NPR and PBS Newshour teamed up to report on the benefits of waste-to-energy systems on dairy farms.

Meanwhile, federal and state subsidies are creating perverse incentives for more and bigger factory farms: A Food & Water Watch report from earlier this year pointed out that, “multinational meat giant Smithfield Foods not only plans to push the U.S. factory farms that raise their animals to construct digesters, but also intends on building new factory farms specifically to tap into the potential to generate biogas.”

These perverse problems aren’t limited to the United States. Europe has wholeheartedly embraced biogas from anaerobic digesters as a “green” energy, but because processing poop alone doesn’t produce as much usable biogas as a mix of manure and food waste, some farmers have begun growing corn for the sole purpose of feeding digesters. As George Monbiot reported for The Guardian, that has been an environmental catastrophe, damaging soils and “threaten[ing] the fertility of the land, the health of our freshwater ecosystems and the homes at risk from flooding.”

“Biogas digesters are a false solution that do nothing to actually mitigate emissions from agriculture,” the Food & Water Watch report states. “On-farm digesters can cost anywhere from an estimated $400,000 to $5 million to construct depending on the size, design, and features. The money being funneled into digesters is waste capital that should instead be invested in zero-emission renewable energy sources, like solar and wind.”

Although the current administration isn’t known for loving renewable energy projects, the money is still flowing. As recently as July 2019, the USDA advertised a whopping $400 million in funding for renewable energy and energy efficiency projects for farms and other rural small businesses, which includes anaerobic digester projects. In New York, the $26 million that NYSERDA invested went to just 22 digesters—an enormous average per-project amount. And some of those operators could still get even more: Of the additional $16 million in funding that NYSERDA has announced, at least half is earmarked for refurbishing existing digesters.

“It’s a ton of money,” says Patty Lovera, food and water program director at Food & Water Watch. “And if that money is available from federal programs or state programs, let’s use that money for something better, to improve either renewable energy or farming practices.”

“This so-called solution, you know, further entrenches and subsidizes that corporate-controlled system,” says Newell. “We should be subsidizing family farmers who are doing the kinds of climate practices that benefit rural communities, financially and environmentally, and that put us on a path to where animal agriculture and agriculture in general is more regenerative and resilient and less extractive and exploitative.”

***

The appeal of anaerobic digesters is in their simplicity: power from poop, energy from waste. But this framing is misleading—energy production was always a byproduct, never the primary goal. (If energy production was the main incentive, one might expect the companies building, installing, and operating digesters to have done a better job eliminating inefficiencies, like the need to flare off excessive biogas.) Unfortunately, as a solution for manure management, anaerobic digesters are hardly a simple or complete solution, but rather one step in an insufficient and fallible process.

When it comes down to it, the problem is not really manure, because manure is a problem only in vast amounts.

“When I was growing up my neighbors were all dairy farmers,” says Peck. “And they would always laugh and say, if manure ever became a problem, you were just too big for your britches.”

The simplest solution is obviously to not amass manure in such large quantities—but that would require a complete reversal of assumptions about market consolidation and economies of scale. On the other hand, current milk production often exceeds demand, so maybe scale isn’t what is most needed right now, especially when mass production is strongly correlated with greater greenhouse gas emissions.

Taking steps to slow or reverse the consolidation of dairies and to encourage pasture-based farming could help curb air pollution that contributes to climate change. Instead, state and federal agencies are spending many millions on making giant factory farms that are too big for their britches marginally better for the environment, and calling it “green.”

Or at least, green enough.

“Nothing’s perfect. There isn’t a perfect solution for anything, and nobody in this world is perfect,” says Gooch. For supporters, anaerobic digesters may simply be the best farm waste solution we have—for now.

The post The misbegotten promise of anaerobic digesters appeared first on The Counter.

]]> https://thecounter.org/eliminate-crop-insurance-subsidies-regenerative-ag/ Thu, 19 Sep 2019 20:35:34 +0000 http://thecounterorg.wpengine.com/?p=19411 Imagine for a moment, a possible future, some years ahead: Across the plains, acres that were once plowed up and planted to corn or wheat go back to native grass. Marginal, flood-prone land is left to return to wetlands, improving water quality downstream. Farmers diversify their operations in order to effectively manage risk in a […]

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]]> Imagine for a moment, a possible future, some years ahead: Across the plains, acres that were once plowed up and planted to corn or wheat go back to native grass. Marginal, flood-prone land is left to return to wetlands, improving water quality downstream. Farmers diversify their operations in order to effectively manage risk in a changing climate. Monocropping is a thing of the past. 

Or this scenario, not so long from now: Growers adopt practices like no-till and cover cropping, which helps lower their inputs—the money spent on fertilizer, pesticides, seed, and anything else they need to get a crop in the ground. They turn a profit with ease. They may even switch to cheaper, non-GMO seeds and see profit margins swell.

In this future tableau, cattle are turned out to pasture on land that was once intensively farmed. Land managers plant low-cost grasses and other silage, and graze livestock on a portion of the land while the remaining acres are allowed to rest and regenerate. There’s always something growing in the soil, anchoring nitrogen, helping retain rainwater, and sequestering carbon.

This is what American agriculture could one day look like, according to farmers, environmentalists, and economists. But first we’d have to get rid of federally subsidized crop insurance.

More than 300 million acres of cropland in the United States are covered by crop insurance. It’s absolutely essential to the success of American farmers and ranchers, at least according to the industry group, National Crop Insurance Services. It protects farmers from yield or revenue losses caused by natural disasters like drought, flooding, pests, or disease—even market volatility. Although administered by private insurance companies, this “essential” safety net is heavily subsidized. The federal government—the taxpayer, ultimately—chips in more than 60 percent of the premium, with farmers paying, on average, less than 40 percent of the cost of coverage.

That financial shield is a major factor for farmers in deciding what to plant where, and how much to spend on fertilizer and pesticides, because it essentially guarantees a minimum income on that land. But there have also been some mostly unintended consequences. This includes confusing guidelines that have, over time, discouraged farmers from planting cover crops like rye or clover, which anchor soil and nutrients during the off-season, and help stabilize yields through years both dry and wet. Practices, in other words, that could protect farmers from the very losses they end up needing crop insurance to recoup.

This conundrum has prompted calls for reform. Earlier this summer, I wrote about a time-consuming and costly effort to create crop insurance products that would reward farmers for adopting regenerative agriculture practices that are restorative, maintain natural systems, and rebuild the topsoil, thereby defending land against the inevitable ravages of a warming climate. 

Not long after my piece was published, someone popped into my Twitter mentions to make a case for what would be the most revolutionary reform of all: Toss out the federally subsidized crop insurance program altogether.

***

I followed up with some of the farmers who reached out to ask why they’d want to get rid of crop insurance and what a world without it might look like. One of them happens to know the program inside and out. Scott Dudek grows open-pollinated seed corn on 120 acres in Michigan, less than 15 minutes from the Canadian border; he also works as a crop insurance adjuster.

“I would like to see the subsidy part of it phased out,” Dudek says. “Let it become a private product completely.”

In his view, farmers are entirely too reliant on crop insurance.

“We’ll end up not being able to feed ourselves or be a productive society because we’ve become reliant upon subsidies,” he says.

While part of Dudek’s objection to subsidized crop insurance is rooted in his libertarian politics and preference for small government, he also says that getting rid of the subsidy completely would force farmers to adopt more conservation practices. As it is now, farmers don’t need to ensure that their soil is rich enough to sustain a crop even in dry years because they can just get an insurance payout if their yields are sub-par. Although there are a number of incentive programs to nudge farmers to start growing cover crops, at both state and federal levels, they haven’t spurred widespread adoption.

“We’re going to have to become better stewards of the land going forward if we’re to remain profitable,” Dudek says.

It’s not just farmers who take issue with crop insurance. The non-profit, non-partisan Environmental Working Group (EWG) published a report in 2017, arguing that crop insurance policy as it exists now could lead us into another Dust Bowl. The report singles out a particularly egregious provision, the Actual Production History Yield Exclusion, which was slipped into the 2014 farm bill and is exacerbating the inherent problems with crop insurance.

Here’s how crop insurance coverage is normally determined: Adjusters calculate the average yield of a crop in a specific area over many years, which gives a reasonable estimate of what those acres might yield in the future. But the yield exclusion changes that equation, allowing farmers in some counties to exclude bad years from that estimate. And not just one or two bad years, but up to 12. This essentially means farmers can rewrite history, and pretend that the region isn’t as arid or bad for crops as it really is.

“Even if bad years occur more often than good years, the bad years are treated as aberrations and the good years as normal,” the authors of the report write. “Crop insurance becomes a form of annual income support that encourages farmers to keep planting crops that fail more often than they succeed.”

This not only drives up the cost of subsidizing crop insurance for taxpayers, it’s causing long-term damage to the environment and the American landscape. High crop insurance payouts discourage farmers from adapting to the changing climate, and that could prompt another man-made environmental disaster like the Dust Bowl.

Anne Weir Schechinger, a senior analyst at EWG and co-author of the 2017 report, says the problems with crop insurance aren’t limited to the yield exclusion.

“When you’re subsidizing crop insurance, you have farmers planting riskier crops or bringing riskier acres into production,” Schechinger says. Studies show that crop insurance encourages more farmers to plant corn, because it is subsidized at a higher rate than other commodity crops, like soybeans. That may seem pretty innocuous, says Schechinger, until you consider that corn is often planted in lieu of winter wheat, which holds the soil in place during the colder months. So without winter wheat in the ground (or a cover crop like buckwheat or clover, which are still rare) there is going to be more erosion, and more nutrient runoff.

Schechinger says that marginal land, or land prone to drought or flooding, is more likely to be brought into production because of subsidized crop insurance. Although they might be riskier acres (read: more likely to fail) with drastically different yields from one year to the next, farmers don’t pay the full premiums that account for that risk, so it’s still worth it to them to plant and take a chance. This has environmental consequences: Because the land is prone to drought or flooding, it’s also prone to soil erosion and nutrient runoff, which degrade local water quality and can have serious consequences downstream, causing toxic algal blooms in all types of water bodies and hypoxic dead zones in the ocean.

“There was a period where you could, as long as you planted corn, you were guaranteed a profit,” says Loran Steinlage, who farms 750 acres in Iowa. Although it used to be almost all corn, Steinlage now grows corn, soybeans, buckwheat, rye, barley, and sunflowers, “a little bit of everything.”

Steinlage says as soon as people figured out that planting corn virtually guaranteed a profit, they started buying more land, raising rents and forcing out smaller operators.

Sandra Kay Miller has also seen problems in Pennsylvania, where she raises meat goats, lambs, and poultry on a 75-acre farm.

“I have watched, for the last 20 years, so many abuses of the crop insurance program,” Miller says. “I’m so frustrated that this is what agriculture has come to.”

Miller says she has seen wetlands that have never been farmed before plowed up and planted. And year after year, the acres flood, and year after year, the crop insurance adjuster shows up.

***

In theory, producers should not be allowed to farm converted wetlands at all, or even highly erodible land, without a conservation system in place. But Seth Watkins says that enforcement of those rules is nearly nonexistent. (It is left up to states to monitor and hold farmers accountable, and they have limited resources to do so.) Watkins is a fourth-generation farmer from southwest Iowa. He runs a diversified operation on 3,000 acres, grazes around 600 cows, and grows a mix of alfalfa, hay, oats, and corn for silage.

“What breaks my heart is that, without some significant policy change, someone would buy it all up and turn it all into crops,” Watkins says. This possibility bothered him so much that he recently put his land into a conservation trust to ensure that will never happen.

Watkins doesn’t actually want to get rid of crop insurance, or at least, he doesn’t want to deprive farmers of a safety net.

“Our food system is pretty complex,” Watkins says. “I think the idea of revenue protection is great, as long as it’s supporting appropriate land use. What bothers me with federal crop insurance is it’s created an incentive to farm land that shouldn’t be farmed.”

The problems with crop insurance have united a number of unlikely allies. On one side, you have environmental groups advocating for significant reforms to the federal program. This includes EWG and the Union of Concerned Scientists. On the other, you have conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute arguing for outright elimination (or, barring that possibility, significant reforms).

In a hefty 2016 report, the Heritage Foundation called the crop insurance program a “complete failure” and argued that it should have been eliminated decades ago.

“Federal coddling of the agriculture industry is deep and comprehensive,” Chris Edwards, director of tax policy studies at Cato, wrote in 2018. “Farm subsidies are costly to taxpayers, but they also harm the economy and the environment.”

Some of the problems that these conservative think tanks identify are issues that might just as likely be championed by progressive organizations. For example: Farm subsidies, including crop insurance, further concentrate wealth among the already-wealthy. Edwards notes that, in 2016, the average income of farm households was 42 percent higher than the average American household. And the benefits may not actually be going to the growers; the authors of the Heritage report wryly observe that “reviews of agricultural programs have repeatedly found tens of millions of dollars in agricultural subsidies annually going to residents of such agriculture powerhouses as New York City and Washington, D.C.”

Then there’s the fact that the majority of crop insurance benefits go to producers of cash crops, like soybeans, rather than fruit and vegetable growers, or the people who epitomize our very idea of “farmer.”

Eliminating crop insurance would force every grower to be more creative, and more careful. Suddenly, they would have to manage all of the risks of farming themselves. Conservative economists like Edwards argue that farmers are more than up to it. Business risk is not unique to farming, and other business owners and operators figure out ways to manage it, he says. They save during good years, and borrow during bad. 

If the government-subsidized program disappeared, private insurance companies would create a range of crop insurance products that farmers could choose from. Edwards adds that farmers could diversify their planting to protect themselves from volatile markets or fluctuating yields, something many of the farmers I spoke with for this story have already done. More farmers might pursue secondary or part-time work to supplement their farming income (again many, like Dudek, already do).

Dudek says that some larger operations would be forced to downsize, which could make those acres available to a greater number of farmers. The Heritage Foundation also says that crop insurance artificially inflates the value of land, which can make it harder than it already is for new, beginner farmers to enter the profession.

***

It’s not just farmers who would be impacted, of course. Subsidies like crop insurance have artificially depressed prices for corn, soybeans, and other grains that concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) rely on to produce inexpensive meat at scale. The Union of Concerned Scientists reports that CAFOs have at times indirectly benefited from grain subsidies to the tune of $4 billion a year. Without crop insurance, fewer producers would grow those crops. That means prices would go up, putting financial pressure on existing CAFOs. 

Some of the acres unsuitable for crops might be turned into rangeland for cattle. Farmers could grow low-cost grasses and other silage for grazing, and with feed costs rising for CAFOs, would be in a newly competitive position.

Decentralizing the livestock industry could have enormous environmental benefits. Well-managed pastures that always have something growing in them retain soil, water, and nutrients, preventing the run-off that degrades water quality. Rotational grazing can also reduce the greenhouse gas emissions associated with raising animals for food, and can help sequester carbon in the soil, just like growing cover crops and practicing no-till.

Crop insurance has not always been as it is now. The current system replaced a disaster relief program that had become too expensive. And yet, the crop insurance program has been far more costly to taxpayers; the Heritage Foundation calculates that it has been six times more expensive.

Getting rid of crop insurance would not necessarily mean getting rid of the farming safety net entirely. Reverting back to an ad-hoc disaster relief program that distributes funds after truly catastrophic natural disasters could protect farmers from unforeseeable circumstances while also removing the incentives that encourage them to plant on risky, environmentally-fragile acres.

All that said, there are powerful, vested interests in keeping crop insurance around. Crop insurance providers, for one. (They’re represented by the trade group that says crop insurance is essential for farmers.) The government subsidizes the cost of administering crop insurance for private insurance companies, and guarantees a much higher rate of return than they could expect in an open market. The result is that, between 2005 and 2009, private insurance companies received $1.44 in government subsidies for every dollar that went to farmers. And the industry doesn’t hesitate to lobby and spend lavishly so that politicians know that crop insurance is essential.

For at least that reason, crop insurance probably isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. But plenty of people agree that the current system is unsustainable, both financially, and environmentally. And there is an alternative.

“Let’s look 10 or 20 years down the road and say, can you imagine what our communities would be like if we really embraced ecologically sound, carbon-smart farming practices?” says Watkins. “I mean, from our water cleaning up to wild species coming back … it would rejuvenate rural Iowa.”

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]]> https://thecounter.org/plant-based-nut-milks-american-academy-pediatrics-aap/ Thu, 12 Sep 2019 19:37:09 +0000 http://thecounterorg.wpengine.com/?p=19258 The milk wars are steaming up. The latest casualty⁠—or perhaps pawn⁠—is the children. The dairy industry has been lobbying to crack down on plant-based “imitation milks” since at least 2000. This year, they won the support of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the influential professional organization representing more than 66,000 pediatricians. Responding to a […]

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]]> The milk wars are steaming up. The latest casualty⁠—or perhaps pawn⁠—is the children.

The dairy industry has been lobbying to crack down on plant-based “imitation milks” since at least 2000. This year, they won the support of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the influential professional organization representing more than 66,000 pediatricians.

Responding to a request for comments by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on using dairy food names for plant-based products, AAP President Kyle Yasuda wrote in January, “the AAP recommends that FDA reserve the label of ‘milk’ solely for traditional dairy products to ensure that children receive the optimal nutrition they need to thrive.”

The AAP’s recommendation hinges on anecdotal reports that “the term ‘milk’ in the labeling of dairy-free alternatives has caused parental confusion, leading to the purchase of products that they assume contain traditional dairy ingredients and, thereby, unintentionally causing harmful nutritional deficiencies in their children.”

There is no citation for this assertion: The letter does not specify how many pediatricians have made such reports nor how many children have been affected. It does not describe the severity of these deficiencies, or their consequences.

The AAP does, however, cite two consumer surveys: One by the Midwest Dairy Association, and one by the National Dairy Council. These industry-funded studies found that consumers do not understand the nutritional differences between dairy and plant-based milks, and that many believe alternative milks to be nutritionally equal or superior to cow milk. Thus far, the dairy industry has failed to convince the courts that consumers have been mistakenly buying plant-based milks thinking they were dairy products; arguing that consumers think plant-based milks are nutritionally equivalent is a variation on a theme.

Dr. George Fuchs, a pediatric gastroenterologist and member of the AAP nutrition committee, told New Food Economy that as a practitioner he can attest that the public sees plant-based milks as a nutritionally equivalent dairy substitute, although he has not seen any of the “harmful nutritional deficiencies” described in Yasuda’s letter. Fuchs was not involved in drafting the letter to the FDA (and AAP was unable to connect me with anyone who was before publication) but says the recommendation is in line with AAP’s position on dairy consumption.

But Fuchs says he is not familiar with the studies cited.

“I am aware of the policy and the rationale for the policy as written I think is sound,” he says. “But if there’s a question about the data on which the policy is written, then I really can’t speak to that.”

I asked Fuchs if he thought that the dairy industry could produce fair and trustworthy studies on this topic.

“There’s a conflict of interest there,” Fuchs says. “That doesn’t mean that the study they sponsored is not accurate, but there’s conflict of interest that should be removed from the equation.”

Fuchs clarified by email that conflict of interest can be removed by inserting a firewall “between the study sponsor and implementation and interpretation of the study results.”

Outside of AAP, individual pediatricians are less strident in their recommendations.

“I don’t think that pediatricians generally have an issue with plant milks being called milk,” Dr. Michelle Dern, a pediatrician at Scripps Coastal Medical Center in Encinitas, California, wrote in an email to New Food Economy.

Deborah Tagliareni, the Clinical Nutrition Manager at the Hassenfeld Children’s Hospital at NYU Langone, says she is not aware of plant-based milks causing problems for parents or children.

Tagliareni says that giving plant-based milk like soy or almond to a child would only be problematic if they weren’t getting key nutrients from another source. Milk is nutritionally dense, containing calcium, magnesium, phosphorus, potassium, protein, vitamin B12 and zinc, but Tagliareni confirmed that children can have a perfectly healthy vegan diet “as long as the parent is aware of which foods contain which nutrients and how to meet vitamin and mineral requirements.”

Even the AAP website healthychildren.org makes it clear that children do not need milk.

“While milk can be nutritious, it isn’t absolutely necessary for a healthy diet,” Dr. Claire McCarthy writes, addressing her comments to a parent whose child won’t drink milk. “Other dairy products, such as cheese and yogurt, can provide the same nutrients, as can “alterna-milks” such as soy milk or almond milk, although you should talk to [a] pediatrician before you switch to one of those.”

Tagliareni does not think it’s necessary to rename soy, almond, and other plant-based milks, but that education is important.

“It’s important that consumers are educated on what they’re choosing and how it diverges from what they’re replacing,” she says. “Many different nutrients—and proteins and carbs and fats and vitamins and minerals—can be met in other ways.”

AAP appears to be the only professional association of pediatricians to have taken a side on the issue: The American Pediatric Society did not respond to an email query, and a public relations strategist at the American Academy of Family Physicians said the organization does not have a specific policy on this topic. AAP was the only professional organization whose support was celebrated in a press release by the National Milk Producers Federation. (After this story published, a representative from NMPF pointed out that the North American Society for Pediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition, also has expressed concern about the health effects of plant-based milk on children, as well as suggesting the possibility of confusion with traditional dairy products.)

This is not the first time that AAP has made statements or endorsements sought by the dairy industry. In 2011, former Washington Post reporter Ed Bruske wrote a series of articles about the hotly contested issue of chocolate milk in school cafeterias, which the dairy industry boasted was supported by leading health organizations like the American Heart Association and AAP. At the time, Bruske reported that one of the authors of an AAP statement on the nutritional benefits of dairy, including sugar-laden flavored milk, was also an advisor to the National Dairy Council.

Bruske also reported that the AAP receives funding from the dairy industry. In the fiscal year 2012-2013, for example, the National Dairy Council gave between $100,000 and $249,999, and the Milk Processor Education Program (MilkPEP) gave between $25,000 and $49,999, according to an AAP Honor Roll of Giving. The dairy industry sponsors other influential organizations, too, including the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, and lobbied heavily to increase the federal recommendation for daily dairy intake from two to three servings a day.

Not unlike studies funded by the soda industry, one of the dairy industry’s tactics is to fund research that can be used to bolster their arguments, whether for keeping chocolate milk in schools or banning “imitation milks” from the dairy aisle.

“Biased though it may be, industry-funded research, with its gloss of scientific authority, makes its way into widely circulated professional journals such as the Journal of the American Dietetic Association and the Journal of Adolescent Health,” Bruske wrote in 2011. “It then migrates into findings of medical groups like the American Heart Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics… The result is a kind of public relations echo chamber in which dairy industry messages based on “research” it pays for are parroted by proxies in the health and education communities who also have financial ties to dairy.”

Considering how long the industry has been trying to force plant-based milks to be called “juices” or “beverages,” this claim that plant-based milks are hurting children seems merely like a new angle of attack in an old war.

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