For example, in 2018 the state’s department of food and agriculture gave a $1.9 million grant to a company called Calgren Dairy Fuels to capture methane at Vander Poel Dairy, a farm in Tulare County with a cattle population of approximately 11,000. The company used the funds to pay for the installation of a methane digester, a towering silo that traps emissions from manure before they can wreak havoc on the atmosphere. The agriculture department estimates that the project will prevent the release of 290,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent over a decade. It’s equivalent to removing 6,250 cars from the road in the same time period.

The California Air Resources Board, the state’s lead agency in charge of overseeing air pollution and climate initiatives, logs these avoided emissions toward the state’s progress on its 2030 methane targets for the livestock sector, which are mandated by state law. But this isn’t the only instance where the agency is counting the methane reductions at Vander Poel Dairy toward California’s climate goals: The agency is also attributing the emissions savings to a separate program called the Low Carbon Fuel Standard, or LCFS.

First implemented in 2011, the LCFS program has one overarching goal, which is to reduce the average carbon footprint for transportation fuel in California. Each year, the air resources board sets a so-called “carbon intensity” target for fuel, which gets progressively lower with each passing year. Gasoline and diesel producers regularly exceed this target, because they are considered to have a high carbon intensity — in other words, they emit a relatively high volume of greenhouse gasses per unit of energy produced.

On the other hand, renewable fuel producers can fall below the target; when they do, they’re allowed to generate and sell lucrative LCFS credits, each representing a metric ton of carbon dioxide saved relative to the year’s carbon intensity target. The idea is that credits and deficits will balance each other out, year after year, resulting in a gradual decline over time. This is where dairy farms come into play: After methane is captured from manure, an energy company can convert it into natural gas and sell it for use as a transportation fuel.

When natural gas is extracted from fossil sources, such as through fracking, the air resources board considers the fuel to have a relatively high carbon intensity. However, the agency actually considers natural gas produced by dairy digesters to have a negative score. That’s because the air resources board calculates carbon intensities for fuels based on what it calls a “well to wheel” analysis, adding up emissions associated with both the combustion of the fuel in a vehicle and those used to generate the fuel in the first place.

Because natural gas production at dairy farms is an alternative to manure methane being released directly into the atmosphere, the fuel’s carbon intensity score is credited with a large negative number that reflects the tons of methane would otherwise get released from manure. In other words, for the purposes of LCFS, the air resources board considers natural gas produced by dairy digesters to be a fuel that has essentially pulled emissions out of the atmosphere, rather than one that’s contributing to new emissions.

“California is treating factory farm gas systems at dairy farms like they are devices that suck carbon from the air,” said Brent Newell, a lawyer who worked as a senior attorney for the Food Project at Public Justice, a nonprofit legal advocacy organization, until March of this year. Newell represented state residents who had petitioned the air resources board to reconsider the way it calculates carbon intensities for dairy digester fuels.

Even if one endorses the LCFS program’s negative scoring for certain fuels, it still appears that the air resources board is counting the avoided emissions at Vander Poel Dairy twice: once toward progress in reducing emissions in California’s dairy sector, and again toward shrinking the average carbon footprint of the state’s transportation fuels, potentially overinflating California’s purported climate progress in the process.

“That is a classic case of double counting,” said Danny Cullenward, a lawyer and policy director at the nonprofit Carbon Plan, an organization that evaluates climate programs. “The same ton [is] counted in two places.”

After reviewing publicly available data on dairy and livestock sector climate subsidies, Grist and The Counter have identified at least 10 instances where the state is double-counting climate benefits across both the livestock and transportation fuel sectors. The air resources board estimates that these farms will collectively reduce agricultural emissions by 1.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent over a decade. Separately, the air resources board is also counting captured methane at the same 10 farms toward its target of reducing the carbon intensity of transportation fuels by 20 percent by 2030.

The agency does not disclose exactly how many LCFS credits any individual dairy farm generates, citing business confidentiality. However, according to aggregate program data, manure-based fuels generated a total of over 2.1 million credits in 2021. This represents about 10 percent of total credits generated last year, despite the fact that manure-based fuels represented a much smaller fraction of the total renewable fuel volume. As a result, the continued success of the LCFS program depends at least in part on considering dairy digester fuel to be carbon negative.

For some, this arrangement raises questions about the legitimacy of credits generated under LCFS. According to the air resources board, each credit is supposed to represent a metric ton of carbon dioxide equivalent that would have been emitted into the atmosphere, if not for the program. In cases where dairy farms have already received grants or subsidies in exchange for their commitment to capturing methane, well before LCFS was part of the equation, critics argue that those farms should be ineligible to participate in the program. 

In an email response to questions from Grist and The Counter, the air resources board disputed the term “double counting” but did not dispute that it was counting the same emissions reductions multiple times across different climate programs.

“California’s numerous greenhouse gas emissions reduction programs often incentivize emissions reductions in the same sector,” an agency spokesperson wrote. “The same general concept applies to the interplay between the Low Carbon Fuel Standard regulations and other programs — by encouraging the capture of methane emissions at dairies and directing that methane in the transportation sector, the program supports dairy sector methane emissions reductions and rewards the displacement of fossil fuels in the transportation sector, thereby reducing [greenhouse gas] emissions associated with transportation fuel use.”

Nevertheless, nothing about LCFS requires natural gas from dairy farms to replace natural gas from fossil sources; it simply gets added to the state’s overall fuel mix. It’s also far from self-evident that LCFS is reducing greenhouse gas emissions associated with transportation fuel. By design, the program is focused narrowly on lowering the average carbon intensity across all fuels. Under this arrangement, it’s feasible for average carbon intensity to go down over time, even as total emissions rise.

The double counting arising from the LCFS program’s design is not limited to methane reductions in the dairy sector. In a petition filed to the air resources board last fall, a coalition of environmental groups and California residents represented by Public Justice flagged eight instances where the state was attributing the same methane reductions to both LCFS and a third climate initiative called the Aliso Canyon Mitigation Agreement.

The Aliso agreement is a program administered by the air resources board to offset a massive natural gas leak that took place in Southern California in 2015, one of the largest such leaks in U.S. history. The disaster unfolded at a facility belonging to the utility SoCalGas, and it resulted in the release of 109,000 metric tons of methane into the atmosphere over 100 days. The leak sickened nearby residents and forced thousands of families to flee their homes.

Under the terms of the Aliso agreement, the air resources board has distributed a total of over $25 million in loans to California dairy farms to fund the construction of digesters to capture methane from manure. The agreement’s goal is to ultimately capture 109,000 metric tons of methane across participating farms, offsetting the climate effects of the 2015 disaster.

Two players heavily involved in the Aliso agreement are the energy companies Chevron and California Bioenergy, whose shared investments in eight dairy digester projects across the San Joaquin Valley are estimated by the air resources board to capture 1.9 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent over a decade. However, while these emissions cuts are intended to offset the Aliso methane leak, the same eight projects are simultaneously participating in the LCFS program. That means that the state is counting their methane emissions reductions a second time toward its progress reducing the carbon footprint of transportation fuels.

The petitioners point out that allowing dairy farms to simultaneously participate in the Aliso agreement and the LCFS program leads to one “perverse result”: The arrangement actually enables greater emissions than a scenario where LCFS is out of the picture. That’s because when a dairy digester generates and sells an LCFS credit to a fossil fuel producer, that credit is the necessary license for the buyer to emit more greenhouse gases than it would otherwise be allowed. In other words, when a dairy farm participates in both programs, it’s first reducing methane emissions under Aliso, then generating credits that permit higher emissions under LCFS, effectively undercutting Aliso’s claims to offset the natural gas leak on a one-to-one basis.

“The Aliso Canyon Mitigation Agreement that [the air resources board] negotiated with [SoCalGas] legally requires SoCalGas to pay for methane reductions at factory farm dairies in California,” the petition reads. “Under no circumstances should mitigation for the Aliso Canyon disaster simultaneously qualify for credits generated and used in the LCFS.”

By design, the LCFS program is supposed to incentivize the production of low-carbon fuels at the expense of high-carbon fuel producers. However, if a dairy farm is already capturing its methane emissions, thanks to a loan from Aliso agreement or dedicated grant from the agriculture department, then the LCFS program isn’t incentivizing anything at all, according to Newell, the attorney who worked at Public Justice.

“There is no causal link between the LCFS and those reductions happening,” he told Grist and The Counter.

The petitioners insist that the LCFS program is supposed to produce what’s known in climate programs as “additionality”: emissions reductions that are attributable to the program and the program alone. If it’s not doing this, argue the petitioners, then the LCFS program isn’t actually doing anything to advance progress on climate. It’s simply taking credit for reductions achieved through other initiatives, like the agriculture department’s grants or the Alison Canyon agreement.

By allowing dairy farms to participate in multiple climate programs, California climate regulators risk over-incentivizing methane capture. This occurs when digester subsidies become so lucrative that the production of manure and the methane it releases becomes a revenue stream in and of itself — meaning there is an incentive to produce more manure and its associated methane, rather than less. Dairy digester developers themselves have suggested that this may already be happening. In an investor meeting last fall, Chevron executives projected that the company’s investments in digesters are expected to yield “double-digit returns” in the coming years, thanks to the negative carbon intensities associated with natural gas production from dairy methane.

Under these projections, private entities stand to reap generous payouts from digesters funded in large part by public climate dollars. In industry parlance, collecting multiple streams of revenue to support a single digester is known as “stacking.” Michael Boccadoro, executive director of DairyCares, a coalition of dairy farms and trade groups that has lobbied in favor of methane capture subsidies for the livestock sector, defended stacking across programs like LCFS, Aliso, and livestock sector grants. Without multiple sources of revenue, he argues, digester technology would be financially impractical for farms.

“It takes the stacking of incentives to make the projects work,” Boccadoro said.

An additionality test could make it much harder for dairy farms to receive subsidies from multiple climate programs simultaneously. When asked whether the air resources board should implement an additionality test for the LCFS program, the agency defended its current administration of the program, noting that such a standard isn’t required under state law.

But environmental advocates, including last fall’s petitioners, say that such a standard would strengthen the state’s climate programs, in part by ensuring that emissions reductions aren’t double counted across multiple initiatives.

“We need to have actual reductions, not paper reductions,” said Tyler Lobdell, staff attorney at Food and Water Watch, one of the petitioning organizations.

It remains to be seen whether the California Air Resources Board will consider changes to the LCFS program in response to recent concerns about additionality and double counting. In January, the agency denied the petition, arguing that it couldn’t consider any updates to the LCFS program due to potential conflicts with other, ongoing efforts to update the state’s overall climate strategy.

In the meantime, dozens more dairy digesters supported by public funding are currently under construction. In a March report, the agency estimated that another 96 digesters will be completed by the end of this year — projects expected to also participate in the LCFS program once they begin capturing methane and producing natural gas.

The post Is California giving its methane digesters too much credit? appeared first on The Counter.

Japan has been legislating around agrivoltaics—simply, solar panels that allow for some kind of ag-related use around and under them—since at least 2013, when it required what it calls “solar sharing,” in which solar projects set up on farmland must allow for various crop or livestock production. The country is also looking to use agrivoltaics as a potential way to get abandoned farmland back in production.

Here in the U.S., Hunter said that farm-based solar “is a space with a ton of possibility;” it can protect plants from too much sun and heat, it can lower water usage, it can increase yields. “But it’s just very early” in its development, with the biggest challenge to implementing it at scale being cost. Solar panels might sit too low to allow a farmer like Cobb’s tall native plants to grow, or to let his cattle meander beneath them, or to let agricultural machinery through, which is where the expense comes in. “Just getting those [agrivoltaic panels] off the ground takes more steel for the posts they sit on,” Hunter said, and more steel equals more money. 

More basic agrivoltaics are being used across the U.S. in conjunction with sheep, which are lower-slung than cattle and therefore better able to graze in tandem with solar panels. But we still need what Hunter called “cutting-edge” systems that have moving panels to allow light to reach plants underneath, or that optimally manage rainfall so that it reaches the soil in the right spots—let alone accommodate cows. “We’re just still at a place where we have to identify economically efficient scalable models,” he said.

It is being studied, though. At the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colorado, lead energy-water-land analyst Jordan Macknick is looking into what he called “opportunities for solar development that can benefit and provide value to agricultural land and soils.” NREL’s InSPIRE project, funded by the Department of Energy, is looking at the potential of agrivoltaics on crop, grazing, pollinator habitat, and greenhouse systems in 25 locations around the country—researching both the solar specifics each system requires and also how the panels affect things like soil moisture and erosion. 

Still, Macknick agrees with Hunter that cost is a major barrier to getting such projects implemented, although some workarounds exist. Rather than raising solar panels to allow for the passage of livestock and equipment, “You can also just increase the distance between the rows of panels,” he said. “We’re really thinking about how do we design these systems with the farmers from the beginning, to make sure that there are sufficient walkways… and that you [think] about where will the irrigation infrastructure be… and that fences are not too close to the panels so you can’t turn a tractor around—small things that in the end can make a big difference on whether a farmer will say yes, I really want to do this, or no, this this will not be worth my time.”

It’s also important for the solar industry to think hard about how it can accommodate agrivoltaics. For some companies, agrivoltaics align with their overall mission to reduce carbon emissions and improve environmental conditions. For others, the fact that operating and maintenance costs can be lower when grazing sheep “mow” the plants growing around panels is a plus, since this translates into a financial incentive for the solar operator. Nevertheless, Macknick believes industrial row crops, which reside on a large portion of ag land that’s suited to solar, are, and will continue to be, a weak link when it comes to agrivoltaics—solar panels and giant combines make for poor companions. But smaller, regenerative farms are well suited to solar. To that end, “We try to incorporate practices and provide research that contributes to how can agrivoltaics can be a part of this broader regenerative agriculture movement,” Macknick said.

How to keep farmers farming the land until some sort of fortuitous balance between ag and solar can be worked out is a looming question. Once again, it mostly comes down to finance. “A big obstacle for doing more regenerative farming is most people can’t afford to spend $30,000 on a seeder they only need once or twice a year,” said Hicks. She sees sharing equipment, as well as finding knowledgeable mentors who can help save time and resources, as ways to make farming more affordable. Likewise, agricultural conservation easements from Marin Agricultural Land Trust (MALT) and AFT, which buy development rights from landowners (or in the case of AFT, provide the landowners with tax incentives to give up the right to develop) and extinguish them, to ensure that land is farmed in perpetuity; this gives farmers money to add value-added products to their operations, for example. With her MALT easement, Hicks built a creamery and expanded her barn.

Back in Texas, Cobb wasn’t sure how long he’d be able to continue working the land. Adding to his stress, his parents had been thinking about leasing out a portion of the family farmland. “They don’t want to do it but they’re on a fixed income,” said Cobb. “If they put 80 acres in solar, they can make $50,000 a year. But that would take 80 of my grazing acres away.” That loss would be bigger than it might appear on paper.

“A farmer who retires from farming, that’s a lot of knowledge that that one person holds that’s no longer available to agriculture, not to mention the [loss of] land,” said Hunter. “Theoretically, solar panels can be removed and you could farm [the land] again. But the knowledge, the community, the infrastructure if half of your neighbors sell out and now there’s nowhere to bring your product, well, that’s a big concern. We need to start talking very seriously about balancing the tradeoffs.”

The post More regenerative farming may be a climate solution. But another climate solution is impeding its progress appeared first on The Counter.

Now, as Audubon works to recuperate these ravaged ecosystems, cattle ranchers will play an unlikely but significant role in the solution.

Creating a supply chain of “bird-friendly beef,” backed by in-house scientific research, could rewrite the conservation playbook, while giving consumers a more concrete, easy-to-understand metric to fixate on, and putting some more money in ranchers’ pockets.

In this vision, birds are both end-goal and proof of concept: Their abundance makes the health of an entire system beautifully visible. Save the birds, the story goes, and you will have already improved the larger whole. 

It’s the flip side of the canary in the coalmine: call it the bobolink in the barnyard. 

In a TEDx talk from 2019, Marshall Johnson, who is today Audubon’s chief conservation officer, appears on a dark stage in a pale button-down shirt with rolled-up sleeves, black jeans, and a white cowboy hat.

“Birds are the prism through which Audubon views our work,” he tells the audience, in the soothing baritone of a nature film narrator, “and the grassland birds are the most imperiled in the entire world.” 

In 10 minutes flat, he connects the dots between birds and beef to explain the rationale behind Audubon’s unlikely bird-friendly certification program. Called the Conservation Ranching Initiative, the program is its master plan to save these birds, which have declined in number by 53 percent in the past 50 years—a greater loss of birds than in any other biome.

The major reason for the precipitous bird declines is extreme habitat loss: “Less than half of the historic U.S. grasslands remain,” Johnson says.

Grasslands are the most massive natural ecosystem in the U.S.—and the most threatened. “Largely forgotten and misunderstood,” is how Audubon’s North American Grasslands and Birds Report describes them.

So, Audubon’s top priority is to preserve the surviving 370 million acres.

The tallgrass prairies stretch westward from Illinois, turning to mixed grass near the Rocky Mountains while the shortgrass prairie extends southward into Texas, reaching north into Canada and southward into Mexico. In the Great Basin, Intermountain West, Southwest, and California there are islands of arid scrubland and sage grass. Historically, savannas and prairies mixed with woodlands in the moist climates of the eastern states.

These spare, achromatic landscapes are easy to overlook, at least for relative newcomers to this continent. The Great Plains, once called the Great American Desert, has a long history of erasure—first the Native people and then the land, from the 1862 Homestead Acts through the Dust Bowl to the age of industrialized farming.

This explains, in part, why the land is vulnerable to development for cities and housing developments, roads and electrification, wind towers and solar panels, oil and gas mines, and row crop agriculture. For many, the grasslands just look like a good place to plow.

But left intact, these native lands are dynamic, high-functioning ecological systems. Invaluable and irreplaceable. “When we lose grasslands, we lose so much more,” Johnson tells the audience. 

The best way to appreciate this particular ecosystem is to plant two feet spread wide over a patch of prairie, hitch forward at the hips, and look straight down. A bird’s eye view. An array of native grasses in heathery greens and amber come into focus, sprinkled with pink, yellow, and white wildflowers in May and June. This beauty is short-lived. By summer, the colors bleed away and the grasses go dormant.

“Senesce” is the word rangeland ecologists use, a term that sounds like wind fluttering through the dried perennial grasses. For most of the year, the plants look brittle, practically dead. 

But underground, their roots plummet 10 feet or more with a total biomass up to six times the plant matter apparent on the soil’s surface. Invisible to the naked eye are the complex natural processes at work, circulating, purifying, and directing fresh water, like a giant built-in cooling system. Pink nitrogen-fixing nodules cling to the roots, microbial life forms that absorb and store carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. According to a report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, grasslands could be more reliable carbon sinks even than forests in a warming climate. 

“The preservation of the grasslands are essential to the future of humanity,” Johnson announces from the stage. With stakes this high, Audubon has determined that the best way to save them is to collaborate with the people who control most of the remaining grasslands in the U.S.—cattle ranchers—a group not typically considered conservation allies. 

Audubon’s strategy is to recruit these landowners to adopt habitat management plans designed to improve the soil, water, and plant conditions for the sake of grassland birds. On every enrolled ranch, science teams conduct comprehensive bird surveys using the Bird Friendliness Index, a monitoring tool developed by Audubon’s scientists to measure the overall abundance, diversity, and resilience of a bird community.

In exchange for going through the ropes, ranchers with lands certified by Audubon receive the organization’s “raised on bird-friendly land” seal to leverage sales of their beef for environmentally conscious consumers. 

In 2017, the year it launched, the conservation ranching program certified 32 cattle operations in the Great Plains. By 2019, the year of Johnson’s TEDx Talk, it had more than doubled to 65 ranchlands in eight states. By enlisting two million acres of ranchlands, the bird-friendly campaign extended Audubon’s reach well beyond its own center and sanctuaries.

In 2021, in an unprecedented move, brokered by Johnson, the organization publicized its first band partnership with Panorama Organic meat company, slated to bring an additional one million acres into the fold. 

 How could this 116-year-old organization wholeheartedly embrace cows as a solution to an environmental crisis? And why would it adopt the motto, “No cows, no grass, no birds”? 

The reasons for this pivot are rooted in the peculiar ecology of grasslands and how Audubon’s youngest state director in a North Dakota outpost (staffed by an office of one) championed a renegade idea within the organization. His mission to grow bird-friendly beef to save grassland birds has become Audubon’s signature conservation campaign.

“I probably shouldn’t wear my cowboy hat as much as I do,” Johnson chuckled, when I mentioned that he dresses like a rancher during our first meeting over Zoom last April. He explained that his uncles in Texas all wore them (although only one was a cattleman)—as did his boyhood hero, Bass Reeves, the first Black U.S. Marshall and former slave rumored to be the model for the Lone Ranger. “I remember picking up a book when I was 7 years old, and I had all of these questions because here was a Black face and a cowboy,” Johnson said. 

Raised in Dallas and Los Angeles, Johnson comes from a family of trailblazers. His father was one of the first Black flight crew chiefs with the Air Force SR-71 “Blackbird,” the world’s fastest plane, and his mother was a disc jockey in the early sixties. 

I suspect that the hat and his mile-wide smile smoothed introductions when Johnson took a part-time job in Fargo with Audubon. Fresh out of the University of Minnesota with a business management degree, he worked part-time as a field organizer for renewable energy reforms. Johnson expected the gig to last six months, tops.

At 24, he became state director of Audubon Dakota, one of the organization’s main hubs. Within a few years, Johnson was spearheading collaborative conservation projects in the Northern Great Plains, leveraging partnerships with landowners, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and other agencies. At the same time, he effectively fundraised for the state office, where he was both vice president and all the staff, raising $50 million for grassland preservation in the Dakotas. 

Over the past 13 years, Johnson has evolved from outlier to the leader for Audubon’s most paradigm-bending restoration project, soaring into national leadership as one of the architects and vice president of the Conservation Ranching Initiative. By the time we spoke again in late summer, he had been appointed Audubon’s chief conservation officer at 34 years old.

Surprisingly, he is not a bird watcher, preferring to hunt upland birds. “I love birds,” Johnson told me. “But I love nature more.” He reminds me of Aldo Leopold—the ecologist and one-time Audubon director—who wrote in A Sand County Almanac of the people who can live without wild things and those who cannot.

Traditionally, Audubon took a preservation approach to grassland conservation, concentrating resources on its own preserves. In 2012, Johnson was managing two of them in the prairie potholes region, a critical breeding area for waterfowl and 300 other species. “I was a sponge for knowledge,” he told me. Whenever he cold-called on neighboring ranches, he noticed vibrant humming—bees, butterflies, and birdsong in the wake of the cattle.

“As someone not trained in biology, it was an anecdotal snapshot,” he told me. But he was struck by how the buzz of biodiversity on those ranchlands indicated something about the management that was absent on the Audubon sanctuaries. Cows, grass, and birds were somehow functioning together in those landscapes. “They were part of a working system,” Johnson said. And that system depends on ruminants to thrive.

One of the most unique and lesser-known features of the grasslands is that they evolved with grazing, along with other natural disturbances of fire (both natural and set intentionally by Native Americans) and drought. Prairie plants need disturbance as much as they need the sun to photosynthesize. It is part of their natural life cycle. And the complement of vegetative, insect, and wildlife communities in the grasslands also all depend on it.

Historically, wild grazers include bison, elk, deer, pronghorn antelope, prairie dogs, and grasshoppers, depending on geographic location. Bison are increasingly being re-introduced to take back their place in the food web across the Great Plains (especially on Native lands where they fulfill essential ecological and cultural roles).

Domesticated livestock still dominate most open lands where their presence is often more destructive than anything else. For example, in pcontinuous grazing—where cattle roam freely within an entire property—cows use their binocular vision to select the tastiest plants, which get consumed, and their least favorites proliferate. Eventually, the grasslands lose the diversity and structures that support all wildlife. 

But many argue that it doesn’t have to be that way. The working principle of regenerative grazing is to control the timing and intensity of livestock grazing patterns to sync with a grassland’s natural functioning. (While lightweight, movable fencing prevents cattle from congregating in waterways or trampling sensitive areas.) Ideally, the animal activity cultivates a natural mosaic of plants to support birds’ needs for food, nesting, and shelter.

Cattle, and increasingly goats and sheep, are playing a crucial role in grassland restoration projects across the U.S. The World Wildlife Fund, The Nature Conservancy, Ducks Unlimited, and Bird Conservancy of the Rockies employ livestock as tools for conservation. Along with state and federal agencies, tribes, and universities, these environmental organizations are partnering on working rangelands to enhance sustainability and address climate change as part of game-changing grasslands conservation strategy.

As the young upstart from the Fargo outpost, Johnson, along with a handful of other state directors, made the case that the traditional preservation approach—nature left untouched and protected—was “a crash course in what not to do.”

Beginning in 2012, Johnson was among a group of rebels within Audubon who introduced these practices on their preserves. In place of the one-size-fits-all conservation approach, it applied a patchwork method using livestock to enhance the habitat for grassland birds.

The out-of-the-box approach took the Audubon leadership by surprise. “The folks in headquarters said, ‘What’s going on out there? Are you trying to fence in North Dakota?’” Johnson said.

But on these sanctuaries, dramatic changes unfolded, from the streams and plants to pollinators and birdlife. When well-managed cattle are present, Johnson said, the land “comes to life.”

These initial, postage stamp-sized demonstration projects bolstered evidence that grasslands need grazing in order to support healthier populations of the 42 bird species that depend on the grasslands to nest, breed, feed, and overwinter. It kicked off a series of strategic planning sessions at the national level to explore how Audubon could leverage grazing to achieve better bird outcomes in places where their populations continued to nose-dive.

The conservation ranching concept got its first dry run on the Audubon Rockies preserve near the Colorado front range. And it also turned out to be the organization’s first foray into the beef business.

Kiowa Creek Ranch, located an hour south of Denver, is an oasis of rare mixed grassland and towering Ponderosa pine trees encircled by housing developments, big box stores, and suburban sprawl. It was donated to Audubon for protection. But left on its own, the property grew clogged with spindly doghair pines.

The woody overgrowth fueled 2013’s devastating Black Forest wildfire, and in the aftermath, Canada thistle, mullein, and other invasive plants moved in quickly, shading out the native grasses. 

In 2014, when rancher Dan Lorenz heard that 1,500 acres of grassland lay idle, he cold-called Audubon Rockies to see about a grazing lease. It was a first for Audubon. But Alison Holloran, Audubon Rockies’ director, already aligned with Johnson, faced the challenge and costs of managing the small sanctuary. So, a cooperative model made sense. “The ranch is a refuge for birds and wildlife in that area,” she said, “and I knew we could manage it better with the tool of livestock grazing.” 

Holloran was not referring to the Old West, freewheeling style of running cattle herds that has devastated landscapes, degraded waterways, and decimated wildlife populations. Instead, rangeland ecologists use managed grazing (also called rotational grazing, holistic grazing, and regenerative grazing) for habitat management. 

With the lease in hand, Lorenz and his partner Adrienne Larrew relocated their small-scale, pasture-based operation, Corner Post Meats, onto Audubon’s Kiowa Creek preserve. The mixed woodland-grassland savanna was ideal food for their cattle, pigs, sheep, and chickens. Lorenz and Larrew used temporary electric fences to control their herding behaviors across the property.

Over time, the livestock helped to transform the land. Bunched together, the animals munched the overgrowth, their hooves trampled native grass seeds into the dirt and left behind divots for water, and their droppings enlivened the worms, fungi, and bacteria. The soils, sterilized by the fire, reactivated. Then, once the animals moved off to another site, the grasses had time to regrow and recover.

All the while, Holloran’s team monitored the property to document new plant growth—shorter for the ground nesting birds and taller for shrub species, for example. Change did not happen overnight, but their bird surveys documented significant recovery.

Vesper sparrows, lark sparrows, and other ground nesting birds began returning to breed at Kiowa Creek. At the edges of Ponderosa forests, insect-eating western bluebirds and pygmy nuthatches were joined by a pair of Northern Goshawks, an elusive bird of prey. The fluting song of iconic western meadowlarks broadcast the news. 

For Audubon, this was proof of concept for conservation ranching as a solution to the bird crisis. Despite through-the-roof conservation spending, bird populations across the American prairies have dropped by more than half since the 1970s.

Although it is indisputable that livestock can cause significant negative environmental impacts, the flip side could also be true: Skillfully and intentionally managed grazing is essential to saving critical and endangered grassland bird habitats. 

Meanwhile, in return for its efforts, Corner Post earned the right to use Audubon’s seal with the phrase “raised on bird-friendly land” on its products. It was the beginning of a new paradigm, one that blurred the lines between two groups—ranchers and environmentalists—that have traditionally stood in each other’s way. It proposed that food production could work in support of, and even enhance, conservation outcomes for birds. And it pointed to a potential for tying grazing directly to the fate of birds on ranchlands throughout the U.S.

Audubon’s Bird Friendliness Index—its metric for evaluating birds’ response to habitat management has documented progress. The first 35 Audubon-certified ranches in the Northern Great Plains studied from 2016–2019 showed a significant increase over conventional ranchlands, with bird abundance on those lands improving by an average of 35 percent. “What we’re clearly seeing is that our protocols are producing more birds,” Johnson said.

Granted, cattle are not an ideal substitute for the wild ruminants that sustained a symbiotic relationship between animals and the land, regenerating nutrients over millennia. Some ecologists are skeptical that cattle alone heal the plains—and worry that their dominance may even represent another, harmful form of monoculture.

Jennifer Molidor, senior food campaigner from the Center for Biodiversity, urges caution when it comes to proposing cattle grazing as a “solution” to biodiversity loss. “Even ‘well-managed’ ranches have serious impacts on water resources, habitats, and species extinction crises,” she said. And she warns of confusing correlation with causation.

“There are a lot of caveats,” Bennett from the Smithsonian agreed. While cows can play a beneficial role in maintaining or improving ecosystem function on native prairies, they have no place in the rainforest. “In the Amazon, there may be no way to have bird-friendly beef that the bird conservation community can support.”

Johnson insists that Audubon’s focus is solely on the places where grazing is compatible with grassland habitats. And he bristles at blanket proposals that the best solution is to remove all the cows. “No one asks the next question, then what?” 

Still, Audubon is not in the business of defending all cattle or all grazing. Many environmental variables feed into the Bird Friendliness Index scores—from precipitation to invasive plants—and it is still being validated outside of the Great Plains. Also, not every ranch has experienced the same level of success, Johnson told me. The key is tracking the data over time; every ranch is evaluated every two years to see how the grassland bird community responds. In the aggregate, that model seems to be working.

“We have this baked-in view that cattle are bad for the environment,” he said. “But the data we’re collecting shows that we’re moving in the right direction, the lands have more birds than they did before we were there.”

Ultimately, it may be a moot point whether or not cattle are the best tool for the job. Of the surviving grasslands, 85 percent are privately owned, and much of that is already tied up in cattle production. Moreover, to have real impact, conservation efforts must match the scale of the grasslands themselves—and that means shifting the focus onto working lands.  

As Johnson put it: “Private landowners have to be a part of the solution.”

Bennett from the Smithsonian shares this perspective for one simple reason. “There are simply not enough protected areas on the planet to conserve the diversity that we want to conserve,” she said. “So, we have to do conservation and landscapes where people are dependent on those landscapes to live, to make money, to have sustainable communities.”

Bennett is one of the leaders of the Bird Friendly Coalition, a scientist-led initiative to establish more sustainable agricultural practices that support global biodiversity. What began as a certification program for shade-grown coffee in 2000 has now branched off into production standards forr maple syrup, rice, and now, bird-friendly beef.

And while private enterprise initiatives like these can smack of greenwashing, many conservationists see it differently. As coalition member and senior director at Center for Avian Population Studies at Cornell, Amanda Rodewald wrote to me by email, “We can turn the dial and improve practices in ways that provide meaningful benefits to birds, but we also have to be realistic and not allow perfect to become the enemy of good.”

The Conservation Ranching Initiative is a long-term agreement with private working ranches built on grazing management plans customized for each property. So, relationship building is a major part of Audubon’s investment. In fact, the first benchmark for Audubon’s partnership with Panorama was to get buy-in from all of its independent beef producers. 

Last April, Johnson walked through the golden senescent grasses on Hutchinson Organic Ranch in north-central Nebraska for the first time. He was joined by owner Dave Hutchinson and Kay Cornelius, the general manager of the grass-based cattle company Panorama Organic.

Hutchinson is one of the pioneers of Panorama, which was founded in 2002 by a group of ranchers who opted out of the commodity feedlot system. His family’s 5,000-acre ranch is on the Central Flyway, one of the country’s migration superhighways over the Great Plains, and it was a prime property for Audubon to secure in the deal.  

Hutchinson was one of the most reluctant about signing up for Audubon’s certification when Cornelius said that he would need to allow the team’s biologists onto his land for routine monitoring. “They better shut the gates,” she recalled Hutchinson saying. 

But meeting Johnson last spring eased all his apprehensions. “He’s really in tune,” Hutchinson told me. “He knows that if you don’t have good grazing practices, then you wouldn’t have all the birds.” 

As the son of a state soil conservationist, Hutchinson is a proud steward in the mold of Leopold’s “farmer as conservationist.” The Sandhills region is a delicate ecosystem of mixed grass prairie anchoring waves of sand dunes so tall Hutchinson told me you need a horse to climb up some of them. No chemicals or heavy machinery touch his fragile soils. “We’ve been ahead of the game for years,” Hutchinson said. 

With his daughter, Sarah Drenth, they rotationally graze bison, cattle, goats, and chickens, moving them after just three to five days on average. Often less. Then, they parade the animals onto new pastures to allow the first to rest and recover for up to a year. “We leave a lot of grass by moving them,” Drenth told me. 

On the Great Plains, large ranching operations like Hutchinson Organic serve as a bulwark to the wholesale conversion of native prairieland. Lands are being plowed up for corn, soybeans, and wheat at an average of four football fields per minute. The disturbed virgin soil causes the carbon stores, long secreted underground, to escape into the atmosphere.

“Just between 2000 and 2013, the conversion equates to nearly 300 million car emissions,” Johnson said. “That’s what happens when we lose ranchers.”

This expansion on croplands, often onto marginally productive lands, fragments habitat and devastates Monarch butterflies, waterfowl and other wildlife. Conversion is the smoking gun of the precipitous bird losses over the past 50 years, according to the North American Bird Conservation Initiative.

The Sandhill’s arid climate and unstable soils have safeguarded it from rampant row crop agriculture, the number one cause of the disappearing grasslands. (“It’s really numbers one through eight, to be honest with you,” Johnson told me.) But since the 1970s center-pivot irrigation tapping into the underground water reserves of the Ogallala Aquifer have brought more corn and alfalfa farming to the region. 

The immediate threat to Hutchinson Organic is Nebraska Public Power’s plans for new power lines that Hutchinson fears will chew up the big bluestem, Indiangrass, buffalo grass, green needle grass, and other native grasses. He is relieved to have the power of Audubon on their side.

“We like their philosophy because they see the whole picture,” he said, calling the relationship like a marriage. His daughter, Drenth, is hoping to leave the land to her two young daughters.

By August, even after a summer of record drought, thick swells of deep green grasses undulated across the ranch. It was hard to tell that they’ve been grazed at all, although Hutchinson told me that he just moved the cattle off the pasture that morning. The difference, he said, is grazing the grasses at the right time for the right amount of time to develop thick and deep root masses that hold moisture in the soil.

“Seeing is believing,” he said.

But lush pastures can tell only a sliver of the story. Tales from ranchers of the ecological health and biodiversity on their lands have long encountered deep skepticism. Strong scientific data is necessary to flesh out the details. So, Audubon is working to validate these observations by collecting evidence, ranch by ranch. 

The Bird Friendliness Index provides the snapshots. Biologists evaluate each property, noting targeted grassland bird species, and assign a score to certify the land as bird-friendly. The goal is to increase that number by shifting land management practices, such as the timing and intensity of grazing or hay mowing, for example. The idea is that over time, the score reflects changes in bird population numbers and communities.

But Audubon has determined that even rigorous bird monitoring is not enough. Along with vegetation and water infiltration tests, the program has added baseline soil monitoring to include biological activity and carbon in the soil. This will take time. “Three to five years from now, we’re going to have solid measures of how soil carbon is changing on all of our ranches,” Conservation Ranching Initiative director Chris Wilson said.

Ultimately, Audubon will know it’s all working when the downward trajectory off grassland bird populations starts to climb. By changing management with specific outcomes for birds across their ranges, this goal is in sight.

“Grassland bird species are going to tell us how we are doing,” Wilson told me. 

Hutchinson catalogs the birds that frequent and live on his ranch, telling me about how the resident greater prairie chicken, a threatened species, are so numerous here that ecologists capture them for repopulation efforts in Kansas and Iowa. The meadows and artesian springs on the property provide stopover sites for migrating Whooping cranes, green-winged teal and other water birds. 

But soon, he’ll have his first Bird Friendliness Index score to back up over 30 years of personal observations. Hutchinson may not subscribe to the science of climate change, but he’s happy to adopt Audubon’s management plan to benefit birds on his lands. Bennett from Smithsonian pointed out to me that birds are apolitical, so they provide a universal way to mobilize people of all stripes to work toward complex environmental goals.

In working individually with cattle ranchers, the challenge is to meet them wherever they are and shift their agricultural practices toward increasing biodiversity and sustainability. For some, like Hutchinson, it may take only small tweaks. For others, it involves weaning off of pesticides or fertilizer or eliminating continuous grazing, more significant changes that might face resistance. 

In all, Cornelius anticipates that it will take three years for all of Panorama’s ranchers to reach full certification and become 100 percent bird-friendly. For its part in the bargain, Audubon is invested in making sure that this works economically as well as environmentally for all of its ranching partners. Can it?

The premise of bird-friendly beef is that by buying Audubon’s certified products, consumers can help to restore the prairies, save birds, and other wildlife while also building soil health.

Called market environmentalism, this idea is being championed by Patagonia, General Mills, and other companies. It rests on the appealing but unproven idea that by choosing products that do right by the land (identified with an eco-seal), everyday eaters can influence supply chains through the retail market. And ultimately food production will become more sustainable. “Vote with your fork” writ large.

Johnson is convinced that the consumer market can underwrite habitat preservation for birds. “There’s a real power in the marketplace to drive conservation,” Johnson said. “I think that that’s where we really can start to turn the tide on grassland loss.”

But, to achieve this goal, it has to reach a certain scale. That’s where Panorama comes in to launch Audubon’s certification program nationally, and in turn, fuel more conservation work by more cattle ranchers on more lands.

As the largest national brand of domestic organic grass-fed beef, Panorama Organic is already the biggest player in a tiny but runaway meat category. For the first half of 2021, growth in organic beef sales outpaced the entire beef sector, up an eye-popping 32 percent compared to 2019, according to Chris Dubois, protein expert at the market research firm IRI. Demand for grass-fed, meanwhile, is tracking at 50 percent growth compared to pre-pandemic figures. 

Both organic and grass-fed, the Panorama brand is in prime position to hit it big. But the meat case is a highly competitive food category marked by label confusion. For Cornelius, the Audubon partnership provides an extra edge in a market rife with unverified claims.

 “I’m fighting for shelf space with product that says, ‘Product of the USA,’” she said, because in reality shoppers don’t realize that most grass-fed beef in the case is actually imported.  

So, the Audubon seal provides the brand with an easy-to-understand differentiator, one that boils the hazy, complex terrain of ecological science down into an easy-to-read bird icon. It also resolves the brand’s conundrum of how to communicate to shoppers the latest buzzword in sustainability: regenerative.

“To me it was the answer to the big fuzzy regenerative ag piece that we were missing,” Cornelius said. She told me that Panorama chose Audubon’s certification program over the Regenerative Organic Certified label because of the rigorous science behind the Bird Friendliness Index and the strength of the organization’s reputation. (The Savory Institute, often targeted for making outsized claims for the benefits of cattle grazing, also recently launched a regenerative certification seal.)

Panorama beef is raised in eight Midwest and Western states on certified organic ranches, meaning that the producers don’t routinely use antibiotics or apply synthetic substances (with some exceptions). The organic pastures are important for grassland birds because many species feed insects to their young, and pesticides are also a cause of bird declines.

Each operation is also animal welfare certified by the Global Animal Partnership as pasture-raised. These certifications add up to retail prices $2–3 more per pound than conventional ground beef. Along with long-term contracts, this premium delivers a stable, guaranteed market for Panorama ranchers.  

Colorado rancher George Whitten is a veteran bird-friendly-certified producer who says that the seal has real value in the marketplace. “Our customers don’t care about organic, but they love our certification with Audubon,” he told me. 

Whitten recalls that in the 1990s, Audubon sued him for grazing San Juan Ranch livestock on the Baca National Wildlife Refuge in southern Colorado. “That’s how far Audubon has come around,” he said. He is wary of the fact that Panorama Organic is owned by global meat giant Perdue Farms since he has strived to stay out of the conventional beef business. 

But he trusts this niche meat brand, which like subsidiaries Niman Ranch and Coleman Natural, focuses on humane animal welfare and strong farmer networks. Whitten said that as his biggest customer, Panorama’s terms make it easy for him to earn a living. ”I can sell a truckload to Panorama quicker than I can sell a ribeye to a lady at the farmers’ market,” he said.

The reality is that ranchers adopt only adopt practices they can afford, and the Conservation Ranching certification costs them nothing but time. Audubon also provides cost-sharing, training, and other incentives.

From Audubon’s standpoint, this method is far cheaper than other strategies. Compared to the old way of protecting bird habitat, the Conservation Ranching Initiative turns out to be a bargain. On average, Johnson told me that grassland conservation typically costs the organization about $80 per acre. But enlisting ranchers to handle the day-to-day management on these lands, Audubon’s program costs drop to $1.35 –$1.40, an acre. “Soup to nuts.” 

“Maybe it’s because I didn’t come up through the ranks as a biologist,” Johnson said, “but I thought the environmental community didn’t care about their bottom line.” With this program, ranchers’ livelihoods are one of the priorities. Keeping them in business keeps them on the land.

Bird-friendly beef ties improved farming practices directly to market opportunities and, potentially, increased profits. With certification, ranchers are rewarded by earning top dollar for their beef sold with the Audubon seal. In principle, it eliminates the environmental shortcomings of conservation programs like the federal Conservation Reserve Program, where once the payment incentives end after 10 or 15 years, farmers are likely to rip up the land for money-making row crops. Audubon’s market-based program, ideally, is self-sustaining. In theory, as the seal becomes more recognizable, profits should only grow.

With the Panorama deal in hand, the Conservation Ranching Initiative could improve land management practices on about 3.5 million acres—an area surpassing Yellowstone National Park and the Grand Canyon combined. 

“If the market can drive the program, it’s a far more efficient way to deliver grassland conservation at scale,” Johnson said. Funded by Audubon’s philanthropy arm, it could grow to 10-12 million acres at an annual cost of $10 – $12 million. 

Audubon is not charging Panorama for the use of the Audubon seal, and there is no revenue sharing arrangement. “One day Harvard Business School may do a case study on how dumb Marshall is,” Johnson quipped, “but it’s by design.” The arrangement creates a firewall between the high standards of the program and what’s happening with any individual ranch on the ground.

The scale of Conservation Ranching has exceeded Audubon’s projections. “We’re on the precipice of mainstreaming market-based conservation,” Johnson told me. The potential to increase market exposure is high with Audubon bird-friendly beef in the pipeline to 320 retail outlets in spring 2022. 

Johnson has already received a deluge of offers from dozens of other companies seeking  to have their own supply chains certified through Audubon. Given the amount of beef that moves through the market, capturing more brands, restaurants, and retailers translates into more ranchlands enrolled, certified, and managed according to bird-friendly standards. 

This voluntary program offers an alternative to federal mandates or tax-payer funded programs to address climate change. It also works towards the Biden Administration’s land conservation goal to protect 30 percent of U.S. lands and water by 2030. 

But market-based conservation raises deeper questions when the lion’s share of resources already flow to predominantly white landowners. “As we’ve seen with other market-based solutions, like carbon markets, they can be both ineffective and inequitable,” said Molidor from the Center for Biodiversity.

Through federal, state and local programs—from the Farm Bill’s Conservation Reserve Program to conservation easements and cost-sharing projects—U.S. ranchers have access to a wealth of resources and technical support, which also increase the value of those lands. When the vast majority of those landowners are white, programs like Audubon’s may further entrench an ongoing land access crisis—soaring prices that thwart the efforts of tribal nations, farmers of color, young farmers, and others to own land. 

Audubon is reckoning with inequities on several levels, including its own slaveholder namesake. When it comes to Conservation Ranching, two ranches owned by Indigenous people in South Dakota are enrolling in the program. And in Montana, a partnership with the Blackfeet Nation is a work in progress involving planning workshops and infrastructure inventories to address tribal needs. In Texas, the organization is reaching out to historically underserved farmers and ranchers.

Johnson recognizes the embedded inequities along with the risks of embracing the regenerative mantle. “I share a concern about regenerative agriculture because a lot of it is not based on the bigger picture,” Johnson said, referring to the focus on grazing’s potential to capture soil carbon. “And I think it sets us up for a regenerative ag bubble, where there are too many promises, not enough data and that bubble could burst.”

“What a tragedy that would be,” he continued, “because the principles of regenerative agriculture tie back to traditional ecological knowledge, which was refined, researched, observed, and implemented by Native people.”

In his vision, Audubon’s conservation ranching initiative is nothing short of transformative. By shifting food production toward more environmental practices that are supported by consumer markets, the food supply can become more sustainable for all eaters. “If it works and it’s good for the soil, it’s good for birds, and it’s good for biodiversity, why aren’t our kids [in schools] eating this?”

Johnson’s own Audubon origin story dates back to when he was still a college student. On an early spring day, his friends dragged him out of bed to a farm in northern Minnesota to witness the mating ritual of the greater prairie-chicken. To avoid startling this short-tailed type of grouse, the group had to arrive before sunrise. In the chilled dim of dawn, Johnson folded his six-foot-two frame to crouch behind the bird blind and peered out toward the open short-grass meadow to wait. 

At daylight, the annual spectacle of males performing their exuberant display, fanning their mottled brown feathers began, and he watched from 15 feet away. They pattered their feet like a drum roll while the yolk-colored sack at their throats uttered low toots like the sound of blowing over the mouth of a beer bottle. They tussled, fluttered, and fought. 

But what struck him most was that beyond the lek—the grassy center stage for the prairie chickens’ performance—there were cows browsing in the distance. In that moment, he fell for the wonder of this “charismatic, loud, and flashy species” flourishing in a human-managed landscape.

It was similar to the same images in the book of landscape paintings from the Hudson River School he picked up as a kid. “There’s always a bird element and a wildlife element,” he said. “It’s a dynamic system that works together and humans are a part of it.”

Johnson has built a career building on the vision that conservation and agriculture not only work hand in hand but can reinforce one another in a beautiful way. For decades, industrialization and homogenization has worked in opposition to conservation efforts. Environmental goals, seemingly, could come only at the expense of productivity. 

But that landscape has changed with an ecological mindset in the food system. It is not one or the other, but about managing the relationships within ecosystems that cannot exclude humanity.

The big question is, what practices can bring about positive changes for environmental health that affect wildlife, climate, and human well-being? 

Two years after the bobolinks first fledged at Stone Barns, I checked in with Algiere. The farm functions as a working holistic system where pigs are the edible subjects for agroforestry studies, laying hens trail the sheep for multi-species grazing experiments, and the compost operation is integral to the whole high-functioning system. Meanwhile, farm teams harvest heirloom vegetables and pasture-raised meats, linking ecology with food production. 

Algiere calls it “live agroecological science.” 

Since 2019, his team is conducting a collective research study of the whole operation that includes monitoring soil carbon, water quality, insects, plants, and birds. “It’s not a clean lab,” Algiere said. “Not the kind of science that we’re used to, and we’re creating it as we go.”

Based on the data, they are learning the methods that best restore balance and health on the farm as a whole. But in the complex natural system called agriculture, so much is invisible.

And so, the birds help to tell the story.

In the old hayfield where cattle grazed, the bobolinks arrived again and fledged 10 young last summer. They were joined by three more grassland specialists, eastern meadowlarks, Savannah sparrows, and kestrels. From the trees fitted with bird boxes at edges of the fields, bluebirds and tree swallows darted out for insects.

“I was pretty shocked at the speed of the response in the bird populations,” Goodwin, Stone Barns’s deputy director of ecology, said. “We saw almost immediate responses to the change in management.”

Every other measure—plant abundance, pollinators and insects, water holding capacity, and soil organic matter—showed increasing stability, diversity, and complexity on these lands.

“If we can physically see change in a human time frame, there’s a lot we can’t see,” Algiere said. And although insects are valid bioindicators (as are the soil microbes), the birds are the most eye-catching centerpiece of nature’s intricate web, tied to our own survival.

Perhaps, then, it’s no accident that bird watching has soared during the pandemic. Or that eBird, an app that crowdsources sightings from people around the world topped one billion observations.

It’s not only that birds’ colors, songs and flight are enchanting. Or that they provide valuable ecosystem services from free insect control and pollination to fertilizer in the form of “poop rain” from the tens of billions of migrating birds each spring and fall.

In a time of crisis with accelerated climate change and biodiversity loss, avifauna are pointing the way forward. At Stone Barns, on the Great Plains and across the west, the best ecological practices for birds appear to be the best practices for land, biodiversity, and even climate. In a world of slippery and hard-to-prove environmental claims, birds are proving to be our north star. 

After journeying throughout the globe, birds are the great connectors, the time travelers, and messengers of our fate. As the field researcher and nature writer Scott Weisendaul notes in his book, A World on the Wing: “Birds are the sentinels and bellwethers, the victims of our follies—but also, if we are heedful of their needs, guides to a more sustainable future for ourselves as well.”

Melissa Hemken contributed reporting.

The post The campaign for “bird-friendly beef” appeared first on The Counter.

The rise of industrial hog farms—and pollution—in North Carolina

Like many Black families in Eastern North Carolina in the 1960s, White-Williamson’s grandfather and other family members raised hogs. The animals roamed the fields near their home and were fed corn and kitchen scraps, a far cry from the factory farms that have since overtaken Duplin and Sampson Counties. These rural communities are now the top hog-producing regions in the state and the country.

“Starting in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, there was just a constant increase in industrialized farms in Eastern North Carolina and these operations were often slammed into low-income communities and communities of color, and these communities haven’t been the same since,” White-Williamson said.

Between 1985 and 1998, North Carolina moved up the ranks in hog production among U.S. states, becoming the second-highest behind Iowa. In large part, this was made possible by former state senator Wendell Murphy, the man credited with “building the modern pig business.” In the 1960s, Murphy founded Duplin County’s Murphy Family Farms. The company, which became one of the largest hog producers in the nation, was sold to Smithfield Foods in the 1990s.

This was around the same time Murphy sponsored a bill that, for seven years, allowed for the proliferation of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs)—otherwise known as factory farms—centered in Eastern North Carolina. In 1992, Smithfield Foods opened the world’s largest meat processing plant in Bladen County. The company is now the world’s largest pork producer and owns or operates more than 200 hog farms in North Carolina, in addition to six feed mills and hundreds of contract farms. 

Reporting on Murphy tends to focus on his humble beginnings and his role in the expansion of North Carolina’s billion dollar industrial hog farming industry, rather than on the way these operations wreak environmental havoc in a region now at the center of multiple ecological disasters.

In the early ‘90s, residents warned officials about environmental impacts, to no avail. The hog industry was becoming valuable—an industry worth more than $1 billion in North Carolina. And as it grew, so did the waste—to disastrous results. In 1995, the worst hog waste spill in North Carolina history occurred, followed by Hurricane Floyd in 1999, which broadly contaminated groundwater, wells, and rivers with waste from hog farms. State officials vowed to do something and came up with an agreement with Smithfield, but it “lacked teeth”—to the great detriment of residents, mostly communities of color. It should come as no surprise that concentrating the state’s hog waste in a region that is low-lying and flood-prone remains a bad idea. During Hurricane Florence in 2018, at least 110 lagoons in the state either released hog waste into the environment or were at “imminent risk” of doing so. 

An uphill battle for communities of color fighting back

In 2018, the North Carolina Medical Journal published an issue devoted to environmental health in the state. The published findings confirmed what the residents of Duplin and Sampson Counties already knew: Those who live near hog CAFOs have higher death rates of all studied diseases, and rates of infant mortality, anemia, kidney disease, septicemia, and tuberculosis were higher in communities with hog CAFOs. 

“Communities don’t have the resources that the agricultural industry has, so the industry has been able to sell a story of prosperity and economic development and jobs and all the good things that you would hope from an industry. The community knows these things are not all true, but it’s hard to counter the level of money that the industry can use to support decision makers who are more likely to support what the industry wants rather than considering the needs and the health of the local community members they are supposed to be representing,” White-Williamson said.

Still, local residents put up a good fight against agricultural operations in the state. Beginning around 2014, 26 federal nuisance lawsuits were brought against Smithfield and its subsidiaries by more than 500 majority Black plaintiffs. Overwhelmingly, these were longtime residents who’d grown sick of the flies, buzzards, squealing, stench and other conditions typical of living near hog operations. In 2018 and 2019, juries awarded 36 plaintiffs a total of almost $550 million, a number that was reduced to about $98 million because of a state law that caps punitive damages.

Also in 2014, the Waterkeeper Alliance, Rural Empowerment Association for Community Help, and the North Carolina Environmental Justice Network filed a complaint under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 against the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality with the EPA’s Office of Civil Rights, alleging that DEQ’s permitting and oversight of swine CAFOs has a racially discriminatory impact on Black, Latino, and American Indian North Carolinians.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. As a recipient of federal funds, DEQ must adhere to Title VI of the act, which prohibits discrimination in any program or activity that receives federal funds or other federal financial assistance.

In 2018, the groups reached a settlement agreement with DEQ that included air and water quality testing in select counties and a pledge by the agency to “develop a more robust Title VI program governing all DEQ activities, including a method to assess potential community impacts related to agency decisions.” But DEQ is at the center of yet another complaint alleging racial discrimination. 

In September of last year, the Southern Environmental Law Center filed a civil rights complaint with EPA on behalf of the Duplin County Branch of the North Carolina Conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the North Carolina Poor People’s Campaign, alleging that DEQ’s issuance of Smithfield’s biogas permits would have a disproportionate impact on communities of color in Duplin and Sampson Counties. The EPA, in connection to the complaint, is also looking into whether NC DEQ has a public participation policy and process that is consistent with Title VI and the other federal civil rights laws. 

Addressing Smithfield’s biogas permits with a civil rights complaint may seem like an unusual strategy, but according to Blakely Hildebrand, a senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center who filed the recent complaint against DEQ, traditional legal tools like the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act provide loopholes for agricultural operations. 

“Options are very limited when it comes to addressing the racially disparate impact of agricultural operations, but the Title VI complaint process with the EPA is a legal tool that communities do have at their disposal to bring to light environmental injustice,” Hildebrand said.  

One of the ways that an agency can violate Title VI, Hildebrand added, is by making policy decisions that have a discriminatory impact. 

DEQ told The Counter it is committed to the “fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all North Carolinians.” The agency said that since 2017, it has given significant priority to compliance with Title VI requirements, particularly with regard to animal waste permitting.

For the four biogas permits, DEQ said it conducted enhanced public outreach, an environmental justice analysis, and held a public meeting and comment period to provide an opportunity for community input on the four farm modifications. 

“DEQ staff reviewed the concerns raised by the public and carefully evaluated the permit modifications to address the concerns within the existing authority of the agency and applicable state rules and regulations,” a DEQ spokesperson said in a statement. 

The pollution caused by hog waste lagoons is in some ways preventable. After Hurricane Floyd in 1999, Smithfield said it would abandon its lagoon and sprayfield systems and develop and implement cleaner, more sustainable hog waste technologies. The company followed through on its word–kind of. 

Smithfield invested $15 million to research how to upgrade its waste management systems, which led to a 2013 report concluding that a system developed by a North Carolina company called Terra Blue met existing industry regulations and could improve existing hog farming operations and be incorporated into new or expanded hog farms. The Terra Blue system involves replacing the old lagoons with open tanks, which helps protect groundwater and land and surface waterways. But Smithfield chose not to adopt the technology, claiming it did not meet criteria for “economic feasibility.”

Instead, it appears Smithfield has chosen to pivot to biogas operations. Not only does this keep the old lagoon system in place, it increases water pollution because it leads to higher concentrations of ammonia in the sprayed waste. Smithfield will profit from these conditions while claiming to address greenhouse gas emissions, a serious environmental issue its own industry is significantly responsible for. According to Hildebrand, very little about Smithfield’s biogas operations is “clean” and “green.”

“The hog industry decided that the cheapest way to dispose of billions of gallons of hog waste was to put it in a pit in the ground and then spray it on a nearby field,” Hildebrand said. “That process produces methane, and now the industry is proposing a ‘solution’ that would cap the open air pits with the goal of reducing methane emissions. I don’t dispute that wanting to reduce emissions is a good thing, but they’re trading a methane emissions problem for an ammonia emissions problem without ever really addressing the pollution and public health crisis that has been playing out on the ground in Eastern North Carolina for decades.” 

Smithfield maintains that their biogas operations in North Carolina are designed to support communities and the environment by making existing hog farms more sustainable, but reporting has shown that they are difficult to sustainably maintain. The company also asserts that their biogas permits were approved following a “robust and unprecedented permit and outreach process.”

“Turning methane from hog farms into clean energy is an innovative, sustainable practice and an absolute win for North Carolina, the communities where Smithfield operates, and the environment,” said Jim Monroe, Smithfield’s vice president of corporate affairs. “Manure-to-energy programs are critical to making hog farming, which is vital to the economic health of Eastern North Carolina and plays an imperative role in feeding the country, more sustainable.”

University of Iowa professor Silvia Secchi studies the environmental impacts of agriculture. She told The Counter that strategically, Smithfield’s shift to biogas is a smart move. By using climate change to rationalize its push for biogas operations in North Carolina and other states, Smithfield is making it more difficult for local communities to push back on its operations. 

“Agriculture is one of the least regulated industries in the United States, so these biogas operations are going to be an uphill battle for communities because any regulations will always be subject to modifications that favor the agricultural industry,” Secchi said.“It screws with communities of color on the front end by telling them they have to put up with biogas operations because it’s a climate change mitigation solution, and it screws with them on the back end because it isn’t actually a solution and the climate change created by the operations will disproportionately affect them,” Secchi said.

Addressing false narratives

In January of this year, EPA announced that it is investigating the discrimination complaint filed last year against DEQ on behalf of organizations in Sampson and Duplin Counties. William J. Barber III sees this as a “promising development.” 

Barber grew up in Eastern North Carolina and is currently the director of climate and environmental justice at the Climate Reality Project founded by former vice president, Al Gore. Barber is also the son of Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, leader of the Poor People’s Campaign, a North Carolina movement that confronts racism, poverty, environmental injustice, militarism, and “the distorted moral narrative of religious nationalism.” They’re also one of the organizations behind the complaint against DEQ.

As co-chair of the group’s ecological justice committee, William J. Barber III told The Counter that he has encountered families who have been in Sampson and Duplin Counties for decades, leading multiple generations to experience the kind of adverse health effects that have become common for those living in close proximity to hog CAFOs–including asthma. Barber said the environmental hazards wrought by agricultural companies in the Southeast are a “pressing, critical issue” that must be addressed. 

“Part of the work in North Carolina is to address false narratives,” Barber said. “These corporations try to pit environmentalists against farmers or make it appear as though we oppose small family farms. That couldn’t be further from the truth. These biogas operations are not run by small family farms; corporations are running these operations. Often, they are foreign corporations that are actually getting premiums to basically pollute American communities and call it green energy.”  

Smithfield Foods was purchased in 2013 by Chinese conglomerate WH Group, and the company’s ever-growing footprint in North Carolina is openly embraced by elected officials. In 2018 when Smithfield opened a 500,000-square foot facility in Tar Heel, farmer Steve Troxler, a Republican and the state’s Commissioner of Agriculture and Consumer Services, applauded the company for its “continued support” of North Carolina’s agricultural industry. 

North Carolina’s stance on environmental issues is muddled. At the beginning of the year, Democratic Governor Roy Cooper issued an executive order to establish new carbon reduction emissions goals to reduce pollution, create good jobs, and protect communities. Barber said the executive order creates an opportunity for a more “robust conversation” about the connection between climate and equity, but that it’s also time to move beyond talk. 

“We have to really push decision makers beyond conversation and beyond abstract claims,” Barber said. “We have to have a real plan for addressing climate injustice that should include taking a look at our public participatory process for agriculture permits and updating our cumulative impact assessments. [DEQ] looked at the biogas permits with a minimal kind of lens, without thinking holistically about the harms to the community related to public health, environmental impacts, and their larger contributions to the climate crisis.” 

In a statement to The Counter, Cooper’s press secretary Jordan Monaghan said that state environmental regulators must follow the law to determine permits and protect the health and safety of North Carolinians.

Iowa is the top pork-producing state in the nation and it grapples with many of the same environmental issues as North Carolina–though the populations harmed by hog operations in Iowa are decidedly different than in North Carolina, Secchi explained.  

“Iowa is predominantly white and we have CAFOs pretty much all over the state. It’s different in North Carolina because the CAFOs are concentrated in certain parts of the state—not just because those areas have cropland to dispose of the manure,” Secchi said. “There is very clear evidence that these areas were chosen for operations because local communities don’t have the same pull with legislators as white communities. I think we can deduce that they decided these communities were poor and marginalized and operations would be met with less resistance.” 

This is why agencies like DEQ are so important. As the department in charge of North Carolina’s environmental resources, part of the agency’s stated mission is transparency and holding bad actors accountable. DEQ is also supposed to serve as a community’s defense against serious environmental hazards. But White-Williamson said the agency has just been “checking boxes” when it comes to low income communities and communities of color.  

“In this region, there are 18-wheelers constantly going to these industrial facilities to pick up and deliver feed or animals to swine and poultry operations, causing diesel emissions. There are trains in communities often sitting for days waiting to be loaded or unloaded,” White-Williamson explained. “The totality of all of these impacts was not considered when the biogas permits were issued. For our communities, that’s deeply problematic. It’s one environmental hazard on top of another.”

Outside of the four farms revealed as part of the permitting process, the Align RNG biogas project has not disclosed to DEQ or the public the full list of participating farms and their locations. In January of last year, 30 Democratic legislators sent a letter to DEQ asking the agency to deny water quality permits for farms who plan to participate in the project. Smithfield told The Counter that with the exception of “a few farms” that it owns, the majority of the farms that will have the opportunity to be part of the Align project are owned by independent farmers and because the permitting process is public, “their participation will be known by both DEQ and the public.” Beginning April 5, DEQ started hosting a series of public hearings regarding general biogas permits. 

As for the racial discrimination complaint against DEQ now being investigated by the EPA, a spokesperson for the agency said the decision to pursue an investigation doesn’t necessarily mean the allegations are true or that Title VI violations have occurred.

White-Williamson is concerned that Michael Regan, the administrator of the EPA, previously served as the secretary of DEQ. However, a spokesperson for the EPA told The Counter that the administrator would not be directly involved in this matter or any other Title VI matter because the External Civil Rights Compliance Office is part of the Office of General Counsel and does not report directly to the administrator. Still, White-Williamson is unsure of how the complaint will play out—and she’s concerned about the future of her county. 

“This is more than just a story about biogas,” White-Williamson said. “This is really a story about power and who makes the decisions in these counties. It seems that everything bad finds its way to places where communities are already overburdened by other polluting facilities. Community members are really tired of having their health and dignity disregarded by the powerful.”

The post North Carolina’s Department of Environmental Quality is facing its second complaint for permitting hog waste operations in poor communities of color appeared first on The Counter.

The Lowcountry’s climate is humid, but mild, and rarely experiences frost. With the right methods, farmers can yield two harvests of indigo in one planting season. So, on St. Helena, King Comer learned to cultivate the plant from the descendants of those people once exploited in the marshlands for their agricultural skill and labor. This is how she found herself approaching a brigade of mosquitos, eager to impart their own lessons. The artist braced herself. 

“I thought I was like Johnny Appleseed,” she said, likening her early naïveté to the gusto of the roving 19th century nurseryman. Now, she realized, “Oh. I’ve erred. This [indigo] will die before I get into this.”

Indigo is a perennial plant and member of the bean family. With its woody stems, it grows densely like a weed and can reach between three and six feet tall. From October through May, bursts of blush-colored flowers erupt, clustered like jewels amid slender fruit pods that curve upward, bearing miniature black seeds. When the smooth green blades of its branches are gathered and steeped, they provide the dark, rich indigo dye that clings to hands and fingertips immersed in its liquor. 

Almost two decades later, King Comer has learned from her mistakes: She now wears tall, sturdy boots when working in the garden, and lots of coconut oil—“mosquitos don’t like it.” She has also since moved her studio to Wadmalaw Island, a lush, green expanse of trees and rushing creeks about 80 miles north of St. Helena. She lives there, too, taking temporary shelter in a camper van, alongside plentiful birds and peckish deer, whom the neighbors gently remind her have long inhabited the six acres where she plans to build a permanent residence and education space. Among the sage live oak trees that ornament the landscape, she plans to grow three species of indigo and sweetgrass seedlings, eager to see what the harvest informs. 

The artist-turned-farmer is one of a few Lowcountry textile and fiber artists who are using natural and indigenous materials tied to the history of the Americas and African enslavement, such as indigo, sweetgrass, and cotton, to create and preserve African American material culture through agriculture and artistic expression. 

Growing agricultural products was not the start nor end point any of these artists had necessarily envisioned. Yet each felt called to sow and reap from the land the raw materials that inspire their work, as a form of cultural preservation, and in at least one case, because the sustainability of their art form may very well depend on it. 

“Everything that I’m doing is coming from the land. I’m growing it, I’m processing it, I’m honoring ancestry,” said King Comer. 

When I visited in February, pieces of King Comer’s textile dye works were on display at the Charleston exhibit Griots of Cotton, Indigo & Clay, a permanent collection commissioned by Acres of Ancestry/Black Agrarian Fund, a group that promotes African American land-based tenure and traditions throughout the South. Local artist Torreah “Cookie” Washington curated the show, which ran at the City Gallery, a two-story building with floor-to-ceiling glass paneled windows overlooking the Cooper River from the city’s French Quarter. 

The river separates Charleston proper from Mt. Pleasant and a handful of so-called settlement communities where African Americans built homes and founded towns after Emancipation. A bridge constructed to join the two almost a century prior has been consequential in both the promotion and decline of the coiled basketry craft practiced in these communities, a tradition that predates American slavery.

More than a dozen Black women artists were featured in the fiber and textile exhibit, employing quilting, appliqué, dye work, and basket-sewing techniques to invoke themes of agrarianism, land stewardship, and cultural preservation. A shrine entitled A Prayer for Flying Africans, and bearing an indigo-dyed, shroud-like cloth marking the names of Black farmers who had joined the decades-long Pigford v. Glickman class-action discrimination lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), and died without receiving fair compensation, honors their legacy.

“We had to turn to the artists for them to speak in a language that could tap into the hearts and minds of people to really join us in this fight to dismantle anti-Black racism within USDA. That’s the vision of Griots of Cotton, Indigo & Clay,” said Tracy Lloyd-McCurty, executive director of the Black Belt Justice Center, a sister organization to Acres of Ancestry, focused on land justice and legal advocacy. “If we steward the land, do we also not have a responsibility to be stewards of Black agrarian material culture?” she asked. 

The exhibit will run from April through early October at the I.P. Stanback Museum and Planetarium at South Carolina State, a historically Black land grant university in Orangeburg, a little over an hour northwest of Charleston. There, the museum’s executive director, Frank Martin, presides over an impressive collection of cultural artifacts: the original photographic panels from the controversial 1969 Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibit “Harlem on My Mind;” Cecil Williams’s visual documentation of the Civil Rights Movement; a collection of Andy Warhol polaroids, among African sculptures and African American art. 

King Comer previously showcased at the Stanback, which is how she and Martin came to think about applying for grants to experiment with indigo. Martin had a vision for a project that could involve multiple colleges, students and professors of various disciplines, community stakeholders, and perhaps most importantly, local government. As part of a proposal to study the feasibility of indigo as a Lowcountry cash crop for small-scale producers, Martin approached farmers and artists, asking if they would consider growing a portion of the crop in different varieties and environments, under varying conditions—sand, loam, clay. 

It may seem like a stretch for an art museum director to seek an agricultural grant, but Martin was quick to note that I.P. Stanback is also a planetarium, grounded in scientific exploration, and its founding director Leo Twiggs is a Lowcountry artist who paints with indigo dye on cotton—a political statement about the region’s history and heritage, Martin said. He has his own agricultural background as well, describing himself as a “farm kid” who grew up working on cotton and tobacco fields. 

“The idea is to help our students in South Carolina and the South look at these traditions that were brought into this hemisphere by their African forbearers, and to be more aware of the importance of those individuals in the early economic development of this state. This was, at one time, the wealthiest state in the 13 colonies largely because of African craftspeople who grew rice and indigo, and later, cotton,” Martin said. He’s hoping to submit a USDA grant proposal by late fall or early winter.

Like so many details related to the history of the Lowcountry, the value of rice is integral to this story. When British colonists arrived in South Carolina in 1670, they experimented with a variety of crops such as cotton, olives, and tobacco to determine which could yield the most money and deliver the best return on capital investments. By 1690, rice had emerged as the state’s most profitable crop, and one without competition throughout the other British colonies. By 1720, it was the state’s primary export. But as tensions increased between England and Spain over the following two decades, eventually exploding into a war that made shipping rice across the Atlantic to England extremely dangerous and expensive, planters and provincial authorities became eager to diversify their market. 

“The history of indigo in South Carolina is intimately connected to the cultivation of rice,” said Nic Butler, historian at the Charleston Public Library. “The reason indigo became a commercial crop is because of the collapse of rice prices in the late 1730s and early 1740s. Around this time, people in South Carolina are scrambling to come up with another crop they can ship out to the other colonies, if not across the Atlantic.”

“On the Sea Islands you’ve got a bit of a microclimate that’s different from the mainland areas—coastal or inland areas. One of the many reasons that people decided to settle on indigo as a secondary crop in the 1740s was because it will grow on a variety of soils that are not really great soils—and specifically—it’s a different kind of soil than rice. Rice is a swampy process, but indigo has to be on high land,” said Butler. 

Harvesting the crop and transforming it into dye is also extremely labor-intensive. In South Carolina’s plantation economy, every six or seven acres of indigo planted required a system of vats used to steep the leaves and extract and process the dye into dried powder cakes that could be shipped long distances. Despite the free human labor planters exploited, those infrastructure costs subtracted from profits. Butler cites a 1755 essay from Gentleman’s Magazine of London that describes the process of cultivating 50 acres of indigo as requiring 15 “hands,” enslaved men and women, to maintain the crop, and at least 25 “very able hands” to process the dye. 

“A lot of people have this kind of, what I call a Gone With the Wind idea of what a plantation is—just crazy,” Butler said. “A plantation is a labor camp.… Rice and indigo are very labor-intensive. The only way to make that labor-intensive process profitable was to employ unfree labor. Without slavery, they would never have considered doing this.”

This is a challenge that modern-day growers must contend with. Often, amateurs plant small plots in order to reap a manageable harvest. Charleston-based David Harper, treasurer of the International Center for Indigo Culture, a nonprofit, is married to an indigo artist and has, since 2015, grown a tropical South American variety of the plant—the same variety cultivated by enslaved Africans in South Carolina for its long-lasting pigment—to use in his wife’s dye work and workshops. He is also one of the candidates that Martin at SC State, has enlisted to join his proposed trial to study the crop’s feasibility. Independently, Harper has also secured funding, through a USDA value-added producer grant, to work with small farmers who share an interest in reviving its use. He and his wife currently have between 600 and 700 plants divided between two quarter-acre plots.

“Every year for the last seven years we’ve left crop in the field because we just couldn’t process it,” he said. That’s one reason why you don’t see indigo dye houses popping up all over the place. Inevitably, you’re doing this really laborious process with almost the same techniques that were used by enslaved people on plantations in the 1700s. Even with better equipment it’s still a bottleneck, it’s still inefficient. That’s one reason we’re going for grants to try to streamline that process so that small farms could benefit from a more efficient production system.”

Like Lowcountry indigo cultivation, the sewn sweetgrass baskets featured in Griots of Cotton, Indigo & Clay by artist Georgette Sanders are borne out of African knowledge and American enslavement. The baskets, contemporarily sewn from native sweetgrass—so ubiquitous with South Carolina history that the state named them the official Lowcountry handicraft in 2006—evolved from the 17th and 18th century plantation baskets made from hardy bulrush bonded with white oak splints or soft palmetto, and fashioned into fanner baskets, used by enslaved Africans to winnow rice. 

Sanders learned to sew them about four decades ago from an aunt. Like so many artists, she said she receives visions of inspiration in her dreams, and recounted awaking abruptly one night about 17 years ago, washed in images of clay. Then newly married, her unsuspecting husband quickly realized his ignorance. 

“He said, ‘You don’t sleep much, huh?’” Sanders tilted her head, appearing briefly apologetic through a burst of laughter. Since then, she’s incorporated smooth, kiln-fired clay into her handsewn basketry. The materials Sanders employs, clay and beadwork, are not tradition but invention. It’s an aspect of the craft that she treasures: the evolution of an object once made for function now interpreted as artwork.

“Each generation shifts. It’s no longer a bread dish, or a set of coasters,” she said. “Your older customers are asking for things that may be products gone by, and they need to preserve them because it may never get back to someone making pot rests. Grandmother may have done that, and mom may have made purses or hats. Now, you’re thinking of big, broad, massive pieces, being in museums. You’ve got the art coming out. Each phase was beautiful for that generation. I’ve started to teach my granddaughters, and I can’t wait to see what they do. If you bought a basket 30 years ago, you really need to be investing in one now just to see how it has evolved.”

There are, however, limits to innovation. Most urgent: extinction. 

Basketry has long been a means of economic self-sufficiency throughout the Lowcountry’s African American communities. There exists a well-established history of enslaved people using this skill to barter goods and earn income to purchase or maintain their freedom, as well as to escape. A year before the Civil War ended, an enslaved man named Jack Frowers made headlines when he wove grasses and rushes to construct “a basketry boat,” using cotton to caulk it and tree gum to waterproof it; then sailed his way to freedom, escaping to the Union-occupied side of South Carolina’s Port Royal Sound. 

“Nothing produced in the Lowcountry has had the power to evoke South Carolina’s African inheritance over such a long period of time as has the coiled basket,” historian Dale Rosengarten writes in the book Grass Roots: African Origins of an American Art.

Yet today, despite the rise and proliferation of e-commerce and digital shopping platforms, it’s gotten much harder for many sewers to make a living selling sweetgrass baskets. To understand why, a drive up Highway 17 North from Charleston to Mt. Pleasant, over the Cooper River Bridge was instructive. 

With paving of Highway 17 and completion of the Cooper River Bridge in 1929, basket sewers from settlement communities had a means to reach customers directly. They began to display their baskets on chairs and crude highway-side stands, advertising to drivers. By 1949, 31 stands were identified along a two-mile stretch of the highway.

In the aftermath and clean up of debris from Hurricane Hugo, which hit South Carolina in 1989, residential and commercial development in the area exploded. Between 2009 and 2013, a five-mile stretch of the highway was widened further, from four to six lanes. Ironically, the road now dubbed “The Sweetgrass Basket Makers Highway” doesn’t support much basket-selling. The majority of stands were moved and replaced, and it can be dangerous for drivers to attempt to pull off on the side of the road. Sweetgrass habitats continue to be cleared to make way for gated condos and housing developments, while the borders of land once considered part of African American settlement communities continue to shrink. 

When, in the 1980s, Rosengarten joined a project to interview basket makers about their craft, she asked sewers what they felt was the most serious threat to the tradition. 

“Everyone, every single one said, ‘The difficulty of finding sweetgrass, that’s the most pressing problem we have,’” she said. “That started in the 1970s already.”

Sewers came up with a workaround. They began reintroducing bulrush, which was abundant and used historically to create plantation work baskets. Researchers, most notably Bob Dufault, a former Clemson horticulturist, undertook massive decades-long efforts to study and repopulate the indigenous, perennial grass. Those efforts yielded mixed results; as Rosengarten noted, there is an abundance of the grass in Mt. Pleasant and along highway dividers and coastal areas today, but much of it is decorative and too brittle to sew with. 

While this is still a problem, she now believes that development poses the greatest threat. 

“It’s a full-on assault,” said Rosengarten. “This rampant development is really threatening the communities themselves where these sweetgrass basket makers live. At the same time, the young people in those families have lots of competing activities and interests. There are very few teenagers that are going to sit around with their moms and grandmas selling baskets like in the old days. So it’s becoming even harder to pass the tradition on to the next generation.” 

In the decades preceding the further widening of Highway 17, Mt. Pleasant’s population more than doubled, yet virtually all of its new residents were white, said Rosengarten. In 1990, Black people accounted for about 16 percent of the population. By 2000 they numbered less than half of that. As of 2020, Black people represented only 4 percent of the town’s residents. 

Kennedy Bennett was born and raised in Mt. Pleasant, where she grew up among a community of sewers: her mother and grandmother, church members, neighbors. It’s a skill the Yale student has not yet mastered, but not for lack of trying. Though much of the development that took place in the area came long before she was born, she’s old enough to recognize the changes that have materialized since she was in secondary school. 

“The community I grew up in was mostly Black. The houses that were there had been there for a really long time. Even if I didn’t know the elders personally, they knew who I was because they knew my mom and my grandparents. Now, driving around some of the settlement communities, you can tell they’re being gentrified. Dynamics have changed. There are huge apartment buildings and parking garages that obstruct the views,” Bennett said. 

“Land that used to be publicly available where sweetgrass grows, basket makers can no longer access because it’s now private property and there are trespass notices, or there’s a house there.”

Dufault, the former Clemson researcher who devoted years in efforts to repopulate sweetgrass, has encouraged home and landowners to grow it wherever they can. Sanders, the sweetgrass and clay artist, is trying her hand at it. She will plant grasses behind her studio, not far from the towering oak tree where she takes shade with her grandchildren, dictating Gullah language lessons in McClellanville, further north of Mt. Pleasant; an area where the weavers who have not abandoned their stands have migrated toward in an attempt to beat the traffic. She will also cultivate sweetgrass on a patch of her husband’s family land.

Small, experimental, yet historically rooted farming like this, is how many artists are attempting to explore and preserve African American heritage. 

Textile artist LaChaun Moore is a Maryland native and Parsons School of Design graduate who moved from Harlem to the small, unincorporated community of Pineland, a little over 80 miles west of Charleston, to begin farming indigo and naturally colored cotton in 2018. She explores the connections between the natural dyes and fiber making methods she learned about in the classroom, and how they relate to Indigenous and African American cultures in the South. 

At Parsons, Moore studied integrated design. She described it as a program where students could build the focus they wanted their work to have.

“Most of us were textile artists who aren’t necessarily interested in runway shows, maybe not super interested in celebrity culture, but love garment making and the history of fashion,” she said. “Or come from a culture that has really strong textiles and want to find a way to bring what they know about textiles into a commercial garment making industry. I’ve always been interested in clothing and history, specifically uniforms. I make garments, but I also make installations.”

In Pineland, Moore began her experimentation by dividing the indigo and naturally colored cotton in shades of green and brown over about a quarter-acre for each. 

“I planted the indigo at least three times, and it wasn’t until the third that I actually got the seeds to germinate,” she said. Moore had grown produce in community gardens in New York City where she was used to working with dirt. “South Carolina has sandy, loamy soil, which is completely different. It has very little nutrients, but it’s the perfect soil for the crop. I just had to learn how to plant it.”

She learned that she had to plant the seeds shallow, rather than dig a deep hole and cover it. “You don’t want to smother the seeds,” Moore said. To make sure they opened up, she soaked them in a bowl of hot water the evening before planting. This makes them “sweat and swell,” opening up the case of the seed and increasing the chance it will grow into a plant. Once you see established leaves, she said, they can virtually fend for themselves, though they do require consistent watering and nutrients. 

That was before the pandemic, when Moore returned to her childhood home, longing for family. In March, she returned to South Carolina, this time to Johns Island, less than 30 minutes west of Charleston, where she aims to increase her planting to an acre of indigo and half an acre of naturally colored cotton, in addition to growing some medicinal herbs, along with birdhouse and luffa gourds. 

In a way, the artists’ foray into agriculture represents a new iteration in their artistic development. Art is, at its core, experimentation. A process that facilitates discovery, and ultimately leads to new forms of expression. In that way, the two seemingly disparate spheres intersect. As farmers and advocates work to stop the acceleration of Black land loss and material culture, these artists have become part of that fight, holding fast to the values and traditions borne from Black agrarianism. 

Additional reporting contributed by Talia Moore and Tricia Vuong.

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The research gap

In 2021, the USDA announced $25 million to state Farm and Ranch Stress Assistance Networks (FRSAN) to build crisis hotlines, establish anti-suicide trainings, and offer free or low-cost counseling, among other services. It was an important step toward recognizing the emotionally grueling, often isolating nature of farm work. But it did little to respond to the needs of Black farmers, who tend to operate smaller farms, face increased economic pressure, and are routinely exposed to racism in agriculture and beyond. Of the 50 FRSAN projects USDA funded in 2021, only 7 programs—in Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, and Rhode Island—pledge to make efforts to accommodate the specific needs of communities of color. 

It’s yet another indication that the bulk of U.S. research on farming and mental or behavioral health and stress focuses on white farmers. And while that may partly be a function of demographics—Black farmers make up 1 percent of growers nationwide, a stat that itself testifies to the exclusionary force of systemic racism in agriculture—important research or diagnostic tools fail to be race-sensitive. Without these mechanisms, it’s difficult to provide informed treatment that responds to the specific needs of Black farmers and could improve their physical and mental well-being. 

The Farm/Ranch Stress Inventory, created by psychology doctoral student Charles K. Welke in 2002, is a tool that assesses stress, satisfaction and perceived social support among farmers and ranchers. It asks dozens of questions to assess a farmer’s anxiety level and is sometimes adapted for studies of farmer well-being. But its questions focus mostly on financial and family matters; while it inquires about conflict with relatives or community, no question mentions race or racism specifically. In another example, a 2021 Farm Bureau-commissioned study of 2,000 rural Americans found that farmers and farm workers were significantly more likely to have said their stress increased in the last year than their non-farming neighbors. But the insurance and lobbying giant told The Counter that it did not analyze its data by race. 

Laketa Smith manages the Farmers of Color Network of the Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI-USA). In collaboration with N.C. State University, she and North Carolina-based RAFI are conducting an ongoing study of farmer mental health and financial stress. Unlike many other studies, that research is intentionally oversampling farmers of color. Though the study won’t conclude until later this year, it will interview 15 Black and Indigenous farmers, respectively, in addition to the same number of white growers (a future iteration will include Latinx subjects). 

While final results aren’t in, Smith said that there’s no indication that suicide is higher among either group. Still, preliminary results suggest that chronic stress is a feature of life for many Black farmers, and that stress can manifest in a variety of ways, from family conflict or separation to substance abuse, depression, anxiety, and ill physical health. 

“Pride is the flip side of shame, and [when money problems happen and land loss is possible], there’s a lot of shame over being in that position,” Smith said. “Farming is often not [simply] what they do. It’s who they are. They’re fourth or fifth generation. And sometimes they think ‘This land’s been in the family for years, and I got us in trouble.'” 

Racism as risk factor

It’s a realm of lived experience that’s also established science: Being subjected to racism is unhealthy. Even encountering the more subtle, daily varieties can be stressful—and, over time, that stress can impact mental and physical health outcomes in concrete ways. A 2013 article in The Atlantic summarized the current state of the medical literature, which draws links between discrimination and increased rates of hypertension, the common cold, cardiovascular disease, breast cancer, and even general mortality. One study of 30,000 participants found that racism-induced stress is directly related to poorer physical and mental health. It’s a phenomenon that social psychologist Nancy Krieger calls “embodied inequality”—and these damaging linkages have only become better established in recent years. 

“The perception of racism, that feeling can have an impact on psychological well-being,” said Telisa Spikes, a cardiovascular researcher at Emory University who has conducted studies on the impacts of financial and racial stressors on African American health. “Your body responds by going into fight or flight mode—blood pressure goes up, heart rate goes up. When you’re constantly in this hypervigilant state it can have a negative impact on health.”

Spikes describes hypervigilance as a heightened response to prior racial trauma that leads African Americans to anticipate negative or discriminatory experiences when they are in predominantly white spaces. 

“You have this stigmatized status as a Black person where you feel you always have to be constantly on watch,” she said. 

Epidemiologist Camara Jones has long made the case that racism is a public health crisis. Notably, she has called on fellow researchers to prioritize data collection by race, urging them to focus their attention on the root causes of racial differences in health outcomes. 

“When we collect data by race, our findings most often reveal significant race-associated differences in health outcomes,” Jones wrote in a 2001 article published in the Journal of American Epidemiology. “The differences are so ubiquitous across organ systems, over the life span, and over time that they do not surprise us or seem to require explanation. Indeed, only when there is a White excess in disease burden, as with suicide, is our professional interest piqued.”

More recently, researchers have continued to probe the role that racism plays in lowering Black Americans’ life expectancy. A 2020 Auburn University study concluded that stress caused by experiencing racism accelerates aging at the cellular level; while a study published by Georgia State University in 2019 found that experienced over time, racism and long term anxiety could “wear and tear down body systems,” weighting the body’s allostatic load—the lifelong build up of stress—and putting African Americans at greater risk for chronic illness. 

“Health cannot be separated from the social environment. Many of the disparities that we see are a result of the social environment. And going back to clinical research, you cannot address problems without highlighting the racial demographic and the role that social determinants play in contributing to these disparities,” Spikes said. “Racism is now listed as a fundamental cause of disparities. It may not be experienced in the form of interpersonal racism—I’m going to charge you a higher price because of the color of your skin—but it’s more of the institutional and systemic racism. The trickle-down policies that derive from that is what has negative implications for health: not being able to afford housing in a good school district if you have children; not being able to get a loan for a mortgage,” said Spikes. 

Those risk factors are only magnified and exacebated within the context of farming, where discriminatory individuals, processes, and systems can continually threaten one’s livelihood and land. Combine U.S. agriculture’s institutionalized racism with the profession’s inherent volatility, and there’s an argument that Black farmers are at heightened risk for all manner of stress-related ailments. 

It happened to Lucious Abrams. The 68-year-old Georgia farmer was denied compensation as a claimant to 1997’s Pigford v. Glickman racial discrimination class action lawsuit against the U.S. government. He has filed numerous legal measures since then to delay foreclosure, and rents his farmland to neighbors to keep the taxes paid. After three decades wrangling with USDA, his body became a vessel of agony and apprehension. 

“I had kidney failure. I had a blood vessel burst up in my colon. My wife had a nervous breakdown. There’s no way to tell you the trauma that we have been through over the years. Through God’s grace and his mercy … that’s the only way I know how [we’ve survived],” said Abrams. “It’s been an absolute nightmare.”

Kentucky State University economist and rural sociologist Marcus Bernard worked with farmers in Alabama’s Black Belt region as the former director of a rural training and research center for the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, a nonprofit association of about 20,000 mostly Black farmers and landowners. While completing his PhD at the University of Kentucky, Bernard examined how racism, institutional racism, and class conflict affected Black male farmers. His research identified high levels of acute stress in both African American men and women farmers, typically wives of the male subjects he interviewed. 

The long and well-documented history of Black mistreatment at the hands of the USDA, its partners, and agricultural colleagues also produces well-founded anxieties that bias will put more roadblocks in Black farmers’ way. 

“When you think about a picture of whites farming [and] then think about a picture of Blacks in agriculture, those are two very different experiences,” said Bernard. “The picture with Blacks in agriculture is marred by stigma and labels: a feeling like ‘Someone is always out to get me.’ Like ‘I’m not going to get a fair shake.’ Either ‘I’m going to get shorted on my price,’ ‘Somebody is after my land,’ or ‘I may not get the financing that I need.’”

For decades, USDA and associated lenders withheld critical loans from Black farmers on the basis of race—only one factor among many that gave white farmers an unfair advantage, and a shorter path to profit. Today, countless hurdles remain, from fierce, hyperlocal cronyism that excludes these farmers, to price manipulation that drives down their profits and earnings, and excessive collateral required to secure loans that put them at risk of losing everything if they fall into debt—a shameful legacy that is literally written across Black farmers’ bodies. 

For 26-year-old farmer Tamarya Sims, the anxiety lies not in the fear of dispossession—but in the fear that she may never own land at all. Sims is a landless Black farmer in Asheville, North Carolina. By day, she works for a land trust, managing chickens and bees on a community farm. She runs her own business, Soulfull Simone Farm, on the side. The urban flower and herbal farm takes up less than half an acre of rented land. 

Sims, who experiences anxiety related to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), hopes to one day own 60 acres of forested land she envisions as a “healing space” where she can grow herbs and plants, and visitors of color can attend workshops and feel welcome. She describes the distress she deals with as threefold.  

“There’s the stress of being a farmer, then there’s the stress of being a Black farmer, and then of being a landless farmer,” she said. Added to the anxiety she feels, these stressors can make it difficult for her to focus, sapping her energy and ability to solve problems that may arise on the farm. 

As a Black female agriculturalist in an overwhelmingly white area, Sims has experienced strong feelings of alienation. When she spoke out in the wake of George Floyd’s death, she became instantly and uncomfortably recognizable in her community. 

But invisibility, rather than hypervisibility, has been the norm for her. When white visitors stop by the community farm, they often pass her wordlessly, seeking out the first white face they can find as an authority. When she was shopping for her own tractor, she brought a white male associate with her to the dealership, for fear she wouldn’t be taken seriously or get a fair deal. The sales agent spoke exclusively to the white man and refused to look her in the eye, she said. Knowing she must enlist the same tactic in her search to acquire land is upsetting and tiresome. 

“One of the main recurring things I’ve went through is being on land and folks seeing me and thinking that I don’t belong just because I’m Black. Even at my job, I’ve had people slowing down in their cars to see what I’m doing.” If they come onto the land, they ignore her just as the tractor salesperson did. “There’s nowhere I can go where people see me and think I belong, or where I feel safe.”

This feeling has been a primary motivator in Sim’s desire to carve out her own piece of land where she can enjoy the restorative benefits of nature that all farmers love: the joy and relief that comes from digging in the dirt, watching a tiny seed shoot out roots long before its verdant foliage begins to show.

“I work through a lot of my life issues in the garden, and I think that everyone should have the opportunity to do that… When you connect people with land, they see the mountains behind them, and they feel comfortable,” she said. It’s a feeling of ease she continues to chase and an irony many Black farmers experience: that working the land can relieve stress, while also exacerbating it. 

Community as coping

Former cattle farmer Michael Rosmann is a psychologist who has worked with farmers and institutions for more than 30 years to raise awareness about the importance of behavioral health in agricultural communities. His work with the nonprofit Agriwellness Inc., a partnership initiative between seven Prairie states facilitated by the Wisconsin Office of Rural Health, informed the framework of USDA’s Farm and Ranch Stress Assistance Network. 

“The traits that define successful farmers are a capacity to endure extreme hardship, the capacity to work alone, if necessary, self-reliance for making decisions, and keeping things to oneself. These traits cut across all races and cultures,” said Rosmann. 

However, these characteristics can have a downside: a reticence to divulge thoughts and emotions to behavioral health professionals or scholars who could document farmers’ individual or collective mental health needs. To combat this, Rosmann emphasizes a need for counselors and therapists who have a shared understanding of not only agriculture, but the complex racial and cultural histories these farmers hold. 

In practice, that’s not always easy. Rural communities, where most farms are, often lack the medical resources and services offered in major cities. At the same time, only about 3 percent of U.S. psychologists are Black. For farmers, these factors—the disparity in health care services and the lack of representation among health care professionals—mix with other forms of inequity to create barriers to relief from occupational stress. 

In the absence of doctors they can trust and enough rural mental health providers, many Black farmers like Abrams lean on religion to lessen their mental anguish. 

“There is still within this community of older Black farmers, deeply spiritual, deeply rooted ties to their churches. Their spiritual life is what I believe is the No. 1 thing that keeps them sane and grounded,” Kentucky State’s Bernard said. 

He speculated that faith may offset suicide risk among Black farmers. But because Black farmers are not often studied or written about outside the bounds of their racial experiences, there’s little to no information about the prevalence of suicide and self-harm among them. 

That most Black farmers turn to social networks for support bears out an aspect of Farm Bureau research: in general, farmers are far more likely to tap their friends and family for help than seek a doctor’s advice.  

Kaleb “KJ” Hill, 35, is a fourth-generation farmer from New Orleans and the founder of Oko Vue Produce Co., an agricultural business that specializes in edible landscapes and stormwater management. 

He looks inside and outside his community for assistance. 

“A lot of [farmers] are not very vocal with what they’re going through. They’ll speak in a lot of cliches, like ‘You know, it’s just part of the job.’ But the way I live my life, I share if I’m seeking additional support,” Hill said.  

Though he doesn’t presume to recommend mental health services to his peers, “we usually talk to each other,” he said. 

“That’s important,” he went on. “I won’t say it’s like traditional group therapy or anything that’s facilitated by a professional. It’s just us sitting around in a circle or gathering at the end of the season, and having a little dinner together with some of the things we have left over and just talking about how that was a rough year. It’s an ongoing conversation. You’re venting like ‘Man, that was frustrating, this insect ate up everything. What did you do about it?’ That’s a therapeutic session in itself.” 

Still, traditional talk therapy keeps him “in touch with reality and it’s helped me grow as a man. … Sometimes you have these emotions that you don’t necessarily have a word for and that professional does,” he added. 

The Provosts also sought help to alleviate their feelings of despair. Both now speak with a therapist regularly. They say it’s had a marked effect on their ability to cope with the day-to-day stress incurred by attempts to preserve their livelihood. But the fight is long from over. What was once an almost 5,000-acre family sugarcane operation—June’s family owned about 300 of those acres and rented the remainder—is now a mere 36 acres, split between June and one of his brothers. Angie’s civil rights claim remains open, and Congress’s effort at debt cancellation, which would have offered them a much-needed reprieve, remains stalled. 

Additional reporting contributed by Cynthia Greenlee.

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“[Ocean aquaculture] is nutritious and low-impact,” said Paul Dobbins, who helps lead the aquaculture team at the World Wildlife Fund and has operated both shellfish and kelp farms. “You’re creating food without using arable land, freshwater, fertilizer or pesticides.”

Seaweed also has potential as a fertilizer, animal feed, a packaging replacement for plastics and biofuel.

Supporters say ocean farming can offer economic opportunity to coastal communities that have lost jobs due to declining commercial offshore fisheries. 

“We need to figure out how to transition all these people who have these ocean-based skills and culture and traditions of blue-collar innovation to this really important work of climate solutions,” said Bren Smith, a former fisher who now farms seaweed and shellfish in Connecticut. 

Smith is a co-founder of GreenWave, a nonprofit that supports aspiring ocean farmers. The group has trained 900 farmers and hatchery technicians, and it has a waiting list of 8,000 prospective farmers who want to join its training program. 

Cutting red tape

Some state leaders are seeking to reduce the regulatory roadblocks aquaculture faces. 

“The core reason aquaculture is not occurring in our state in any meaningful way is the broken permitting process,” said California Assemblymember Robert Rivas, a Democrat who chairs the Committee on Agriculture.

Rivas has proposed a pilot program that would task state agencies with identifying sites to lease for seaweed and shellfish operations. While the bill stalled last year, Rivas said he remains committed to changing regulations.

Florida created an Aquaculture Use Zone system in the 1990s, with 26 coastal regions in which shellfish farmers can apply for leases with a streamlined permitting process. In Alaska, legislators passed a law last year to speed up the lease renewal process for ocean farmers. The measure’s sponsor, Democratic state Rep. Andi Story, also has worked with regulators to make more staffers available to clear a backlog in lease appeals.

“We’re serious about trying to grow this industry,” she said. “We’re trying to clear regulatory hurdles, because it’s got so much potential.”

Alaska leaders are aiming to grow mariculture into a $100 million industry by 2040. The state’s nascent industry totaled $1.4 million in sales in 2019. They’re hoping to enable more entrepreneurs like Lia Heifetz, who co-founded Barnacle Foods in Juneau in 2016. Her company uses kelp to make products such as salsa and hot sauce. 

“We really were motivated to grow a business that could provide a market for kelp farmers and harvesters,” Heifetz said. “It’s not a cultural norm to have seaweed on our plates in America, but there would be a big upside if that were to happen here.”

Lawmakers in New York passed a law last year to allow commercial kelp farming in two Long Island bays, in waters that already had been designated for shellfish operations. Officials are likely to expand ocean farming to more state waters.

“This is an industry that’s in its infant stages, but it has the potential to really transform the marine economies here,” said Assemblymember Fred Thiele, the Democrat who sponsored the measure. Thiele said state leaders likely will need to streamline the permitting process as well.

Many aquaculture leaders cite Maine, which created the nation’s first leasing system for farming in state waters in 1974, as having a well-developed industry and reasonable regulations. The 190 commercial farms in Maine generate $80 million to $100 million annually in sales, led by salmon, mussels and oysters. Many of the state’s new ocean farmers come from commercial fishing or other maritime backgrounds.

The state offers a special limited-purpose permit for new seaweed and shellfish farmers, a one-year lease for a 400-square-foot site. About 750 of those sites are in operation.

“It allows people to start small, to experiment … and limit risks,” said Sebastian Belle, executive director of the Maine Aquaculture Association. “That’s what’s fueling the growth in the state, this lower barrier to entry.”

Several aquaculture advocates said they hope more states will offer a similar small-scale permit for beginning farmers. Ocean farmers also would like to access the benefits available to their land-based counterparts, such as crop insurance and loan programs.

Competition for waters

Unlike farmers on land, who are limited to private property zoned for agriculture, ocean farmers see vast areas of unclaimed waters with robust growing potential. But because their prospective farm sites are in public waters, they must contend with other ocean users, including the military, shipping companies, recreational boaters, commercial and recreational fishers and shorefront property owners.

“The ocean is actually a very busy place,” said Dobbins, with the World Wildlife Fund. “Permitting is never efficient or fast, and there’s good reason for that, because these farms operate in the commons.”

Ocean farmers say their biggest task is building public acceptance. In some areas, wealthy property owners have tried to block farms that alter their views. Farmers and conservationists will have to work out whether aquaculture can coexist in protected marine habitats.

Aquaculture also faces some environmental opposition to the farming of net-penned fish. Opponents point to cases where nonnative fish species have escaped from fish farms, leading to concerns that they could out-compete native fish, spread disease or weaken the gene pool of wild stocks. They also point out the waste from penned-up fish increases nutrient loads in coastal waters.

“If you have regular escapes or large escapes, you’re changing the ecosystem, and we don’t know if that’s repairable,” said Marianne Cufone, founder of the Recirculating Farms Coalition, which promotes the use of recycled water to grow food. Cufone’s land-based farm in Louisiana produces catfish and other species on an aquaponic system, which she said is a more sustainable model.

Supporters of ocean-based fish farming acknowledge there have been some poorly run operations, but they say that better species awareness, improved gear, sustainable feed and smart siting locations can reduce the risk of environmental harm.

‘Let us be the stewards’

Ocean farmers note that many Indigenous peoples have cultivated and harvested coastal resources for millennia. In Hawaii, islanders built distinctive rock-walled fishponds in tidal areas that contributed greatly to local food supplies. 

In more recent years, Hawaiians seeking to restore historic ponds found that their cultural practice was now blocked by an overwhelming regulatory system. Locals working to restore one pond site spent 20 years trying to obtain the 17 different permits they needed. 

“They had the community support, they had the grants, they had everything, and they just couldn’t get through the process,” said Michael Cain, acting administrator of the state Office of Conservation and Coastal Lands.

In 2011, Cain joined a team of state regulators tasked with streamlining that process, creating a single statewide permit to encompass much of the previous paperwork. Permits now are issued in about 17 days, he said.

“The permitting process was so onerous and expensive that many folks just didn’t want to start,” said Brenda Asuncion, who leads fishpond restoration efforts with Kuaʻāina Ulu ‘Auamo, a community group focused on island ecosystems and culture. “[The changes] have really helped to facilitate people doing restoration work.”

Asuncion’s group has about 60 fishponds in its network in various stages of restoration. 

In Alaska, tribal peoples have long used kelp to harvest herring spawn, supplement meals and make nutrient cakes. The Native Conservancy, a Cordova-based, Indigenous-led land conservancy, is aiming to foster 100 Native-owned kelp farms over 2,000 acres of ocean within 10 years. 

“A lot of people have left the villages because they just can’t make a living,” said Dune Lankard, the group’s president and founder. “We hope this industry will help relocalize individuals that were lost to the seafood industry.”

The Native Conservancy has helped seven private kelp farmers procure permits, and it’s also set up a commercial farm and nine test sites of its own. The group is supporting another 10 farmers who are seeking permits. 

Lankard said state officials should give priority to tribes and Native people seeking to restore traditional cultural practices. He cautioned that the fast-growing industry could create another “land rush,” in which large corporations from out of state build massive farms in the waters surrounding Native villages. 

“Honor the Indigenous people’s right to the land and ocean near them,” he said. “Let us be the stewards and guardians that we’re capable of being.”

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“The Biden administration wanted to hear from farmers for some real evidence of how the policies of companies like John Deere are affecting their livelihoods,” said Kevin O’Reilly, right to repair campaign director for U.S. PIRG, a consumer advocacy group and one of the complainants. “We presented 43 pages of evidence to bolster their case.”

Currently, when a piece of John Deere equipment breaks down on the job, its owner is expressly forbidden from making their own fixes—only authorized, company-employed technicians have those permissions. And even if you attempted to conduct your own repairs, you’d find it next-to-impossible, particularly on newer, computer-driven models. Deere locks down its proprietary knowledge tightly, and without company-provided diagnostic software and equipment, even getting a sense of what’s broken is virtually out of reach. 

Agriculture is a profession rife with DIY spirit, where farmers are constantly pushed to do their own repairs and hacks because they don’t have the time—or spare funds—to outsource it. “If a piece of my equipment breaks down during planting season, time is a luxury I don’t have,” said Jared Wilson, a commodity corn and soybean farmer in Missouri. “My only purpose in life is to get it working again as soon as I can.”

In the complaint, compiled by D.C.-based litigation firm Fairmark Partners, farmers detail a variety of challenging scenarios they’ve faced, with common themes: lengthy waits to get a Deere-authorized technician to service machinery; further waits for the actual repairs; crops and profits lost in the meantime; and overall frustration that a company making $6 billion annually can keep such a stranglehold on their own ability to do business.

The right to repair movement is far wider than farm gear—there are parallel arguments being made for laptops, cell phones, cars, and complex medical equipment. “It wouldn’t be fair to say we’re the first to make noise,” said attorney Jamie Crooks, managing partner at Fairmark. “We’re just situating ourselves as an important part of a broader movement.”

In fact, the battle for farm equipment self-repair is working on multiple fronts: statehouse lobbying, scattered pieces of federal legislation, even farmer hacking initiatives sharing knowledge of how to crack Deere’s codes. And John Deere is not the only target—with 50 percent of the U.S. tractor market, they’re simply the most powerful. “They’re the 900-pound gorilla,” said Schweitzer. “All the big tractor companies have this proprietary technology, but Deere is the biggest, and they’re also the ones fighting back.”

In 2018, John Deere announced it would begin voluntarily making repair tools, software guides, and diagnostic equipment available for ordinary farmers beginning January 1, 2021. By all accounts, this promise failed to materialize. “The company simply lied,” said O’Reilly. “We don’t think they’re ever going to change voluntarily.”

The FTC granted itself subpoena power to investigate companies like John Deere, an indication that action may be imminent. If it so chooses, the agency can ultimately mandate Deere and other tractor manufacturers to open up their products to home repair (or even independent technicians, currently sidelined from conducting John Deere diagnostics and repairs in the same way farmers are). 

“The five FTC commissioners have all indicated their support of right to repair,” said O’Reilly. “They have the power to issue subpoenas, to access internal documents, to compel Deere executives to testify. And once they make a decision on our claims, they can take immediate action.”

The Counter reached out to John Deere for comment; if they reply, we will update this story.

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Flood it

One promising alternative to water intensive farmland involves simply constructing giant ponds — called groundwater recharge basins — strategically designed to capture and store floodwater underground. These are some of the most likely land-repurposing projects, said Ann Hayden, a policy expert at the Environmental Defense Fund, mainly because they would benefit people, the ecosystem and the broader agricultural industry. Birds and pollinators can always use the habitat, and storing water underground helps chronic depletion of groundwater, which, in turn, helps communities dependent on wells depleted by overpumping.

The San Joaquin Valley is a giant floodplain; before 19th century developers drained the marshes and diverted tributaries for agriculture, it was home to the largest lake in the West. Recharge basins absorb floodwater, create wetland habitat and address the impact of decades of groundwater mining, according to California’s Fourth Climate Change Assessment, a report intended to guide government policy on adaptation.

The assessment also predicts longer droughts, but when wet years do come, the rainfall will be more intense, and recharge basins can play a vital role in storing the water underground.

Farm it (Yes, you read that right.)

Aidee Guzman grew up in the San Joaquin Valley and now studies soil health as an agroecologist. She sees land repurposing as an opportunity, not to take farmland out of production, but rather to invest in a different type of farming.

Guzman’s research focuses on small-scale farms run by Southeast Asian refugees in the San Joaquin Valley. Her findings suggest that their techniques, which involve planting a diverse set of crops, have a wide array of ecosystem benefits. Not only do they increase the number of mycorrhizal fungi, which help distribute nutrients and decrease the need for fertilizer, the plants and fungi also improve water retention and carbon sequestration in the soil. The farming is often less water-intensive, too.

“They are not doing this on healthy, prime farmland,” said Guzman. “They are farming on formerly industrially managed land. We have an enormous opportunity to farm this land differently, to rethink how this landscape can be designed.”

Whatever ends up happening will be up to local governments and the communities they represent, said Shabazian. An effective land-transition process cannot not be prescriptive, he added: Rural communities, landowners and governments will decide what is best.

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