For the past year and a half, you may have heard a lot about butter. It started with a viral video of influencer chef Justine Doiron carefully slathering two sticks of butter directly onto a wooden cheese board, seasoning the thick layer with flaky sea salt and lemon zest, arranging torn herbs and red onion across the surface, and finally finishing the dish with flower petals and a drizzle of honey. This was the butter board, a TikTok trend that quickly reached escape velocity and was featured by The New York Times, CNN, and the Today Show.
On high-end restaurant menus, the once-humble bread-and-butter course snowballed into $38 tableside “butter service,” and 14-inch cylinders of creamy, imported carved-to-order butter earned prominent placement in restaurants’ open kitchens. By early March, New York Magazine could declare that “butter has become the main character.”
A butter charcuterie board with fresh herbs.
Getty Images
What accounts for butter’s spectacular renaissance in American cuisine? According to the U.S. dairy lobby, it’s their own public relations campaign that started the spread. The industry marketing group Dairy Management Inc., has claimed credit for the butter board in industry press, because it paid Doiron as a sponsor at the time of her video. While Doiron’s original butter board video did not include an advertising disclosure — and, according to Dairy Management, was not itself technically part of the partnership — the chef posted a Dairy Management ad two days before her viral post and was part of the industry group’s “Dairy Dream Team” of paid influencers at the time. (Doiron did not respond to an interview request, but Dairy Management told Grist that her contract has since expired.)
Dairy Management, whose funding largely consists of legally mandated fees collected from farmers, is one of a constellation of government-supported dairy marketing groups that also includes the Fluid Milk Board, a beverage-focused entity whose promotion arm has paid Emily Ratajkowski, Kelly Ripa, Amanda Gorman, and more than 200 others to promote milk on social media. (The milk board also recently sponsored a section in New York Magazine’sThe Cut, focused on women in sports.) In recent years, Dairy Management has partnered with mega-influencer MrBeast at least twice, filming him as he toured a dairy farm and paying him to promote a dairy-focused competition in the video game Minecraft.
In perhaps the dairy lobby’s biggest coup of last year, the limited-run McDonald’s Grimace shake went viral after TikTok users began crafting miniature horror films featuring the bright purple beverage. Dairy Management has a longstanding partnership with McDonald’s; beginning in 2009, it placed two dairy scientists at the fast food chain to help incorporate more dairy into the menu. Less than a decade later, 4 in 5 McDonald’s menu items contained dairy, according to a Dairy Management board member. Dairy Management has even funded research to help improve McDonald’s notoriously glitchy milkshake machines.
“My hope is that farmers, when they see a new milkshake or a new McFlurry at McDonald’s, that they know that it’s their new product,” Dairy Management CEO Barb O’Brien said on a podcast in December.
A spokesperson for McDonald’s told Grist that they could not independently confirm the proportion of their offerings that contain dairy due to variations in local menus, but added that the fast food chain makes its own menu decisions. “Our partnership with [Dairy Management] helps McDonald’s ensure the quality and great taste of the dairy-based items on our menu, and deepen relationships with the thousands of dairy farmers who supply milk, cream, butter, and cheese to restaurants across the U.S.,” the company said in an emailed statement to Grist.
Partnering with food companies to roll out products that contain ever-escalating quantities of dairy is one of the industry group’s tried-and-true strategies. In the last couple of years, Dairy Management has partnered with Taco Bell to launch a frozen drink mixing dairy with Mountain Dew and a burrito with ten times the cheese of a typical taco. The organization also assisted with last year’s rollout of pepperoni-stuffed cheesy bread at Domino’s and supported marketing efforts for General Mills’ Oui line of yogurts.
Thirty years after the era-defining “Got Milk?” campaign — itself a project of the California Milk Processor Board — the U.S. dairy lobby’s PR machine appears to be getting a second wind. The point of all these efforts is straightforward: The dairy promotion boards’ mission is to increase demand for their products. They spend hundreds of millions of dollars, collected from farmers and milk processors, on annual research and advertising in hopes of growing the market for dairy domestically and abroad.
Clayton Aldern / Grist
However, as dairy consumption and production continue to grow, so too does the industry’s environmental footprint. In 2019, the EPA estimated that U.S. dairy cattle emitted 1,729,000 tons of methane each year, pollution roughly equivalent to 11.5 million gasoline-powered cars being driven over the same period. A United Nations report found that the dairy sector’s global greenhouse gas emissions rose by 18 percent between 2005 and 2015.
Meanwhile, it’s not entirely clear that all these efforts are helping the average dairy farmer. The number of U.S. dairy farms has fallen by three quarters in the last 30 years, as farmers’ costs rise and milk prices fluctuate. Many small and mid-sized dairy farms have been driven out of business and farmers’ net returns fall below zero year after year. In 2000, farms with more than 2,000 cattle produced less than 10 percent of milk, but by 2016 farms of this size were responsible for more than 30 percent of U.S. production. The diverging trend lines have prompted some farmers to question whether the focus on market growth above all else — which has been accompanied by increasing climate pollution and the collapse of small dairy herds — is still the best policy.
Ever since Congress passed the Dairy Act in the 1980s, farmers have been required to pay 15 cents per hundred-weight of milk (equivalent to a little less than 12 gallons) toward industry promotion programs overseen by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, or USDA. Ten cents is sent to local promotion entities and the remaining five cents go to the national Dairy Board, which promotes all dairy products. (Eggs have their own $20 million program.) Farmer contributions to the national program totaled $124.5 million in 2021.
The Dairy Board in turn sends money to Dairy Management Inc. Milk processors work under a similar structure, paying their own assessments to the Fluid Milk Board, which works exclusively on promoting a category that includes milk, flavored milk, buttermilk, and eggnog. The Fluid Milk Board received $82.4 million in processor fees in 2021. Its marketing arm is called MilkPEP.
In an emailed statement, a Dairy Management spokesperson told Grist that “all dairy research, promotion content and information not only complies with all regulations and standards, but also seeks to help consumers make informed decisions about the foods they choose for themselves and their families, including nutritious, sustainably produced dairy.”
The financial structure of these efforts is complicated, but the end result is that these programs, which are known to farmers as “checkoffs,” bring in more than $200 million each year in the dairy industry alone. As a result, the lobby takes care to note its accomplishments. For instance, in the first eight years the checkoff of partnered with Domino’s Pizza, the average store increased its cheese use by 43 percent.
Other promotional efforts, however, have amounted to slickly-produced flops. Last year, the Fluid Milk Board hired actor Aubrey Plaza to hawk “wood milk” in an apparent effort to lampoon plant-based milk alternatives, which resulted in a formal complaint filed by a group of physicians who advocate for plant-based diets. Another effort involved a Board-funded website featuring Queen Latifah, which was devoted to combating the seemingly fictional phenomenon of “milk shaming.”
‘The Office’ actor Brian Baumgartner poses for a 2023 promotional photo for “Never Doubt What You Love,” a pro-dairy parody news campaign created by the California Milk Processor Board.
Rachel Murray for CMPB / Getty Images
Some recent industry-funded persuasion campaigns have been more subtle. In 2021, the fluid milk checkoff sponsored a wellness weekend for top editors from Bustle, New York Magazine, Marie Claire, and others at a $750-per-night Hamptons resort where they participated in workouts led by a celebrity trainer and “partook in milk-forward meals.” Congressional disclosures indicate that the Fluid Milk Board held USDA-approved advertising and marketing contracts with Vice Media and Food52 in 2021. A spokesperson for MilkPEP told Grist that these were branded editorial contracts to develop milk-inclusive recipe content.
There’s some evidence that all this marketing has worked. A recent USDA report delivered to Congress claimed that farmers earn $1.91 for every dollar spent on “demand-enhancing activities” for fluid milk, $3.27 for every dollar spent promoting cheese, and $24.11 for every dollar spent boosting butter. An independent evaluation by the Government Accountability Office in 2017 likewise found that, between 1995 and 2012, the fluid milk program returned $2.14 for every dollar spent.
After decades of growth, per-capita U.S. dairy consumption reached an all-time high in 2021, though fluid milk consumption has been steadily declining since the 1970s. This presents formidable challenges for climate action: Meat and dairy consumption is responsible for a full 75 percent of the country’s diet-related greenhouse gas emissions, even though animal products account for only 18 percent of calories consumed.
And even setting aside climate concerns, small-scale farmers worry that this emphasis on demand growth might actually end up edging them out of the market. They say that the checkoffs have unfairly benefited a few big producers, supercharging their growth while driving others out of the industry.
“[The checkoff is] set up to be entirely demand-side,” said Wisconsin farmer and former Dairy Board member Rose Lloyd. “You’re not allowed to talk about price, you’re not allowed to talk about supply. It’s a wasted effort.”
Lloyd and her family maintain a herd of 350 cows, and while checkoff assessments represent less than 1 percent of her revenue, she says she feels like she’s paying to reinforce a structure that’s working against her farm and her community. For example, she’s watched a neighboring dairy farm quadruple in size to supply mozzarella to a nearby factory that produces frozen pizzas. The local infrastructure has struggled to contend with the waste produced by all those additional cows.
“We have massive water quality issues,” she told Grist. “It’s a real crisis right now on all the legs of sustainability: ecologically, socially, economically.”
Some farm groups are holding out hope that they can persuade Congress to pass a form of supply-management legislation that limits total milk production, which they are pitching as a win-win for small-scale farmers and the environment. If the government placed a cap on the amount of dairy produced in the United States, the idea goes, such a policy could theoretically ensure that a market exists for all the dairy produced.
A similar model has functioned in Canada for decades. Each year, annual dairy demand is forecasted based on the previous year’s sales figures. The resulting estimate is divided among provincial boards, which in turn distribute production quotas to individual farmers. In exchange for promising not to market more milk than the quotas allow, farmers are guaranteed minimum prices for their products — meaning they’re somewhat insulated from the seasonal price fluctuations and rising costs that plague their U.S. counterparts.
To maintain this delicate balance, Canada prevents an influx of cheap imported milk using high tariffs. In part for this reason, the system is not without controversy. Critics argue that the policy pushes up dairy prices, and the quota licensing system can make it hard for new producers to enter the market.
A farmer moves cows into a barn for their evening milking near Cambridge, Wisconsin, in 2017. Scott Olson / Getty Images
Still, the system has enough admirers that some are hoping it will be adopted in the U.S. Earlier this year, representatives from the National Family Farmers Coalition, or NFFC, flew to Washington, D.C., to try to persuade legislators to adopt supply-management legislation through their proposed “Milk from Family Dairies Act” in the next Farm Bill. The bill would establish price minimums and quota-like “production bases” for farmers. Farmers would have to pay additional fees to export their product, and the policy would raise import fees where possible.
Antonio Tovar, senior policy associate at NFFC, said the proposal has garnered support from environmental groups who see supply management as a means of reducing emissions from feed and trucking.
Nevertheless, Tovar is clear-eyed about the bill’s likelihood of passage, at least in the near term. “I have to be honest with you, I’m a little bit pessimistic about these proposals being included in the next Farm Bill,” he said, citing Congressional gridlock and limited political will to pursue the change.
In the meantime, the dairy checkoff has set its sights on the export market. Specifically, it’s promoting pizza — which one executive called “a strong carrier for U.S. cheese” — in the Middle East and Asia. In Japan, the checkoff and Domino’s launched a “New Yorker” pizza topped with a full kilogram of cheese and served with a packet of seaweed and maple syrup. The New Yorker was subsequently rolled out in Taiwan.
Domestically, there are still some fast-food menu items that haven’t yet been topped with a slice of American cheese or shaken with milk. In a 2022 blog post, Dairy Management Inc., chair Marilyn Hershey pointed out that 80 percent of the 2 billion chicken sandwiches sold in the U.S. each year do not contain a slice of cheese.
The checkoff, she wrote, was engaging with Chick-fil-A, Raising Cane’s, and McDonald’s to change that.
The Environmental Protection Agency unveiled a proposal this week to ban a controversial pesticide that is widely used on celery, tomatoes and other fruits and vegetables. The EPA released its plan on Tuesday, nearly a week after a ProPublica investigation revealed the agency had laid out a justification for increasing the amount of acephate allowed on food by removing limits meant to protect…
On 19 April 2024, the Philippines Supreme Court issued a cease-and-desist order on the commercial propagation of genetically modified (GM) Golden Rice and GM eggplant in the country.
The Stop Golden Rice Network says that the court decision is a victory for farmers and consumers everywhere as the decision goes beyond Golden Rice and insecticidal eggplant and covers “any application for contained use, field testing, direct use as food or feed or processing, commercial propagation, and importation of GMOs.”
The court recognised that government agencies and other proponents of GM Golden Rice and GM eggplant “failed to submit proof of safety and compliance with all legal requirements.” The order remains indefinite until GMO proponents can fulfil all the mandated steps and provide concrete evidence that these GMOs are indeed safe.
A network of farmers, consumers and civil society organisations, Stop Golden Rice emphasises the need to address hunger and malnutrition through securing small farmers’ control over resources such as seed, appropriate technologies, water and land.
The campaign group says:
We believe that GM crops are primarily pushed by global monopoly capitalists in food and agriculture… there is already irrevocable evidence of the failure of GM crops and how it has contributed to further indebtedness, crop failures, hunger and loss of biodiversity.
It states that the court’s decision shows that ordinary people can prevail in the face of corporate power.
The story of Golden Rice
Vitamin A deficiency is a problem in many poor countries in the Global South and leaves millions at high risk of infection, diseases and other maladies, such as blindness.
The agritech industry has long argued that Golden Rice is a practical way to provide poor farmers in remote areas with a subsistence crop capable of adding much-needed vitamin A to local diets. Lobbyists say that Golden Rice, developed with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, could help save the lives of around 670,000 children who die each year from Vitamin A deficiency and another 350,000 who go blind.
Such claims, however, are based more on spin than reality, and, over the years, the interests behind Golden Rice have wasted no time in attacking anyone who questioned it.
As Britain’s Environment Secretary in 2013, the now disgraced Owen Paterson claimed that opponents of GM were “casting a dark shadow over attempts to feed the world”. He called for the rapid roll-out of vitamin A-enhanced rice to help prevent the cause of up to a third of the world’s child deaths. He claimed:
It’s just disgusting that little children are allowed to go blind and die because of a hang-up by a small number of people about this technology. I feel really strongly about it. I think what they do is absolutely wicked.
On Twitter, The Observer’s Nick Cohen chimed in with his support by tweeting:
There is no greater example of ignorant Western privilege causing needless misery than the campaign against genetically modified golden rice.
The rhetoric took the well-worn cynically devised PR line that anti-GM activists and environmentalists are little more than privileged, affluent people residing in rich countries and are denying the poor the supposed benefits of GM crops.
Despite these smears and emotional blackmail, in a 2016 article in the journal Agriculture & Human Values Glenn Stone and Dominic Glover found little evidence that activists were to blame for Golden Rice’s unfulfilled promises.
Researchers still had problems developing beta carotene-enriched strains that yield as well as non-GM strains already being grown by farmers. It was questionable whether the beta carotene in Golden Rice could even be converted to vitamin A in the bodies of badly undernourished children. There had also been little research on how well the beta carotene in Golden Rice would hold up when stored for long periods between harvest seasons or when cooked using traditional methods common in remote rural locations.
In the meantime, Glenn Stone noted that, as the development of Golden Rice crept along, the Philippines had managed to slash the incidence of Vitamin A deficiency by non-GM methods.
So, whose interests were really being served in the push for Golden Rice?
In 2011, Marcia Ishii-Eiteman, a senior scientist with a background in insect ecology and pest management, answered this question:
An elite, so-called Humanitarian Board where Syngenta sits – along with the inventors of Golden Rice, Rockefeller Foundation, USAID and public relations and marketing experts, among a handful of others. Not a single farmer, indigenous person or even an ecologist or sociologist to assess the huge political, social and ecological implications of this massive experiment. And the leader of IRRI’s Golden Rice project is none other than Gerald Barry, previously Director of Research at Monsanto.
Sarojeni V Rengam, executive director of Pesticide Action Network Asia and the Pacific, called on the donors and scientists involved to wake up and do the right thing:
Golden Rice is really a ‘Trojan horse’; a public relations stunt pulled by the agribusiness corporations to garner acceptance of genetically engineered (GE) crops and food… money and efforts would be better spent on restoring natural and agricultural biodiversity rather than destroying it by promoting monoculture plantations and GE food crops.
To tackle disease, malnutrition and poverty, you have to first understand the underlying causes – or indeed want to understand them.
Renowned academic Walden Bello notes that the complex of policies that pushed the Philippines into an economic quagmire over the past few decades is due to ‘structural adjustment’ that included the restructuring of agriculture and export-oriented production.
And that restructuring of the agrarian economy is something touched on by Claire Robinson of GMWatch who notes that leafy green vegetables used to be grown in backyards as well as in rice (paddy) fields on the banks between the flooded ditches in which the rice grew.
Ditches also contained fish, which ate pests. People thus had access to rice, green leafy veg and fish – a balanced diet that gave them a healthy mix of nutrients, including plenty of beta-carotene.
But indigenous crops and farming systems have been replaced by monocultures dependent on chemical inputs. Green leafy veg were killed off with pesticides, artificial fertilisers were introduced, and the fish could not live in the resulting chemically contaminated water. Moreover, decreased access to land meant that many people no longer had backyards containing leafy green veg.
Blindness in developing countries could have been eradicated years ago if only the money, research and publicity put into Golden Rice over the last 20 years had gone into proven ways of addressing Vitamin A deficiency. However, instead of pursuing genuine solutions, what we have seen is pro-GM spin in an attempt to close down debate.
Technology and development
If the discussion so far tells us anything, it is that technology is not neutral. It is developed and promoted by people who want to cement their control over a sector and stand to financially gain from its rollout.
All too often, politicians, corporations and the media equate new technology with ‘progress’. And those who question it, as we see with GMOs, are called Luddites or anti-science in order to prevent proper debate over the social, economic and ethical concerns of rolling out a given technology.
Take the Green Revolution, for instance. There was nothing progressive, inevitable or neutral about its seed, chemical and related infrastructure technology.
Despite it being rolled out under the banner of ‘progress’, it underperformed, was exploitative and has had devastating social, ecological and environmental impacts (see the writings of Prof. Glenn Stone, Vandana Shiva and Bhaskar Save). It served US geopolitical, financial and agribusiness interests and prioritised urban-industrial expansion at the expense of rural communities and a more diverse, healthy and nutrient-sufficient agriculture.
But the Green Revolution became integral to the ‘development’ agenda.
In a recent article on the Winter Oak website, Paul Cudenec says that ‘development’:
… is the destruction of nature, now seen as a mere resource to be used for development or as an empty undeveloped space in which development could, should and, ultimately, must take place. It is the destruction of natural human communities, whose self-sufficiency gets in the way of the advance of development, and of authentic human culture and traditional values, which are incompatible with the dogma and domination of development.
Cudenec argues that those behind ‘development’ have been destroying everything of real value in our natural world and our human societies in the pursuit of personal wealth and power. Moreover, they have concealed this crime behind all the positive-sounding rhetoric associated with development on every level.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in India.
The World Bank, the World Trade Organization, global agribusiness and financial capital are working to corporatise India’s agriculture sector. This ‘structural adjustment’ policy and process involves displacing the current food production system with contract farming and an industrial model of agriculture and food retail that serves the above interests.
The plan is to displace the peasantry, create a land market and amalgamate landholdings to form larger farms that are more suited to international land investors and export-oriented industrial farming.
The demand is that India sacrifice its farmers and its own food security for the benefit of a handful of billionaires. This is all passed off as ‘development’.
It involves the state facilitating the enrichment of a wealthy elite and privileging a certain model of social and economic development based on urban sprawl, centralised power and dependency on global finance, corporations, markets and supply chains. All legitimised under the banners of innovation, technological progress and ‘development’.
There are other pathways that humanity can take. Anthropologist Felix Padel and researcher Malvika Gupta offer some insights (based on their work with India’s Adivasi communities) into what the solutions or alternatives to ‘development’ might look like:
Democracy as consensus politics rather than the Western model of liberal democracy that perpetuates division and corruption behind the scenes; exchange labour rather than the ruthless, anti-life logic of ‘the market’; law as reconciliation rather than judgements that depend on exorbitant legal fees and divide people into winners and losers… and learning as something to be shared, not competed over.
However, we see more ‘development’ being proposed: more rural population displacement and human dislocation, more mining, port and other big infrastructure developments and the further entrenchment of corporate interests and their projects.
While many have a different vision for the future, self-interest and consumerism underpinned by economic neoliberal dogma continue to seduce the masses into accepting the prevailing ‘development’ agenda.
Corporate industrial agriculture is integral to that agenda. A model that took hold half a century ago in the Western nations and which has resulted in nutrient-deficient food, narrower diets, the massive use of agrochemicals, food contaminated by hormones, steroids, antibiotics and a wide range of chemical additives, the eradication of many smallholder farmers, spiralling rates of ill health, degraded soil and contaminated and depleted water supplies.
That’s ‘progress’? Well, agribusiness interests aside, perhaps so for the many private health clinics that have sprung up in India in recent years.
The introduction of GMOs represents a further entrenchment of the prevailing ‘development’ agenda.
The decision by the Philippines Supreme Court called out government agencies and those behind the Golden Rice agenda for key failures. This is important for India, whose Supreme Court is about to decide on whether to sanction the commercial cultivation of GM mustard. It would be India’s first GM food crop (of which there are many more in the pipeline).
Will India’s Supreme Court come down on the side of reason and stop GM mustard on the basis of there being no need for GMOs in Indian agriculture and the well-documented fraud and regulatory delinquency that has surrounded this issue for many years?
Manzanita, with its peeling red bark and delicate pitcher-shaped blossoms, thrives on the dry, rocky ridges of Northern California. The small, evergreen tree or shrub is famously drought-tolerant, with some varieties capable of enduring more than 200 days between waterings. And yet here I was, gently lowering an 18-inch variety named for botanist Howard McMinn into the damp soil of Tacoma, a city in Washington known for its towering Douglas firs, bigleaf maples, and an average of 152 rainy days per year.
It’s not that I’m a thoughtless gardener. Some studies suggest that the Seattle area’s climate will more closely resemble Northern California’s by 2050, so I’m planting that region’s trees, too.
Climate change is scrambling the seasons, wreaking havoc on trees. Some temperate and high-altitude regions will grow more humid, which can lead to lethal rot. In other temperate zones, drier springs and hotter summers are disrupting annual cycles of growth, damaging root systems, and rendering any survivors more vulnerable to pests.
Greened larches stand in the city forest between larches already dead from bark beetle infestation. The persistent high temperatures and the drought also create a special stress situation for the native forest. Jonas Güttler / Picture Alliance via Getty Images
Dead Joshua trees lie in the dust on the eastern Mojave Desert on August 28, 2022. Scientists say that climate change will likely kill virtually all of California’s iconic Joshua trees by the end of the century. David McNew / Getty Images
The victims of these shifts include treasured species from around the globe, including certain varietials of the Texas pecan, the towering baobabs found in Senegal, and the expansive fig trees native to Sydney. In the Pacific Northwest, I’ve seen summer heat domes turn our region’s beloved conifers into skeletons and prolonged dry spells wither the crowns of maples until the leaves die off in chunks.
The world is warming too quickly for arboreal adaptation, said Manuel Esperon-Rodriguez, an ecologist at Western Sydney University who researches the impact of climate change on trees. That’s especially true of native trees. “They are the first ones to suffer,” he said.
A group of people sit underneath a tree for shade amid an intense heatwave on August 31, 2022 in Calexico, California.
Ariana Drehsler / Getty Images
While the best solution would be to stop emitting greenhouse gases, the world is locked into some degree of warming, and many regional governments have begun focusing on building resilience into the places we live. Urban botanists and other experts warn that cities are well behind where they should be to avoid overall tree loss. The full impact of climate change may be decades away, but oaks, maples, and other popular species can take 10 or more years to mature (and show they can tolerate a new climate), making the search for the right varieties for each region a frantic race against time.
In response, scientists and urban foresters are trying to speed up the process, thinking strategically about where to source new trees and using experiments to predict the hardiness of new species. Beyond that, many places are moving past the idea that native species are the most sustainable choice by default.
“Everybody is looking for the magic tree,” said Mac Martin, who leads the urban and community forestry program at Texas A&M’s Forest Service. He went on to say that one kind of tree isn’t enough. We need “a high number of diverse trees that can survive.”
In other words, a whole new urban forest.
In late 2023, that quest took Kevin Martin, no relation to Mac, to the arid forests of Romania. As the head of tree collections at the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, he spent a week hiking through pine-scented forests to gather beech acorns. He brought seeds from seven species back to the U.K. and planted them in individual pots at the botanical garden’s nursery. Now, he waits.
He hopes the trees will thrive in London’s drier springtime soils, which are making it hard for old standbys like the English oak to survive the hotter summers that follow. The research is part of a bigger change for the botanical garden, Martin said, which historically focused on collecting rare plant specimens. “We’re flipping that on its head and looking at what we want to grow,” he said. “We want a good outcome for humanity.”
A group of people trek through a wooded area of Romania looking for trees for the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, that might thrive in a future London climate. Thomas Freeth
Under normal conditions, trees are among the best defenses against heat, and not just because they provide a shady place to rest. As their leaves transform sunlight into energy, trees give off water vapor through tiny holes called stomata, cooling the air around them with “nature’s own air conditioning,” Martin said.
But increasingly hot temperatures can shut down this process. In extreme dry heat, the cells slacken and the stomata close, stopping water from escaping. The point at which this happens is called the turgor loss point, and it’s like the leaves on a houseplant wilting. If a stressed tree doesn’t get water, its leaves will overheat and die before the fall, sometimes across entire sections of the crown. In highly humid conditions, the air holds too much water vapor to absorb any more, leaving leaves waterlogged and beckoning rot. Even if a tree in this condition looks healthy, it can’t cool cities as well as it used to. Making matters worse, distressed plants are more vulnerable to pests like the borer beetle.
Native trees are particularly at risk for climate stress, and in many cities, they make up a significant chunk of urban tree cover. Eighty-seven percent of the trees in Plano, Texas, are native species, for example. That number is 66 percent in Santa Rosa, California, and 30 percent in Providence, Rhode Island.
To be sure, non-native trees have been a part of human settlements for a long time. Plants often spread with human migration, and European colonists brought many species to other continents. Many of these newcomers grow faster than the indigenous varieties, and some have proven better suited to urban areas.
Dead leaves hang on a holly tree branch in London in August 2022 as a result of stress caused by heat and lack of rain.
Mike Kemp / In Pictures via Getty Images
However, flora introduced from far away can also experience climate shock. Currently, non-native trees typically come from climates similar to those trees they now stand alongside. Until the seasons started going haywire, this made them well-suited to their adopted homes. For example, the London plane, a cross between an American sycamore and a plane tree from western Asia, lines streets in temperate zones around the world. Now, scientists are worried about the tree’s future in its namesake city as dry springs and hot summers leave them weak and susceptible to pests.
To find solutions, researchers are studying which trees could do better than those currently struggling in rapidly warming cities, with an eye toward species that have already adapted to drier regions hundreds or even thousands of miles away. In Canada, for example, scientists have matched trees from the northern United States with the expected climates in cities including Vancouver, Winnipeg, and Ottawa. Urban foresters in Sydney are considering the trees in Grafton, an Australian city about 290 miles closer to the equator.
An researcher from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, bends over his notes while hunting for beech acorns in Romania. Thomas Freeth
Thinking of a future U.K., Kevin Martin started evaluating trees from the steppes of Romania more than 1,000 miles away. To find the right places to collect acorns, Martin looked at both temperature and the amount of water available in the soils of Romanian forests, explaining that trees in moist soils in tropical rainforests or near rivers will keep going even in hot conditions.
He will have to wait two years for the acorns to sprout and grow into saplings. Only then can he begin stress-testing the specimens to see if the trees are a good fit for the growing conditions of London in 2050 and beyond. Martin plans to study at what point the trees’ leaves hit turgor loss in dry, hot conditions. But crucially, the trees must also be able to adapt to London’s cold winters, which are expected to stay freezing even as drought and heat waves increase.
Seedlings grow in the arboretum at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
Courtesy of Royal Botanic Gardens Kew
Examining leaf turgor loss can’t be used to assess trees for every neighborhood in a city. Parts of Sydney are facing increasingly humid summers in an otherwise temperate climate. With this in mind, the municipal forestry department used a database that matches a far-off location’s current humidity with what experts expect for the city in 2050. In addition to considering temperature, officials hope to increase tree canopy to cover 27 percent of the city in the next quarter century. They are also mindful that the climate will change gradually and have laid out a phased planting plan. Trees that thrive in the Sydney of 2060 may struggle in 2100.
Such factors are on Mac Martin’s mind as his department updates Texas A&M’s online tree selector, a statewide database that recommends species, to include varieties that are likely to flourish in the future.
Texas is slated to experience a triple climate whammy of hotter summers, colder winters, and changing humidity, with some places becoming intolerably dry and others getting more muggy. It’s a complex weather pattern to plant for — and that’s assuming cities are prepared to adapt once the right species are identified.
As risky as it may seem to hold on to endemic species in the face of climate change, some governments continue to create policies that favor native trees over non-natives. Canada, for example, has funded the planting of thousands of native trees in urban areas through its 2 Billion Trees project.
Botanists like Henrik Sjöman, who oversees collections at the Gothenburg Botanical Gardens in Sweden, say native-only thinking can leave cities unprepared to adapt to climate change. But he doesn’t believe cities must completely abandon native species. He hopes that some species can be saved with a process he calls “upgrading.” The idea is to find trees from the same species that are already growing in harsher conditions, and propagate seeds from those plants. To grow more resilient English oaks in the U.K., for example, scientists could grow them from acorns sourced from western Asia, where the tree also grows. These acorns would come from trees thriving in a more arid region, so they could potentially yield hardier varietals that will one day thrive in a drier London.
Additionally, locale-adapted native species might continue thriving in woodlands like large city parks or green spaces. Sjöman said it’s possible that trees in undeveloped areas will have more time to adapt to climate change, because rainfall more easily soaks into the ground and fills the water table. That’s not the case in highly paved and built-up neighborhoods, where decreasing rainfall hurts trees more.
“Everything’s pushed to its limit in urban environments,” Sjöman said.
That reality has many locales taking a “block-by-block” approach to planting guidelines. Toronto, for example, plants trees from the region’s ecosystem whenever possible, said Kristjan Vitols, the city’s supervisor of forest health care and management. That’s especially true of its iconic ravines, where newly planted trees must be endemic — and raised from locally sourced seeds when possible. But the city is also open to non-native species where plants face harsh conditions along streets.
The rules for Toronto’s ravines are based on the idea that a species will develop traits specific to a location as they grow over many generations. As a result, trees grown from seeds gathered in Toronto may be more likely to blossom when native pollinators are active than seeds from the same species grown at a lower latitude.
Foresters say there’s another valid argument for trying to keep as many native trees as possible. For some First Nations and Indigenous people with deep ties to particular varieties, phasing them out could add to the long history of cultural and physical dispossession.
In the Pacific Northwest, for example, the Western redcedar (written as one word because it’s not a true cedar) is central to Native American cultural practices for many local tribes. Some groups refer to themselves as the “people of the cedar tree,” using the logs for canoes, basketry, and medicine.
A dead branch is visible on a Western redcedar tree in Oregon in October 2023. Amanda Loman / AP Photo
But drying soils mean the tree is no longer thriving in many parts of Portland, Oregon, said Jenn Cairo, the city’s urban forestry manager. The city has faced deadly heat domes and drier conditions in recent years. As a result, Portland only recommends planting the species in optimal conditions in its list of approved street trees. “We’re not eliminating them,” she said, “but we’re being careful about where we’re planting them.”
A similar tactic is being used in Sydney, where the Port Jackson fig tree is struggling, but a close relative, the Moreton Bay fig, is thriving. Head of urban forestry Karen Sweeney said the city is looking at irrigated parklands as potential homes for native species that are dying elsewhere in the city. “We often say we’re happy to do it where we can find a location,” she said.
When introducing new tree species to supplement the urban canopy, they must be sure any newcomers won’t spread invasively — dominating their new habitats and causing damage to native species.
There are plenty of examples of what to avoid. The Norway maple, native to Europe and western Asia, has escaped the bounds of North American cities, creating excessive shade and crowding out understory plants — they’re one of the invasive species pushing out natives in the ravines of Toronto. Tree of heaven, native to China, deposits chemicals into the soil that damage nearby plants, letting it establish dense thickets and drive out native species; it is illegal to plant in parts of the U.S., including Indiana, where residents are urged to pull it up wherever they see it. The highly flammable eucalyptus, native to Australia, has put down roots all over the world, bringing increased wildfire danger along with it.
Urban tree experts don’t expect introduced species to cause major disruptions to native wildlife. Done right, adding some variety to cities dominated by one kind of tree could reduce the problems caused by waves of pests or disease. A patchwork of species could create a buffer against tree-to-tree infection among the same species. While it’s possible that new plant species displace plants used by animals that depend on one kind of plant to survive, those cases are the exception, Esperon-Rodriguez, the ecologist at Western Sydney University, said.
Some native animals do surprisingly well alongside their new plant neighbors. Introducing trees that are closely related to what’s already there could provide additional food and shelter for the local fauna. Animals might already be eating fruit from a new tree that grows somewhere else in their range.
The manzanita tree in my yard is still growing strong as of April 2024.
Laura Hautala
If it thrives, my Howard McMinn manzanita could attract Anna’s hummingbird with its pale blossoms in the Pacific Northwest, just as it would in its native California hills.
For now, my manzanita is a small bush. (Manzanita straddles the line between shrub and tree, which is not clear-cut distinction. The definition of a tree is something that ornithologist David Allen Sibley said “one could quibble endlessly over.”) The plant made it through a cold snap this winter, and I was happy to see the bright green new leaves growing at the tips of its little branches after temperatures warmed.
Eager for a sign of spring, I leaned in close and found what I was looking for: clusters of tiny, unopened flower buds.
Although the EPA’s new restrictions are groundbreaking, they only apply to a portion of the nation’s extensive PFAS contamination problem. That’s because drinking water isn’t the only way Americans are exposed to PFAS, and not all companies spreading PFAS into the environment deliberately added the chemicals to the products. In Texas, a group of farmers whose properties were contaminated with PFAS from fertilizer are claiming the manufacturer should have done more to warn buyers about the dangers of its products. The first-of-its-kind lawsuit illustrates how much more regulation will be needed to rid the environment — and Americans’ bodies — of forever chemicals.
PFAS have been around since the middle of the 20th century, when chemical giants DuPont and 3M started putting them in products such as nonstick cookware, firefighting foam, and tape. The chemicals, ultra-effective at repelling water, quickly became ubiquitous in products used by Americans every day: pizza boxes, takeout containers, popcorn bags, waterproof mascara, rain jackets.
Material is loaded into a mixing truck where biosolids and amendments are combined then stored in climate controlled piles to cure at the Tulare Lake Compost plant. Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times / Getty Images
In February, five farmers in Johnson County, Texas, sued Synagro, a biosolids management company based in Maryland, and its subsidiary in Texas. Synagro has contracts with more than 1,000 municipal wastewater plants in North America and handles millions of tons of waste every year. The company separates liquids and solids, and then treats the solids to remove some toxins and pathogens. But PFAS, thanks to their strong molecular bonds, can withstand conventional wastewater treatment. Synagro repurposes 80 percent of the waste it treats, some of which is marketed as Synagro Granulite Fertilizer.
The lawsuit claims Synagro “falsely markets” its fertilizers as “safe and organic.” The plaintiffs accuse the company of selling fertilizer with high levels of PFAS and failing to warn farmers about the dangers of PFAS exposure. They say an individual on a neighboring property used Synagro Granulite, and the product then made its way onto their farms.
Dana Ames, Johnson County’s environmental crimes investigator, opened an investigation after the plaintiffs made a complaint to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and the Johnson County constable’s office. Ames tested soil, surface water, and well water samples from the affected farms for PFAS. She found contamination ranging from 91 to 6,290 parts per trillion in soil and water samples from the plaintiffs’ properties. The county also tested tissue from two fish and two calves on those farms. The fish tested as high as 75,000 parts per trillion. The liver of one of the calves came back with an astounding 610,000 parts per trillion of PFOS — about 152,000 times higher than the EPA’s new PFAS drinking water limits.
The plaintiffs voluntarily stopped selling meat, fish, and other agricultural products after discovering the contamination. They’re suing Synagro to recoup their losses and more damages they say are sure to come. Synagro, the complaint reads, failed to conduct adequate environmental studies and the company “knew, or reasonably should have known, of the foreseeable risks and defects of its biosolids fertilizer.”
A spokesperson for Synagro told Grist the company denies the “unproven and novel” allegations. “EPA continues to support land application of biosolids as a valuable practice that recycles nutrients to farmland and has not suggested that any changes in biosolids management is required,” the spokesperson said, highlighting the lack of federal regulations.
Workers move materials at Nursery Products, an 80-acre biosolids composting facility in California owned by Synagro.
Paul Bersebach / MediaNews Group / Orange County Register / Getty Images
Ames, the investigator, said that federal and state inaction is the real root of the problem. “EPA has failed the American people and our regulatory agency here in the state of Texas has failed Texans by knowingly allowing this to continue and knowingly allowing farms to be contaminated and people, too,” Ames told Grist.
In response to Grist’s request for comment, the EPA confirmed that recent federal PFAS restrictions do not affect the application of biosolids on farmland. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality declined to comment on the ongoing litigation in Texas.
Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, an environmental nonprofit that helped organize the PFAS testing on the plaintiffs’ properties in Texas, is considering filing its own lawsuit against the EPA for not implementing restrictions on PFAS in biosolids. “They have a mandatory duty to look at what pollutants are in these biosolids and set standards for them,” said the group’s science policy director, Kyla Bennett, who is a former EPA employee. “They have not followed through.”
In much of the United States, groundwater extraction is unregulated and unlimited. There are few rules governing who can pump water from underground aquifers or how much they can take. This lack of regulation has allowed farmers nationwide to empty aquifers of trillions of gallons of water for irrigation and livestock. Droughts fueled by climate change have exacerbated this trend by depleting rivers and reservoirs, increasing reliance on this dwindling groundwater.
In many places, such as California’s Central Valley, the results have been devastating. As aquifers decline, residential wells start to yield contaminated water or else dry up altogether, forcing families to rely on emergency deliveries of bottled water. Large-scale groundwater pumping has also caused land to sink and form fissures, threatening to collapse key infrastructure like roads, bridges, and canals. These local impacts have been the price of an economic model that provides big farmers with unlimited access to cheap water.
At a tense twelve-hour hearing that lasted well into the night on Tuesday, California officials struck a big blow against that model. The state board that regulates water voted unanimously to take control of groundwater in the Tulare Lake subbasin, one of the state’s largest farming areas, imposing a first-of-its-kind mandatory fee on water pumping by farmers in the area.
The decision to place the basin’s water users on “probation,” a punishment for not managing their water effectively, could force some of the region’s largest land barons to pay millions of dollars in fees or stop cultivating huge sections of their farmland.
The vote sets up a high-stakes enforcement fight with some of the state’s most powerful farmers, who have foughtfor years to avoid state intervention on their profitable dairy pens and tomato fields. The state will start measuring water usage and collecting fines later this year, but it has never attempted any such enforcement action before, and there is no way to know yet whether farmers will comply with the fees.
The larger question is whether the state’s policing effort will succeed in forcing a long-term reduction to groundwater usage in the state’s agricultural areas. The success or failure of this effort matters not just for California but also for many other pasture-rich states, from Nevada to Nebraska, that are trying to police their groundwater. If the Golden State can cut water usage without causing political or economic upheaval, it will leave a blueprint for other states trying to manage scarce water.
“Groundwater is one of these collective resources where your pumping has an impact on a lot of other people, and you have to have a mechanism to manage that,” said Ellen Hanak, an economist and water expert at the Public Policy Institute of California, a think tank. “I seriously doubt that the state wants to be taking over basins and managing them, but there has to be a backstop.”
The probation vote for Tulare Lake comes almost a decade after the California lawmakers passed the landmark Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, which requires water users in threatened areas across the state to draft plans for healing their depleted aquifers by 2040. The Central Valley pumps around 7 million acre-feet of groundwater per year, enough to supply more than 15 million average American households, and almost all of it is used for agriculture.
The vast majority of the state’s 89 troubled groundwater basins have already created viable plans for dealing with the crisis, agreeing to fallow some farmland or replenish aquifers by capturing rainwater.
But six laggard basins in the Central Valley have never presented the state with adequate plans for fixing their groundwater deficits. Tulare Lake in particular has slow-walkeditsplanning, even as aquifer levels in the area have plummeted and huge sections of land have sunk by several feet. Water officials from the area have submitted several different water management plans with the state over the past few years, and during Tuesday’s hearing even said they would soon unveil another plan that includes a commitment to use less water for farming. But none of this documentation convinced the state that it could trust local officials to stop the rapid decline of the area’s aquifers.
The probation will force all significant water users in the basin to measure their well water usage starting in July, something that has never been done or even attempted in the Central Valley. It will charge these users a fee of $20 for every acre-foot of water they use, with exceptions for individual households, impoverished communities, and public institutions like schools. That fee is lower than the fees that water officials in other basins have voluntarily imposed on large users.
The basin could exit probation within months if local water leaders present the state with a plan that endorses major usage reductions. One state official said he hoped the probation period would be “short.”
“The reality is that probation is a step in the process,” said E. Joaquin Esquivel, the chair of the state water board. “It’s the forcing of something that the locals aren’t willing to do.”
The major forces in the Tulare Lake area are J.G. Boswell, a massive farming company that has dominated Central Valley politics for almost a century, and Sandridge Partners, another large farming enterprise owned by the Bay Area real estate magnate John Vidovich. These two companies together own tens of thousands of acres of tomatoes, nuts, and dairy farms. They both have representatives on the agencies charged with managing groundwater in the Tulare Lake basin. (A representative for the group of groundwater agencies in the basin didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.)
The farmland owned by these two companies sits atop the former site of Tulare Lake, once the largest body of freshwater west of the Mississippi River. Farmers drained the lake in the late 19th century so they could cultivate the fertile soil beneath it, but the lake reappears during wet years as flooded rivers roar down from the Sierra Nevada mountains and fill the Central Valley. When the lake reappeared last year, Boswell and other landowners erected makeshift levees to protect their valuable crops.
Enforcement of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act will transform this landscape and the rest of the fertile Central Valley. Despite recent investments in more efficient drip irrigation systems and recharge projects that can refill aquifers, most areas in the state will have no choice but to farm less land in order to comply with the law by 2040. According to one study from the Public Policy Institute of California, the law will eliminate between 500,000 and 1 million acres of irrigated crops in the valley, or between 10 and 20 percent of the valley’s agricultural land.
Tulare Lake farmers who spoke at the hearing said the fees could devastate their industry.
“My concern is with the fiscal strain you’re placing on the small farmers,” said Aaron Freitas, a fourth-generation nut farmer who helps run a smaller operation in the basin, at the hearing. “It’s just not encouraging for us to continue our work or protect the future for our children.”
The state believes this reduction is necessary in order to protect low-income communities and critical infrastructure from the devastating effects of subsidence. But enforcing the transition won’t be easy, especially because the major farmers have drawn water with impunity for so long. Some observers worry that the decision to send Tulare Lake into probation could lead to a dangerous confrontation between state regulators and local agricultural interests.
“There may have to be some kind of law enforcement agency out there when the state goes to meter wells for the fees,” said a person who has been closely involved with implementing the groundwater law, who spoke anonymously because they weren’t authorized to speculate about the consequences of the probation decision. “That’s the worst case-scenario.”
This story was produced by Grist and co-published with Slate.
When Henri Kunz was growing up in West Germany in the 1980s, he used to drink an instant coffee substitute called Caro, a blend of barley, chicory root, and rye roasted to approximate the deep color and invigorating flavor of real coffee. “We kids drank it,” Kunz remembered recently. “It had no caffeine, but it tasted like coffee.”
As an adult, Kunz loves real coffee. But he also believes its days are numbered. Climate change is expected to shift the areas where coffee can grow, with some researchers estimating that the most suitable land for coffee will shrink by more than half by 2050, and hotter temperatures will make the plants more vulnerable to pests, blight, and other threats. At the same time, demand for coffee is growing, as upwardly mobile people in traditionally tea-drinking countries in Asia develop a taste for java.
“The difference between demand and supply will go like that,” Kunz put it during a Zoom interview, crossing his arms in front of his chest to form an X, like the “no good” emoji. Small farmers could face crop failures just as millions of new people develop a daily habit, potentially sending coffee prices soaring to levels that only the wealthy will be able to afford.
To stave off the looming threats, some agricultural scientists are hard at work breeding climate-resilient, high-yield varieties of coffee. Kunz, the founder and chair of a “flavor engineering” company called Stem, thinks he can solve many of these problems by growing coffee cells in a laboratory instead of on a tree. A number of other entrepreneurs are taking a look at coffee substitutes of yore, like the barley beverage Kunz grew up drinking, with the aim of using sustainable ingredients to solve coffee’s environmental problems — and adding caffeine to reproduce its signature jolt.
Stem’s cell-cultured coffee powder is prepared, roasted, and extracted. Courtesy ofJaroslav Monchak / STEM
A crop of startups, with names like Atomo, Northern Wonder, and Prefer, is calling this category of throwbacks “beanless coffee,” even though in some cases their products contain legumes. Beanless coffee “gives you that legendary coffee taste and all the morning pick-me-up you crave, while also leaving you proud that you’re doing your part to help unf–k the planet,” as the San-Francisco based beanless coffee company Minus puts it. But it’s unclear whether coffee drinkers — deeply attached to the drink’s particular, ineffable taste and aroma — will embrace beanless varieties voluntarily, or only after the coming climate-induced coffee apocalypse forces their hand.
Coffea arabica — the plant species most commonly cultivated for drinking — has been likened to Goldilocks. It thrives in shady environments with consistent, moderate rainfall and in temperatures between 64 and 70 degrees Fahrenheit, conditions often found in the highlands of tropical countries like Guatemala, Ethiopia, and Indonesia. Although coffee plantations can be sustainably integrated into tropical forests, growing coffee leads to environmental destruction more often than not. Farmers cut down trees both to make room for coffee plants and to fuel wood-burning dryers used to process the beans, making coffee one of the top six agricultural drivers of deforestation. When all of a coffee tree’s finicky needs are met, it can produce harvestable beans after three to five years of growth, and eventually yields 1 to 2 pounds of green coffee beans per year.
A worker picks coffee berries in Karnataka, India. Rising temperatures and erratic weather patterns are forcing India’s coffee growers to change the way they farm, leading to reduced crop yields and concerns with quality. Abhishek Chinnappa / Getty Images
If arabica is Goldilocks, climate change is an angry bear. For some 200 years, humans have been burning fossil fuels, spewing planet-warming carbon dioxide into the air. The resulting floods, droughts, and heatwaves, as well as the climate-driven proliferation of coffee borer beetles and fungal infections, are all predicted to make many of today’s coffee-growing areas inhospitable to the crop, destroy coffee farmers’ razor-thin profit margins, and sow chaos in the world’s coffee markets. That shift is already underway: Extreme weather in Brazil sent commodity coffee prices to an 11-year high of $2.58 per pound in 2022. And as coffee growers venture into new regions, they’ll tear down more trees, threatening biodiversity and transforming even more forests from carbon sinks into carbon sources.
At many times in the past, coffee has been out of reach for most people, so they found cheaper, albeit caffeine-free, alternatives. Caro and other quaint instant beverage mixes, like Postum in the U.S. and caffè d’orzo in Italy, were popular during World War II and in the following years, when coffee was rationed or otherwise hard to come by. But the practice of brewing non-caffeinated, ersatz coffee out of other plants is even older than that. In the Middle East, people have used date seeds to brew a hot, dark drink for hundreds or perhaps thousands of years. In pre-Columbian Central America, Mayans drank a similar beverage made from the seeds of ramón trees found in the rainforest. In Europe and Western Asia, drinks have been made out of chicory, chickpeas, dandelion root, figs, grains, lupin beans, and soybeans. These ingredients have historically been more accessible than coffee, and sometimes confer purported health benefits.
An illustrated advertisement from 1902 for Postum by the Postum Cereal Company of Battle Creek, Michigan.
Jay Paull / Getty Images
Today’s beanless-coffee startups are attempting to put a modern spin on these time-honored, low-tech coffee substitutes. Northern Wonder, based in the Netherlands, makes its product primarily out of lupin beans — also known as lupini — along with chickpeas and chicory. Atomo, headquartered in Seattle, infuses date seeds with a proprietary marinade that produces “the same 28 compounds” as coffee, Atomo boasts. Singapore-based Prefer makes its brew out of a byproduct of soymilk, surplus bread, and spent barley from beer breweries, which are then fermented with microbes. Minus also uses fermentation to bring coffee-like flavors out of “upcycled pits, roots, and seeds.” All these brands add caffeine to at least some of their blends, aiming to offer consumers the same energizing effects they get from the real deal.
“We’ve tried all of the coffee alternatives,” said Maricel Saenz, the CEO of Minus. “And what we realize is that they give us some resemblance to coffee, but it ultimately ends up tasting like toasted grains more than it tastes like coffee.”
A Prefer company display of its “beanless” coffee raw ingredients, including bread, barley, and soy.
Courtesy of Prefer
In trying to explain what makes today’s beanless coffees different from the oldfangled kind, David Klingen, Northern Wonder’s CEO, compared the relationship to the one between modern meat substitutes and more traditional soybean products like tofu and tempeh. Many plant-based meats contain soybeans, but they’re highly processed and combined with other ingredients to create a convincing meat-like texture and flavor. So it is with beanless coffee, relative to Caro-style grain beverages. Klingen emphasized that he and his colleagues mapped out the attributes of various ingredients — bitterness, sweetness, smokiness, the ability to form a foam similar to the crema that crowns a shot of espresso — and tried to combine them in a way that produced a well-rounded coffee facsimile, then added caffeine.
By contrast, traditional coffee alternatives like chicory and barley brews have nothing to offer a caffeine addict; Atomo, Minus, Northern Wonder, and Prefer are promising a reliable daily fix.
“Coffee is a ritual and it’s a result,” said Andy Kleitsch, the CEO of Atomo. “And that’s what we’re replicating.”
An espresso shot made with Atomo beanless coffee. Courtesy of Atomo Coffee
Each of these new beanless coffee companies has a slightly different definition of sustainability. Northern Wonder’s guiding light is non-tropical ingredients, “because we want to make a claim that our product is 100 percent deforestation free,” Klingen said. Almost all its ingredients are annual crops from Belgium, France, Germany, Switzerland, and Turkey, countries whose forests are not at substantial risk of destruction from agriculture. Annual crops grow more efficiently than coffee trees, which require years of growth before they begin producing beans. A life cycle analysis of Northern Wonder’s environmental impacts, paid for by the company, shows that its beanless coffee uses approximately a twentieth of the water, generates less than a quarter of the carbon emissions, and requires about a third of the land area associated with real coffee agriculture.
Michael Hoffmann, professor emeritus at Cornell University and the coauthor of Our Changing Menu: Climate Change and the Foods We Love and Need, said he was impressed with Northern Wonder’s life cycle analysis, which he described as nuanced and transparent about the limitations of its data. He praised the idea of using efficient crops, saying that some of those used by beanless coffee companies “yield far more per unit area than coffee, which is also a big plus.”
An aerial view of a coffee plantation near Ribeirao Preto in Sao Paulo, Brazil. DeAgostini / Getty Images
But there are trade-offs associated with higher yields. Daniel El Chami, an agricultural engineer who is the head of sustainability research and innovation for the Italian subsidiary of the fertilizer and plant nutrition company Timac Agro International, pointed out that higher-yield crops tend to use more fertilizer, which is manufactured using fossil fuels in a process that emits carbon. Crops that use land and other resources efficiently can require several times more fertilizer than sustainably grown coffee, he said. For this reason, El Chami just didn’t see how Northern Wonder could wind up emitting less than a quarter of coffee’s emissions.
Other beanless coffee companies are staking their sustainability pitch on their repurposing of agricultural waste. Atomo’s green cred is premised on the fact that its central ingredients, date seeds, are “upcycled” from farms in California’s Coachella Valley. Whereas date farmers typically throw seeds away after pitting, Atomo pays farmers to store the pits in food-safe tote bags that get picked up daily. Atomo’s current recipe also includes crops from farther afield, like ramón seeds from Guatemala and caffeine derived from green tea grown in India, but Kleitsch said they’re looking to add even more upcycled ingredients.
Atomo beanless coffee grounds include date seeds “upcycled” from farms in California’s Coachella Valley.
Courtesy of Atomo Coffee
Food waste is a major contributor to climate change, and Hoffmann, the Cornell professor, said repurposing it for beanless coffee is “a very good approach.” Minus, which also uses upcycled date pits, claims its first product, a canned beanless cold brew (which is not yet available in stores), uses 94 percent less water and produces 86 percent less greenhouse gas emissions than the real thing. Those numbers are based on a life cycle analysis that Saenz, Minus’ CEO, declined to share with Grist because it was being updated.
(Atomo expects to release a life cycle analysis this spring, and Prefer is planning to conduct a study sometime this year.)
Despite beanless coffee companies’ impressive sustainability claims, not everyone is convinced that building an alternative coffee industry from scratch is better than trying to make the existing coffee industry more sustainable — by, for instance, helping farmers grow coffee interspersed with native trees, or dry their beans using renewable energy.
El Chami thinks the conclusion that coffee supply will dwindle in an overheating world is uncertain: A review of the research he coauthored found that modelers have reached contradictory conclusions about how climate change will change the amount of land suitable for growing coffee. Although rising temperatures are certainly affecting agriculture, “climate change pressures are overblown from a marketing point of view by private interests seeking to create new needs with higher profit margins,” El Chami said. He added that the multinational companies that buy coffee from small farmers need to help their suppliers implement sustainable practices — and he hoped beanless coffee companies would do the same.
Whether demand for beanless coffee will increase depends a great deal on how much consumers like the taste.
I, for one, enjoyed the $5 Atomo latte that I tried at the Midtown Manhattan location of an Australian cafe chain called Gumption Coffee — the only place on Earth where Atomo is being sold. The pale, frothy concoction tasted slightly sweet and very smooth. Atomo describes its espresso blend as having notes of “dark chocolate, dried fruit, and graham cracker.” If I hadn’t known it was made with date seeds instead of coffee beans, I would have said it was a regular latte with a dash of caramel syrup added.
My $5 latte made with Atomo beanless grounds. L.V. Anderson / Grist
The Northern Wonder filter blend that I ordered from the Netherlands (about $12 for a little more than a pound of grounds, plus about $27 for international shipping) had to overcome a tougher test: I wanted to drink it black, the way I do my regular morning coffee. I brewed it in my pour-over Chemex carafe, and the dark liquid dripping through the filter certainly looked like coffee. But the aroma was closer to chickpeas roasting in the oven — not an unpleasant smell, just miles away from the transcendent scent of arabica beans. The flavor was also off, though I couldn’t quite put my finger on what was wrong. Was it a lack of acidity, or a lack of sweetness? It wasn’t too bitter, and it left a convincing tannic aftertaste in my mouth. After a few sips, I found myself warming up to it, even though it obviously wasn’t coffee. My Grist colleague Jake Bittle had a similar experience with Northern Wonder, describing the flavor it settled into as “weird Folgers.” If real coffee suddenly became scarce or exorbitantly priced, I could see myself drinking Northern Wonder or something like it. It would certainly be better than forgoing coffee’s flavor and caffeine entirely by drinking nothing at all in the morning, or acclimating to the entirely different ritual and taste of tea.
Klingen concedes that the aroma of beanless coffee needs work. Northern Wonder is developing a bean-like product that, when put through a coffee grinder, releases volatile compounds similar to those that give real coffee its powerful fragrance, like various aldehydes and pyrazines. But beanless coffee could win over some fans even if it doesn’t mimic coffee’s every attribute. Klingen said drinkers often rate his product higher for how much they like it than for how similar it is to coffee. “With Oatly, oat milks or [other] alt milks, there you see the same,” he said. When you ask consumers if oat milk tastes like milk, they say, “‘Eh, I don’t know.’ But is it tasty? ‘Yes.’”
Northern Wonder cofounder and CEO David Klingen drinks a “Coffee Free Coffee” oat latte. Courtesy of Northern Wonder
Just as the dairy industry has tried to prevent alternative milk companies from calling their products “milk,” some people raise an eyebrow at the term “beanless coffee.” Kunz — the German entrepreneur who grew up drinking Caro and is now trying to grow coffee bean cells in a lab — takes issue with using the word coffee to describe products made out of grains, fruits, and legumes. “What we do — taking a coffee plant part, specifically a leaf from a coffee tree — it is coffee, because it’s the cell origin of coffee,” Kunz said. Drinks made from anything else, he insists, shouldn’t use the word. Kunz’s cell-cultured coffee product hasn’t been finalized yet and, much like lab-grown meat, faces fairly steep regulatory hurdles before it can be sold in Europe or the United States.
The specter of plant-based meat and dairy looms large over the nascent beanless coffee industry. A slew of startups like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods hit the scene in the mid-2010s with products that they touted as convincing enough to be able to put animal agriculture out of business. But in recent years, these companies have faced declining sales in the face of concerns about health, taste, and price.
Jake Berber, the CEO and cofounder of Prefer, fears something similar could happen to beanless coffee businesses. “My hope for everyone in the industry is to keep pushing out really delicious products that people enjoy so that the whole industry of beanless coffee, bean-free coffee, can profit from that, and we can sort of help each other out,” he said.
A Prefer worker lays out fermented base for roasting. Courtesy of Prefer
Different beanless coffee companies are staking out different markets, with some positioning themselves as premium brands. Saenz wouldn’t say how much Minus wants to charge for its canned cold brew, but she said it will be comparable to the “high-end side of coffee, because we believe we compete there in terms of quality.” Atomo is putting the finishing touches on a factory in Seattle with plans to sell its beanless espresso to coffee shops for $20.99 per pound — comparable to a specialty roast.
“The best way to enjoy coffee is to go to a coffee shop and have a barista make you your own lovingly made product,” Kleitsch said. Atomo is aiming to give consumers a “great experience that they can’t get at home.”
In contrast, Northern Wonder and Prefer are targeting the mass market. Northern Wonder is sold in 534 grocery stores in the Netherlands and recently became available at a leading supermarket in Switzerland. Prefer, meanwhile, is selling its blend to coffee houses, restaurants, hotels, and other clients in Singapore with a promise to beat the price of their cheapest arabica beans. Berber predicts that proposition will get more and more appealing to buyers and consumers in the coming years as the cost of even a no-frills, mediocre espresso drink approaches, and then surpasses, $10. A warming planet will help turn coffee beans into a luxury product, and middle-class customers will get priced out. Then, Prefer’s bet on a climate-proof coffee replacement will pay off.
“We will, in the future, be the commodity of coffee,” Berber said.
The Fight Between Carnival and Lent (1559) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder
Introduction
Eleanor Parker writes in her book, Winters in the World, that “in Anglo-Saxon poetry winter is often imagined as a season when the earth and human beings are imprisoned, kept captive by the ‘fetters of the frost’. Naturally enough, then, spring is associated with images of liberation and freedom once those fetters are released.” (p. 93) Even the title of the book, Winters in the World, described one’s age; e.g., I have 30 winters in the world, a recognition of the harshness of the winters which one had survived.
Historically, the transition from winter to spring was symbolised by many traditions that reflected the end of difficult times and the coming of the new season of growth and rebirth. These traditions ranged from the celebration of vegetation deities through fertility rites, and the public rituals associated with Carnival/Fat Tuesday (February/March), Lent (February/March), Easter (fires/eggs/hares) (March/ April) and Rogation Days (April). Many rituals were taken over by the Christian church and given new meanings which themselves are now being secularised.
However, since the development of industrial farming in the early twentieth century, the connection between local farming and spring rituals associated with the land have declined and taken on a commercialised aspect separated from nature. We can see this with Carnival and Easter, while Lent fasting is not practised so much anymore.
This is not to say that the ending of the underlying reasons for carnival and the fasting of Lent; i.e., the finishing up of winter stocks and the privation until new crops grew, is such a bad thing, but our dependence on the current global system of industrial farming is worrying at a time when climate change is affecting food production around the world.
This change is also partly due to unsustainable agricultural methods that are negatively affecting our ability to farm in the future; for example, the spread of desertification, whereby fertile areas become arid due to the overexploitation of soil.
Furthermore, supermarkets packed to the gills with produce from all over the world deflects our attention from looming disasters. In Ireland we know the difference between famine (widespread scarcity of food) and hunger (in Irish Gaelic, An Gorta Mór, the great hunger) … ‘when a country is full of food and exporting it’.
Moreover, governmental measures to deal with land issues may be too little too late, or ineffective, as new laws are simply ignored by vested interests.
The Past
Vegetation Deities and Fertility Rites
From earliest times our relationship with nature had an element of awe and respect that resulted in the belief in vegetation deities “whose disappearance and reappearance, or life, death and rebirth, embodies the growth cycle of plants.” Many vegetation deities were also considered fertility deities, that is, “a god or goddess associated with fertility, sex, pregnancy, childbirth, and crops.”
In Mesopotamian culture (dating back to the mid-4th millennium BCE) religion “involved the worship of forces of nature as providers of sustenance” and which later became personified as a range of gods with different functions. Natural phenomena in nature were seen to be directed by nature spirits, thus:
A nature deity can be in charge of nature, a place, a biotope, the biosphere, the cosmos, or the universe. Nature worship is often considered the primitive source of modern religious beliefs and can be found in pantheism, panentheism, deism, polytheism, animism, Taoism, totemism, Hinduism, shamanism, some theism and paganism.
In some cases the gods die and later return to life, particularly in religions of the ancient Near East. These dying-and-rising, death-rebirth, or resurrection deities are associated with the seasons as allegories of the death of nature and the rebirth of nature during spring; for example, Osiris, the god of fertility, agriculture, the afterlife, the dead, resurrection, life, and vegetation in ancient Egyptian religion, and Persephone in Greece, the goddess of spring and nature whose return from the underworld each spring is a symbol of her immortality.
Persephone, Queen of the underworld, Goddess of spring, the dead, the underworld, grain, and nature
Statue of syncretic Persephone-Isis with a sistrum. Heraklion Archaeological Museum, Crete
Similarly, many later Roman gods and goddesses were the subjects of fertility rites and celebrations. The festival of Liberalia was held on the 17th March to celebrate the spring growth. Liber was one of the original Roman gods. A favourite of the plebeians, he was the god of fertility and wine. His festival, the Liberalia, was an occasion to mark the return of life:
The celebration was meant to honor Liber Pater, an ancient god of fertility and wine (like Bacchus, the Roman version of the Greek god Dionysus). Liber Pater was also a vegetation god, responsible for protecting seed. Again like Dionysus, he had female priestesses, but Liber’s were older women known as Sacerdos Liberi. Wearing wreaths of ivy, they made special cakes, or libia, of oil and honey which passing devotees would have them sacrifice on their behalf. Over time this feast evolved and included the goddess Libera, and the feast divided so that Liber governed the male seed and Libera the female.
Of all the ancient festivals that survived into current times Carnival is probably the most prominent. Winter spirits have been forced out to make way for the new season since antiquity. Carnival symbolised this transition from winter to summer and darkness to light. The carnival was a feast whereby ordinary people feasted on the last of the winter stocks before they rotted. This in turn created the obligatory restraint and fasting until new produce was available. The Christian festival consists of Quinquagesima or Shrove Sunday, Shrove Monday, and Shrove Tuesday or Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday). Therefore:
Carnival typically involves public celebrations, including events such as parades, public street parties and other entertainments, combining some elements of a circus. Elaborate costumes and masks allow people to set aside their everyday individuality and experience a heightened sense of social unity. Participants often indulge in excessive consumption of alcohol, meat, and other foods that will be forgone during upcoming Lent.
The phrase ‘Shrove Tuesday’ comes from ‘shrive’ to be absolved of one’s sins and therefore shriven before the start of Lent. It is also the last day of the Christian liturgical season which in French is known as Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday) the last night of eating well before the ritual fasting beginning on the next day, Ash Wednesday.
Lent (February / March)
Lent begins on Ash Wednesday and lasts around six weeks. In this Christian religious observance, (according to the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke) Jesus Christ spent 40 days fasting in the desert and enduring temptation by Satan. The word Lent comes from the lengthening days of spring and is considered a period of grief which ends with the celebrations of Easter.
Lent observers, including a confraternity of penitents, carrying out a street procession during Holy Week, in Granada, Nicaragua. The violet color is often associated with penance and detachment. Similar Christian penitential practice is seen in other Christian countries, sometimes associated with fasting.
Easter (March / April)
Easter is derived from pagan customs that celebrated the victory of Spring over Winter. They lit fires that helped to accelerate the end of Winter and spread the ashes over the fields to help fertilise the soil in fertility rites. Easter bonfires “have been a tradition in Germany since the 11 century. The Christians adopted the pagan custom and reinterpreted it. The fire was now seen as the light of Jesus, reminding people of the life and resurrection of Christ.” The Christian festival commemorates the resurrection of Jesus from the dead after his crucifixion by the Romans at Calvary c. 30 AD. Easter is also called Pascha (Aramaic, Greek, Latin) or Resurrection Sunday.
Other cultural traditions associated with Easter include Easter parades, communal dancing (Eastern Europe), the Easter Bunny and egg hunting. It is likely that the eggs and the prodigious reproduction of rabbits and hares led to their depiction as symbols of fertility.
Rogation Days (April)
Rogation Days follow some weeks after Easter when processions are formed to pray or beseech (Latin ‘rogare’) God for protection from natural disasters such as hailstorms, floods, and droughts and to ask for blessings on the fields. Rogation processions started at a very early date in order to counteract the Roman Robigalia processions that the pagans made in honor of their gods:
The Robigalia was a festival in ancient Roman religion held April 25, named for the god Robigus. Its main ritual was a dog sacrifice to protect grain fields from disease. Games (ludi) in the form of “major and minor” races were held. The Robigalia was one of several agricultural festivals in April to celebrate and vitalize the growing season, but the darker sacrificial elements of these occasions are also fraught with anxiety about crop failure and the dependence on divine favor to avert it.
Blessing the Fields on Rogation Sunday at Hever, Kent in 1967
As can be seen in these regular prayers, blessings, and processions throughout the Spring season, the anxiety of the people regarding their crops shows a deep understanding of the vagaries of nature and an awareness of their lives’ dependence on the health of their cultivation work.
The Future
Industrial Farming
By the early twentieth century agriculture started to change due to new developments that brought in the era of industrial farming. Previously a wide variety of foods were produced by many small farms. However, that was all about to change as modern science was applied to various aspects of farming:
In 1909, a scientific breakthrough by German chemist Fritz Haber—the “father of chemical warfare”—enabled the large-scale production of fertilizer (and explosives), igniting the industrialization of farming. Synthetic fertilizers, along with the development of chemical pesticides, allowed farmers to increase their crop yields (and their profits). Farmers began specializing in fewer crops, namely corn and soy, grown to feed farmed animals. Chickens became the first factory farmed animal when a farmer decided to try to raise ten times as many birds in a chicken house that was only built for 50. Other farmers followed suit.
Thus followed the new era of industrial farming. The effect of mass production led to the use of antibiotics, selective breeding to increase the size of farm animals, and the mechanisation of slaughter houses.
These developments led to the collapse of the many small farmers who could not compete with farming on an industrial scale. For example, now in the USA “small independent and family-run farms use only 8% of all agricultural land. In just under a century, and especially since the 1960s, agriculture has become dominated by large-scale multinational corporations. Driven by profit, these food giants rely on practices that, by design, exploit and abuse animals, destroy natural habitats, and generate pollution”.
Seed corn is being harvested outside of Bode, Iowa, September 17, 2017. USDA Photo by Preston Keres
In more recent decades industrialisation has led to more innovations in “agricultural machinery and farming methods, genetic technology, techniques for achieving economies of scale in production, the creation of new markets for consumption, the application of patent protection to genetic information, and global trade.”
This type of intensive farming has a low fallow ratio, and a high level of agrochemicals and water, producing higher crop yields per unit land area. Most of the meat, dairy products, eggs, fruits, and vegetables available in supermarkets are produced by such farms.
Costs to the Environment
Despite the current massive production of food globally, industrialized farming has costs that do not augur well for the future. It has been noted that intensive farming pollutes air and water (through the release of manure, chemicals, antibiotics, and growth hormones), destroys wildlife, facilitates the spread of viruses from animals to humans, fosters antimicrobial resistance, and is linked to epidemics of obesity and chronic disease, through the production of a wide variety of inexpensive, calorie-dense and widely available foods.
Regenerative Agriculture
The increasing awareness of the types of problems that intensive farming could be leading us to in the future is turning some farmers back to more traditional methods of farming. Regenerative agriculture focuses on “topsoil regeneration, increasing biodiversity, improving the water cycle, enhancing ecosystem services, supporting biosequestration, increasing resilience to climate change, and strengthening the health and vitality of farm soil.” Regenerative agriculture also includes different philosophies of farming such as permaculture, agroecology, agroforestry, restoration ecology, crop rotation, and uses “no-till” and/or “reduced till” practices often described as sustainable farming.
Nature Restoration and Practice
The negative aspects of industrial farming have come to the notice of governmental bodies such as the EU parliament which has adopted a law to restore habitats and degraded ecosystems in all member states. It notes that “over 80% of European habitats are in poor shape” and “sets a target for the EU to restore at least 20% of the EU’s land and sea areas by 2030 and all ecosystems in need of restoration by 2050.”
However, resistance to positive changes and procrastination deal serious blows to good intentions. The recent referral of Ireland to the EU Court of Justice for failing to halt the continued cutting of peat in areas designated to conserve raised bogs and blanket bogs is a good example. The infringement is one of the longest running infringement cases in Europe, having begun in 2010.
Conclusion
Our long running relationship with nature has benefited from science in the form of the production of plentiful food on a global scale. Yet our deep respect for nature in the past was partly due to our lack of understanding of the processes of biology which led to much anxiety and fear of starvation. All of the polytheistic and monotheistic debates over the influence of gods and goddesses or God have been replaced by scientific processes, but no less anxiety about the future of farming. Farming has always been reliant on predictability as plants are very sensitive to sudden climatic changes such as drought or frost, which can destroy a crop overnight (unseasonal frost) or slowly (extreme drought). Such incidences of crop failures are sporadic if examined on a global scale, but if these incidences multiply rapidly then we will see food price rises and their disastrous social consequences. A new respect for nature is called for that echoes down the centuries when those that did not heed the warnings witnessed the collapse of civilisations.
The art of maple syrup production flows through generations of Dan Potter’s family history.
His great-grandfather bought the family farm in rural Iowa in the late 1880s and cleared the land for strawberries, clay, and whiskey production. Eventually, he transitioned to making maple syrup to add to his whiskey. That started a 140-year-old tradition that has persisted through the Civil War, the Great Depression, and both World Wars.
Potter opened his own maple syrup company with his wife and three daughters in 2009. Great River Maple, in Garnavillo, Iowa, is now among the state’s most prolific syrup producers.
This year’s record-warm winter caused sap to flow early, bringing challenges for the family-run company. They tapped their first trees on Jan. 22 — more than three weeks earlier than ever before.
“When you take into account that the average season is somewhere around six-and-a-half weeks long,” Potter said, “you’re talking an incredible amount earlier.”
This year’s maple sap season began early for many producers in Upper Midwestern states, who experienced shorter seasons. Some credit those shifts to the year’s record-warm winter. Thanks to the El Niño effect, the season ranked among the top 10 warmest.
But Indigenous and non-Native experts say human-caused climate change also is having varied and unpredictable effects on the maple harvest. Farmers and Indigenous communities whose ancestors have tapped trees since time immemorial are altering their practices and planning for an erratic future.
“It seems like from year to year, the season gets a little bit earlier,” said Theresa Baroun, executive director of the Wisconsin Maple Syrup Producers Association. “But nothing, nothing, nothing like this year. If you talk to many older producers, they’ve never seen anything like this as well. This is just a different, weird year here in Wisconsin.”
Climate effects
Even amid increasingly earlier seasons, this year stood out, said Justin Cain, operations manager of Maple Valley Cooperative, of Cashton, Wisconsin, whose members include more than 40 farmers from Wisconsin, Michigan, New York and Vermont.
Mike Duss, who has been processing raw maple syrup, returns with firewood used to heat the apparatus that boils down the syrup on March 17, 2023, at Indian Creek Nature Center in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
Geoff Stellfox / The Gazette
“Most of my farmers were kind of scrambling to get all their taps in and get their vacuums set up,” he said. “Typically, you don’t even think about that stuff till the end of February.”
As of mid-March, cooperative president and maple farmer Cecil Wright and his two business partners had collected about 90 percent of a normal crop — about 100,000 gallons of maple sap. Wright boiled his first barrel of syrup in early February, about three weeks sooner than normal.
“The weather patterns that we’re seeing are typical for the maple-producing areas in more southern areas like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana,” Wright said.
In Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Indian Creek Nature Center tapped its first maple the second week of February, when temperatures already surpassed 40 degrees. The sap flowed. By March 1, though, their taps trickled to a stop. The season was already over — a month earlier than 2023.
Last year, the center collected nearly 2,000 gallons of sap and produced 46 gallons of syrup, one of its best years on record. This year, it collected 500 gallons, just enough to produce 12.
Sap production depends on temperature and microclimates, where just a few degrees difference can make or break a harvest. Flow depends upon freeze-thaw cycles, which generate the pressure to push the liquid up and down the trunk of the maple. As daylight increases and if the weather warms too quickly, tree buds open, ending the season.
“We’re all limited to what nature gives us,” Cain said. “The trees kind of do their own thing.”
New England and the Midwest dominate maple syrup production in the United States. Wisconsin — the fourth-largest producer in the country — netted about 400,000 gallons of syrup valued at $13.5 million in 2022.
Because temperature swings drive sap production, the increased variability might actually increase the harvest in the Upper Midwest.
Wright said the growing sophistication of weather forecasting makes it easier to plan ahead. But tapping too soon presents its own risks. Vacuum equipment and tubing, which can be used instead of buckets on maple farms, can freeze during an unexpected cold snap, and early-drilled tap holes will close over time.
“We have to acknowledge that humans are affecting our environment, and we don’t totally understand everything that’s happening,” Wright said.
In Wisconsin, sugar maples populate the northern and western portions of the state. Experts expect the trees to persist as climate warms, but the sap is likely to contain less sugar. Experts also expect an earlier harvest, but the timing, which has always varied, is becoming increasingly unpredictable.
Additionally, a lack of snowpack, the spread of non-local species and long periods of drought intermixed with heavy rainfall events, could stress or damage maple trees to the detriment of future harvests.
Indigenous communities already are preparing.
Preserving lifeways into the future
The production of maple syrup began thousands of years ago when Indigenous peoples began transforming sap into syrup and sugar.
Abigail Barten (right), trail coordinator, and Gabe Anderson, trail builder, load raw maple syrup into a tank on March 16, 2023, at Indian Creek Nature Center in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
Geoff Stellfox / The Gazette
Ojibwe bands did so in the Upper Midwest, but in the mid-1800s, the federal government forcibly acquired their lands and waters through a succession of treaties. The bands retained hunting, gathering and fishing rights across what’s now called the Ceded Territory: millions of acres stretching across northwestern Michigan and its Upper Peninsula, northern Wisconsin, and northeastern Minnesota.
For Wisconsin tribes, tapping maple trees is a traditional lifeway, or bimaadiziwin in the Ojibwe language. In addition to exercising treaty rights, promoting food sovereignty and strengthening community ties, Ojibwe people harvest from nature as an act of stewardship. If they do not, the Creator will cease to provide those beings.
Climate change threatens those lifeways and in turn, identity.
Some tribes have developed climate adaptation plans to manage natural resources in a way that protects cultural practices and treaty rights, including the harvesting of maple sap.
Some options include tapping sugar maples in several locations rather than a concentrated gathering. Tree-planting efforts could utilize non-local seedlings from sources that are better adapted to future climate conditions or even related species like red maple.
A generous harvest
In Garnavillo, Potter of Great River Maple expected to collect less sap this year, but in some northern Wisconsin sugar bushes, it flowed comparatively freely.
The Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa youth sugar bush, in northern Wisconsin, commenced about two weeks earlier this year, and although the season felt condensed, the trees gave generously. The youth collected 900 gallons of sap during the first two weeks of March, from which they produced almost 20 gallons of maple syrup, or Anishinaabe-zhiiwaagamizigan.
Maria Nevala, of Odana, Wisconsin, and her partner, JD Lemieux, assisted the program.
The two also have their own sugar bush, which they named Ozaawaa Goon, or “yellow snow.”
“We have a lot of little kids running around and every time they say, “I gotta go to the bathroom!’ and I’m like, ‘Go ahead,’” Nevala said.
At Ozaawaa Goon, which she has tapped for about 13 years, they began collecting sap in March, about 10 days earlier. The weather was so warm, Nevala didn’t have to wear snowshoes.
The two use their syrup in community demonstrations, turning it into sugar and candies, and gift much of the rest.
“It’s a real expensive hobby for us,” Lemieux said, jokingly.
As of mid-March, the maple buds hadn’t opened, and they had collected the same amount of sap as previous years, if not a little more.
“What is next year gonna be like?” Nevala said. “It’s unknown. And that could be a good thing or it could be a bad thing. Hopefully, it’s a good thing.”
America’s “fescue belt,” named for an exotic grass called tall fescue, dominates the pastureland from Missouri and Arkansas in the west to the coast of the Carolinas in the east. Within that swath, a quarter of the nation’s cows — more than 15 million in all — graze fields that stay green through the winter while the rest of the region’s grasses turn brown and go dormant.
But the fescue these cows are eating is toxic. The animals lose hooves. Parts of their tails and the tips of their ears slough off. For most of the year, they spend any moderately warm day standing in ponds and creeks trying to reduce fevers. They breathe heavily, fail to put on weight, and produce less milk. Some fail to conceive, and some of the calves they do conceive die.
The disorder, fescue toxicosis, costs the livestock industry up to $2 billion a year in lost production. “Fescue toxicity is the most devastating livestock disorder east of the Mississippi,” said Craig Roberts, a forage specialist at the University of Missouri Extension, or MU, and an expert on fescue.
By the early 20th century, decades of timber-cutting and overgrazing had left the ranching region in southern states barren, its nutrient-rich native grasses replaced by a motley assortment of plants that made poor forage. Then, in the 1930s, a University of Kentucky professor spotted an exotic type of fescue growing in the mountains of eastern Kentucky, which seemed to thrive even on exhausted land. Unlike most native grasses, Kentucky-31, as it was called, stayed green and hearty through the winter. Ranchers found the species remarkably resilient and, if not beloved by cattle, edible enough to plant. Over the next 20 years, much of the country’s southern landscape was transformed into a lush, evergreen pasture capable of supporting a robust cattle industry.
Cattle in Elk Creek, Missouri, submerge themselves in a pasture pond to cool off in between grazing on non-native fescue grass, which can raise a cow’s temperature and give them a constant fever, one of the symptoms of fescue toxicity. Terra Fondriest via FERN
As early as the 1950s, however, ranchers began to notice tall fescue’s disturbing effects: One study showed that cattle had to be fenced out of other grasses before they’d touch fescue. When they did eat it, the cows saw only one-sixth of their normal weight gain and lost eight pounds of milk production a day.
Between the cells in fescue grows an endophyte, a fungus living symbiotically inside the grass. The endophyte is what makes the fescue robust against drought and overgrazing, but it’s also what makes it toxic. When scientists engineered a version of fescue without the fungal endophyte, in 1982, its hardiness disappeared and ranchers saw it die out among their winter pastures. Farmers learned to live with the health impacts of the toxic version, and today it remains the primary pasture grass across 37 million acres of farmland.
It’s a longstanding problem, and it’s spreading. Warming temperatures from climate change are now expanding the northern limit of the fescue belt, and the grass is marching into new areas, taking root on disturbed land, such as pastures. Northern Illinois and southern Iowa could already be officially added to the fescue belt, Roberts said, introducing toxicosis to new farming regions.
“It’s becoming not just present but part of their normal pastures,” he said, noting that he increasingly gets calls from farmers in this region who are wondering what to do.
Amelia Bates / Grist
As more farmers find themselves facing the challenges of toxic fescue, there are two strategies emerging to finally solve the decades-old problem, though in diametrically opposed ways. One involves planting a modified version of tall fescue — called “friendly fescue” — in which the toxic endophyte has been replaced by a benign one that still keeps the grass hearty and green all winter. Another would abandon fescue altogether and restore the native grasses and wildflowers that once dominated the region, as well as help revitalize natural carbon sinks and fight climate change.
For a variety of reasons — some economic, some cultural — neither solution has really taken hold with most fescue belt ranchers. But the debate embodies the agricultural industry in the era of climate change: As ecosystems shift and extreme weather makes farming even more precarious, ranchers are facing tough decisions about how to adapt their land use practices. What is best for business, and will that ultimately be what’s best for the land and for the changing climate?
Friendly fescue hit the market in 2000, developed by Pennington Seed Inc. It looks identical to toxic fescue and behaves almost identically, thus requiring little change to the ranching habits of fescue belt farmers over the last 70 years.
It would seem an ideal fit for an industry focused on maintaining the status quo amid climate challenges. But ranchers have been slow to embrace it. For one thing, friendly fescue, formally known as “novel endophyte fescue,” costs twice as much as the toxic variety — $4 for a pound of seed versus $2. And replacing one grass with another is labor-intensive; a 2004 report by the University of Georgia said it would take farmers who made the switch about three years to break even. Matt Poore, a professor of animal science at North Carolina State University, chairs the Alliance for Grassland Renewal, a national organization dedicated to eradicating toxic fescue. Yet Poore, who also raises cattle, has only converted 30 percent of his fields, preferring to do it slowly. “The fear of failure is a big deal,” he said. “You’re sticking your neck out there when you go to kill something that looks really good.”
Many farmers would like to avoid the risk of total pasture makeovers, if they can. Until now, toxic fescue ranchers have found ways to scrape by, and a parade of treatments have come out through the decades, promising relief from toxicosis.
They can supplement their cows’ diets with grain (an expensive remedy), or cut and dry their fescue and feed it to them as hay, which reduces its toxicity somewhat. They can dilute the toxicity of their fields by planting clover among the fescue, or clip the especially toxic seed heads before cows can graze them. They can try to genetically select cows with moderate fescue tolerance, which can salvage as much as a quarter of their losses.
Poore counts over 100 such remedies. “If you do enough of those things you can tell yourself you don’t really have a problem,” he said. Meanwhile, the lush ground cover that fescue displays in winter is seductive.
An overgrazed non-native fescue pasture in Elk Creek, Missouri. Terra Fondriest via FERN
A lack of trust, too, is a problem. In the early 1980s, when researchers introduced endophyte-free fescue, it was hailed as the answer to toxicosis, a way to save the industry. Ranchers trusted the scientists, and they lost a lot of money when that version withered in the fields. The sting of that debacle persists as researchers try to convince ranchers to trust friendly fescue. “The sins of the past have come back to haunt us,” MU’s Roberts said. “It’s going to take a while to overcome that screwup.”
Every March, Roberts and other scientists travel around the fescue belt giving workshops on friendly fescue to anyone who will listen. He tries to assuage farmers who are worried about the expense and labor of pasture conversion.
There aren’t good numbers on adoption rates, because seed companies are guarded about how much they sell. But Robert says he knows it’s rising. Some states promote it more than others, by offering cost-shares, for example, and hosting workshops like those Roberts leads.
It doesn’t help that endophyte-free fescue — the one that fails in the winter — remains on the market. The state of Kentucky even provides cost-share funding for ranchers who switch from toxic fescue to endophyte-free fescue. And several Kentucky ranchers said they were still unclear on the differences among toxic fescue, endophyte-free fescue, and friendly fescue. Farm supply stores often don’t even stock friendly fescue seed, as it’s less shelf stable.
Roberts noted that toxic fescue exudes fluids that “pretty much destroy the food web,” poisoning insects that quail and other creatures feed on. A 2014 study showed that climate change could increase the endophyte’s toxicity. Friendly fescue soil, by contrast, has more microbes than toxic fescue soil. And water quality is better with friendly fescue, since sick cows don’t have to congregate in streams and ponds to stay cool.
Despite the confusion and slow uptake, Roberts is optimistic, noting the 30 years it took for farmers to embrace the revolution of hybrid corn in the early 20th century. And he can point to some wins. Darrel Franson, a Missouri rancher who remembers the endophyte-free fescue debacle, nevertheless decided to take the risk, converting his 126 acres to friendly fescue. He loves the results. “It’s hard to argue with the production potential of tall fescue and the length of season it gives us,” he said.
Roberts’ employer, the University of Missouri, is betting that a modified version of exotic fescue will appeal to ranchers more than the idea of converting to native grasslands. “What we’re promoting is environmentally friendly as well as economically sound,” he said. “When you seed a nontoxic endophyte and add legumes [to dilute pasture toxicity], that works as well as anything, and we have a lot of data on it. It may take another 20 years for it to catch on, but it’s not going away. It’s too good.”
For decades, Amy Hamilton and her late husband, Rex, fought fescue toxicosis in Texas County, Missouri, the heart of the Ozarks. They watched their and their neighbors’ cows lose tail switches, hooves, and parts of their ears to gangrene. Finally, they’d had enough.
But the Hamiltons didn’t reach for an artificially modified version of an exotic grass. Instead, in 2012, they converted 90 acres of pasture to native warm-season grasses, using their own money and cost-share funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, or NRCS. The effects were immediate; the next year they documented increased conception and weaning rates in their cows and calves. Since then, they’ve converted another 75 acres. A former soil conservationist with a degree in agronomy, Hamilton’s mission became to annihilate fescue, on her property and across the fescue belt.
Amy Hamilton stands in a patch of prairie blazing star in one of the Hamilton family’s native grazing fields in Elk Creek. Terra Fondriest via FERN
I visited Hamilton’s ranch in November 2022. She and her family run about 45 cows and 150 bison. She and her daughter Elizabeth Steele, who helps run the family’s native seed company, walked through a pasture where fescue grew 15 years ago. Now big bluestem, little bluestem, and sunflowers fill the main body of the pasture, and freshwater cordgrass and ironweed decorate a creek’s edge. Quail have returned for the first time in decades.
Unlike the Hamiltons’ neighbors’ pastures, however, this field was not green; most of the plants had gone dormant for winter. Hamilton reached through a thick mass of bluestem and pointed to two diminutive, green plants: wild rye and a sedge species, cool-season grasses that provide a native analogue to fescue — and, crucially, winter forage.
“This is what would have been here pre-settlement,” said Steele, referring to the land before Europeans arrived. “A functioning grassland with different plants serving different functions. Nature’s design is not for monocultures.”
To understand the fescue-native debate requires an understanding of the ecological tradeoff between warm- and cool-season grasses. Simply put, warm-season grasses grow in the summer, harnessing the strong sunshine to grow tall and robust; then they go dormant in the winter. Cool-season grasses do the opposite, putting their evolutionary resources into frost-tolerance. As a result, they tend to be smaller than their warm-season counterparts, providing less biomass and less food per plant for the cows that graze them.
Cattle belonging to the Hamiltons graze on freshly cut eastern gamagrass that was harvested for seed on the family’s land in Elk Creek. Terra Fondriest via FERN
Hamilton and Steele have decided to bet on biodiversity. Instead of a year-round monoculture of fescue, they have a biodiverse mix of warm- and cool-season grasses, along with wildflowers. It’s not as visibly lush as a fescue field, but the benefits to cattle health, soil health, and climate resistance make it worth it. “It is a kind of faith that these prairies evolved for the good of the native species that were here,” Hamilton said.
Even with the leaner cool-season grasses, their native fields produce twice as much forage as the old fescue fields and generate a much higher amount of organic matter, enriching the soil and allowing the pasture to hold more water. A soil-health specialist from NRCS tested their soil’s organic matter content before the 2012 restoration, then again five years later. The result was pastureland that holds up to a half gallon more water than a typical fescue field.
In a warming climate with more extreme droughts — much of the Ozarks was in severe drought last year — that extra water storage can make a critical difference for cattle and soil health. The southeastern U.S., the heart of the fescue belt, faces a future of more intense drought and floods. The Hamiltons’ biodiverse style of ranching helps address both extremes, and they expect their native ecosystems will be more resilient to climate change.
“[The extra water] trickles into our stream through the year, as opposed to running off in a flood,” said Steele.
From left: Elizabeth Steele, her niece Scout Kipp, and sons Otis Ray and Jacob work on making a native flower bouquet near Amy Hamilton’s home in Elk Creek last July. Terra Fondriest via FERN
The roots of native grasses also reach three times deeper than fescue roots, making them drought-resistant as well as efficient carbon sinks. Grasslands are uniquely good at carbon sequestration. Unlike forests, they store more than 80 percent of their carbon underground, where it’s more safely sequestered than in aboveground trees where the carbon can potentially volatilize and return to the atmosphere.
What’s more, intensive grazing of monocultures makes it hard to sequester carbon. A 2019 study, published in the journal Nature,showed that native, biodiverse, restored grasslands hold more than twice as much carbon as monocultures. The deep roots of the Hamiltons’ native species lock carbon deep underground, where it can take hundreds or even thousands of years to return to the atmosphere.
In the years since the Hamiltons converted their fields, the use of native warm-season grasses has gained momentum in the ranching industry. The University of Tennessee — firmly in the fescue belt — opened the Center for Native Grasslands Management in 2006 aimed at getting ranchers to incorporate native warm-season grasses, known as NWSGs, into pastureland. The Missouri Department of Conservation conducts workshops to familiarize ranchers with NWSGs. Research by the center found that pastures of native switchgrass financially outperform fescue pastures.
And Patrick D. Keyser, the center’s director, says native grasses significantly outperform fescue in climate resiliency. Fescue, he says, wants it to be 73 degrees and rainy every other day. “Think Oregon or Scotland,” he said. Native warm-season grasses in the fescue belt, on the other hand, can go weeks with blistering heat and drought without a problem. “To them, the worst climate projections that we’re getting really aren’t a big deal. From a resiliency standpoint, they absolutely win.”
If replacing fescue with natives is moving slowly in general, replacing it with native cool-season grasses, to get year-round forage, remains nearly unheard of. As with friendly fescue, cost is partly to blame. Elizabeth Steele’s “cowboy math” estimates that a native conversion today would cost around $365 per acre, a scary number for ranchers.
Amy Hamilton holds seed from a native grass within a savannah restoration area on Hamilton family land in Elk Creek. Terra Fondriest via FERN
Proponents of native conversion also face a more complicated obstacle than cost as they seek buy-in from ranchers. The debate over how beef cattle are raised is caught up in the culture war over climate change. By some estimates, meat production accounts for nearly 60 percent of the greenhouse gases generated by the food system, with beef as the leading culprit. Even as the concept of “regenerative ranching,” a method of cattle farming that tries to restore degraded soil and reduce emissions, has secured a toehold in the industry, “climate change” remains a political term in farm country, one that is largely avoided.
Ranchers like Amy Hamilton risk being marginalized as “progressives.” So while she believes diverse native grasslands will make pastures more resilient to climate change, she doesn’t mention that when proselytizing to fellow ranchers. Insead, she talks about increased water infiltration, more abundant wildlife, and improved soil health — things that matter to ranchers no matter their thoughts on climate change.
She also tells them that native conversion pencils out. Hamilton doesn’t fertilize her pastures, and she rarely uses hay, as most ranchers do to supplement their cows’ fescue diet. And Steele estimates that, because native pastures produce more forage than fescue monocultures, increased forage and resulting weight gain makes up for the initial conversion costs in less than two years. “The more you emulate natural systems, the less money you have to spend on stuff like baling machines, herbicides, toxicosis effects, and fertilizer,” she said. That extra forage also allows ranchers to feed more cows. So if a rancher wants to expand their herd size, they can either expand their fescue acreage, for $3,000 an acre, or spend $365 an acre to convert the land they already have to natives.
Saving money matters in the fescue belt. According to U.S. Department of Agriculture data, 60 percent of farms in Texas County, Missouri, run a deficit, and every state in the fescue belt loses money on agriculture, except for Illinois, which is largely a crop state.
“Agriculture is so hard that if you don’t do it with your pocketbook in mind, you can cause people to go broke. I don’t want to do that,” Hamilton said.
Amy Hamilton stands in one of the cooled seed storage rooms at the headquarters of Hamilton Native Outpost in Elk Creek. Terra Fondriest via FERN
Hamilton estimates that more than 100 other fescue belt ranchers she’s in touch with are in the process of converting some or all of their pasture to native grasses. One of them, Steve Freeman, co-owns Woods Fork Cattle Company with his wife, Judy, in Hartville, Missouri. Freeman has converted 80 acres of fescue to natives, with plans to convert 180 more in three years. In total, that will make a third of his pasture diverse native grasslands.
“Almost all my inspiration has come from going to [the Hamiltons’] field days every year and seeing what this land could be,” Freeman told me on the phone. For him it’s not just about eradicating fescue toxicosis, it’s about the whole suite of benefits for biodiversity, soil health, and water retention. “I realized we’re not going to get there with the grasses we have.”
Freeman notes the power imbalance between the informal effort to promote native grasses and the universities and beef industry groups that are pushing modified fescue. “There’s no money that backs this,” he said of native restoration. “The novel endophytes and those kinds of things, there’s a lot of money to be made. They’ve helped the universities. I think [Hamilton] is starting to change people’s minds, but it’s been 15 years of doing this.”
For his part, MU’s Roberts hears the subtle dig at his work. “Friends of mine in conservation groups think the university professors are hooked on fescue,” he said. “They’re not. What they’re hooked on is a long grazing season, good yield, and good quality. They’re hooked on criteria, not on a species.”
Either way, change on this scale takes time. The University of Missouri claims that 98 percent of pastures in the state are still toxic, with ranchers slowly opening up to either friendly fescue or native forage. “I’m sure there are ranchers out there that think we’re absolutely nuts,” Hamilton said. “But some of them are interested in thinking about new ways of doing things.”
As we drove out to visit her cows, we passed some of her neighbors’ fields. In one, a herd of emaciated cattle had grazed a fescue field down to stubble. In another, all but a few cows stood in the middle of a pond, trying to cool themselves on a mild, cloudy day.
“These are good people,” Hamilton said. “They’re just trying to make a living.”
For farmworkers in Skagit Valley, Washington, the year passes in crops. In February, flower and bulb season starts. By the end of spring, it’s berry season, which continues through hot and smoky summer months and winds down in autumn. As the weather cools, the work shifts to pruning. There is less work during this part of the winter, and it is harder to earn enough money, but before long…
Palm Beach, Florida, is one of our nation’s true billionaire enclaves, whose denizens include some of the world’s most powerful corporate barons, with sunny oceanfront estates valued at eight- and nine-digits. But for the next three days, the farmworkers who harvest the produce plenishing the menu items and grocery store shelves that deliver their profits, are coming to town.
America’s farms don’t just run on corn and cattle. They also run on cash from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Every year, the USDA spends billions of dollars to keep farmers in business. It hands out money to balance fluctuations in crop prices; it provides loans for farmers who want to buy livestock or seeds; and it pays growers who lose crops to drought, floods, and other extreme weather.
The agency is also now giving money — including $20 billion that Congress earmarked two years ago in the Inflation Reduction Act — to farmers trying to curb their greenhouse gas emissions and store carbon in soil, a key part of the Biden administration’s goal to cut the 10 percent of the country’s emissions generated by agriculture. That windfall of climate-smart farm funding has been widely lauded by climate activists and researchers.
But exactly how the USDA spends that money is more complicated — and contentious — than it might appear, and not simply because Republicans in Congress have threatened to siphon the funds away. A new report from the Environmental Working Group says that more than a dozen of the farming practices that the USDA recently designated as “climate-smart”— including several of the highest-funded ones — don’t actually have proven climate benefits. That finding is especially important, according to the group, because the USDA is likely to spend more money on the same practices in the years to come: Much of the $20 billion authorized by the Inflation Reduction Act has yet to reach farmers’ pockets.
Supporting farming techniques with uncertain benefits “undermines potentially real reductions in emissions,” said Anne Schechinger, author of the report and midwest director at the Environmental Working Group, an environmental research and advocacy organization. “If these unproven practices stay on the list, then a lot of money will go to these practices that likely aren’t going to reduce emissions.”
A USDA spokesperson said the agency uses a rigorous, scientific process to determine what it considers climate smart. Still, the agency acknowledges that not everything on its list necessarily has quantifiable benefits. New additions to the list are provisional — that is, they’re added “under the premise that they may provide benefits” and will be removed later on if those benefits can’t be quantified.
Schechinger analyzed spending by the USDA’s Environmental Quality Incentives Program, called EQIP for short, the agency’s biggest conservation program. She found that between 2017 and 2022 the program directed around $2 billion to techniques that were added provisionally to its climate-smart list for this fiscal year.
“It looks like a lot of money is going to climate-smart practices between 2017 and 2022 when, really, very little of the total EQIP money has actually gone to practices with proven climate benefits,” said Schechinger.
In particular, the group called into question eight of 15 methods that the Biden administration added provisionally, such as installing a waste facility cover or an irrigation pipeline. One of them — “waste storage facility,” a structure that holds manure and other agricultural waste — may even increase emissions, according to the report. The USDA spent about $250 million on them between 2017 and 2022.
The department specifies on its list that only a specific kind of waste storage facility, one that composts manure, counts as climate-smart. These composting structures can reduce methane emissions and improve water quality, the agency says.
“Unfortunately, EWG did not take into account the rigorous, science-based methodology used by USDA to determine eligible practices, nor the level of specificity required during the implementation process to ensure the practices’ climate-smart benefits are being maximized,” said Allan Rodriguez, a spokesperson for the USDA, in an emailed statement. “As a result, the findings of this report are fundamentally flawed, speculative, and rest on incorrect assumptions around USDA’s selection of climate-smart practices.”
Schechinger acknowledged that the USDA doesn’t define all waste storage facilities as climate-smart, but she said that the funding data she was able to obtain through a records request didn’t distinguish between specific facility types and that it “remains to be seen” whether the Inflation Reduction Act money will go only to the kind that composts manure.
Some researchers have argued that more studies need to be done on most “climate-smart” practices — even ones, such as planting cover crops, that the Environmental Working Group doesn’t question in its report — before anyone can say how much climate pollution they’re curbing or carbon they’re sequestering. “For most climate-smart management practices we do not yet have the data and information we need to understand when and where they are most likely to succeed,” said Kim Novick, an environmental scientist at Indiana University.
Most scientists agree that more data needs to be collected and analyzed to understand, say, the nuances of storing carbon in the soil. But some argue that climate change is just too urgent to delay action.
That’s one reason Rachel Schattman, a professor of sustainable agriculture at the University of Maine, supports the USDA’s use of climate funding. She also has confidence in the agency’s commitment to science. A practice doesn’t get put on the agency’s conservation list “without having demonstrated environmental benefits or reduced environmental harm,” she said. “Whether those benefits or reduced harms are related to climate change is something [the USDA] is grappling with in a really meaningful way right now.”
Schattman also said it’s important not to paint climate-smart practices with a broad brush. “Everybody’s farm is different. Everybody’s soil is different. Everybody’s microclimate is different,” she said. An irrigation pipeline in the Arizona desert might have a different effect on water and energy use than one on a farm in Vermont. Even if a practice here or there doesn’t reduce emissions or store carbon in the soil exactly how the USDA intends, Schattman said the influx of funding still could move agriculture in the right direction.
The Inflation Reduction Act created “a once in a lifetime opportunity for a lot of farmers,” she said. “I think it is going to make a lot of things possible that people couldn’t do before.”
In August 2020, Maria do Espirito Santo was returning from her family’s field in the savanna of northeast Brazil when she saw smoke billowing from her thatched hut.
Do Espirito Santo raced back to find that her home and those of her neighbors had been burnt to the ground by a group of armed men, some of them local police. They felled fruit trees, ripped up crops with tractors, and forced the small community of Bom Acerto from the lands where they had grown cassava, corn, and beans for generations. Afterward the families found out a businessman from Tocantins, the state she lives in, had laid claim to 10,872 acres of public land abutting 9,884 acres of land he had purchased, which includes the land that her family has been living on for generations. They suspect that he hired the men and bribed the police to come and terrorize the families so that they would leave.
“When we arrived, we found several dozen people, mainly women and children, huddling under the one remaining structure that cast any shade,” said Maciana Veira, president of the Sindicato dos Produtores Rurais de Balsas, the local rural workers association. Veira, in her decades of work for the association, has more accounts of land being stolen from rural communities than she can count.
Maria do Espírito Santo and her husband stand in front of their former house, which was destroyed by gunmen who they suspect were hired by a local farmer to illegally claim their land. Ingrid Barros / Grist
Brazil possesses vast tracts of lands which exist in the public domain. Traditional peoples, small-scale farmers, quilombolas, and other homesteaders have the legal right to lay claim to these lands, but in rural Brazil, many communities like Bom Acerto still lack formal deeds. Those seeking to claim that land — often business owners or corporations — reportedly hire armed men to intimidate and run off residents. They then clear the land of trees or native vegetation, either seeding pasture for cows or preparing it to grow crops like soy, cotton, or corn. Eventually, they gain formal ownership through legal maneuvers or by forging land titles, sometimes by leaving falsified titles in a box with crickets, whose excreta makes the papers seem older than they are. It’s such a common practice that it’s picked up its own noun: grilagem, derived from the Portuguese for cricket, grilo.
Land grabbing is not a new phenomenon in Brazil, but it’s especially rampant in the 337 municipalities in the northern Cerrado that make up an area known as Matopiba (a portmanteau of the states Maranhao, Tocantins, Piaui, and Bahia.) The Cerrado, the world’s most biodiverse savanna, stretches 1.2 million square miles up the spine of Brazil, covering a fifth of the country. Squished between the Amazon rainforest on one side and the Atlantic rainforest on the other, it has been dubbed “the underground forest” because so much of its biomass is found in the long, thick roots that funnel water down into aquifers and store impressive amounts of carbon. Deforestation and land use change is Brazil’s single largest source of greenhouse gas emissions, so conserving the Cerrado, and its role as a carbon sink, is crucial for Brazil to meet its Paris Agreement goals. Much of the biome’s last remaining tracks of native Cerrado vegetation are in Matopiba, the country’s last agricultural frontier.
In Matopiba, some 1.7 million acres of native vegetation were ripped up and turned into soy plantations between 2013 and 2021, helping to turn Brazil into the world’s largest producer and exporter of soybeans. Most of the beans are used to fatten livestock in Europe and China, the two biggest buyers of Brazil’s crop. The usual narrative is that the destruction of the Cerrado is closely linked to the growing demand for meat and dairy. The full story, however, is more tangled and wider in scope: Behind this rapid and widespread transformation are some of the world’s largest investment funds that have put billions into buying farmland in the Cerrado, including pension funds in Sweden and Germany, Harvard University’s endowment, and the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association, better known as TIAA, the $1.2 trillion pension fund for 5 million people across the United States.
Thanks in part to its investments in Brazilian farmland, TIAA has become one of the largest farmland investors in the world. Through its wholly owned subsidiary, Nuveen Natural Capital, the fund has accumulated some 3 million acres across 10 countries. It owns stakes in water-hungry almond and pistachio orchards in drought-stricken California, Macadamia nut farms and row crops in Australia, and vast swaths around the Mississippi Delta. But its investments in Brazil, where it manages 1 million acres, are some of its most controversial holdings.
Around the time of the financial crisis in 2008, TIAA and other investment funds started buying up farmland in Brazil, eventually honing in on the northern Cerrado, specifically Matopiba, where environmental protections are thin and land ownership is often in disputed. According to environmental organizations, academic researchers, satellite images, and media reports, many of the farms TIAA acquired are connected to land grabbing and deforestation. TIAA has regularly denied any knowledge of these practices, but emails and other leaked documents obtained from a data breach last year reportedly showed that as far back as 2010, TIAA was aware that some of the land it purchased was bought from people publicly accused of stealing it — groups like those that destroyed do Espirito Santo’s village of Bom Acerto. Despite an almost decades-long campaign by the Brazilian nonprofit The Network for Social Justice and Human Rights, along with environmental advocacy groups like ActionAid and Friends of the Earth, to get TIAA and other foreign funds to divest from their Brazilian landholdings, TIAA continues to raise money to invest in the region.
The New York offices of financial services firm TIAA-CREF as seen in January 2009.
Mark Lennihan / AP Photo
Connecting specific farms to specific investment funds is a complicated task, said Lucas Seghezzo, a professor of environmental sociology at the National University of Salta, Argentina, who studies large-scale land acquisitions. Investment funds often keep their assets private when they aren’t stocks and bonds, and following the money can lead to a maze of shell companies and chains of subsidiaries. Researchers wind up stuck in dead ends. Deforestation and land clearing is a complex process, and not every instance is directly connected to pension funds or investors. But experts have traced the massive influx of foreign capital in Matopiba to skyrocketing land prices in the region, which, in turn, has fueled land grabbing, deforestation, and violent conflicts, all with devastating consequences for local communities and the land itself.
“There’s a lot of evidence that investors who buy land in Latin America, for instance, but also in Southeast Asia, are responsible for deforestation — directly or indirectly,” said Seghezzo, who is also a scientific advisor to the Land Matrix Initiative, an independent monitoring initiative. “There is a clear correlation between land acquisitions and deforestation, especially those for agriculture.”
Bom Acerto is a two-hour drive from Balsas, an agricultural town in the heart of Matopiba. The route there is largely unpaved, passing over hills and through miles of scraggly shrubs and waving golden grass. The road dips occasionally from flat stretches of savanna into lush forests wedged into tiny riverine valleys. Far less known than the Amazon rainforest that borders the savanna to the north and west, the Cerrado is Brazil’s second-largest biome, covering an area larger than Germany, France, England, Italy, and Spain combined. It’s one of the oldest and richest ecosystems on Earth, with 5 percent of the planet’s biodiversity.
An aerial view of native Cerrado in western Bahia state, Brazil. Nelson Almeida / AFP via Getty Images
Much of the Cerrado has been plowed under for agriculture, especially in the southern and central parts of the savanna, which are closer to large urban centers like Sao Paulo and Brasilia, the country’s capital. Some of the last remaining swaths of intact Cerrado vegetation remain in the north, around places like Bom Acerto, which until the beginning of the 20th century had been largely occupied by peasant, Afro-Brazilian, and Indigenous communities.
Fabio Pitta has been studying the expansion of agriculture in the Cerrado since he was a university student researching sugarcane companies in the mid-2000s. Rising oil and gas prices and fossil fuel companies’ desire to appear “green” had stoked investments in sugarcane, which could be turned into ethanol when gas prices were high and used as sugar when they were low. The size of farms in the region was steadily growing, as were the number of laborers literally working themselves to death. Pitta set out to study this dynamic, focusing on Cosan, Brazil’s largest producer of sugarcane. He was puzzled to find that the company had started buying up large tracts of land in the Cerrado around 2008, thousands of miles from its home base near Sao Paulo in the southern Cerrado, through an investment arm it created called Radar Propriedades Agrícolas, or simply Radar.
More puzzling still was the identity of Radar’s second-largest shareholder, an investment fund run by what was then known as TIAA-CREF, the pension giant in New York City that manages retirement funds for millions of American teachers and professors.
Pitta was witnessing the convergence of two global crises. The U.S. financial crisis that started in 2007 sent big investors scrambling to find assets that weren’t tied to American real estate. Farmland, once considered a backwater and risky investment, gained overnight appeal. The surge in prices of basic staples that had started in 2005 had, by 2008, led to a fully fledged global food crisis. The commodities that could be grown on farmland suddenly became much more valuable, too. “Buying farmland was like buying gold with yield,” said Roman Herre, an agricultural expert at FIAN Germany, a human rights organization that advocates for the right to food. And global investors, Herre said, rushed to buy up whatever farmland they could.
An agriculture field abuts native Cerrado in western Bahia state, Brazil. Nelson Almeida / AFP via Getty Images
More than 100 new investment funds specializing in food and agriculture were created between 2005 and 2008, and agricultural investment magazines and conferences ballooned. Famous investors like George Soros wanted in. Whereas in 2008, the annual expansion of farmland hovered around 9.9 million acres a year, by the middle of 2009, around 138 million acres worth of large-scale farmland deals had been announced, many of them larger than 500,000 acres, or two and a half times the size of New York City. It was dubbed “a new global land rush.”
“In the beginning, it was really more like a Wild West story,” Herre said. And one of the biggest players was TIAA, which went from having virtually no farmland in 2007 to holding just shy of 2 million acres worldwide within a decade.
But it wasn’t just teachers in the United States whose savings were providing the capital for the land rush. Dutch, Canadian, and Swedish public employees, along with German physicians, were also funding it. In 2012, TIAA launched its first international farmland fund called TIAA-CREF Global Agriculture LLC with $2 billion primarily from pension funds to invest in farmland, primarily in Brazil, Australia, and the U.S. The roster included Swedish AP2, then one of the largest pension funds in northern Europe, Germany’s Ärzteversorgung Westfalen-Lippe, a pension fund for physicians, and the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, a public and private pension fund manager with around $176 billion in assets at the time. TIAA launched a second fund in 2015, the $3 billion TIAA-CREF Global Agriculture II LLC.
Figuring out exactly where these investments were located was difficult. Pension funds and other private investors don’t have to disclose precisely where their farmland holdings are, and investors often use complex business structures to buy farmland — particularly in places like Brazil, where foreign land ownership is legally restricted. Much of the data on TIAA’s investments comes from organizations like The Network for Social Justice and Human Rights, which Pitta now works for, that have traced the money through a messy web of subsidiaries and land acquisition companies, of which TIAA owns more than seven in Brazil, according to TIAA’s 2021 statements.
In 2016, the investment data company Preqin estimated that since 2006, more than 100 unlisted funds had raised approximately $22 billion in capital globally to invest in agriculture and farmland. TIAA’s investments, by far the biggest of any investor, made up almost a quarter of those.
“TIAA is really the vanguard of pension funds making this type of investment,” said Gustavo Oliveira, an assistant professor of geography at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, who has been studying foreign investments in Brazil. “The important role that TIAA plays is not just on its own, because it’s got deep pockets and it invests in a lot of land. It is that once TIAA has ventured deep, it then becomes possible for smaller pension funds and other investors to follow in its wake.”
The northern Cerrado is crisscrossed by a handful of paved highways, lined on all sides by soybeans, that connect large agricultural hubs in Matopiba. In the rainy season, it’s a sea of bright green as far as the eye can see. Trucks thunder down the highways to and from large grain silos, many of them owned by international agricultural giants such as Bunge and Cargill which, alongside a few other companies, control more than half of the soy trade in Brazil. In the dry season, the soil lies bare and dusty, large piles of stark white lime piled up to one side, applied liberally to coax the otherwise nutrient-poor, acidic soil into producing what is now one of Brazil’s most lucrative exports. Over the last two decades, soybean production in Brazil has more than quadrupled.
A factory for Dutch agribusiness and food company Bunge in western Bahia state, Brazil, on September 25, 2023. Nelson Almeida / AFP via Getty Images
The farms are so large that their office complexes lie miles away from the highway, often on the iconic flat-top mountains called chapadas, ancient sandstone and quartzite formations formed tens of millions of years ago. While the rusty signs on the farms are largely in Portuguese, some of the owners are global. Between 2008 and 2020, Harvard Management Company, which manages Harvard University’s endowment fund, amassed more than 40 rural properties covering approximately 1 million acres, an area twice the size of all the farmland in the school’s home state of Massachusetts. BrasilAgro, whose shareholders include the Utah Retirement Systems, the Los Angeles City Employees Retirement System, and the Public School and Education Employee Retirement Systems of Missouri, owns a total of 741,000 acres in Matopiba. SLC Agrícola, one of the country’s largest soy producers and TIAA’s largest farm operator, and its sister organization SLC Landco, a joint venture with the British private equity fund Valiance, collectively bought up more than 450,000 acres of farms in Matopiba between 2011 and 2017.
While soybean farming has been expanding in the Cerrado for several decades, the relatively recent spread of soy into Matopiba, which has attracted the bulk of foreign farmland investment, stands out. “Matopiba is a relatively small portion of the Cerrado overall, but it is without a doubt the main expansion frontier for soy in the region,” said Lisa Rausch, a scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who for the last two decades has studied how agricultural production leads to forest loss in Brazil.
Elsewhere in the Cerrado, soybeans tend to be grown on already converted land, often pasture. But in Matopiba, the vast majority of new farmland created since the turn of the century has been from previously intact Cerrado vegetation. According to Trase, a group that tracks global supply chains, three-quarters of all the deforestation from soybean production in the entire Cerrado from 2005 to 2016 happened in Matopiba alone. “One of the main features of soybean expansion in Matopiba has been its association with the clearing of native vegetation,” Rausch said.
Based on data obtained from the Network for Social Justice and Human Rights and Trase, Grist mapped the municipalities of farms that had significant investments from foreign pensions funds with information on which municipalities had the highest deforestation risk from soy farming. The results revealed that farms with significant foreign investment owned thousands to tens of thousands of acres in nine of the 10 municipalities that have experienced the most deforestation from soy from 2008 to 2020.
Grist / Clayton Aldern
The loss of habitat threatens the region’s biodiversity, and consequently, the livelihoods of locals, many of whom depend on the forests and shrublands of the Cerrado for food and medicine. Alongside deforestation and foreign farmland investment, violent land conflicts in the region have also ballooned. Matopiba saw an overall 56 percent increase in reported land conflicts between 2012 and 2016, in contrast to a national increase of 21 percent. According to the Pastoral Land Commission, an organization affiliated with the Catholic Church that tracks conflicts in Brazil’s countryside, Bahia and Maranhao — both in Matopiba — ranked first and second among the states with the highest number of conflicts in 2022.
To be sure, some funds have dropped their investments in companies that deal in soy in the Brazilian Cerrado, some citing deforestation risk, others based on what they claim are financial reasons. The Norwegian Government Pension Fund and the Danish insurer Danica Pension divested their shares from SLC Agricola in 2017 and 2021, respectively. And last year, Germany’s pension fund for physicians in Westphalia-Lippe divested its shares from TIAA’s Global Agriculture Funds. But others have jumped in: In 2022, the Board of the Los Angeles County Employees Retirement Association committed around $500 million to TIAA-CREF Global Agriculture Funds, which encompasses its Brazilian farms.
The rapid expansion of large farms, funded by an influx of foreign capital, has reshaped the Cerrado’s landscape. The long, thick roots of vegetation store billions of metric tons of carbon, and have long funneled the region’s rainwater into aquifers. Two-thirds of Brazil’s rivers originate here, and nine out of 10 Brazilians use electricity generated by water originating in the Cerrado, according to the World Wildlife Fund. Now, so many trees and shrubs have been ripped out for soy fields, cattle, and sugarcane plantations that nearly half of the biome is cropland or pasture. Scientists predict that if agricultural expansion continues unabated, the biome could collapse by 2030, threatening the region’s drinking water as well as the thousands of unique species native to the world’s most biodiverse tropical savanna.
The soya boom is far from over. Brazil is expected to plant roughly 30 million more acres of soy between 2021 and 2050, according to one study. Of that, 27 million acres are destined for the Cerrado, and 86 percent of that is projected to be planted in Matopiba. But this is already coming at a cost. “The loss of native vegetation in the Cerrado has very serious consequences environmentally,” Rausch said. That loss has disrupted the region’s water cycle and has increased the frequency of extremely hot days in places like Matopiba, leading to more severe droughts. Climate change is likely to make all these problems worse.
Tractors work in an agricultural field in western Bahia state, Brazil, on September 29, 2023. Nelson Almeida / AFP via Getty Images
TIAA has previously said it invests responsibly and always carries out thorough due diligence on land purchases. But last year, a hacker group obtained 100 gigabytes of files from Cosan, Brazil’s sugarcane giant, through a ransomware attack, a trove that included sales documents, land holding records, legal papers, and emails, which were then handed over to Distributed Denial of Secrets, an activist group. They reportedly revealed that both Cosan and TIAA ignored red flags when buying Brazilian farms — even purchasing land from people who had already been publicly accused of stealing it.
Grist reached out to TIAA and its subsidiary Nuveen to respond to the information uncovered in the data breach and asked how the pension fund incorporates sustainability into its investment decisions. A spokesperson replied that TIAA and Nuveen evaluate the impact of their investments on local communities, make sure that the land they acquire and hold meets all government requirements for forest and natural habitat protection, and also ensure that their investments comply with local rules and regulations.
“Any suggestion that TIAA has engaged in improper business practices is without merit,” the spokesperson wrote. “In every country in which we operate, including Brazil, we follow the requirements of all laws and adhere to strong ethical guidelines in our investments. And we expect the government to investigate and prosecute instances of land-grabbing wherever it occurs.”
News of TIAA’s farmland holdings in Brazil first gained widespread attention in 2015 when a smattering of media reports began to lay out the extent of TIAA’s investments in the Cerrado. But it was a report in 2018 that detailed the scope and scale of Harvard endowment’s extensive landholdings in Brazil, written by the Network for Human Rights and Social Justice and the international nonprofit GRAIN, that gave the issue traction in the United States. The news spurred the growing fossil fuel divestment movement at Harvard to include land grabbing in its platform, forming the “Stop Harvard Land Grabs” campaign. Brazilian authorities were also starting to take notice, scrutinizing companies backed by Harvard’s endowment and TIAA.
In 2020, a small activist group called TIAA Divest tapped Caroline Levine, an English professor at Cornell University, to help lead a campaign to urge TIAA to get rid of its investments in fossil fuels and other environmentally destructive industries. Earlier that year, Levine had successfully helped win the campaign to get Cornell to divest its own endowment from fossil fuels, and she was riled up by what she saw as the blatant disregard for the environment and human rights that accompanied many of the investment decisions universities were making.
A protester holds a sign at a 2022 rally in New York City calling on TIAA to make good on anti-deforestation commitments.
Erik McGregor / LightRocket via Getty Images
“I had this idea that financiers were sort of unaware of what was happening, that there’s a kind of distance between the investment and what’s going on on the ground,” Levine said. “But the more I looked at it, the more it seemed like, ‘No, there’s a lot of conscious bad action happening.’”
Levine and a dozen other professors started researching TIAA’s investments, but were taken aback by the sheer number of shell companies and the opaque web of financial flows. “I’m a researcher, but this really wasn’t my ballpark,” she said. They brought on Tom Sanzillo, a former New York state comptroller then working with the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, who talked them through the financial hurdles. After two years of gathering evidence, they filed an 87-page complaint in October 2022 to the United Nations-sponsored Principles for Responsible Investment against TIAA and its subsidiary, Nuveen. Nearly 300 academics, researchers, and TIAA account holders signed on, including the climate scientist Michael Mann, the American academic Judith Butler, and the writer and activist Bill McKibben.
“TIAA/Nuveen’s climate commitments are contradicted by its substantial investments in fossil fuels and commodities linked to deforestation, which undermine the climate objectives established in the Paris Agreement,” the complaint states. “TIAA/Nuveen’s ongoing investments in coal, oil, and gas, as well as land-based investments linked to deforestation and illegality, are financially, morally, and socially irresponsible.”
TIAA was one of the founding signatories of Principles for Responsible Investment, or PRI, in 2006, which aimed to help investors make their funds more sustainable. The complaint argued that the $78 billion worth of investments in fossil fuels, as well as various environmental and human rights abuses connected to their large farm holdings in the Brazilian Cerrado, violated PRI’s principles, as well as TIAA’s own climate pledges. It charged that TIAA was misleading investors by advertising its funds as climate-friendly, making the case that many of its products marketed as being aligned with ESG principles — shorthand for environmentally and socially responsible — allegedly had higher exposure than non-ESG funds to fossil fuels and deforestation, the top two sources of greenhouse gas emissions in the world.
PRI signatories commit to six principles, including incorporating ESG matters into decision-making. While PRI has a serious violations policy, it is only sparingly applied, Levine said. In 2021, the Save the Dawson project in Australia filed a complaint to PRI about Liberty Mutual’s financing of a coal mine, which resulted in the global insurer canceling their financing. In October 2022, PRI said that it had reviewed Nuveen’s response to the allegations and “decided that the allegations do not constitute a breach of the policy. As such, there is no reason to change Nuveen’s status as a PRI signatory,” they wrote in an email response to Levine.
“We knew it was a long shot,” Levine said. Still, she considered the result disappointing.
University students, professors, and pension holders aren’t the only ones attempting to highlight the connection between foreign investment funds, deforestation, and land grabbing. Traditional communities and peasant farmers in Matopiba have protested in front of government agencies and blocked roads to bring attention to the problem. Last June, a delegation of leaders from several rural communities in Piaui handed a letter to government authorities asking for the state to protect them from ongoing violence and violations of their rights.
“Human rights violations in Piaui caused by land grabbing, deforestation, fumigation with toxic agrochemicals and other pollutants, as well as physical and psychological violence against rural communities, have been widely documented and brought to the attention of state and federal authorities,” the letter said. “The perpetrators of the violence are usually individuals linked to local land grabbers and/or agribusinesses, but research has shown that international investors play a key role in encouraging human rights violations and environmental crimes in the region.”
A tree that has been pulled up with industrial-strength chains is left to dry in the sun near Bom Acerto. Ingrid Barros / Grist
Around 10 miles from Bom Acerto, piles of native shrubs and vegetation cook in the punishing sun, their long, thick roots a contrast to the bright blue sky and the flat-topped mountains in the distance. For generations, the tops of these mountains were common areas used by peasants and Afro-descendent communities to forage for food, firewood, and medicines. People preferred to live in the more lush valleys, where crystalline rivers flowed. Nowadays, many of these rivers are polluted with agricultural runoff, and plantation owners keep ripping out more native vegetation. Just over the border from Bom Acerto, in Piaui, 5,000 acres of land was cleared in 2021 from a large farm, called Kajubar. In all likelihood, Pitta and other researchers predict, it will be sold to the highest bidder.
Though not all the deforestation in Matopiba can be directly linked to foreign investors, researchers agree that the scale and speed of destruction would not be possible without the massive influx of foreign capital. “Even if they sold all the enterprises, they profited from them a lot, and the impacts are still there,” Pitta said. Last year, the Stop Harvard Land Grabs campaign published a petition demanding that Harvard “stop investing in new farmland, return the lands already acquired to affected communities, and pay reparations for the undeniable harm of Harvard’s global land business.”
Meanwhile, forests continue to be torn down in the Cerrado at a fast clip. Between July 2022 and August 2023, deforestation in the region rose almost 17 percent, eating up more than 1.5 million acres of Cerrado vegetation, an area almost twice as large as Yosemite National Park. Around three-quarters of that was in Matopiba. According to the Pastoral Land Commission, more than 20,000 families in the four states were involved in conflicts over land in 2022, a record number.
In Bom Acerto, all that remains of the former settlement are piles of ashes and empty trails. The community has tried to take the businessman who is claiming he owns their land to court, but the case is stalled. Despite the uncertainty, the community has begun to rebuild some of the stalls for animals, and replant the fields with cassava, beans, and rice. Most of the trails end at the edge of the dry forest, where native Cerrado vegetation still extends for acres and acres into the horizon.
Maria do Espírito Santo has lived in Bom Acerto for decades. “I have the dream to stay here,” she told Grist in January. Ingrid Barros / Grist
Last January, do Espírito Santo stood on the site of her old house and looked toward the village that she and her old neighbors are slowly piecing back together. “My dream is to stay here,” she said. “My dream is that we have the right to stay here, that we have the right to have our land and our home.”
At the end of August, four men in an unmarked pickup truck invaded Bom Acerto and set fire to a family’s house. Now, residents report that a drone constantly flies overhead. Most of the native Cerrado is still visible out beyond their fields, but for how long, do Espírito Santo doesn’t know.
Hundreds of fed-up Germans driving tractors rumbled into Berlin and parked in a long line leading up to the stately sandstone columns of the Brandenburg Gate in mid-December. Many donned yellow vests, now the trademark garb of European populism. They blasted horns and brandished signs that said the German government had declared war on them.
The country’s center-left leaders, faced with a budget deficit, had decided to get rid of tax breaks on diesel used in agriculture, a move that would save the government some 900 million euros ($1 billion) —and one that might carry climate benefits — but would cost individual farmers as much as 20,000 euros ($21,500). Many growers and ranchers saw the cuts as the last straw in a series of events, like inflation, the war in Ukraine, and new environmental regulations, that had already made life harder for them. Protests mostly in the form of tractor blockades soon spread across the country.
Then they erupted across the continent. For the past few weeks, roads and city plazas in nearly every country in the European Union have been blocked by farmers angry about a number of regulations, including policies intended to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture. E.U. officials, who met earlier this month mere feet from protesters clashing with police in Brussels, scrapped plans for the bloc’s first-ever target to reduce climate pollution specifically from food production.
The protests have revealed just how tough it is for governments to curb agricultural emissions, not just in Europe but worldwide, policy analysts told Grist. Farming accounts for about 10 percent of climate pollution in both Europe and the United States, and climate scientists largely agree that curbing those emissions is key to limiting global warming. The E.U.’s reversal on agriculture-specific climate goals highlights the need for a meticulously-planned ‘just transition’ — a shift toward climate-friendly farming that doesn’t ignore farmers’ economic needs, said Tim Benton, who directs research on food production and the environment at Chatham House, a think tank based in London.
“Farmers are increasingly fed up with being seen as the whipping boy of food-systems emissions, in terms of them being told they are bad people and bad managers of the land,” Benton said. “If we are going to do transitions, then we have to bring people along with us.”
Farmers with tractors arrive for a protest at the government district in Berlin, Germany, January 15. AP Photo / Ebrahim Noroozi
With echoes of France’s populist yellow vest protests in 2018, farmers from Spain to Slovenia have been choking off highways with tractors, leaving hulking piles of dirt and manure in front of government buildings, hurling eggs and firecrackers at police, and setting hay bales and tires on fire. The farmers have a litany of complaints — high fuel and fertilizer costs, cheap imports and competition with foreign producers, volatile commodity prices — but one thing in particular has united them: the European Union’s climate policies, which they view as out of touch and overbearing.
E.U. officials, who agreed in 2020 on a target to make the continent carbon-neutral by 2050, were planning to make a recommendation this month to cut pesticide use in half and slash 30 percent of agricultural greenhouse gas emissions by 2040. After farmers took to the streets of Brussels, the European Commission – the E.U.’s executive branch — nixed the proposal, although they kept a broader target to reduce 90 percent of the bloc’s total emissions by 2040. Officials also delayed a recommendation to leave some farmland fallow to preserve biodiversity, and they abandoned a plan to promote lab-grown and plant-based meats to limit climate pollution from the livestock industry.
“We’ve seen this slide, this reversal from a really ambitious agenda a few years ago to basically nothing left,” said Patty Fong, director of the climate program at the Global Alliance for the Future of Food in the Netherlands.
The proposals would’ve needed approval by the E.U. parliament after elections in June, when the far-right is expected to make gains. Eyeing the polls, right-wing politicians in Europe have tried to capitalize on the farmers’ discontent as they push to dismantle the E.U.’s climate policies, according to Danielle Resnick, a research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute and the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. “The discourse is being hijacked in some quarters,” Resnick said.
Lacking popular support, top-down mandates and emissions targets don’t tend to work, Benton and other policy researchers told Grist. The key, they said, likely will involve investing billions of dollars to incentivize farmers to take up environmentally friendly growing practices and to ensure that they’ll make a living even if yields decline as a result of those changes.
As an example of a step in the right direction, Benton cited the Inflation Reduction Act, the landmark climate bill that the U.S. Congress passed in 2022. That legislation wasn’t accompanied by a specific target for lowering agricultural emissions, but it directed $20 billion to “climate-smart” farming and tens of billions of dollars more to spur the renewable energy transition.
In Europe, lawmakers have set ambitious climate goals, but they haven’t done the extensive planning — or investing — that the transition calls for, analysts told Grist.
“No one’s really proposing a long-term plan saying, ‘We need to transition. We need massive amounts of funding to be able to do this transition to more sustainable agrifood systems. This is how we’re going to pay for it. And this is how we’re going to support farmers in this transition,’” said Julia Bognar, head of the land use and climate program at the Institute for European Environmental Policy.
A daunting task for governments is figuring out where to get all that money to help farmers along. Bognar pointed to the vast subsidies that the E.U. already doles out: About one-third of its entire budget — some 56 billion euros ($60 billion) each year — goes to farmers, agricultural companies, and rural development. Bognar suggested that reallocating some of those payments would be one way to free up cash. For example, the E.U. could reduce funds that support environmentally harmful practices, like intensive livestock production at factory farms, and boost funds for practices that curb emissions (say, planting carbon-storing perennials like trees).
Still, dairy and meat companies probably wouldn’t let those livestock subsidies slide without a fight. And there’s no guarantee that money set aside for “climate-smart” agriculture will actually go to practices that help the planet. In the U.S., a good chunk of the Inflation Reduction Act funding, for example, could flow to equipment at factory farms, like methane digesters, which capture methane emissions from manure but still tend to pollute the air and water.
“It’s very easy to say we must have a just transition,” Benton said. “But I can’t think of an example where we’ve really managed it.”
In 2021, after a year-long protest, India’s farmers brought about the repeal of three farm laws that were intended to ‘liberalise’ the agriculture sector. Now, in 2024, farmers are again protesting. The underlying issues and the facilitation of the neoliberal corporatisation of farming that sparked the previous protest remain and have not been resolved.
The World Bank, the World Trade Organization, global agribusiness and financial capital are working to corporatise India’s agriculture sector. This plan goes back to the early 1990s and India’s foreign exchange crisis, which was used (and manipulated) to set this plan in motion. This ‘structural adjustment’ policy and process involves displacing the current food production system with contract farming and an industrial model of agriculture and food retail that serves the above interests.
The aim is to reduce the role of the public sector in agriculture to a facilitator of private capital, which requires industrial commodity-crop farming. The beneficiaries will include Cargill, Archer Daniels Midlands, Louis Dreyfus, Bunge and India’s retail and agribusiness giants as well as the global agritech, seed and agrochemical corporations and the big tech companies with their ‘data-driven agriculture’.
The plan is to displace the peasantry, create a land market and amalgamate landholdings to form larger farms that are more suited to international land investors and industrial farming. As a result, there has been an ongoing strategy to make farming non-viable for many of India’s smallholder farmers and drive hundreds of millions out of farming and into urban centres that have already sprawled to form peri-urban areas, which often tend to contain the most agriculturally fertile land. The loss of such land should be a concern in itself.
And what will those hundreds of millions do? Driven to the cities because of deliberate impoverishment, they will serve as cheap labour or, more likely, an unemployed or underemployed reserve army of labour for global capital — labour which is being replaced with automation. They will be in search of jobs that are increasingly hard to come by the (World Bank reports that there is more than 23% youth unemployment in India).
The impoverishment of farmers results from rising input costs, the withdrawal of government assistance, debt and debt repayments and the impacts of cheap, subsidised imports, which depress farmers’ incomes.
While corporations in India receive massive handouts and have loans written off, the lack of a secure income, exposure to volatile and manipulated international market prices and cheap imports contribute to farmers’ misery of not being able to cover the costs of production and secure a decent standard of living.
The pressure from the richer nations for the Indian government to further reduce support given to farmers and open up to imports and export-oriented ‘free market’ trade is based on nothing but hypocrisy. For instance, according to policy analyst Devinder Sharma, subsidies provided to US wheat and rice farmers are more than the market worth of these two crops. He also notes that, per day, each cow in Europe receives a subsidy worth more than an Indian farmer’s daily income.
The World Bank, the World Trade Organization, global institutional investors and transnational agribusiness giants require corporate-dictated contract farming and full-scale neoliberal marketisation for the sale and procurement of produce. They demand that India sacrifice its farmers and its own food security for the benefit of a handful of billionaires.
Farmers are merely regarded as producers of raw materials (crops) to be fleeced by suppliers of chemical and biotech inputs and the food processing and retail conglomerates. The more farmers can be squeezed, the greater the profits these corporations can extract. This entails creating farmer dependency on costly external inputs and corporate-dominated markets and supply chains. Global agrifood corporations have cleverly and cynically weaved a narrative that equates eradicating food sovereignty and creating dependency with ‘food security’.
Farmers’ demands
In 2018, a charter was released by the All India Kisan Sangharsh Coordination Committee (an umbrella group of around 250 farmers’ organisations). The farmers were concerned about the deepening penetration of predatory corporations and the unbearable burden of indebtedness and the widening disparities between farmers and other sectors.
They wanted the government to take measures to bring down the input costs of farming, while making purchases of farm produce below the minimum support price (MSP) both illegal and punishable.
The charter also called for a special discussion on the universalisation of the public distribution system, the withdrawal of pesticides that have been banned elsewhere and the non-approval of genetically engineered seeds without a comprehensive need and impact assessment.
Other demands included no foreign direct investment in agriculture and food processing, the protection of farmers from corporate plunder in the name of contract farming, investment in farmers’ collectives to create farmer producer organisations and peasant cooperatives and the promotion of agroecology based on suitable cropping patterns and local seed diversity revival.
These demands remain relevant today due to government inaction. In fact, the three farm laws that were repealed after a year-long protest by farmers in 2021 aimed to do precisely the opposite. They were intended to expose Indian agriculture to a massive dose of neoliberal marketisation and shock therapy. Although the laws were struck down, the corporate interests behind them never went away and are adamant that the Indian government implements the policies they require.
This would mean India reducing the state procurement and distribution of essential foodstuffs and eradicating its food buffer stocks — so vital to national food security — and purchasing the nation’s needs with its foreign exchange reserves on manipulated global commodity markets. This would make the country wholly dependent on attracting foreign investment and international finance.
To ensure food sovereignty and national food security, the Mumbai-based Research Unit for Political Economy (RUPE) says that MSPs, through government procurement of essential crops and commodities, should be extended to many major cops such as maize, cotton, oilseed and pulses. At the moment, only farmers in certain states who produce rice and wheat are the main beneficiaries of government procurement at the MSP.
Since per capita protein consumption in India is abysmally low and has fallen further during the liberalisation era, the provision of pulses in the public distribution system (PDS) is long overdue and desperately needed. The PDS works with central government, via the Food Corporation of India, being responsible for buying food grains from farmers at MSPs at state-run market yards or mandis. It then allocates the grains to each state. State governments then deliver to ‘ration shops’.
Today, in 2024, farm union leaders are (among other demands) seeking guarantees for a minimum purchase price for crops. Although the government announces support prices for more than 20 crops each year, government agencies buy only rice and wheat at the support level and, even then, in only some states.
State agencies buy the two staples at government-fixed minimum support prices to build reserves to run the world’s biggest food welfare programme that entitles more than 800 million Indians to free rice and wheat. Currently, that’s more than half the population who per household will receive five kilos per month of these essential foodstuffs for at least the next four years, which would be denied to them by the ‘free market’. As we have seen throughout the world, corporate plunder under the guise of neoliberal marketisation is no friend of the poor and those in need who rely on state support to exist.
If public procurement of a wider range of crops at the MSP were to occur — and MSPs were guaranteed for rice and wheat across all states — it would help address hunger and malnutrition, encourage crop diversification and ease farmer distress. Indeed, as various commentators have stated, by helping hundreds of millions involved in farming this way, it would give a massive boost to rural spending power and the economy in general.
Instead of rolling back the role of the public sector and surrendering the system to what constitutes a transnational billionaire class and its corporations, there is a need to further expand official procurement and public distribution.
The RUPE notes, it would cost around 20% of the current handouts (‘incentives’) received by corporations and their super-rich owners, which do not benefit the bulk of the wider population in any way. It is also worth considering that the loans provided to just five large corporations in India were in 2016 equal to the entire farm debt.
However, it is clear that the existence of the MSP, the public distribution system and publicly held buffer stocks are an impediment to global agribusiness interests.
Farmers’ other demands include a complete debt waiver, a pension scheme for farmers and farm labourers, the reintroduction of subsidies scrapped by the Electricity (Amendment) Bill 2020 and the right to fair compensation and transparency concerning land acquisitions.
In the meantime, the current administration is keen to demonstrate to international finance capital and agricapital that it is being tough on farmers and remains steadfast in its willingness to facilitate the pro-corporate agenda.
After the recent breakdown in talks between government and farmers’ representatives, the farmers decided to peacefully march to and demonstrate in Delhi. But at the Delhi border, farmers were met with barricades, tear gas and state violence.
Farmers produce humanities’ most essential need and are not the ‘enemy within’. The spotlight should fall on the ‘enemy beyond’. Instead of depicting farmers as ‘anti-national’, as sections of the media and prominent commentators in India try to, the focus needs to be on challenging those interests that seek to gain from undermining India’s food security and sovereignty and the impoverishment of farmers.
Note: The issues discussed in the above article are set out in the author’s free-to-read book (2022), which can be accessed at Academia.edu and Global Research
Indigenous nations, farmers, and ranchers throughout the Klamath Basin in the Pacific Northwest reached an agreement on Wednesday to collaborate on ecosystem restoration projects and to improve water supply for agriculture.
The memorandum between the Klamath Tribes, Yurok Tribe, and Klamath Water Users Association, which represents agricultural producers across 17,000 acres in both California and Oregon, serves as a major step in a long-running battle over access to water as the Klamath River dries up and federal officials cut flows to tribes and producers.
Drought in the region has often pitted Indigenous peoples and endangered fish against more than 1,000 farms that rely on the same water for their crops. In 2001, the Bureau of Reclamation shut off irrigation water to farmers in the midst of a drought, prompting protests from farmers and illegal water releases. Two decades later, amid another drought, the agency cut water to farmers to preserve endangered suckerfish, again heightening tensions. ”It’s not safe for Natives to be out in farmland during a drought year,” Joey Gentry, a member of the Klamath Tribes, told Inside Climate News after the 2021 water cuts.
In 2022, tribes won a long-running campaign to convince the federal government to remove four dams that stopped salmon from reaching their spawning grounds, marking a major win for Indigenous communities that rely on the Klamath. Now, Clayton Dumont, chairman of the Klamath Tribes, says the new agreement goes even further.
“We’re nowhere near finished, but this is a really strong beginning,” he said. “Getting adversaries like this together in a room and having to sit through a lot of bitterness to get to a point where we are now, I think it’s not just commendable, it’s pretty miraculous.”
Klamath Tribes were forced to cede 23 million acres in Oregon and California to settlers in exchange for a reservation, but an 1864 treaty gave the tribe the right to hunt and fish on those ceded lands forever. However, fishing hasn’t been consistently possible with drought and conflicting demands for water.
“What’s at stake is our very livelihood, our culture, our identities, our way of life,” Dumont said.
In the next month, tribes and agricultural producers will meet to decide on restoration projects that could be completed within the next two years and supported through existing federal or state programs. After the priorities are decided, officials from the U.S. Department of the Interior will identify both existing funding and new funding sources for the projects. The agency also plans to release more than $72 million to modernize agricultural infrastructure and restore the ecosystem in Klamath Basin.
Officials from the Klamath Water Users Association said in a press release that working together with the tribes will make both parties more effective in obtaining state and federal funding to support the region.
“I am hoping that this MOU will be the first step to bring all the different entities together to work on a solution to the conflicts over water that have hampered this region for decades,” said Tracey Liskey, president of the Klamath Water Users Association Board of Directors. “The water users want fish in our rivers and lakes and water in our irrigation ditches. This way, we all can have a prosperous way of life in the basin.”
Dumont says it helped that the administrations locally, statewide, and federally were all supportive of this agreement. However, he added that there’s no guarantee that the MOU will have any staying power after November.
“If the election goes the wrong way, all of this could dry up really quickly,” Dumont said.
Dirt, it turns out, isn’t just worm poop. It’s also a humongous receptacle of carbon, some 2.5 trillion tons of it — three times more than all the carbon in the atmosphere.
That’s why if you ask a climate wonk about the U.S. farm bill — the broad, trillion-dollar spending package Congress is supposed to pass this year (after failing to do so last year) — they’ll probably tell you something about the stuff beneath your feet. The bill to fund agricultural and food programs could put a dent in the country’s greenhouse gas emissions, some environmental advocates say, if it does one thing in particular: Help farmers store carbon in their soil.
The problem is, no one really knows how much carbon farmers can store in their soil.
“There’s still a ton of research that’s needed,” said Cristel Zoebisch, who analyzes federal agriculture policy at Carbon180, a nonprofit that promotes carbon removal.
Farmers and ranchers interact with carbon more than you might think. Draining a bog to plant rows of soybeans, for example, unleashes a lot of carbon into the air, while planting rows of shrubs and trees on a farm — a practice called alley cropping — does just the opposite, pulling the element out of the air and putting it into the earth. If America’s growers and herders made sure the carbon on their land stayed underneath their crops and their cows’ hooves, then some scientists say the planet would warm quite a bit less. After all, agriculture accounts for some 10 percent of the United States’ greenhouse gas emissions.
“We’re really good at producing a lot of corn, a lot of soybeans, a lot of agricultural commodities,” Zoebisch said, but farmers’ gains in productivity have come at the expense of soil carbon. “That’s something we can start to fix in the farm bill.”
For more than a year, climate advocates have been eyeing the bill as an opportunity to increase funding and training for farmers who want to adopt “climate-smart” practices. According to the Department of Agriculture, that label can apply to a range of methods, such as planting cover crops like rye or clover after a harvest or limiting how much a field gets tilled. Corn farmers can be carbon farmers, too.
But experts say the reality is a bit more opaque. There’s still a lot that scientists don’t know about how dirt works, and they disagree about the amount of carbon that farmers can realistically remove from the air and lock up in their fields.
Zoebisch and other advocates say that for the farm bill to be a true success, it’ll have to go even further than incentivizing carbon farming. Congress also, they say, should fund researchers to verify that those practices are, in fact, removing carbon from the atmosphere.
Ranchers in New Mexico learn about soil health and “regenerative” grazing, which has been touted as a way to store carbon in the ground. Mario Tama/ Mario Tama / Getty Images
Right now, there’s pretty much no good way for a farmer to know how much carbon they’re storing on their land. Current techniques for sampling soil and measuring carbon levels are really expensive and require equipment that’s hard to use, Zoebisch said. It’s a lot more complicated than sending buckets of dirt to a room full of scientists. Researchers need to drill more than a foot deep into the ground and exhume a ‘core’ that has to be handled with care to avoid compacting or disturbing the soil on its way to a lab.
“There are so many points where errors could be introduced,” Zoebisch said.
Several companies are trying to make the process easier and cheaper, but new technologies haven’t scaled up yet. Beyond taking physical measurements, the USDA uses a model to estimate levels of soil carbon that’s based on severely limited data, and its projections are highly uncertain, so that it’s pretty much useless at the local level, said Jonathan Sanderman, a soil scientist and carbon program director at the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Massachusetts. “You can’t really tell a farmer, ‘This is the exact benefit.’”
Scientists largely agree that cover crops help sequester some amount of carbon, but just how much is up for debate, and it varies by geography, soil type, and numerous other factors. Planting cover crops in fertile Iowa might not have the same effect as planting them in the sandy soils of southern California.
“There is uncertainty in the literature, but from a first principles standpoint it makes sense that cover crops should gain carbon because you’re capturing CO2 out of the atmosphere — a couple tons per hectare — that you wouldn’t have captured” otherwise, Sanderman said. “It’s the nuance we don’t understand.”
Timothy Searchinger, an agriculture and forestry researcher at Princeton University and the World Resources Institute, said he’s a fan of cover crops because they prevent precious topsoil from getting washed or blown away and nitrogen from polluting rivers and streams, but he thinks their potential climate benefits — and those of other practices like reducing tillage — are often exaggerated. Rather than fixate on soil carbon, he said the farm bill should focus on making agriculture more efficient. Helping farmers produce more food on existing farmland could save carbon-rich forests and peatlands from being cleared to meet demand for crops and livestock.
Still, Searchinger acknowledged there might be at least a little potential to store carbon on agricultural lands and said he didn’t want the USDA to stop assisting farmers who want to plant cover crops or try out other “climate-smart” practices.
Congress allocated almost $20 billion through the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022 to programs that do just that. Some $300 million of it is going to the USDA to ramp up efforts over the coming years to measure carbon in the soil. Currently, the agency draws on long-term data from only 50 sites across the country, Sanderman said. The Inflation Reduction Act funding could increase that number to several thousand.
That money was “an incredible first investment,” Zoebisch said. “This is going to be great for the next four years of funding. But then what happens after that?” Zoebisch and others want to see funding for soil carbon research made permanent in the farm bill.
Fulfilling that wish — and the many others held by climate advocates — hinges most of all on a divided Congress’ ability to reach an agreement. The farm bill expired at the end of September, when lawmakers were busy fighting over other things, like how to avoid a government shutdown and who should (or shouldn’t) be Speaker of the House. So instead of agreeing on a new bill, they extended the old one by a year.
The extension kept money temporarily flowing to programs that prop up farmers and assist families in need of food. It didn’t, however, do anything to tackle climate change or advance anyone’s understanding of how much carbon is in the mush of decaying plants, bacteria, fungi, and worm poop beneath your feet.
Hybrid Bt cotton, the only commercialised GM crop in India, has failed conclusively. Based on this failure and the evidence on GM crops to date, the Union of India’s proposal to commercialise herbicide-tolerant (HT) mustard will destroy not just Indian mustard agriculture but citizens’ health.
There have been five days of intense hearings on this matter in the Supreme Court (SC) — the GMO Public Interest Writ filed almost 20 years ago in 2005 by the author, which ended on 18 January 2024.
In these last 20 years, piecemeal hearings have dealt with submissions relating to individual crops like hybrid Bt cotton, the attempted commercialisation of hybrid Bt brinjal (2010) and now the attempt to commercialise hybrid HT mustard.
The evidence provided here is a distillation of the critical inputs of those 60+ submissions based on the affidavits and studies of leading, independent scientists and experts of international renown.
However, there is a serious and proven conflict of interest among our regulators, the Ministry of Science and Technology and the Ministry of Agriculture along with the International Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), which promote GMOs in Indian agriculture. This evidence reflects the findings of the TEC Report (Technical Expert Committee) appointed by the Supreme Court (SC) in 2012 and two Parliamentary Standing Committees of 2012 and 2017.
‘Modern biotechnology’ or genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are products where the genomes of organisms are transformed through laboratory techniques, including genetically engineered DNA (recombinant) and its direct introduction into cells. These are techniques not used in traditional breeding and selection.
GMOs create organisms in ways that have never existed in 3.8 billion years of evolution and produce ‘unintended effects’ that are not immediately apparent. This is why rigorous, independent protocols for risk and hazard identification are the sine qua non of correct regulation in the public interest. The Indian ‘Rules of 1989’ describe GMOs as “hazardous”.
Contamination by GMOs of the natural environment is of outstanding concern, recognised by the CBD (Convention on Biodiversity), of which India is a signatory. India is one of 17 listed international hot spots of diversity, which includes mustard, brinjal and rice. India is the centre of the world’s biological diversity in brinjal with over 2500 varieties grown in the country and as many as 29 wild species.
India is a secondary centre of origin of rape-seed mustard with over 9000 accessions in our gene bank (National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources). With a commercialised GM crop, contamination is certain. The precautionary principle must apply, is read into the Constitution and is a legal precedent in India.
Hybrid Bt cotton was introduced in 2002 and remains the only approved commercialised crop in India. It has been an abject failure.
Failure of Bt cotton
India is the only country in the world to have introduced the Bt gene into hybrid Bt Cotton. It was introduced in hybrids as a ‘value-capture mechanism’, according to Dr Kranthi, ex director of the Central Institute for Cotton Research (CICR). The hybrid technology disallows seed saving by millions of small farmers. Conservative estimates indicate that Indian farmers may have paid an additional amount of Rs 14,000 crores for Bt cotton seeds during the period 2002-18, of which trait fees amounted to Rs 7337.37 crores, (Dr Kranthi). There was also a phenomenal three-fold increase in labour costs in hybrid cotton cultivation.
Prof. Andrew Gutierrez (University of California, Berkeley) is among the world’s leading entomologists and cotton scientists and provided the ecological explanation of why hybrid Bt cotton is every bit a disaster that it is in India. Most hybrid cottons are long season (180-200-day duration). This increases the opportunities for pest resurgence and outbreaks because it links into the lifecycle of the pest. The low-density planting also increases the cost of hybrid seeds substantially.
Hybrids require stable water too (therefore, irrigation, as opposed to rain-fed) and more fertiliser. Some 90% of current Bt cotton hybrids appear susceptible to sap-sucking insects, leaf-curl virus and leaf reddening, adding to input costs and loss of yield. Most telling is that India produces only 3.3 million tonnes from its irrigated area of 4.9 million hectares compared to 6.96 million tonnes from an equivalent area in China.
Hybrid Bt cotton in India has resulted in a yield plateau, high production costs and low productivity that reduce farmer revenues, correlated with increased farmer distress and suicides. It has stymied the development of economically viable high-density short-season (HD-SS) Non-Bt high-yielding straight-line varieties. The failure of hybrid Bt cotton is an abject lesson for GMO implementation in other crops.
Yet, the regulators attempted to repeat history in the form of hybrid Bt brinjal and Hybrid HT Mustard.
Field trial solutions (CICR data) of high-density short-season (HD-SS) NON-GMO pure-line (non-hybrid), rainfed cotton varieties have been developed in India that could more than double yield and nearly triple net income.
The Central Government admitted in its affidavit in the Delhi High Court (22 Jan 2016), adding, (on 23 January 2017), that Bt “cotton seeds are now unaffordable to farmers due to high royalties charged by MMBL (Mahyco Monsanto Biotech Ltd) which has a near monopoly on Bt cotton seeds and that this has led to a market failure”.
Moreover, there is no trait for yield enhancement in the Bt technology. Any intrinsic yield increase is properly attributable to its hybridisation in both Bt cotton and Bt brinjal. Lower insecticide use is the reason for introducing the Bt technology worldwide.
The pink bollworm has developed high levels of resistance against Bollgard-II Bt cotton, leading to increased insecticide usage in India, increases in new induced secondary pests and crop failures. The annual report 2015-16 of the ICAT-CICR confirms that Bt cotton is no longer effective for bollworm control
Insecticide usage on cotton in 2002 was 0.88 kg per hectare, which increased to 0.97 kg per hectare in 2013 (Srivastav and Kolady 2016).
Matters were deliberately muddied in India, leading to any hybrid vigour being attributed to the Bt technology! Yields have stagnated despite the deployment of all available latest technologies, including the introduction of new potent GM technologies, a two-fold increase in the use of fertilisers and increased insecticide use and irrigation. And yet, India’s global rank is 30-32nd in terms of yield.
In 13 years, the cost of cultivation increased 302%. In 15 years, there was 450% increase in labour costs. The costs of hybrid seed, insecticide and fertiliser increased more than 250 to 300%.
Regulators tried to commercialise Bt brinjal and in hybrids in 2009. The Bt gene is proven to be undeniably toxic (Profs. Schubert of the Salk Institute; Pusztai, Seralini and others have confirmed this).
In August 2008, the regulators were forced to publish the Developers’ (Monsanto-Mahyco) self-assessed bio-safety dossier on their website, 16 months after the order of the SC to make the safety dossier data public (15 Feb 2007).
Bt brinjal was the first vegetable food crop in the world to be approved for commercialisation, by the collective regulatory body and their expert committees, virtually without oversight. When the international scientific community examined the raw data, their collective comments were scathing. Prof Jack Heinemann stated that Mahyco has failed at the first, elementary step of the safety study: “I have never seen less professionalism in the presentation and quality assurance of molecular data than in this study”.
He criticised Mahyco for using outdated studies, testing to below acceptable standards and inappropriate and invalid test methods.
Prof David Andow, in his comprehensive critique of Monsanto’s Dossier, ‘Bt brinjal Event EE1’, listed 37 studies of which perhaps one had been conducted and reported to a satisfactory level by Monsanto. He concluded: “The GEAC set too narrow a scope for environmental risk assessment (ERA) of hybrid Bt brinjal, and it is because of this overly narrow scope that the EC-II is not an adequate ERA… most of the possible environmental risks of Bt brinjal have not been adequately evaluated; this includes risks to local varieties of brinjal and wild relatives, risks to biological diversity, and risk of resistance evolution in BFSB.”
The Central Government itself declared an unconditional and indefinite moratorium on Bt brinjal in Feb 2009 based on the collective responses of the scientific community.
Disaster in the making: GM Hybrid HT Mustard
Like Bt, HT is a pesticidal crop (to kill weeds). These two GMO technologies represent about 98% of crops planted worldwide, with HT crops accounting for more than 80%. Neither has a trait for yield. In its 2002 Report, the United States Department for Agriculture stated: “currently available GM crops do not increase the yield potential… In fact, yield may even decrease if the varieties used to carry the herbicide tolerant or insect-resistant genes are not the highest yielding cultivars… Perhaps the biggest issue raised by these results is how to explain the rapid adoption of GE crops when farm financial impacts appear to be mixed or even negative.”
The developer’s (Centre for Genetic Manipulation of Crop Plants University of Delhi) bio-safety dossier, in contempt of the SC orders, has never made its data public. A Right to Information (RTI) request was filed in 2016 with the Directorate of Rape-Seed Mustard Research, which conducts protocols of non-GMO mustard trials for crop improvement programmes for our farmers, for varietal stability and performance. The RTI was an eye opener. Virtually all the directorate’s norms were flouted in the field trials, making them invalid. Hybrid mustard HT DMH 11 was out yielded by more than the 10% norm by non-GMO varieties and hybrids, which forced the developers to admit this fact in their formal reply affidavit in the SC.
Hybrid HT mustard DMH 11 employs three transgenes: the male sterility gene, barnase, the female restorer gene, barstar, and the bar gene that confers tolerance to Bayer’s herbicide glufosinate ammonium or BASTA. Each of the parent lines has the bar gene that makes them both HT crops along with their resulting hybrid DMH 11. The reason for employing barnase and barstar is because mustard is a closed pollinating crop (even though it out crosses pretty well, 18%+) and this technology (a male sterility technology) makes it easier to produce mustard hybrids. It is not a hybrid technology. Its counterpart in non-GMO male sterility technology is the CMS system (cytoplasmic male sterility). Employing male sterility in mustard allows it to be used more easily in already existing hybridisation technology.
It is curious the extent to which the regulators have tried to obfuscate the facts and muddy the waters. Their first response was that the acronym HT in mustard DMH 11 means ‘hybrid technology’. When this didn’t work, the next ‘try’ was that DMH 11 isn’t an HT crop!
This too was easily proved wrong because of the presence of the bar gene. Now, this fact has been admitted.
Furthermore, the regulators have failed either intentionally, or because they are simply unable to stop, illegal HT cotton being grown on a commercial scale for the last 15 years or so. This is the state of GMO regulation in India.
Bayer’s own data sheet states that glufosinate causes birth defects and is damaging to most plants that it comes into contact with. Like its counterpart, glyphosate, it is a systemic, broad spectrum, non-selective herbicide (it kills indiscriminately soil organisms, beneficial insects etc) and is damaging to most plants and aquatic life. The US Environmental Protection Agency classifies glufosinate ammonium as “persistent” and “mobile” and is “expected to adversely affect non-target terrestrial plant species”.
Glufosinate is not permitted in crop plants in India, under the Insecticide Act. Since it is very persistent in the environment, it will certainly contaminate water supplies in addition to food. Surfactants are used to get the active ingredients into the plant, which is engineered to withstand the herbicide, so it doesn’t die when sprayed. The herbicide and surfactant are sprayed directly on the crops and significant quantities are then taken up into the plant. The weeds die — or used to!
The US Geological survey noted that while 20 million pounds/year of glyphosate was used prior to GE crops (1992), 280 million pounds/year was used in 2012, largely as a result of glyphosate-resistant crops. In the U.S. alone, glyphosate-resistant weeds were estimated to occupy an area of over 24 million hectares as of 2012. This is a failed and unsustainable technology anywhere, and for India it will be disastrous.
The stated objective by the regulators themselves for HT mustard is that the two HT parent lines (barnase and barstar each with the bar gene), will be similarly employed in India’s best (non-GMO) varieties to create new crosses resulting in any number of HT hybrid mustard DMH crops. Thus, Indian mustard varieties (non-GMO) in a very short time will be contaminated and Indian mustard agriculture (which is non-GMO) destroyed.
The regulators claim that GMO HT hybrid DMH 11 will create a significant dent in India’s oilseeds imports. Given that GMO mustard has no gene for yield enhancement, is significantly out yielded by non-GMO mustard hybrids and varieties, this is indeed a magic bean produced from thin air by the regulators, defying all logic and commonsense. Mustard Oil imports are virtually zero (ie rapeseed mustard as distinct from canola rape oil which is also illegal GMO).
The story of the current steep decline in oilseeds production in Indian farming must be laid at the door of a wrong policy decision that comprehensively ignored national and farmers’ interest to severely slash import duties on oilseeds of around 300% to virtually zero. In 1993-94, India imported just 3% of our oil-seed demand; we were self- sufficient. Then we happily bowed to WTO pressure and now import almost 70% of our demand in edible oils! (Devinder Sharma). This is the real reason for our heavy import bill.
The TEC recommend a double bar on GM Mustard — for being an HT crop and also in a centre of mustard diversification and/or origin. It is hoped that our government will recognise the dangers of GMOs, bar HT crops, including GM mustard, and impose a moratorium on all Bt crops.
Aruna Rodrigues
Lead Petitioner in the GMO PIL filed in 2005 for a moratorium on GM crops.
Below the red-tile roofs of the Catalina Foothills, an affluent area on the north end of Tucson, Arizona, lays a blanket of desert green: spiky cacti, sword-shaped yucca leaves, and the spindly limbs of palo verde and mesquite trees. Head south into the city, and the vegetation thins. Trees are especially scarce on the south side of town, where shops and schools and housing complexes sprawl across a land encrusted in concrete.
On hot summer days, you don’t just see but feel the difference. Tucson’s shadeless neighborhoods, which are predominantly low-income and Latino, soak up the heat. They swelter at summer temperatures that eclipse the city average by 8 degrees Fahrenheit and the Catalina Foothills by 12 degrees. That disparity can be deadly in a city that experienced 40 straight days above 100 degrees last year — heat that’s sure to get worse with climate change.
The good news is there’s a simple way to cool things down: plant trees. “You’re easily 10 degrees cooler stepping under the shade of a tree,” said Brad Lancaster, an urban forester in Tucson. “It’s dramatically cooler.”
A movement is underway to populate the city’s street corners and vacant lots with groves of trees. Tucson’s city government, which has pledged to plant one million trees by 2030, recently got $5 million from the Biden administration to spur the effort — a portion of the $1 billion that the U.S. Forest Service committed last fall to urban and small-scale forestry projects across the United States, aiming to make communities more resilient to climate change and extreme heat.
But in Tucson and many other cities, tree-planting initiatives can tackle a lot more than scorching temperatures. What if Tucson’s million new trees—and the rest of the country’s—didn’t just keep sidewalks cool? What if they helped feed people, too?
That’s what Brandon Merchant hopes will happen on the shadeless south side of Tucson, a city where about one-fifth of the population lives more than a mile from a grocery store. He’s working on a project to plant velvet mesquite trees that thrive in the dry Sonoran Desert, and have been used for centuries as a food source. The mesquite trees’ seed pods can be ground into a sweet, protein-rich flour used to make bread, cookies, and pancakes. Merchant, who works at the Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona, sees cultivating mesquite around the city and surrounding areas as an opportunity to ease both heat and hunger. The outcome could be a network of “food forests,” community spaces where volunteers tend fruit trees and other edible plants for neighbors to forage.
“Thinking about the root causes of hunger and the root causes of health issues, there are all these things that tie together: lack of green spaces, lack of biodiversity,” Merchant said. (The food bank received half a million dollars from the Biden administration through the Inflation Reduction Act.)
Saplings soak up the Tucson sun before getting planted around the city.
City of Tucson
Merchant’s initiative fits into a national trend of combining forestry — and Forest Service funding — with efforts to feed people. Volunteers, school teachers, and urban farmers in cities across the country are planting fruit and nut trees, berry bushes, and other edible plants in public spaces to create shade, provide access to green space, and supply neighbors with free and healthy food. These food forests, forest gardens, and edible parks have sprouted up at churches, schools, empty lots, and street corners in numerous cities, including Boston, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Seattle, and Miami.
“It’s definitely growing in popularity,” said Cara Rockwell, who researches agroforestry and sustainable food systems at Florida International University. “Food security is one of the huge benefits.”
There are also numerous environmental benefits: Trees improve air quality, suck carbon from the atmosphere, and create habitat for wildlife, said Mikaela Schmitt-Harsh, an urban forestry expert at James Madison University in Virginia. “I think food forests are gaining popularity alongside other urban green space efforts, community gardens, green rooftops,” she added. “All of those efforts I think are moving us in a positive direction.”
Researchers say food forests are unlikely to produce enough food to feed everyone in need of it. But Schmitt-Harsh said they could help supplement diets, especially in neighborhoods that are far from grocery stores. “A lot has to go into the planning of where the food forest is, when the fruits are harvestable, and whether the harvestable fruits are equitably distributed.”
She pointed to the Philadelphia Orchard Project as an emblem of success. That nonprofit has partnered with schools, churches, public recreation centers, and urban farms to oversee some 68 community orchards across the city. Their network of orchards and food forests generated more than 11,000 pounds of fresh produce last year, according to Phil Forsyth, co-executive director of the nonprofit.
Volunteers plant fruit trees at a food forest in Philadelphia. Philadelphia Orchard Project
Some of the sites in Philadelphia have only three or four trees. Others have over 100, said Kim Jordan, the organization’s other executive director. “We’re doing a variety of fruit and nut trees, berry bushes and vines, pollinator plants, ground cover, perennial vegetables—a whole range of things,” Jordan said.
The community food bank in Tucson started its project in 2021, when it bought six shade huts to shelter saplings. Each hut can house dozens of baby trees, which are grown in bags and irrigated until they become sturdy enough to be planted in the ground. Over the past three years, Merchant has partnered with a high school, a community farm, and the Tohono O’odham tribal nation to nurse, plant, and maintain the trees. So far they’ve only put a few dozen saplings in the ground, and Merchant aims to ramp up efforts with a few hundred more plantings this year. His initial goal, which he described as “lofty and ambitious,” is to plant 20,000 trees by 2030.
The food bank is also organizing workshops on growing, pruning, and harvesting, as well as courses on cooking with mesquite flour. And they’ve hosted community events, where people bring seed pods to pound into flour — a process that requires a big hammermill that isn’t easy to use on your own, Merchant said. Those events feature a mesquite pancake cookoff, using the fresh flour.
Merchant is drawing on a model of tree-planting that Lancaster, the urban forester, has been pioneering for 30 years in a downtown neighborhood called Dunbar Spring. That area was once as barren as much of southern Tucson, but a group of volunteers led by Lancaster — who started planting velvet mesquite and other native trees in 1996 — has built up an impressive canopy. Over three decades, neighborhood foresters have transformed Dunbar Spring’s bald curbsides into lush forests of mesquite, hackberry, cholla and prickly pear cactus, and more—all plants that have edible parts.
“There are over 400 native food plants in the Sonoran Desert, so we tapped into that,” Lancaster said. “That’s what we focused our planting on.”
The Dunbar Spring food forest is now what Lancaster calls a “living pantry.” He told Grist that up to a quarter of the food he eats — and half of what he feeds his Nigerian dwarf goats — is harvested from plants in the neighborhood’s forest. “Those percentages could be much more if I were putting more time into the harvests.” The more than 1,700 trees and shrubs planted by Lancaster’s group have also stored a ton of water — a precious commodity in the Sonoran Desert — by slurping up an estimated 1 million gallons of rainwater that otherwise would have flowed off the pavement into storm drains.
Another well-established food forest skirts the Old West Church in Boston, where volunteers have spent a decade transforming a city lawn into a grove of apple, pear, and cherry trees hovering over vegetable, pollinator, and herb gardens. Their produce — ranging from tomatoes and eggplants to winter melons — gets donated to Women’s Lunch Place, a local shelter for women without permanent housing, according to Karen Spiller, a professor of sustainable food systems at the University of New Hampshire and a member of Old West Church who helps with the project.
“It’s open for harvest at any time,” Spiller said. “It’s not ‘Leave a dollar, and pick an apple.’ You can pick your apple and eat your apple.”
Merchant wants to apply the same ethic in Tucson: mesquite pods for all to pick — and free pancakes after a day staying cool in the shade.
Natalia, a 58-year old veteran farmworker from Florida, gets paid by the hour to work in a greenhouse, subjecting her and coworkers to a wretched humid heat that grows worse every summer. She gets two 10-minute breaks and one half-hour lunch each day, which recently have been moved from wherever she could find a corner to an air-conditioned lunchroom, a change she said has made a world of difference. No federal laws regulate heat exposure in the workplace, leaving employers free to do whatever they deem appropriate to protect workers; other farms Natalia has worked at lacked a bathroom and didn’t provide drinking water.
Failing to provide such things could soon become illegal. Later this year, a new rule from the Occupational Health and Safety Administration, or OSHA, could for the first time provide federal protection to heat exposure and require companies to invest in employees’ well-being during the hottest parts of the year.
Over the past several months, the agency held dozens of public meetings and collected more than 1,000 comments, many from workers but a number from businesses and business associations worried about the impact any rule might have on their bottom line. But new research says employers might want to think twice about opposing a heat standard, because unprotected workers will deliver diminishing returns in an ever-hotter world. Meanwhile, labor advocates are trying, mostly unsuccessfully, to push state and local versions of a rule.
Natalia’s testimony was recorded by Jeannie Economos, who coordinates health and safety programs for an organization called Farmworker Association of Florida. Economos has been using that interview and countless others from the Sunshine State’s field, greenhouse, and construction workers to advocate for local, state, and federal workplace heat standards. An ideal guideline, she said, would at the very least guarantee sufficient access to cold, clean water and “not having to walk a mile down the fields to get water to drink when you’re hot, not having to wait until a break or you’re on the verge of fainting.”
OSHA is considering various components to the proposed standard, which it plans to publish later this year, an agency official told the Washington Post. (When asked about the timeline, OSHA referred Grist to a posting in the Federal Registry, which does not specify a timeline.) Mandatory workplace education programs would teach both workers and managers how to recognize and respond to heat illness and take its risks seriously. The rule also could mandate that employers consider heat stress a medical emergency, and prohibit retaliation against employees who complain or report violations. The measure almost certainly will require that employers provide regular breaks; clean, accessible water; and protective equipment like hats and cooling vests. Another possibility is a requirement that employees be allowed to acclimate to intense heat by working only 20 percent of a typical workday during the first day of a heat wave and incrementally increasing their hours each day.
Over the past 15 years, OSHA received three petitions to implement a federal heat standard. The rulemaking process finally began in 2021 but could stall again if President Biden loses this year’s election. “OSHA has to be balanced and there’s a lot of pressure on OSHA to do something, so we’ll just wait and see,” Economos said. “It could take three to eight years to get a [final] rule.”
She had hoped a state heat standard in Florida could prevent deaths in the meantime. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 387 workers lost their lives to heat illness between 2013 and 2022, and because heat illness is often misattributed as heart failure or stroke, that’s almost certainly an undercount. State-level heat standards already exist in California, Washington, Minnesota, and Oregon, and one has been proposed in Colorado. California’s guideline only protects outdoor workers, but the state is planning to introduce rules for indoor workers this year. However, right-to-work states in the South have shown more opposition to such ideas. Texas preempted municipal attempts to regulate heat exposure last year. In Florida, attempts at a state heat standard were stymied by Republican lawmakers. Miami-Dade County officials were to consider a measure last fall but pushed it to March after amid complaints that it was unfair to local business.
The federal rulemaking process is complicated and crowded, and OSHA is facing immense pressure from all sides. Any regulation must cover wildly varying conditions of a vast labor pool in multiple sectors, from electricians working in stuffy attics to construction workers framing houses to farmworkers harvesting vegetables in the full sun. Meanwhile, an equally staggering array of business interests have largely condemned, and in many cases actively lobbied against, attempts to do something, stating that employers already follow voluntary, and in some cases, state, heat stress guidance and further regulation would be burdensome. Segments of the construction and agricultural industries along with chambers of commerce have opposed the standard. “We firmly believe employers should be responsible or address heat hazards at individual facilities,” representatives of the National Grain Association and the Agricultural Retailers association wrote in a joint public comment directed to OSHA.
Their opposition may be short-sighted, however. In order to weather climate change in the long term without severe economic damage, research shows, governments and employers will have to find ways to protect people from the heat. For agricultural workers, that’s particularly vital. A study released last week in the journal Global Change Biology found that heat exposure doesn’t only impact crop yields – it impairs the productivity of the people who plant and and harvest the crops, and limits their ability to work in the field. Already hot and humid Florida will heat up even more by the end of the century, reducing fieldworkers to around 70 percent of their current work capacity if working conditions do not improve.
Gerald Nelson, a professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the study’s lead author, said that feeding the world in a new and extreme era of climate crisis makes caring for the people who put our food on the table.
“At some point it’s gonna be too hot,” Nelson said, “and you’re going to have to do some kind of remediation.”
That could mean simple rest breaks and water breaks. It could also mean opportunities to work at night, or to find and invest in crop varieties that thrive in slightly cooler seasons. “The challenge is to figure out a system that’s both good today and good tomorrow,” Nelson said.
But in the short term, Economos said a federal heat protection rule is urgent. “While we’re waiting for the federal government,” she said, “people are dying.”
This article was produced by Sludge, an independent, ad-free investigative news site covering money in politics. Click here to support Sludge. A gas industry trade association has hired a batch of revolving-door lobbyists as it works to convince policymakers that biomethane gas produced by factory farms should be eligible for renewable energy tax credits. Environmental groups warn that if energy…
A big challenge for anyone trying to take on climate change is finding solutions that don’t create new problems. Climate scientists, for instance, agree that the world needs more solar panels, wind turbines, and transmission lines. But building all that infrastructure takes up a lot of land, and that land could be a critical habitat for endangered animals, teeming with wildflowers and birds and insects, or a great place for Indigenous people to forage for traditional foods.
According to a recent study in the journal Nature Communications, areas around the world that are well-suited for wind, solar, and other forms of clean energy overlap with some 10 percent of the land that’s important for biodiversity and other human needs like clean water and wood for fuel. The United States alone would need tens of millions of acres of sunny plateaus for solar arrays and windy ridges for wind mills to stop burning oil, gas, and coal. The potential for conflict between conservation and developing renewables is even higher than it is between conservation and farming, mining, or drilling for fossil fuels, the study found.
That finding was the “biggest surprise” for Rachel Neugarten, a researcher at Cornell University and one of the paper’s authors. “Renewable energy is absolutely critical for climate goals,” she said. “However, if it’s located in the wrong places it could have negative impacts.”
Neugarten’s team mapped the entire world for biodiversity, pressure from farming, mining, and other forms of development, and 10 of “nature’s contributions to people” — from crop pollination to recreation. The researchers found that only 18 percent of the land that humans need is currently protected from urban expansion and resource extraction, more than one-third of which is highly suitable for agriculture, mining, oil and gas drilling, or clean energy projects. In Ireland, for example, 60 percent of the land is well-suited for renewables, agriculture, or mining while also important for grazing, storing nutrients like nitrogen, and recreation, the authors wrote.
“One of the key takeaways from this study is that it is possible to achieve conservation, climate, and development goals, but that this will require careful planning,” Neugarten said. “We need to think carefully about how decisions in one sector, such as renewable energy development, might undermine goals in other sectors, such as habitat for pollinators or biodiversity conservation.”
The authors suggest that a way around this problem would be to build wind or solar farms on land that’s already been cleared or degraded. That could mean installing solar panels on abandoned industrial sites or above parking lots, Neugarten said. But she also recommended coupling renewables with agriculture. As two examples, she pointed to an 18-acre solar array in Minnesota that’s nestled among pollinator-friendly flowers and bee hives, which can power more than 100,000 homes, as well as a wind farm on a cattle ranch in Arizona.
The paper doesn’t address whether there’s actually enough land to fit all the solar and wind farms that the world needs without threatening biodiversity and causing other ecological damage. That’s still an open question, Neugarten said. The United States would need a swath of earth about the size of five South Dakotas to generate enough clean power to run a carbon-free economy by 2050, according to an analysis by Bloomberg News and Princeton University. And you can’t just stick wind turbines and solar panels anywhere: A solar farm needs to be on flat, sunny terrain, close enough to the electrical grid to keep transmission costs from skyrocketing.
Still, some research indicates that there doesn’t have to be a dramatic tradeoff between conservation and clean energy. The Nature Conservancy, which helped fund Neugarten’s study, released a report last year showing that the U.S. could deploy a lot of wind and solar without significant damage to the environment. The report outlined three courses of action: combining solar and wind on the same land, installing solar panels on farmland, and using solar panels that tilt to absorb more sunlight and produce more energy.
Where and how renewable energy projects get built affects biodiversity more than the amount of clean energy produced globally does, according to Ryan McManamay, an ecologist at Baylor University who wasn’t involved in Neugarten’s study. “It’s quite possible to meet more needs of the population and have a lower biodiversity impact based on thoughtful considerations of how things are developed,” he said.
Scientists also say the environmental consequences of building a lot of wind turbines and solar panels likely won’t be as dire as continuing to burn gargantuan amounts of fossil fuels. Climate change itself poses a major risk to biodiversity.
“There has been some rhetoric about green vs. green, which is setting up renewable energy in conflict with biodiversity conservation,” Neugarten said. “I really do think it’s feasible to do both if we put our minds to it.”
The modern food system is being shaped by the capitalist imperative for profit. Aside from losing their land to global investors and big agribusiness concerns, farmers and ordinary people are being sickened by corporations and a system that thrives on the promotion of ‘junk’ (ultra-processed) food laced with harmful chemicals and cultivated with the use of toxic agrochemicals.
It’s a highly profitable situation for investment firms like BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, Fidelity and Capital Group and the food and agribusiness conglomerates they invest in. But BlackRock and others are not just heavily invested in the food industry. They also profit from illnesses and diseases resulting from the food system by having stakes in the pharmaceuticals sector as well. Institutional investors and wealthy individuals park their funds and wealth in these firms and depend on the financial system a toxic food system to deliver.
Lobbying by agrifood corporations and their well-placed, well-funded front groups ensures this situation prevails. They continue to capture policy-making and regulatory space at international and national levels and promote the (false) narrative that without their products the world would starve.
They are now also pushing a fake-green, ecomodernist agenda and rolling out their new proprietary technologies in order to further entrench their grip on a global food system that produces poor food, illness, environmental degradation, dependency and dispossession.
The prevailing globalised agrifood model is built on unjust trade policies, the leveraging of sovereign debt to benefit powerful interests, population displacement and land dispossession. It fuels export-oriented commodity monocropping and regional food insecurity.
This model is responsible for increasing rates of illness, nutrient-deficient diets, a narrowing of the range of food crops, chemical runoffs, increasing levels of farmer indebtedness and the eradication of biodiversity. And it relies on a policy paradigm that privileges urbanisation, global markets and agrifood corporations’ needs ahead of rural communities, local markets, on-farm resources and food sovereignty.
In addition, there are also the broader geopolitical aspects of food and agriculture in a post-COVID world characterised by food inflation, hardship and multi-trillion-dollar global debt.
There are huge environmental, political, social and health issues that stem from how much of our food is currently produced and consumed. A paradigm shift is required.
That book contains substantial sections on the agrarian crisis in India and issues affecting the agriculture sector. Aruna Rodrigues — prominent campaigner and lead petitioner in the GMO Mustard Public Interest Litigation currently being heard in the Supreme Court of India — stated the following about the book:
This is graphic, a detailed horror tale in the making for India, an exposé on what is planned, to hand over Indian sovereignty and food security to big business.
‘Sickening Profits’ continues in a similar vein. By describing situations in Ukraine, India, the Netherlands and elsewhere, it is another graphic horror tale in the making that is being intensified across the globe. The question is: Can it be stopped?
Frederic Mousseau, policy director at the Oakland Institute, an influential US-based think tank, says:
It takes a book to break down the dynamics that are pushing agro-chemical agriculture to farmers and consumers around the world and to reveal the strength of the diverse movement of people and organizations who stand in the way of these destructive and predatory forces.
Colin Todhunter takes readers on a world tour that makes a compelling case against the fallacy of the food scarcity and Green Revolution arguments advanced by the mainstream media and international institutions on behalf of powerful financial interests such as Blackrock, Vanguard, or Gates. Todhunter makes it obvious that a key factor of world hunger and of the environmental crisis we are facing is a capitalist system that ‘requires constant growth, expanding markets and sufficient demand.’
Uplifting rather than depressing, after this lucid diagnosis, he highlights some of the countless people-led initiatives and movements, from Cuba, Ethiopia to India, that fight back against destruction and predation with agroecology and farmers-led practices, respectful of the people and the planet. By debunking the “artificial scarcity” myth that is constantly fed to us, Todhunter demonstrates that it is actually not complicated to change course. Readers will just have to join the movement.
The Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) is “an independent research and media group of writers, scholars, journalists and activists” and believes in “open access to truthful information and nuanced reporting”. It is committed to publishing e-books that are free of charge. Sickening Profits: The Global Food System’s Poisoned Food and Toxic Wealth can be read directly on the GRG site here and can also be accessed and downloaded as a fully formatted pdf (numbered contents/pages etc) on the academia.edu website here.
Coastal Georgia regulators want to change a rule designed to protect the state’s marshes, which serve as a buffer against storms and rising sea levels and a vital part of the coastal ecosystem. But advocates say the seemingly small change points to a need for a broader review of marsh protections.
The state passed a law to protect coastal salt marsh half a century ago, which means that now, though Georgia has just 100 miles of coastline, it’s home to half a million acres of salt marsh — the second-largest amount of salt marsh in the country and a third of the marshes on the East Coast. Those marshes absorb the power of strong storm surges and capture carbon in their grasses and mud.
So coastal advocates are especially sensitive to changes in the state’s marsh law — concerned that modifications to allow more development could erode protections, leading to actual erosion of the coastline itself.
But at a public meeting last week on the proposed change, state officials tried to assuage concerns.
“This amendment is not intended to roll back any marsh protections,” said Jill Andrews, chief of coastal management for the state’s Coastal Resources Division. “It will not change a thing within the actual Coastal Marshlands Protection Act itself. It is not intended, nor will it, fast-track bulkheads or shoreline hardening.”
Salt marshes exist along much of the country’s coastline, from New England to Florida, along the Gulf, and on the West Coast — but many have been degraded or destroyed by development, industry, and other human activities. Multimillion-dollar efforts are underway in many of those places to restore marsh habitat. In the Southeast, coastal managers have launched a new regional initiative aimed at restoring and better protecting the marshes in the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida.
In Georgia, most structures built in the state’s well-preserved coastal marshes need a permit under the marsh protection law, also known as CMPA. That goes for large docks, marinas, or a length of bulkhead — a kind of small wall along the waterfront designed to prevent shoreline erosion of someone’s backyard.
Those projects also get a 50-foot buffer, a zone of dry land where no building or paving is allowed because it might affect the marsh. The buffer line is measured from the part of the project that’s farthest from the marsh, known to regulators as the “upland component.” For a marina, that might include buildings for dry dock boat storage, bathrooms, or a shop. For shoreline stabilization like a bulkhead, the upland component might only be underground anchors that hold the structure in place.
The buffer rule is what CRD wants to change, because the agency says it can be a problem for smaller projects.
At the public meeting last week, Andrews explained that the buffer for a bulkhead on a residential property might run through the house. In an example she showed, the buffer encompasses most of a home’s backyard. That means the homeowner couldn’t build a shed, fire pit, or swing set without special permission from the CRD, which the agency says creates a burden both for homeowners and for the agency.
So the agency is proposing a rule change to exempt small projects from the upland component buffer requirement. Andrews and other CRD officials at the meeting stressed that shoreline stabilization projects and anything else built in the marsh will still need CMPA permits, even if the project is exempted from the buffer rule.
But critics said it’s time for a more comprehensive review. Instead of the rule change, several environmental groups are calling for a stakeholder committee to take a holistic look at how projects are approved and what rules protect the marsh.
Speaking at the meeting, Bill Sapp of the Southern Environmental Law Center said bulkheads are particularly worrisome because while building them can stabilize a shoreline in the short term, they can do long-term damage to the marsh. And though each project is small, Sapp said they can add up.
“There are going to be more and more bulkheads built along the Georgia coast over the years as the sea level rises,” he said.
And advocates said this permitting question points to a bigger concern: development too close to the marsh.
Josiah Watts grew up on Sapelo Island and now works for environmental group One Hundred Miles. He told attendees at the meeting the marsh is sacred as well as a protective buffer for the coast, and the state should rethink allowing building close to it.
“When we’re talking about bulkheads, we’re also talking about development,” he said. “That means that there is construction and building near these spaces on the coast and the marsh.”
The Coastal Resources Division is accepting public comments about the proposed change to marsh buffers until January 19.
Last year, climate change came into sharp relief for much of the world: The planet experienced its hottest 12-month period in 125,000 years. Flooding events inundated communities from California to East Africa to India. A heat wave in South America caused temperatures to spike above 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the middle of winter, and a heat dome across much of the southern United States spurred a 31-day streak in Phoenix of 110 degree-plus temperatures. The formation of an El Niño, the natural phenomenon that raises temperatures globally, intensified extreme weather already strengthened by climate change. The U.S. alone counted 25 billion-dollar weather disasters in 2023 — more than any other year.
Yet this devastation was met by some of the largest gains in climate action to date. World leaders agreed for the first time to “transition away” from oil and gas at the annual United Nations climate summit, hosted last month by the United Arab Emirates. Funds and incentives from President Joe Biden’s signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, started to roll out to companies and municipalities. Electric vehicle sales skyrocketed, thousands of young people signed up for the first-ever American Climate Corps, and companies agreed to pay billions of dollars to remove harmful chemicals called PFAS from drinking water supplies.
As we enter a new year, we asked Grist reporters what big stories they’re watching on their beats, 24 predictions for 2024. Their forecasts depict a world on the cusp of change in regard to climate — both good and bad, and often in tandem. Here’s what we’re keeping an eye on, from hard-won international financial commitments, to battles over mining in-demand minerals like lithium, to the expansion of renewable energy.
Protesters hold placards during a climate march in New York City last September.
Photo by Ryan Rahman/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images
Politics & Policy
A new climate corps will turn young people’s anxiety into action
The American Climate Corps will officially kick off in the summer of 2024, sending 20,000 18- to 26-year-olds across the country to install solar projects, mitigate wildfire risk, and make homes more energy-efficient. President Biden’s New Deal-inspired program is modeled after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Climate Conservation Corps and attracted 100,000 applicants. As it rolls out, the climate corps will continue to draw criticism from the left for low wages and ageism, and from the right for being a “made-up government work program … for young liberal activists.” Yet the program will remain popular with the public, bolstering towns’ resilience to weather disasters and training thousands of young people to help fill the country’s shortage of skilled workers needed for decarbonization.
Kate Yoder
Staff writer examining the intersections of climate, language, history, culture, and accountability
Despite rising temperatures, climate change takes a backseat during the 2024 election
Although more than a decade of surveys and polls show that a growing proportion of Americans are concerned about climate change, it has never been a defining issue in a general election — and will likely remain that way in 2024, at least on the main stage. Put simply, there are too many immediate concerns that will dominate the campaign trail as President Joe Biden faces off against the Republican nominee — most likely former President Donald Trump: Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine, Israel’s war against Hamas, the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the fight for abortion rights, new charges against Biden’s son, Hunter, and, of course, the numerous criminal charges against Trump. Biden may herald his signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, in his own messaging, but climate change is unlikely to cross party lines.
Zoya Teirstein
Staff writer covering politics and the intersection between climate change and health
A climate reparations fund gets off the ground
During COP28, the U.N. climate conference that took place in Dubai last year, countries agreed to set up a climate reparations fund on an interim basis at the World Bank. The fund was a longtime priority of developing countries and climate justice advocates who argued that nations that had contributed negligibly to a warming planet were facing the consequences. This year, the World Bank is expected to set up the fund and begin disbursing money to poor nations. Board members will be selected, an executive director will be appointed, decisions about how countries can access the money will be made, and money will begin flowing to those in need. During COP28, wealthy countries chipped in more than $650 million to the fund. More money will also fill the coffers this year.
Naveena Sadasivam
Senior staff writer covering environmental justice and accountability
‘Greenhushing’ spreads as companies seek to dodge lawsuits
Just a few years ago, splashy corporate climate promises were everywhere. Even oil companies promised to cut their emissions. But there won’t be as many misleading advertisements touting companies’ climate progress in 2024. Amid new regulations against false environmental marketing and a pileup of greenwashing lawsuits, more corporations will join in hiding their climate commitments to avoid scrutiny. This trend of “greenhushing” ramped up in 2023, when 1 in 5 companies declined to publicly release their sustainability targets, a threefold increase from the prior year. While this makes it harder to see what companies are doing, California’s new “anti-greenwashing” law, which went into effect on January 1, will tackle the transparency problem by requiring companies to disclose their carbon emissions.
Kate Yoder
Staff writer examining the intersections of climate, language, history, culture, and accountability
A global treaty to end plastic pollution faces delays
Delegates from around the world have been working to finalize a U.N. treaty by the end of 2024 that will “end plastic pollution.” They’ve had three negotiating sessions so far, and two more are scheduled for later this year. Despite signs of progress, petrochemical industry interests have resisted the most ambitious proposals to limit plastic production — they’d prefer a treaty focused on cleaning up plastic litter and improving plastic recycling rates. After countries failed to make significant headway at the most recent round of talks, it’s now possible that an extended deadline will be needed to deliver the final treaty. To some involved in the talks, that’s OK if it’ll mean a stronger agreement. But the pressure is still on, as every year without a treaty means more unchecked plastic pollution.
Joseph Winters
Staff writer covering plastics, pollution, and the circular economy
Employees of NY State Solar, a residential and commercial photovoltaic-systems company, install solar panels on a roof in Massapequa, New York, in 2022. AP Photo/John Minchillo
Energy
Expect a deluge of new household electrification and efficiency rebates
When the Inflation Reduction Act passed in 2022, some decarbonization incentives were quickly accessible — such as tax credits for solar and heat pump installation — but others have taken longer to kick in. The wait, however, is almost over, and 2024 is set to see a slew of new, or expanded, opportunities come online. The Inflation Reduction Act earmarked $8.8 billion for residential electrification and energy-use reduction, especially in low-income households.Think things like induction cooktops and energy-efficient clothes dryers, which don’t currently have federally funded rebates. The Department of Energy is in the process of allocating funding to participating states, which will be in charge of getting the money into Americans’ pockets.
Tik Root
Senior staff writer focusing on the clean energy transition
A push for public power takes root in communities nationwide
Across the country, close to a dozen communities are exploring ways to replace their investor-owned electric utilities with publicly owned ones. Advocates say they want to lower electricity costs, improve reliability, and speed up a clean energy transition. While a referendum in Maine to create a statewide publicly owned utility failed this past November, supporters elsewhere are just getting started. Next year, a group in San Diego could succeed in getting a vote for a municipal utility on the ballot. Decorah, Iowa, is contemplating a similar vote, and ongoing efforts could gain traction in San Francisco, the South San Joaquin Irrigation District in California, New Mexico, and Rochester, New York.
Akielly Hu
News and politics reporting fellow
Puerto Rico becomes be a U.S. leader in residential-solar energy adoption
While the nationwide rate of residential-solar installations is expected to shrink by more than 10 percent next year, due to interest rates and changes in California’s net-metering rules, installations show no sign of slowing down in Puerto Rico. The archipelago of 1.2 million households already installs 3,400 residential rooftop solar and battery-storage systems per month. In spring 2024, the Energy Department will begin deploying $440 million in residential-solar funding, which they say will be enough for about 30,000 homes. Analysts predict that by 2030, one-quarter of Puerto Rico households will have photovoltaic systems, though that depends in part on whether Puerto Rico passes a pending bill that would protect net metering until then.
Gabriela Aoun Angueira
Climate solutions reporter who helms The Beacon, Grist’s solutions-oriented newsletter
Workers walk the assembly line of Model Y electric vehicles at Tesla’s factory in Berlin in 2022. Patrick Pleul/picture alliance via Getty Images
Business & Technology
Changes to the federal tax credit will improve EV access for lower-income drivers
As of January 1, consumers can redeem the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean-vehicle tax credit directly at car dealerships. Last year, the $7,500 incentive for new electric vehicles and $4,000 for previously owned ones were only available as a credit, meaning that car buyers had to wait until they filed their taxes to get any benefit. The point-of-sale rebate will make getting a clean vehicle more accessible to buyers who can’t afford a hefty down payment, or whose income is too low to owe taxes. But their model options will also shrink — the Treasury Department just proposed rules disqualifying cars with battery components or minerals that come from countries deemed hostile to the U.S.
Gabriela Aoun Angueira
Climate solutions reporter who helms The Beacon, Grist’s solutions-oriented newsletter
Carbon-capture tech will continue to boom (and be controversial)
In some ways, it was a mixed year for carbon capture. While the world’s largest carbon-capture plant broke ground in Texas, the builders of a major carbon dioxide pipeline — which would be used to transport captive emissions to their final destination underground — canceled the project in the face of regulatory pushback. Climate activists have also long been skeptical of carbon capture as an industry ruse to keep burning fossil fuels. Overall, though, the carbon-capture market is surging on the tailwinds of largely favorable government policies in recent years. The use of the technology is also spreading beyond traditional sectors, such as natural gas facilities, into other industrial arenas, including cement, steel, and iron manufacturing. Next year will bring some continued hiccups but, overwhelmingly, continued growth.
Tik Root
Senior staff writer focusing on the clean energy transition
Republicans ramp up their war on “woke” ESG investing
An ongoing Republican crusade against ESG investing — shorthand for the environmental, social, and governance criteria investors use to evaluate companies — could end up costing retirees and insurers millions in lost returns next year. GOP lawmakers claim that considering climate risks while making investments imposes “woke” values and limits investment returns. Yet anti-ESG laws passed in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas last year were estimated to have cost taxpayers up to hundreds of millions of dollars. That’s partly because most Wall Street banks and businesses still employ ESG strategies. The backlash could continue through next year’s election — presidential candidates Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy have both taken strong anti-ESG positions.
Akielly Hu
News and politics reporting fellow
Unions expand their fight for electric vehicle worker protections
United Auto Workers recently won provisions for electric vehicle employees after a sweeping strike at Detroit’s Big Three carmakers — Ford, Stellantis, and General Motors. Now, the union has launched organizing campaigns at 13 non-union shops, including at EV leaders like Tesla and at other companies just getting into the EV space, such as Volkswagen and Hyundai. Next year, these campaigns will begin to go public, with resulting walkouts, negotiations, and expected union-busting tactics. Such efforts have failed in the past, and some companies have announced wage increases to entice workers away from a potential union drive, but UAW has already announced thousands of new member sign-ups and filed labor grievances against several companies, signaling a hard-headed approach that may win new contracts to protect workers as the auto industry increasingly shifts toward EVs.
Katie Myers
Climate solutions reporting fellow
A ConocoPhillips refinery abuts a residential area in the Wilmington neighborhood of Los Angeles in 2022. Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Environmental Justice
The EPA will back away from using civil rights law to protect residents
In 2020, a federal judge ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to start investigating the complaints it receives under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race or national origin in any program that gets funding from the federal government. Since then, communities around the country have attempted to use the law to achieve environmental justice in their backyards. But after the agency dropped its highest profile civil rights case in Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley” following a lawsuit from the state attorney general, advocates worry that the legal avenue won’t fulfill its promise. In 2024, it’s likely that the EPA will pursue Title VI complaints in states with cooperative environment agencies, but shy away from pressuring industry-friendly states like Louisiana and Texas to make big changes based on the law.
Lylla Younes
Senior staff writer covering chemical pollution, regulation, and frontline communities
Additional testing will reveal the true scope of “forever chemical” pollution
Major chemical manufacturers like 3M, DuPont, and Chemours were forced to strike multibillion-dollar settlements last year with coalitions of states, cities, and townships over PFAS — the deadly “forever chemicals” these companies knowingly spewed into the environment for decades. 2024 will be a big year for determining just how pervasive this problem is in U.S. water supplies. New hotspots are likely to emerge as the EPA conducts additional testing across the country, particularly in areas where little data on the chemicals currently exists. New fights over forever chemicals will also unfold in places like Minnesota, where lawmakers have introduced a bill that would require 3M and other large chemical corporations to pay for medical testing for PFAS-exposed communities, and in North Carolina, where the United Nations just declared PFAS pollution a human rights violation.
Zoya Teirstein
Staff writer covering politics and the intersection between climate change and health
A booming liquefied natural gas industry goes bust … maybe
The liquefied natural gas industry is booming on the U.S. Gulf Coast as companies export huge amounts of fracked gas to Europe and Asia, but the buildout of liquefaction facilities in the South has stumbled in recent months. A federal court revoked one facility’s permit in Texas, and the federal Department of Energy denied another company seeking an extension to build a facility in Louisiana. The coming year will be a big test for the nascent business: If courts and regulators delay more of these expensive projects, the companies behind them may abandon them and instead try building smaller, cheaper terminals elsewhere in the United States or even offshore.
Jake Bittle
Staff writer focusing on climate impacts and adaptation
Polluting countries could be legally liable to vulnerable ones
At COP28, negotiators from small island states sought to hold larger countries financially accountable for their outsize role in fueling carbon emissions. In 2024, that issue could be decided in international courts: As soon as March, the International Court of Justice will weigh arguments regarding countries’ obligations under international law to protect current and future generations from the harmful effects of climate change. The case brought by Vanuatu raises the question of how much big polluters owe island nations, with Vanuatu and other Pacific island communities particularly affected by rising sea levels and worsening storms.
Anita Hofschneider
Senior staff writer focusing on Indigenous affairs
An aerial view of Thacker Pass in northern Nevada. A proposed lithium mine on the site has drawn impassioned protest from the local Indigenous population, ranchers, and environmentalists. Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Land Use
Mining for rare earths takes off, as new discoveries and investments are made
Discoveries of major new deposits of rare earth minerals will continue to explode in the western and southeastern U.S. — places like the Salton Sea in California and a lithium belt in North Carolina — as well as in Alaska. These developments, alongside incentives from the Inflation Reduction Act, will bolster domestic mining and renewable energy industries in 2024. Many of these discoveries are being made in coalfields and oil fields by fossil fuel companies looking to diversify their portfolios. In response, expect a boom in the efforts to reform laws around the poorly regulated mining industry as well as community-driven activism against places like the Thacker Pass lithium mine in Nevada.
Katie Myers
Climate solutions reporting fellow
Congress doles out funds for unproven “climate-smart” agriculture
2024 could be the biggest year yet for “climate-smart” agriculture. Billions of dollars that Congress earmarked a year and a half ago in the Inflation Reduction Act are starting to flow to farmers planting trees and cover crops that sequester carbon. Lawmakers will have the chance to carve out even more funds in the farm bill, the sprawling legislative package that will be up for renewal next year. But climate advocates won’t be satisfied with all of the results: The fight over what counts as “climate smart” will heat up as subsidies go to tools like methane digesters, which some advocates blame for propping up big polluters.
Max Graham
Food and agriculture reporting fellow
More renewable energy comes to public lands
The Bureau of Land Management controls a tenth of the land base in the U.S. — some 245 millions acres. The Biden administration has been trying to utilize that public land for renewable energy projects and infrastructure, with the Department of Interior recently announcing 15 such initiatives. The department is also aiming to reduce fees to promote solar and wind development. These efforts have run into roadblocks in the past, including from Indigenous nations. For example, the Tohono O’odham Nation and San Carlos Apache Tribe challenged a transmission line in southern Arizona because of its potential to harm cultural sites. But with the goal of permitting 25 gigawatts of renewable energy on BLM land by 2025, expect the federal government to continue pushing its buildout next year.
Tik Root
Senior staff writer focusing on the clean energy transition
Residents in Houston look out at flooding from Hurricane Harvey in August 2017. Scott Olson/Getty Images
Climate Impacts
El Niño peaks, bringing a preview of life in the 2030s
Last year brought the onset of the latest cycle of El Niño, a natural phenomenon that spurs the formation of a band of warm water in the Pacific Ocean and fuels above-average temperatures globally. In fact, the cycle has already nudged the world over 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming for the first time.
Because these systems tend to peak from December to April, the worst impacts will likely hit in the first half of 2024. Scientists predict the world will experience its hottest summer on record, giving us a preview of what life will look like in the 2030s. El Niño has already spurred an onslaught of knock-on effects, including heat waves in South America, flooding in East Africa, and infectious disease outbreaks in the Americas and the Caribbean. This year, researchers expect El Niño will lead to an unusually strong hurricane season in the Pacific, impact agricultural production and food security, lead to more explosions of vector-borne diseases, and depress the global economy. In some places, this is already happening.
Zoya Teirstein
Staff writer covering politics and the intersection between climate change and health
To migrate or not: Pacific islanders weigh their options
Last year, a proposed treaty between Australia and Tuvalu made international headlines for a unique provision: migration rights for climate refugees from the Pacific island country, which is at particular risk of rising seas. Now, Tuvalu’s general election, set for later this month, may serve as a de facto referendum on the agreement. But the country’s voters aren’t the only ones weighing their options as their islands slowly sink. The coming year will bring more attention to the plight of Pacific Islanders who are confronting a future of forced migration and grappling with the question of where their communities will go, what rights they’ll have, and how their sovereignty will persist.
Anita Hofschneider
Senior staff writer focusing on Indigenous affairs
Insurers flee more disaster-prone states
California. Louisiana. Florida. Who’s next? The insurance markets in these hurricane- and fire-prone states have descended into turmoil over the past few years as private companies drop policyholders and flee local markets after expensive disasters. State regulators are stepping in to stop this downward spiral, but stable insurance markets will mean higher prices for homeowners, especially in places like low-lying Miami, where the average insurance premium is already around $300 a month. The next year will see the same kind of insurance crisis pop up in other states such as Hawaiʻi, Oregon, and South Carolina, as private carriers try to stem their climate-induced losses.
Jake Bittle
Staff writer focusing on climate impacts and adaptation
Despite barriers, workplace heat standards make slow progress
Earlier this year, Miami-Dade County in Florida — where the region’s humidity makes outdoor workers especially vulnerable to extreme heat — was poised to pass one of the most comprehensive and thoughtful workplace heat standards in the country. Instead, county commissioners bowed to pressure from industry groups, and the vote was deferred. On the national level, OSHA, the agency responsible for workplace safety, has been in the process of creating a federal heat standard for over two years. That work is far from over, and it seems unlikely that the agency will announce a finalized rule next year, despite record-breaking heat. That leaves states and municipalities to lead the way in 2024 for worker-heat protections, but as was the case in Miami-Dade, local officials will likely face obstacles from powerful industry groups as they do so.
Siri Chilukuri
Environmental justice reporting fellow
“Heatflation” comes for desserts
Heatflation came for condiments like olive oil and sriracha in 2023. This year, it’ll strike desserts. Unusually dry weather and a poor sugar cane harvest in India and Thailand — two of the world’s biggest producers — have driven global sugar prices to their highest level in more than a decade. Heavy rainfall in West Africa has led to widespread rot on the region’s prolific cocoa farms, causing chocolate prices to soar and snack companies like Mondelēz, which makes Oreos, to warn of more expensive products in 2024. And an extra-hot year fueled by a strong El Niño could be a rough one for wheat growers and flour prices. So now’s the time to indulge in chocolate cake — before it’s too late.
This story was originally published by Yale E360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Makueni County, a corner of southern Kenya that’s home to nearly a million people, is a land of extremes. Nine months a year, Makueni is a hardened, sun-scorched place where crops struggle and plumes of orange dust billow from dirt roads. Twice yearly, though, the county is battered by weeks of torrential rain, which drown farm fields and transform roads into impassable morasses. “Water,” says Michael Maluki, a Makueni County engineer, “is the enemy of roads.”
Maluki’s axiom is true the world over: Where roads and water intersect, trouble follows. Roads cut off streams and bleed sediment; meanwhile, floods often erode roadbeds into muddy gullies. Although wealthy nations are far from immune, these problems are most severe in developing countries, where roads are largely unpaved and thus especially vulnerable to obliteration. In Kenya and other nations, the issue is exacerbated by climate change, which has amplified the intensity of seasonal monsoons and droughts.
In 2019, Maluki began to ponder how to reconcile two of his county’s challenges: the aridity of its dry season and the destructiveness of its wet season. That year, he and colleagues attended a local workshop led by a Dutch consulting firm called MetaMeta on the concept of “Green Roads for Water” — a set of precepts for designing roads to capture water through strategic channels, culverts, and ponds and divert it for agricultural use. Inspired by the session, Maluki brought the idea to his colleagues and local farmers, who gave Green Roads their cautious blessing.
Makueni County’s Green Roads quickly proved their worth. Along roadsides, Maluki’s team members installed “mitre drains,” which shunted floodwaters into newly dug channels that irrigated mangoes, bananas, and oranges. They excavated farm ponds, which stored the rainy season’s floodwaters for use during drought, and they planted roadside fruit trees to absorb runoff and help control the dust that billowed from unpaved roads. And where travel routes crossed ephemeral rivers at right angles, the county built drifts — concrete road segments that also functioned as makeshift dams. During seasonal floods, the drifts captured deep banks of sand on their upstream sides. The sand retained pockets of water, which farmers tapped during the dry season via four-foot-deep wells dug upstream of the drift. In neighboring Kitui County, one study found that every $400 spent on similar low-tech tweaks increased farmers’ yields by around $1,000; according to Maluki, they’ve also made the rainy season far less damaging.
A tree-lined road in Bangladesh. Trees block dust, reduce erosion, and absorb runoff.
Andrew Zakharenka
“The biggest asset for [the county government] in this program is the reduction of maintenance costs,” Maluki says. “It’s a two-way benefit.” He estimates that between 5 and 10 percent of the counties’ roads now apply water-harvesting principles.
Southern Kenya isn’t the only place seeing such gains: Nearly 20 countries have either implemented Green Roads for Water or plan to begin soon, and thousands of kilometers of roads, worldwide, have already received Green Roads interventions. Engineers who have taken MetaMeta’s trainings have employed its tenets in Ethiopia and Bangladesh, and the concept is rapidly spreading to places as diverse as Somaliland, Tajikistan, and Bolivia. The idea has also gained a toehold at the World Bank and other international lending institutions, which are currently financing a road-building boom that promises to reshape ecosystems and communities around the world. Green Roads for Water offers one potential path through this thicket of new construction, one that repositions roads as environmental assets as well as liabilities.
“By integrating these small and easy practices, you can have very big benefits,” says Anastasia Deligianni, manager of MetaMeta’s Green Roads for Water program. “We think this is a critical moment to really do it right.”
Green Roads for Water is the brainchild of Frank Van Steenbergen, a Dutch geographer and MetaMeta’s director. While working on irrigation projects in Pakistan in the early 1990s, van Steenbergen first encountered “gabarbands,” stone terraces likely built by farmers millenia ago to capture water and soil from seasonal rivers during monsoons. The gabarbands were proto-dams, but their sinuous paths across ancient streambeds also reminded van Steenbergen of roads, which tend to gather water along their surfaces. In the years that followed, he began to wonder: Why not use roads to direct and collect water in desirable locations, rather than undesirable ones?
The idea’s first major test occurred in the Ethiopian state of Tigray. Every year, the region’s farmers take part in a weeks-long volunteer restoration effort known as “mass mobilization,” rebuilding terraces and clearing irrigation canals. In 2015, the mobilization included the application of Green Roads principles. Among other measures, Ethiopian farmers dug new trenches and ponds and installed “floodwater spreaders” — low earthen berms that channeled road runoff into adjacent fields of maize, wheat, and barley.
Low stone barriers built to channel runoff into cropland in Tigray, Ethiopia.
Courtesy of MetaMeta
The results, says Kifle Woldearegay, a geoengineer at Ethiopia’s Mekelle University, were dramatic. By 2018, so much water had infiltrated the soil around Tigray’s Green Roads that the water table had risen around two meters, improving the productivity of adjacent farms by 35 percent. Woldearegay has estimated that Tigray’s efforts produced nearly $17,000 in agricultural and infrastructural benefits for every kilometer of road the state treated — around a fourfold yield on the government’s investment.
“Farmers were very happy,” Woldearegay says. “They see that moisture is retained in their farmlands and landscapes, and that their crops are performing better.” Today, he says, practically every road in Tigray has been retrofitted with at least some water-harvesting techniques.
Buoyed by their success in Ethiopia, van Steenbergen and a growing network of collaborators have refined the precepts of Green Roads for Water. The techniques tend to be astonishingly simple. Gentle earthen ridges called crossbars guide water off roads and toward irrigation ditches. “Borrow pits” left after the excavation of gravel can be repurposed as rainwater collection ponds. In Bangladesh, engineers have deployed gated culverts to channel floodwaters into rice paddies. “It is often very non-glorious things that make the difference,” van Steenbergen says.
Although MetaMeta coined the term “Green Roads for Water,” van Steenbergen is adamant that no single entity owns the concept. MetaMeta holds no patents nor licenses any technologies; it merely conducts trainings and assessments, and it offers technical guidance to road-building agencies. Many of the techniques it promulgates were developed by local engineers and farmers: for example, an Ethiopian drain design that might also apply to Yemen, or a Pakistani culvert with relevance in Tajikistan. “People are very creative,” says van Steenbergen. “These are all things that can be easily replicated.”
As Green Roads practices have cohered, the concept has garnered institutional support. The German NGO Welthungerhilfe has funded Green Roads trainings and construction in Somaliland; the Global Resilience Partnership has funded assessments in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Nepal; and the International Fund for Agricultural Development and the United Nations World Food Programme have organized events on the topic. In 2021, the World Bank hired MetaMeta to compile a set of guidelines delineating the principles of Green Roads for Water and highlighting successful case studies. The approach, says Kulwinder Singh Rao, the World Bank’s lead transport specialist, “offers a new way of thinking” about the relationship between roads and water. “Practitioners and policymakers in the road sector need to embrace this new concept.”
Trees block dust that billows from an unpaved road in Makueni, Kenya.
Courtesy of Makueni County
The Green Roads movement is expanding in an era of unprecedented road construction in developing nations. William Laurance, an ecologist at James Cook University, has dubbed the phenomenon an “Infrastructure Tsunami” — a wave of construction that could produce more than 15 million miles of paved roads by mid-century and tens of millions of miles of unpaved roads. This exploding transportation network may produce immense benefits for human welfare. “Once there is a road, there is everything,” says Saroj Yakami, an engineer who spearheads the Green Roads movement in Nepal, where thousands of road miles have been constructed since 2015. “You can go to the hospital easily. You can get government services quickly. You can take your produce to the market.”
Yet this enhanced connectivity often comes at a high social and ecological price. In the Amazon, Laurance has found, the vast majority of deforestation occurs near roadways; in Nepal’s Chitwan National Park, researchers have cautioned that roads stand to “cause dramatic reductions in tiger numbers” over the next two decades. According to Yakami, shoddily bulldozed Himalayan roads often leave behind wedges of spoil, which absorb water and trigger devastating landslides. “They’re taking roads everywhere, and that is not good for the environment,” he says.
In some cases, roads provide benefits and costs simultaneously. According to Yakami, new Nepalese roads have cut off mountain springs that have long sustained farms and households, but they’ve also revealed long-buried springs. Left to flow, the unearthed springs turn dirt roads into unstable slicks of mud. But channeled into taps and pipes, they can become important water sources for drought-stressed villages. This approach differs from Green Roads strategies in Ethiopia or Kenya, where roads have primarily been modified to capture rainfall rather than groundwater, but it similarly tries to synchronize road design with water delivery infrastructure.
But if roads can be recast as boons for water provision, will that framing provide a perverse incentive to build more of them? The very notion that a road can be “green” seems oxymoronic: A vast body of scientific literature demonstrates that roads befoul air and water, fragment ecosystems, introduce non-native species, and obliterate wildlife. In an email, Laurance expressed worry that “water harvesting might become a driver of road expansion in arid environments.”
Deligianni doesn’t dismiss those fears outright, but she doesn’t give them much credence. For one thing, most Green Roads for Water techniques have thus far been applied as retrofits to existing roads, rather than included in new ones. For another, she says, new roads are inevitable and, in many cases, desirable to local communities. So why not optimize the construction to come? “We’re looking at the projections for the future, and so many roads are going to be built,” Deligianni says. “We’re just trying to change the narrative and add some benefits.”
For now, the Green Roads movement, for all its institutional momentum, is moving forward in fits and starts. The idea, says the World Bank’s Singh Rao, requires “a paradigm shift in thinking and practice,” one that entails cooperation across agencies that tend to be siloed. In Ethiopia, Woldearegay says that agricultural ministries are enthusiastic about Green Roads and have incorporated them into their own technical guidelines, but road departments themselves have proved reluctant. “They don’t want the costs associated with designing and implementing [them],” he says. That’s the case in Kenya’s Makueni County, where limited budgets have hampered progress.
Yet these projects continue to attract attention: In recent months, Michael Maluki has given Green Roads tours to newspaper reporters, engineers, and farmers from neighboring counties. “We have been receiving so many visitors,” Maluki says. “The small things we do here, people are noticing.”
This story was produced by Grist and co-published with Fresnoland.
The land of the Central Valley works hard. Here in the heart of California, in the most productive farming region in the United States, almost every square inch of land has been razed, planted, and shaped to support large-scale agriculture. The valley produces almonds, walnuts, pistachios, olives, cherries, beans, eggs, milk, beef, melons, pumpkins, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, and garlic.
This economic mandate is clear to the naked eye: Trucks laden with fertilizer or diesel trundle down arrow-straight roads past square field after square field, each one dense with tomato shrubs or nut trees. Canals slice between orchards and acres of silage, pushing all-important irrigation water through a network of laterals from farm to farm. Cows jostle for space beneath metal awnings on crowded patches of dirt, emitting a stench that wafts over nearby towns.
There is one exception to this law of productivity. In the midst of the valley, at the confluence of two rivers that have been dammed and diverted almost to the point of disappearance, there is a wilderness. The ground is covered in water that seeps slowly across what used to be walnut orchards, the surface buzzing with mosquitoes and songbirds. Trees climb over each other above thick knots of reedy grass, consuming what used to be levees and culverts. Beavers, quail, and deer, which haven’t been seen in the area in decades, tiptoe through swampy ponds early in the morning, while migratory birds alight overnight on knolls before flying south.
Corn for silage grows in a field next to a restored floodplain and riparian habitat at Dos Rios Ranch Preserve on September 21, 2021. Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Austin Stevenot, who is in charge of maintaining this restored jungle of water and wild vegetation, says this is how the Central Valley is supposed to look. Indeed, it’s how the land did look for thousands of years until white settlers arrived in the 19th century and remade it for industrial-scale agriculture. In the era before colonization, Stevenot’s ancestors in the California Miwok tribe used the region’s native plants for cooking, basket weaving, and making herbal medicines. Now those plants have returned.
“I could walk around this landscape and go, ‘I can use that, I can use this to do that, I can eat that, I can eat that, I can do this with that,’” he told me as we drove through the flooded land in his pickup truck. “I have a different way of looking at the ground.”
You wouldn’t know it without Stevenot there to point out the signs, but this untamed floodplain used to be a workhorse parcel, just like the land around it. The fertile site at the confluence of the San Joaquin and Tuolumne rivers once hosted a dairy operation and a cluster of crop fields owned by one of the county’s most prominent farmers. Around a decade ago, a conservation nonprofit worked out a deal to buy the 2,100-acre tract from the farmer, rip up the fields, and restore the ancient vegetation that once existed there. The conservationists’ goal with this $40 million project was not just to restore a natural habitat, but also to pilot a solution to the massive water management crisis that has bedeviled California and the West for decades.
Austin Stevenot leans on his pickup truck near Dos Rios Ranch Preserve, a restored floodplain in California’s Central Valley. Cameron Nielsen / Grist
Like many other parts of the West, the Central Valley always seems to have either too little water or too much. During dry years, when mountain reservoirs dry up, farmers mine groundwater from aquifers, draining them so fast that the land around them starts to sink. During wet years, when the reservoirs fill up, water comes streaming down rivers and bursts through aging levees, flooding farmland and inundating valley towns.
The restored floodplain solves both problems at once. During wet years like this one, it absorbs excess water from the San Joaquin River, slowing down the waterway before it can rush downstream toward large cities like Stockton. As the water moves through the site, it seeps into the ground, recharging groundwater aquifers that farmers and dairy owners have drained over the past century. In addition to these two functions, the restored swamp also sequesters an amount of carbon dioxide equivalent to that produced by thousands of gas-powered vehicles. It also provides a haven for migratory birds and other species that have faced the threat of extinction.
“It’s been amazing just getting to see nature take it back over,” Stevenot said. “When you go out to a commercially farmed orchard or field, and you stand there and listen, it’s sterile. You don’t hear anything. But you come out here on that same day, you hear insects, songbirds. It’s that lower part of the ecosystem starting up.”
Water flows through part of Dos Rios nature preserve.
Cameron Nielsen / Grist
Water flows through part of Dos Rios Ranch Preserve. The former farmland now acts as a storage area for floodwaters during wet years. Cameron Nielsen / Grist
A “No Trespassing” sign stands on the Dos Rios Ranch Preserve, California’s largest single floodplain restoration project in Modesto, Calif., on Wednesday, Feb. 16, 2022.
Rich Pedroncelli / AP Photo
Austin Stevenot walks through Dos Rios Ranch Preserve. Stevenot manages the restored floodplain site. Cameron Nielsen / Grist. The floodplain, which is off limits for hunting, fishing, or dumping, absorbs excess water from the San Joaquin and Tuolumne Rivers. Rich Pedroncelli / AP Photo
Austin Stevenot walks through Dos Rios Nature Preserve in Modesto, California.
Cameron Nielsen / Grist
Stevenot’s own career path mirrors that of the land he now tends. Before he worked for River Partners, the small conservation nonprofit that developed the site, he spent eight years working at a packing plant that processed cherries and onions for export across the country. He was a lifelong resident of the San Joaquin Valley, but had never been able to use the traditions he’d learned from his Miwok family until he started working routine maintenance at the floodplain project. Now he presides over the whole ecosystem.
This year, after a deluge of winter rain and snow, water rolled down the San Joaquin and Tuolumne rivers, filling up the site for the first time since it had been restored. As Stevenot guided me across the landscape, he showed me all the ways that land and water were working together. In one area, water had spread like a sheet across three former fields, erasing the divisions that had once separated acres on the property. Elsewhere, birds had scattered seeds throughout what was once an orderly orchard, so that new trees soon obscured the old furrows.
The advent of the restoration project, known as Dos Rios, has worked wonders for this small section of the San Joaquin Valley, putting an end to frequent flooding in the area and altering long-held attitudes about environmental conservation. Even so, it represents just a chink in the armor of the Central Valley, where agricultural interests still control almost all the land and water. As climate change makes California’s weather whiplash more extreme, creating a cycle of drought and flooding, flood experts say replicating this work has become more urgent than ever.
But building another Dos Rios isn’t just about finding money to buy and reforest thousands of acres of land. To create a network of restored floodplains will also require reaching an accord with a powerful industry that has historically clashedwithenvironmentalists — and that produces fruit and nuts for much of the country. Making good on the promise of Dos Rios will mean convincing the state’s farmers to occupy less land, irrigate with less water, and produce less food.
Cannon Michael, a sixth-generation farmer who runs Bowles Farming Company in the heart of the San Joaquin Valley, says such a shift is possible, but it won’t be easy.
“There’s a limited resource, there’s a warming climate, there’s a lot of constraints, and a lot of people are aging out, not always coming back to the farm,” Michael said. “There’s a lot of transition that’s happening anyway, and I think people are starting to understand that life is gonna change. And I think those of us who want to still be around the valley want to figure out how to make the outcome something we can live with.”
Members of several conservation groups gather on the Dos Rios Ranch Preserve property in 2013. It took a conservation nonprofit around a decade to restore the site. Michael Macor / The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images
You can think of the last century of environmental manipulation in the Central Valley as one long attempt to create stability. Alfalfa fields and citrus orchards guzzle a lot of water, and nut trees have to be watered consistently for years to reach maturity, so farmers seeking to grow these crops can’t just rely on water to fall from the sky.
In the early 19th century, as white settlers first claimed land in the Central Valley, they found a turbulent ecosystem. The valley functioned as a drain for the mountains of the Sierra Nevada, sluicing trillions of gallons of water out to the ocean every spring. During the worst flood years, the valley would turn into what one 19th-century observer called an “inland sea.” It took a while, but the federal government and the powerful farmers who took over the valley got this water under control. They built dozens of dams in the Sierra Nevada, allowing them to store melting snow until they wanted to use it for irrigation, as well as hundreds of miles of levees that stopped rivers from flooding.
But by restricting the flow of the valley’s rivers, the government and the farmers also desiccated much of the valley’s land, depriving it of floodwaters that had nourished it for centuries.
“In the old days, all that floodwater would spread out over the riverbanks into adjacent areas and sit there for weeks,” said Helen Dahlke, a hydrologist at the University of California, Davis, who studies floodplain management. “That’s what fed the sediment, and how we replenish our groundwater reserves. The floodwater really needs to go on land, and the problem is that now the land is mainly used for other purposes.”
The development of the valley also allowed for the prosperity of families like that of Bill Lyons, the rancher who used to own the land that became Dos Rios. Lyons is a third-generation family farmer, the heir to a farming dynasty that began when his great-uncle E.T. Mape came over from Ireland. With his shock of gray hair and his standard uniform of starched dress shirt and jeans, Lyons is the image of the modern California farmer, and indeed he once served as the state’s secretary of agriculture.
Bill Lyons stands for a portrait on the banks of the Tuolumne River at Dos Rios Ranch Preserve in 2021. Lyons, a prominent Central Valley farmer, owned the farmland that became Dos Rios. Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Lyons has expanded his family’s farming operation over the past several decades, stretching his nut orchards and dairy farms out across thousands of acres on the west side of the valley. But his territory straddles the San Joaquin River, and there was one farm property that always seemed to go underwater during wet years.
“It was an extremely productive ranch, and that was one of the reasons it attracted us,” said Lyons. But while the land’s low-elevation river frontage made its soil fertile, that same geography put its harvests at risk of flooding. “Over the 20 years that we owned it, I believe we got flooded out two or three times,” Lyons added.
In 2006, as he was repairing the farm after a flood, Lyons met a biologist named Julie Rentner, who had just joined River Partners. The conservation nonprofit’s mission was to restore natural ecosystems in river valleys across California, and it had completed a few humble projects over the previous decade, most of them on small chunks of not-too-valuable land in the north of the state. As Rentner examined the overdeveloped land of the San Joaquin Valley, she came to the conclusion that it was ready for a much larger restoration project than River Partners had ever attempted. And she thought Lyons’ land was the perfect place to start.
Floodwaters pool at Dos Rios Ranch Preserve earlier this year. As water passes through the site, it recharges groundwater aquifers in the area. Cameron Nielsen / Grist
Most farmers would have bristled at such a proposition, especially those with deep roots in a region that depends on agriculture. But unlike many of his peers, Lyons already had some experience with conservation work: He had partnered with the U.S. Forest Service in the 1990s on a project that set aside some land for the Aleutian goose, an endangered species that just so happened to love roosting on his property. As Lyons started talking with Rentner, he found her practical and detail-oriented. Within a year, he and his family had made a handshake deal to sell her the flood-prone land. If she could find the money to buy the land and turn it into a floodplain, it was hers.
For Rentner, the process wasn’t anywhere near so easy. Finding the $26 million she needed to buy the land from Lyons — and the additional $14 million she needed to restore it — required scraping together money from a rogues’ gallery of funders including three federal agencies, three state agencies, a local utility commission, a nonprofit foundation, the electric utility Pacific Gas & Electric, and the beer company New Belgium Brewing.
Julie Rentner, president of the nonprofit River Partners, stands by a small grove of trees at Dos Rios Ranch Preserve. Rentner spent the better part of a decade raising money for the floodplain restoration project. Rich Pedroncelli / AP Photo
“I remember taking so many tours out there,” said Rentner, “and all the public funding agency partners would go, ‘OK, so you have a million dollars in hand, and you still need how many? How are you going to get there?’”
“I don’t know,” Rentner told them in response. “We’re just gonna keep writing proposals, I guess.”
Even once River Partners bought the land in 2012, Rentner found herself in a permitting nightmare: Each grant came with a separate set of conditions for what River Partners could and couldn’t do with the money, the deed to Lyons’ tract came with its own restrictions, and the government required the project to undergo several environmental reviews to ensure it wouldn’t harm sensitive species or other land. River Partners also had to hold dozens of listening sessions and community meetings to quell the fears and skepticism of nearby farmers and residents who worried about shutting down a farm to flood it on purpose.
Floodbase
Floodbase
It took more than a decade for River Partners to complete the project, but now that it’s done, it’s clear that all those fears were unfounded. The restored floodplain absorbed a deluge from the huge “atmospheric river” storms that drenched California last winter, trapping all the excess water without flooding any private land. The removal of a few thousand acres of farmland hasn’t put anyone out of work in nearby towns, nor has it hurt local government budgets. Indeed, the groundwater recharge from the project may soon help restore the unhealthy aquifers below nearby Grayson, where a community of around 1,300 Latino agricultural workers has long avoided drinking well water contaminated with nitrates.
As new plants take root, the floodplain has become a self-sustaining ecosystem: It will survive and regenerate even through future droughts, with a full hierarchy of pollinators and base flora and predators like bobcats. Except for Stevenot’s routine cleanup and road repair, River Partners doesn’t have to do anything to keep it working in perpetuity. Come next year, the organization will hand the site over to the state, which will keep it open as California’s first new state park in more than a decade and let visitors wander on new trails.
“After three years of intensive cultivation, we walk away,” said Rentner. “We literally stopped doing any restoration work. The vegetation figures itself out, and what we’ve seen is, it’s resilient. You get a big deep flood like we have this year, and after the floodwaters recede what comes back is the native stuff.”
Dos Rios has managed to change the ecology of one small corner of the Central Valley, but the region’s water problems are gargantuan in scale. A recent NASA study found that water users in the valley are over-tapping aquifers by about 7 million acre-feet every year, sucking half a Colorado River’s worth of water out of the ground without putting any back. This overdraft has created zones of extreme land subsidence all over the valley, causing highways to crack and buildings to sink dozens of feet into the ground.
Fixing the state’s distorted water system for an era of climate change will be the work of many decades. In order to comply with California’s landmark law for regulating groundwater, which will take full effect by 2040, farmers will have to retire as much as a million acres of productive farmland, wiping out billions of dollars of revenue. Protecting the region’s cities from flooding, meanwhile, will require spending billions more dollars to bolster aging dirt levees and channels.
In theory, this dual mandate would make floodplain restoration an ideal way to deal with the state’s water problems. But the scale of the need is enormous, equivalent to dozens of projects on the same scale as Dos Rios.
“Dos Rios is good, but we need 50 more of it,” said Jane Dolan, the chair of the Central Valley Flood Protection Board, a state agency that regulates flood control in the region. “Do I think that will happen in my lifetime? No, but we have to keep working toward it.” Fifty more projects of the same size as Dos Rios would span more than 150 square miles, an area larger than the city of Detroit, Michigan. It would cost billions of dollars to purchase that much valuable farmland, saw away old levees, and plant new vegetation.
Members of the California Conservation Corps plant new vegetation on the Dos Rios Ranch Preserve in 2013. After a decade of restoration work, the floodplain now functions as a self-sustaining ecosystem. Michael Macor / The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Image
As successful as Rentner was in finding the money for Dos Rios, the nonprofit’s piecemeal approach could never fund restoration work at this scale. The only viable sources for that much funding are the state and federal governments. Neither has ever devoted significant public dollars to floodplain restoration, in large part because farmers in the Central Valley haven’t supported it. But that has started to change. Earlier this year, state lawmakers set aside $40 million to fund new restoration projects. Governor Gavin Newsom, fearing a budget crunch, tried to slash the funding at the start of the year, but reinserted it after furious protests from local officials along the San Joaquin. Most of this new money went straight to River Partners, and the organization has already started to clear the land on a site next to Dos Rios. It’s also in the process of closing on another 500-acre site nearby.
But even if nonprofits like River Partners get billions more dollars to buy agricultural land, creating the ribbon of natural floodplains that Dolan describes will still be difficult. That’s because river land in the Central Valley is also some of the most productive agricultural land in the world, and the people who own it have no incentive to forgo future profits by selling.
“Maybe we could do it some time down the road, but we’re farming in a pretty water-secure area,” said Cannon Michael, the sixth-generation farmer from Bowles Farm whose land sits on the upper San Joaquin River. The aquifers beneath his property are substantial, fed by seepage from the river, and he also has the rights to use water from the state’s canal system. “It’s a hard calculation because we’re employing a lot of people, and we’re doing stuff with the land, we’re producing.”
Even farmers who are running out of groundwater may not need to sell off their land in order to restore their aquifers. Don Cameron, who grows grapes in the eastern valley near the Kings River, has pioneered a technique that involves the intentional flooding of crop fields to recharge groundwater. Earlier this year, when a torrent of melting snow came roaring along the Kings, he used a series of pumps to pull it off the river and onto his vineyards. The water sank into the ground, where it refilled Cameron’s underground water bank, and the grapes survived just fine.
The farmer Don Cameron stands near a pump on the Kings River in 2021. The pump moves water from the Kings onto Cameron’s grape fields, flooding them in order to recharge the groundwater aquifers beneath them. Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
This kind of recharge project allows farmers to keep their land, so it’s much more palatable to big agricultural interests. The California Farm Bureau supports taking agricultural land out of commission only as a last resort, but it has thrown its weight behind recharge projects like Cameron’s, since they allow farmers to keep farming. The state government has also been trying to subsidize this kind of water capture, and other farmers have bought in: According to a state estimate, valley landowners may have caught and stored almost 4 million acre-feet of water this year.
“I’m familiar with Dos Rios, and I think it has a very good purpose when you’re trying to provide benefits to the river, but ours is more farm-centric,” said Cameron.
But Joshua Viers, a watershed scientist at the University of California, Merced, says these on-farm recharge projects may cannibalize demand for projects like Dos Rios. Not only does a project like Cameron’s not provide any flood control or ecological benefit, but it also provides a much narrower benefit to the aquifer, focusing water in a small square of land rather than allowing it to seep across a wide area.
“If you can build this string of beads down the river, with all these restored floodplains, where you can slow the water down and let it stay in for long periods of time, you’re getting recharge that otherwise wouldn’t happen,” he said.
As long as landowners see floodwater as a tool to support their farms rather than a force that needs to be respected, it will be difficult to replicate the success of Dos Rios. It’s this entrenched philosophy about the natural world, rather than financial constraints, that will be River Partners’ biggest barrier in the coming decades. In order to create Viers’ “string of beads,” Rentner and her colleagues would have to convert farmland all across the state.
It’s one thing to do that in a northern area like Sacramento, where officials designed flood bypasses on agricultural land a century ago. It’s quite another to do it farther south in the Tulare Basin, where the powerful farm company J.G. Boswell has been accused of channeling floodwater toward nearby towns in an effort to save its own tomato crops. River Partners is funneling some of the new state money toward restoration projects in this area, but these are small conservation efforts, and they don’t alter the landscape of the valley like Dos Rios does.
To export the Dos Rios model, River Partners will have to convince hundreds of farmers that it’s worth it to give up some of their land for the sake of other farmers, flood-prone cities, climate resilience, and endangered species. Rentner was able to build that consensus at Dos Rios through patience and open dialogue, but the path toward restoration in the rest of the state will likely be more painful. California farmers will need to retire thousands of acres of productive land over the coming decades as they respond to rising costs and water restrictions, and more acres will face the constant threat of flooding as storms intensify in a warming world and levees break. As landowners sell their parcels to solar companies or let fallow fields turn to dust, Rentner is hoping that she can catch some of them as they head for the exits.
“It’s going to be a challenge,” said Rentner. “We’re hopeful that some will think twice and say, ‘Wait, maybe we should take the time to sit down with the people in the conservation community and think about our legacy, think about what we’re leaving behind when we make this transaction.’ And maybe it’s not as simple as just the highest bidder.”
The first-ever day devoted to food and agriculture at the United Nations’ annual climate conference was expected to be momentous. But some of the buzz fizzled at the gathering in Dubai on Sunday after the U.N. released the first part of its much-anticipated “roadmap” to easing hunger and reducing climate pollution from food and agriculture, a source of about a third of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. It was far from the groundbreaking proposal that climate advocates hoped for. They say it lacks a vision to move away from chemical fertilizers and an industrial livestock industry that emits an astonishing amount of methane.
“The roadmap fails to name the fact that industrial agriculture is the second largest cause of emissions on the planet,” said Teresa Anderson, who leads the global climate justice program at ActionAid International, a humanitarian organization. “It sort of dances around the elephant in the room by refusing to name the real problem. It’s a ‘trying to please people’ sort of report, without calling anyone out.”
The first-of-its-kind roadmap aims to reform how food is produced around the world to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). It’s essentially a guidebook drafted by the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization in the hope that member countries will eventually follow the recommendations. The document outlines goals for cutting a quarter of methane emissions from livestock by 2030, feeding the world in a way that’s carbon-neutral by 2035, and turning agriculture into an industry that soaks up more carbon than it emits by 2050. Addressing not only crops but also fisheries, food waste, forestry, and more, the FAO advocates for a “global rebalancing” of meat consumption and access to nutritious foods and calls for “improved efficiencies,” like shifting to livestock feed that cuts down on methane pollution.
Advocates have lauded world leaders for finally talking about food and agriculture at this year’s conference. But some think the roadmap falls short. In particular, critics say, it prioritizes incremental change over wholesale shifts in agriculture, such as moving away from industrialized farming and toward an approach that promotes biodiversity and carbon storage by integrating crops with surrounding ecosystems.
The roadmap also barely mentions fossil fuels. By one estimate, 15 percent of global oil, gas, and coal use is tied to food and agriculture. The FAO’s proposal has a section on clean energy, but it focuses on making biofuels more sustainable and on controversial technologies such as carbon capture rather than tackling the pervasiveness of oil and gas across agricultural supply chains.
“Industrial food systems are locked into fossil-fuel dependency,” said Patty Fong, who directs a climate program at the Global Alliance for the Future of Food. “They’re not actually calling for decoupling food systems from fossil fuels.”
The FAO document highlights 120 actions, such as curbing methane emissions from rice farming (a source of 8 percent of human-generated methane) and improving soil health by, for example, tilling less land and planting more cover crops like clover. The organization plans to release two more “volumes” of the roadmap at the next two U.N. climate conferences. The second installment will include regional analyses, and the third will have specific country action plans.
Before the organization published the document, climate advocates and critics had anticipated that it would call on wealthy countries like the United States, where the average person eats more than their body weight in meat each year, to consume less and help reduce the vast amount of methane generated by livestock, especially cows. But beyond saying that the world needs to “readjust consumption patterns,” the report doesn’t give details or call out specific countries for consuming too much.
The roadmap also says next to nothing about alternatives to meat — a solution that the UN’s own environmental program, in its first-ever report on alternative proteins, described as “important” just a few days before the roadmap came out.
Shayna Fertig, a co-author of that report and an adviser at the Good Food Institute, an international think tank based in Washington, D.C. that promotes alternative proteins, said efforts to improve animal agriculture are necessary but shouldn’t come at the “expense” of developing substitutes for meat and dairy.
Fong said she wasn’t surprised that the roadmap didn’t harp on meat consumption, a “highly political” issue.
One thing the report does advocate for is making livestock farming more productive by breeding climate-resilient cows and developing animal feed that’s more digestible — so that cattle belch less methane. Some researchers consider these reforms to be necessary as demand for meat rises, but others see them as distractions from the broader need to make the world less dependent on industrialized animal agriculture.
Despite what she considers drawbacks and omissions, Fong said the roadmap wasn’t a total letdown. She praised it for being “comprehensive” — because it touches on a lot more than agriculture — and for taking on often-overlooked problems like land use. The destruction of carbon-rich forests and wetlands by expanding animal agriculture is one reason farming accounts for so much of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, and among the FAO’s more ambitious goals is one to end all deforestation by 2035.
This coverage is made possible through a partnership with WABE andGrist, a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future.
On a sunny day this fall, two Georgia Southern University grad students stood waist-deep in the North Newport River near St. Catherine’s Island on Georgia’s coast, while their professor and a team from the Georgia Department of Natural Resources used a winch to lower pallets full of oyster shells into the water.
The students guided the pallets into place on the muddy river bank. Those pallets, piled with shells, will provide a hard surface for baby oysters to latch onto.
“We are creating a foundation which wild oysters can populate and grow into a independent reef,” said Cameron Brinton, a marine biologist with DNR.
Oysters used to be abundant here: Georgia led the nation in oyster harvesting in the early 20th century, according to the University of Georgia. But by the 1930s, they’d been overharvested. A similar story has played out in other formerly thriving oyster grounds.
Scientists all along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts are trying to bring oyster populations back, and not just because they’re a popular food. Oysters are also important for healthy coastal ecosystems. And researchers are now studying how creating new oyster reefs could help fight climate change by sequestering carbon.
Oysters, Brinton explained, are a keystone species. That means they create habitat for other critters, from small shrimp and crabs to fish like red drum and spotted sea trout that are popular for fishing.
“The majority of commercially and recreationally important species of fish and shellfish will spend a portion of their life associated with oyster reefs,” Brinton said.
And scientists are studying two ways that oyster reefs suck up and store carbon. First, they keep the sediment in the river from washing away.
“There’s lots of organic matter in this sediment in the rivers here,” said John Carroll, a professor of biology at Georgia Southern. “So some of that organic matter gets buried behind the reefs.”
Organic matter has carbon in it, so the oyster reefs can store that carbon and keep it from warming the planet.
Second, by stabilizing the shoreline, oyster reefs also help marshes expand — and marshes themselves are very good at storing carbon.
“As the marsh grasses grow toward the reefs, they’ll also trap a lot of carbon,” Carroll said.
Graduate students and members of the Georgia Department of Natural Resources used pallets of oyster shells to help create a new reef in the North Newport River on Georgia’s coastline.
Grist / Emily Jones
So Carroll and his students are helping the Georgia DNR build these reefs. Then, they’ll track how the shoreline changes and how much carbon it’s storing.
The project is funded by the environmental arm of Yamaha, the boat engine maker. The company, with manufacturing headquarters for the United States located in the Atlanta area, is looking for ways to offset its carbon impact, and a project on Georgia’s coast made sense, said sustainability program manager Josh Grier.
“It’s something that our customers who are out using our products can see,” he said. “Not only are we investigating how we could potentially sequester CO2, but also providing habitat for fish, you know, kind of giving back into the communities where our customers are using our products.”
Marine combustion – that is, ship and boat engines – produced 23.7 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent emissions in 2020, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. That accounts for a tiny fraction of overall transportation emissions, which were more than 1,500 MMT CO2 equivalent in 2020, mostly from roads.
Yamaha is funding similar research into oyster reefs and carbon sequestration in the Gulf of Mexico through Texas A&M University. The two projects could make for an interesting comparison, Grier said, because the Atlantic coast of Georgia and the Gulf coast of Texas differ a lot in their tides, salinity, and other factors that can influence oyster growth.
“They’re such different environments that we’re very curious to see kind of how the CO2 sequestration manifests itself over time,” Grier said.
Once researchers are able to quantify the carbon storage, Carroll said, he’s hopeful Yamaha and other companies will want to fund more oyster reefs.
“There’s lots of need,” he said. “It just boils down to having enough of the materials.”
