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.”
Fossil fuels usually suck up everyone’s attention at the annual United Nations’ climate summit. But at this year’s gathering in Dubai, COP28, another topic is generating headlines: food.
More than 130 countries signed a declaration on Friday saying that the world must transform its food systems, the source of one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions, “to respond to the imperatives of climate change.” On Saturday at the conference, the Biden administration announced a national strategy to reduce food waste, a huge emitter of methane. And on December 10,the U.N. is expected to call on countries that consume a lot of meat to eat less of it.
All this news comes after years of prodding from scientists and environmental advocates who say the only path to keep global warming below the Paris Agreement’s goal of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) is to do things like limit how much meat we eat in the U.S. and other beef-loving countries. (Livestock alone are responsible for about 15 percent of global climate pollution.)
The problem is that meat consumption is as politically polarizing as ever. Fox Business recently ran a headline saying world leaders planned to “declare a war on meat” at COP28. “They don’t want solutions, they want a sick, depressed populace,” television chef Andrew Gruel said on the social media platform X.
The political right is also taking aim at climate-friendly alternatives to meat, like cultivated chicken and beef, made from cells grown in labs. State legislators in Florida recently proposed a bill that would make selling cultivated meat a second-degree misdemeanor. In Europe the issue has been just as partisan. Italy’s right-wing government just banned the production and sale of cultivated meat, ostensibly to protect the country’s culinary heritage. And Germany’s far-right Alternative for Deutschland party has been drumming up fears that the left is coming for their fried cutlets. “They will not take away my schnitzel,” a party co-chair said at a campaign event this fall.
Some of the backlash is likely a result of lobbying by the meat and dairy industries and the proliferation of misinformation on social media. But no matter how good it might be for the planet to end factory farming and to stop converting forests into pastures, researchers say meat is inherently political.
“It’s a political relationship between our species and other species,” said Sparsha Saha, a political scientist who studies meat politics at Harvard University. “That’s what makes it a lot different. It’s not a technology.”
Technological solutions tend to be more popular than lifestyle ones, even though some researchers say both may be necessary to avert environmental catastrophe. According to a survey across 23 countries, people in every one but France showed more support for solving the climate crisis through technology and innovation than by changing how they live.
Saha’s research suggests that meat is even more polarizing than gas-guzzling cars. In a recent study published in the journal Frontiers, she found that voters are more likely to oppose candidates who advocate for curbing emissions by eating less meat than those who talk about the need to limit emissions from transportation.
“It’s like asking us to be a different kind of human,” Saha said. “I think that’s why people are so reticent about it. It is kind of a costly thing to bring up. Even as an academic, I have to be really thoughtful about how I’m framing things.”
To Saha, the solution isn’t to keep meat out of political conversation; it’s to talk about it differently and focus on building consensus. Rather than avoid the issue or pretend like it doesn’t have to be political, she thinks the meat-reduction movement would benefit from messaging supported by a broader coalition, including religious leaders, hunters, and even ranchers who oppose factory farming.
“If we had put more thought into how it could be communicated well to people ahead of time we might not be in this position,” Saha said. “It feels like it was sprung on people.”
Saha advises against “quiet meat politics,” an idea articulated in a piece published in 2021 by the Breakthrough Institute, an environmental research center in Berkeley, California. The author of the article, a researcher named Alex Smith, argued for an approach that “avoids political partisanship and culture warring in favor of creating a technological and infrastructural environment that can achieve long-term sustainable change.”
Smith wrote that plant-based burgers, like those made by Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat, have a lot of potential to replace animal products, and he predicted that more people would shift their diets if those alternatives — as well as “more futuristic” lab-grown meat — got cheaper.
Today, Smith is less optimistic. He told Grist he’s “wary of the possibility” that plant-based meat will ever meaningfully displace poultry and beef, and he noted that “we’re still so far from actually knowing the scalability, the actual potential of cultivated meat.” In his view, efforts to lower greenhouse gas emissions from farming can’t only focus on replacing beef. They have to include improving animal agriculture, like developing feed additives that reduce methane. Smith pushed back against the idea that making meat more central in our politics would convince people to eat less of it.
“There’s pleasure involved. There’s culture involved,” Smith said. “I’m relatively skeptical of the idea that we can divert people and push them ideologically, culturally talking-wise towards anything other than that.”
Saha’s paper offers some evidence for a different perspective. To her surprise, she found that voters were more receptive to a theoretical candidate who talked about animal rights than one who talked about the environmental costs of meat eating. That might signal that meat itself isn’t as divisive as some think. Perhaps it’s made more partisan through its connection to another polarizing issue: climate change.
Humans eat a stunning amount of meat every year — some 800 billion pounds of it, enough flesh to fill roughly 28 million dump trucks. Our carnivorous cravings, particularly in industrialized, beef-guzzling countries like the United States, are one reason the planet is warming as fast as it is. Raising animals consumes a lot of land that would otherwise soak up carbon. Cows, sheep, and goats spew heat-trapping methane. And to grow the corn, soy, and other plants that those animals eat, farmers spray fertilizer that emits nitrous oxide, another potent planet-warming gas.
For all those reasons, and many more, activists and scientists have called for people to eat less meat or abstain altogether. At last year’s United Nations climate conference in Egypt, activists chanted slogans like “Let’s be vegan, let’s be free.” At this year’s conference, which starts November 30, world leaders are expected to talk about ways to shift diets toward plant-based foods as a way to lower animal agriculture’s climate pollution, the source of 15 percent of the planet’s greenhouse gas emissions.
Cutting out meat can be an effective tool: The average vegan diet is linked to about one-quarter the greenhouse gas emissions of a meat-intensive one, according to a paper published in Nature in July.
But what would happen if everyone actually stopped eating meat tomorrow?
“It would have huge consequences — a lot of them probably not anticipated,” said Keith Wiebe, a senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute.
Such a quick shift probably wouldn’t cause the sort of turmoil that would come if the planet immediately ditched fossil fuels. But still, the upshot could be tumultuous, upending economies, leaving people jobless, and threatening food security in places that don’t have many nutritious alternatives.
Livestock accounts for about 40 percent of agricultural production in rich countries and 20 percent in low-income countries, and it’s vital — economically and nutritionally — to the lives of 1.3 billion people across the world, according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization. One-third of the protein and nearly one-fifth of the calories that people eat around the world come from animals.
Researchers say the economic damage caused by the sudden disappearance of meat would fall disproportionately on low-income countries with agrarian economies, like Niger or Kenya, where farming and raising livestock are critical sources of income. Niger’s livestock industry makes up about 13 percent of the country’s gross domestic product; in the U.S., the entire agricultural system accounts for only around 5 percent.
Niger is home to 4 million livestock breeders, according to the World Bank. Issouf Sanogo / AFP via Getty Images
It’s tough to predict exactly what the economic shock would look like on a global level. There has been “relatively little” research on how phasing out meat would affect employment around the world, Wiebe said. “It’s an issue that deserves a lot more attention.”
Millions of people would lose jobs, but demand for other sources of calories and protein might rise and offset some of those losses. Some workers might be drawn into agriculture to grow more crops like legumes. That shift in labor, some researchers hypothesize, could slow economic growth by pulling people out of more profitable industries.
Still, the effects would vary across cultures, economies, and political systems, and they aren’t as clear-cut as, say, the amount of methane that would be saved if cows ceased to exist. “It depends on the species of livestock. It depends on the geographic location,” said Jan Dutkiewicz, a political economist at the Pratt Institute, in New York City. “It’s very difficult, if not impossible, to talk in universal terms about addressing those kinds of things.”
It’s easier to talk in broad terms about another challenge with getting rid of meat: nutrition. Eliminating livestock overnight would deprive many people of essential nutrients, especially in regions like South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, where meat comprises a small but crucial sliver of the average person’s starch-heavy diet. Animal-based foods are high in vitamin B12, vitamin A, calcium, and iron. That’s why researchers say preserving access to meat, milk, and eggs is key to keeping people healthy in low- and middle-income countries right now, where nutritious plant-based options are harder to come by.
And then there’s the issue of cultural damage. Taking away meat, according to Wilson Warren, a history professor at Western Michigan University, would do more than just deprive Americans of hot dogs and hamburgers and Italians of salami.
“Historically, the way that most people understood animals was through farming and having close contact with their livestock,” said Warren, who’s also the author of Meat Makes People Powerful, a book about the global history of meat. “You get rid of that sort of close connection, [and] I envision people in some ways being even less environmentally in touch.” (Warren grapples with this idea in a self-published novel called Animeat’s End about a future world in which eating meat is a serious crime.)
Many researchers agree that phasing out meat entirely, let alone immediately, isn’t an ideal solution to the climate crisis. It would be plenty, they say, to reduce consumption methodically and to focus on the countries that eat the most, particularly wealthy ones like the United States that have no shortage of alternatives.
It might be easier for the average American, who eats about 220 pounds of red meat and poultry each year, to trade a daily hamburger for a bowl of lentils than for someone in rural sub-Saharan Africa, who eats 10 times less meat, to give up the occasional goat or beef stew for something less nutritious. Such a shift in beef-loving countries also might reduce heart disease and cancer linked to eating a lot of red and processed meat.
Dutkiewicz suggested using guidelines established by the EAT-Lancet Commission, an international group of scientists who have designed a diet intended to give people the nutrients they need without destroying the planet. It consists of roughly 35 pounds of meat per year. Adopting that diet would require a drastic reduction of cows and chickens in countries like the United States, Australia, China, Brazil, and Argentina, and a slight increase in parts of Africa and South Asia.
Gradually replacing meat with plants could have immense benefits for the planet. “It would be a huge net win for the environment,” Dutkiewicz said. By one estimate, a complete phaseout of meat over 15 years would cut as much as one-third of all methane emissions and two-thirds of all nitrous oxide emissions. Water use would fall drastically. Biodiversity loss would slow. Animal welfare advocates would be happy to see fewer animals packed into tight pens wallowing in their own poop awaiting slaughter. And there would be ample opportunity to rewild abandoned rangelands and pastures at a scale that would sequester a whole lot of carbon — as much as 550 gigatons, enough to give us a pretty good shot at keeping warming below catastrophic levels.
Given the complexities and pitfalls of a complete phaseout, researchers and advocates have pointed instead to a more modest goal: cutting meat production in half. Replacing it with plant-based alternatives would lower agricultural emissions 31 percent by 2050, a recent study found.
“It doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing approach,” Raychel Santo, a food and climate researcher at the World Resources Institute, said in an email.
The solution, in other words, lies somewhere between culling cows in Niger and gorging ourselves on factory-farmed flesh.
Just weeks after the deadliest wildfire in modern U.S. history ripped through the coastal town of Lāhainā, Native Hawaiian taro farmers, environmentalists, and other residents of West Maui crowded into a narrow conference room in Honolulu for a state water commission hearing.
The chorus of criticism was emotional and persistent. For nearly 12 hours, scores of people urged commissioners to reinstate an official who had been key to strengthening water regulations and to resist corporate pressure to weaken those regulations. One after another, they calmly and deliberately delivered scathing criticism of a developer named Peter Martin, calling him “the face of evil in Lāhainā” and “public enemy number one.”
One person summed up the mood of the room when he said, “F— Peter Martin.”
More than 100 miles away on Maui, Martin followed parts of the hearing through a livestream on YouTube. Despite the deluge of criticism, he wasn’t upset. He wasn’t even surprised. After nearly 50 years as a developer on Maui, he’s used to public criticism.
“When you’re around a gang of people, a mob, the commissioners just listen to the mob, they don’t listen to reasoned voices,” Martin told Grist. “I’m not comparing these people to Hitler; I’m just saying Hitler got people involved by hating, hating the Jews.”
Martin, who is 76, has long been controversial. He moved to Maui from California in 1971 and got his start picking pineapples, teaching high school math, and waiting tables. Before long, he began investing in real estate. His timing was perfect: Hawaiʻi had become a state just 12 years earlier, and Maui’s housing market was booming as Americans from the mainland flocked there. By 1978, local headlines were bemoaning the high price of housing, and prices only went up from there.
Developer Peter Martin West Maui Land Company displays a map during an interview with Grist reporter Anita Hofschneider.
Cory Lum / Grist
Developer Peter Martin told the New Yorker that protecting water for Native Hawaiian cultural practices was “a crock of shit,” and that invasive grasses and “this stupid climate change thing” had “nothing to do with the fire.”
A bible stands on top of a stack of papers next to West Maui Land Company developer Peter Martin.
Cory Lum / Grist
Martin points to a map of West Maui, indicating an area where he hopes to build homes. Next to him is his Bible, which he often quotes in conversations and emails. Cory Lum / Grist
Developer Peter Martin West Maui Land Company points to development locations on a map of west Maui during the interview. September 18, 2023.
Cory Lum / Grist
Over the last five decades, Martin has made millions of dollars off this real estate boom, building a development empire on West Maui and turning hundreds of acres of plantation land into a paradise of palatial homes and swimming pools.He owns or holds interest in nearly three dozen companies that touch almost every aspect of the homebuilding process: companies that buy vacant land, companies that submit development plans to local governments, companies that build houses, and companies that sell water to residents. His real estate brokerage helps find buyers for homes built on his land, and he’s even got a company that builds swimming pools.
Companies associated with Martin own more than 5,500 acres of land around Lāhainā, according to an analysis of county records, making him one of the area’s largest private landowners, and his web of businesses wields immense influence in West Maui, which is home to about 25,000 people. He drives his white Ford F-150 around the island with a large, black Bible on the center dashboard and peppers his conversations and emails with quotes from Scripture or libertarian economist Milton Friedman. He once served on the Maui County salary commission, where he helped determine pay for elected officials and county department heads, and he has donated $1.3 million to the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii, a libertarian think tank that has fought Native Hawaiian sovereignty. So extensive is the reach of his land empire that the command center for the response to the August wildfires is located on land owned by a company in which he has a stake.
Development on Maui, where the median home price now exceeds $1 million, often sparks controversy, and Martin is far from the only builder who has inspired opposition. But his staunch ideological commitment to free market capitalism and Christianity, coupled with his companies’ persistent pushback against water regulations intended to protect Native Hawaiian rights, has evoked particularly passionate distaste among many locals. “F— the Peter Martin types,” reads one bumper sticker spotted in Lāhainā.
And that was before the wildfire. Just two days after the outbreak of a blaze that would go on to kill 97 people, fueled in part by invasive grasses on Martin’s vacant land, an executive at one of Martin’s companies sent a letter to the state water commission. Glenn Tremble, who works for West Maui Land Company, wrote that the company’s request to fill its reservoirs on the day of the fire had been delayed by the state. He also asked the commission to loosen water regulations during the fire recovery.
“We anxiously awaited the morning knowing that we could have made more water available to [the Maui Fire Department] if our request had been immediately approved,” he wrote.
Residents of Martin’s West Maui developments have gorgeous views of the Pacific Ocean — and now many also look out on the burned remains of Lāhainā. Cory Lum / Grist
Tremble’s letter implied that a state official key to implementing local water regulations — and the first Native Hawaiian to lead the state water commission — had impeded firefighting efforts. He soon walked back the claim, but his first letter had immediate effect. The state attorney general launched an investigation into the official, the governor suspended water regulations, and the official was temporarily reassigned. Critics saw it as an attempt to capitalize on the grief of the community for profit.
It didn’t help that within weeks, when the Washington Post asked about the role the invasive grasses on Martin’s land played in the deadly wildfire, Martin said he believed the fire was the result of God’s anger over the state water restrictions.
Most people in West Maui get water from the county’s public water system. But Martin-built developments such as Launiupoko, a community of a few hundred large homes outside of Lāhainā, draw their water from three private utility systems that he controls, siphoning underground aquifers and mountain streams to fill swimming pools and irrigate lawns. More than half of all water used in the Launiupoko subdivision, or around 1.5 million gallons a day, goes toward cosmetic landscaping on lawns, according to state estimates. Just over a quarter is used for drinking and cooking.
The scale of this water usage is stunning: According to state data, Launiupoko Irrigation Company and Launiupoko Water Company deliver a combined average of 5,750 gallons of water daily to each residential customer in Launiupoko, or almost 20 times as much as the average American home. The development has just a few hundred residents, but it uses almost half as much water as the public water system in Lāhainā, which serves 18,000 customers.
Martin says he didn’t set out to make Launiupoko a luxury development, but that its value spiked after Maui County imposed rules that limited large-scale residential development on agricultural land. Martin’s development was grandfathered in under those restrictions, and demand for large homes drove up prices in the area. He says criticism of swimming pools and landscaped driveways is rooted in envy.
“People come over and make their land beautiful by using water,” he said.
Martin also maintains that there’s more than enough water for everyone, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Annual precipitation around Lāhainā declined by about 10 percent between 1990 and 2009, drying out the streams near Launiupoko, and now Martin sometimes can’t provide water to all his customers during dry periods. The underground aquifer in the area is also oversubscribed, according to state data, with Martin’s companies and other users pumping out 10 percent more groundwater than flows in each year on average. Climate change could exacerbate this shortage by worsening droughts along Maui’s coast: Projections from 2014 show that annual rainfall could decline by around 15 percent over the coming century under even a moderate scenario for global warming.
In response, the state water commission has intervened to stop Martin and other developers from overtapping West Maui’s water, setting strict limits on water diversion and fining his companies for violating those rules. Last year, the state took full control of the region’s water, potentially jeopardizing the future of Martin’s luxury subdivisions and making it harder for him to build more in the area.
Now, though, Martin is poised to play a key role as West Maui recovers from the Lāhainā wildfire, which destroyed 2,200 structures, including six housing units Martin had developed. Nine of his employees lost their homes. As of early November, more than 6,800 displaced people on Maui remained in hotels or other temporary lodging. Millions of dollars in federal funds are expected to flow into the state for reconstruction. Martin, with his dozens of development companies and thousands of acres of vacant land, is perfectly positioned to build new homes. And his concerns about water regulations slowing development may find a more sympathetic audience as local officials seek to address a post-fire housing crisis.
Moreover, he is itching to build. Before the fire, county and state officials were shooting down most of his new building proposals amid a concern about overdevelopment, even the ones that Martin pitched as affordable workforce housing. Martin thinks he can mitigate West Maui’s fire risk and and its housing crisis by getting rid of the barriers that prevent developers like himself from building more houses with irrigated farms and green lawns.
“What I just want is the water to be able to be used on the land, which God intended it to,” he said.
Daniel Kuʻuleialoha Palakiko doesn’t know what deity Martin is referring to.
“Ke Akua is a God of love and restoration and abundant life,” he told the water commission during September’s hearing, using the Hawaiian word for God. Palakiko had flown to Honolulu with many other Maui residents to urge the state officials to uphold their responsibility to protect water.
Daniel Kuʻuleialoha Palakiko kneels next to a taro plant on his family farm. The starch is a traditional part of the Native Hawaiian diet and is also spiritually important: Indigenous histories describe Hawaiians as being descended from the plant, known as kalo. Cory Lum / Grist
Palakiko doesn’t take his land, or water, for granted. He was a teenager in Lāhainā in the 1980s when his family started getting priced out by rising rents. That’s when his dad remembered that his own father had once shown him the family’s ancestral land in nearby Kauʻula Valley. According to Palakiko’s grandfather, the family had been forced out by the Pioneer Mill sugar plantation, which had diverted the Palakikos’ water to irrigate crops. Palakiko’s family still owned the title to the land, and his father was determined to find a way to reclaim it.
First they cleared brush by cutting firebreaks and burning the overgrowth, controlling the flames with five-gallon buckets of water hauled from a nearby river. Once they had opened enough land to build a house, the Palakikos worked out a deal with Pioneer Mill to restore free water access to their property, connecting their home to the plantation’s water system with a series of 1½-inch plastic pipes.
Access to that water meant that the Palakikos could live on their ancestral land for the first time in generations. Back then, Palakiko says, their property felt isolated from Lāhainā, accessible only by old cane field roads that could take 45 minutes to reach town. But the family didn’t mind. It was enough to be able to stay on Maui when so many other Native Hawaiians were forced by economic necessity to leave.
That isolation didn’t last. In 1999, Pioneer Mill harvested its last sugar crop, ending 138 years of cultivation in Lāhainā. The abandoned fields turned brown and Palakiko heard that the company was selling off thousands of acres. Where once the Palakikos had seen Filipino plantation workers tending to crops, they noticed fair-skinned strangers and surveyors exploring the fallow grounds.
The Palakikos soon realized that the land was now in the hands of Peter Martin, who had joined other local investors to buy everything he could of the old plantation land. These new owners soon subdivided the land and sold parcels at ever higher prices as demand for the area known as Launiupoko kept increasing. It didn’t matter that the area was zoned for agriculture: Like many other developers, Martin took advantage of a legal provision that allowed homeowners to build luxurious estates on such land as long as they did some token farming of crops like fruit or flowers, no matter how perfunctory it might be.
Daniel Kuʻuleialoha Palakiko walks walks through his family’s land in West Maui, which they’ve owned since before the U.S. overthrew the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi. Their farm relies on water from Kauaʻula Stream, from which Martin also pulls water. Cory Lum / Grist
By the time Martin finished the development, which included around 400 homes on around 1,000 acres, he was diverting almost 4 million gallons from the stream every day, according to state data, almost as much as the 4.8 million gallons Pioneer Mill had diverted each day before it shut down.
Some days the Palakiko family would wake up to find no water running through the pipes. By the afternoon, puddles along the stream would evaporate and fish would flop on the hot rocks, suffocating. It wasn’t just the Palakikos who were suffering, but the whole river system: As Martin diverted water from the mountains, the waterway dried up farther downstream, threatening the native fish and shrimp that lived in it. Palakiko appealed to Martin’s new water utility, Launiupoko Irrigation Company, but he said the company was hostile. First it tried to shut off the water the family had been receiving through plastic pipes, then asked the family to pay for water they’d always drawn for free, only relenting after the Palakikos fought back.
In addition to diverting water away from Native Hawaiian families, Martin has tried to force some from their land. In 2002, his Makila Land Company filed a so-called “quiet title” case against the Kapus, another farming family whose land borders the Palakikos, seeking to claim a portion of the family’s ancestral land as its own. This legal strategy, which allows landowners to take control of properties that may have multiple ownership claims, later gained notoriety when Mark Zuckerberg used it to consolidate his holdings on Kauai.
Water gushes behind Daniel Kuʻuleialoha Palakiko on its way to his family’s taro patch, known as a loʻi. Farther behind him is a stretch of dry, invasive grass, similar to the grass that fueled the Lāhainā fire. Cory Lum / Grist
When the Kapus fought back, the company kept them in court for almost two decades, appealing over and over to gain the rights to a 3.4-acre parcel. The situation between Martin and the Kapu family became so tense that in 2020, Martin sought a restraining order against one member of the family, Keeaumoku Kapu, accusing him of “verbally attack[ing] me with an expletive-laced tirade” and blocking Martin’s access to the disputed land. The court imposed a mutual injunction against Martin and Kapu later that year; two years later, Kapu finally prevailed in court and secured the title to his property.
Martin’s companies filed multiple quiet-title lawsuits over the years as Martin sought to consolidate control of the land around Launiupoko. Just after it began litigation against the Kapus, Makila Land Company made a similar claim against a neighboring taro farmer named John Aquino, seeking to seize a portion of the land belonging to Aquino’s family. The company won the slice of land in an appellate court in 2013, but the Aquino family stayed put. Police arrested Aquino in 2020 after two of Martin’s employees drove a semi onto the land; Aquino had smashed the truck’s windows with a baseball bat. Makila later filed a trespassing lawsuit in 2021 against Brandon and Tiara Ueki, who also live near the Kapus. The parties agreed to dismiss the case the following year after an apparent settlement. More recently, Martin has fanned even more frustration by selling properties with contested titles, prompting at least one ongoing legal battle.
The offices of West Maui Land Company, the firm at the center of Peter Martin’s development enterprise. The company has been the subject of multiple lawsuits in the wake of the August wildfire. Cory Lum / Grist
Meanwhile, Martin and his fellow investors sought to expand to other parts of West Maui with several large-scale developments in areas along the coastline. In one instance, he and another pair of developers named Bill Frampton and Dave Ward proposed building 1,500 homes, including both single and multifamily housing units, in the small beachfront town of Olowalu, even though water access in the area is minimal and rainfall is declining. The developers later scrapped the project following protests from environmental activists, but in the meantime, Martin sold off a few dozen more lots in Olowalu, where he has a home. He also created another utility, Olowalu Water Company, to supply homes in the area with stream water.
Hawaiʻi, like most of the Western United States, allocates water using a “rights” system: A person or company can own the right to draw from a given water source, often on land they own, but they can’t own the water source itself. In states like Oregon and Arizona, this system has led to conflicts between settlers and tribal nations, but in Hawaiʻi the law provides explicit protection for Native Hawaiian users. State law stipulates that traditional and cultural uses, such as taro farming, “shall not be abridged or denied.” In times of shortage, Native users have the highest priority.
In 2018, the state water commission imposed so-called “flow standards” on several West Maui streams, capping the amount of water that Launiupoko Irrigation Company and Olowalu Water Company could divert at any given time. Palakiko had mixed feelings about this: He didn’t want to cede more control over the water that his family had used for generations, but it felt necessary in order to ensure someone could hold the companies accountable.
Even after these rules took effect, though, Martin’s water utility companies violated them dozens of times. When the state threatened to fine the companies, Launiupoko Irrigation Company stopped taking water from its stream completely. Residents of the lush Launiupoko subdivision soon had to ration irrigation water, and the Palakikos lost their access altogether. Their pipes stayed dry for more than a week until a judge ordered Martin’s company to turn on the tap back on.
West Maui Land Company has been struggling in recent years to secure approval for new developments. The wildfire could now spur a surge in housing construction on Maui. Cory Lum / Grist
The new restrictions started to hamper Martin’s development activities. Last year, his Launiupoko Water Company applied to the state’s utility regulator for permission to deliver water to a new area near Lāhainā. The company said it had agreed to supply a nearby landowner with potable water for 11 new homes, and told the state it needed to increase its groundwater pumping by at least 65,000 gallons per day. The regulator rejected the expansion plan, saying the company had omitted “basic information” about where it would get this new water. The landowner that would have received the water was another company in which Martin has an ownership stake.
Even as his companies’ plans faced headwinds, Martin continued to benefit. He loaned Launiupoko Irrigation Company a total of $9 million in recent years as the company tried to expand its Lāhainā well system, charging 8 percent interest. The company tried in 2021 to secure a bank loan for the project, but three banks turned it down, with one noting that the company’s “interest payments to Pete” were “substantial.”
Glenn Tremble, a top executive at West Maui Land Company, the company at the center of Martin’s development empire, said in response to a list of questions that Grist’s statements were “generally false and often libelous.” Tremble noted that Martin has built affordable housing units on West Maui and donated to churches. He said that Martin is “well positioned to assist with recovery and efforts to rebuild.”
If Martin’s track record with water and land made him infamous in Lāhainā, it also invigorated local support for even stricter water controls. Palakiko’s long campaign for more attention to the region’s water problems finally bore fruit last year when the state designated West Maui as a “water management area.” Instead of just setting limits on how much water Martin’s companies could take from West Maui streams at any given time, the state water commission announced that it would revamp the area’s entire water system, giving highest priority to Indigenous cultural uses like taro farming. That may mean limiting access for Martin’s luxury developments, though Tremble disputes this.
“We’ve heard a lot from the community about the development of West Maui Land’s holdings in Launiupoko,” said Dean Uyeno, the interim chair of the state water commission, about the decision. “To continue building in these types of ways is going to keep taxing the resource.” The question, Uyeno said, is whether developers “can … find a way to [be] building more responsible development that balances the resources we have.”
A worker checks on a water well that serves one of Martin’s housing developments in West Maui. Cory Lum / Grist
Martin thinks the argument that water is a scarce resource is a “red herring.” He argues that the market is calling for more housing, not more water for native fish that rely on the streams.
“All the people [who] ever come to me say, ‘Peter, can you get me a house? I want a place to live,’” he said. “They don’t go, ‘Oh, I wish I had [shrimp] for dinner.’ That’s not what people tell me. They say, ‘Can’t you give me some house, some land?’ I go, ‘I’d love to but the government won’t let me.’”
In the days before the wildfire, Martin’s executives worked long hours in his West Maui Land Company office filling out 30 state applications justifying their current water usage and seeking more, in accordance with the state’s revamp of the area’s water system. They submitted the applications just days before the state’s August 7 deadline. The day after the deadline, Lāhainā burned.
To Martin, this is not a coincidence. He believes the state water commission’s efforts to more strictly regulate water enabled the fire by preventing more construction of homes with irrigated lawns — in other words, more development would have made West Maui more resilient to fire. The day before the water commissioners met in September, he wondered if the commissioners would acknowledge their responsibility for the wildfire deaths and regretted not pushing harder against their restrictions.
“I feel I actually have blood on my hands because I didn’t fight hard enough,” he said.
Developer Peter Martin told Grist that concern about invasive grass fueling wildfires is a “red herring,” and asked, “How could this stuff that’s 8 inches, or 10 or 12 inches, or very low on the ground be the culprit?” Cory Lum / Grist
There’s no evidence that the state management rules, which are still in the process of going into effect, had any bearing on the fire. When Grist relayed this argument to the interim leader of the state’s water commission, he was stunned.
“That actually leaves me speechless,” said Uyeno. “I don’t know how to respond to that.”
Palakiko and his family spent the day of the fire watching the smoke rising from the coastline, watering the grass on their property and praying the winds wouldn’t shift, sending the flames their way. Five years earlier, another fire fueled by a passing hurricane had burned down two homes on their land.
That day, their prayers were answered. But when Palakiko’s son, a firefighter, came home shaken from his shift fighting the blaze, the family realized that the West Maui they had known their whole lives was gone.
Two days later, Palakiko received another shock when he read Tremble’s letter accusing Kaleo Manuel, the deputy director of the water commission, of delaying the release of firefighting water. The letter argued that Manuel had waited to release water to West Maui Land Company’s reservoir until he had checked with the owners of a downstream taro farm. That farm belongs to the Palakikos.
The company’s allegations were explosive. The state attorney general launched an investigation and requested that the commission reassign Manuel, who had been instrumental in establishing the Lāhainā water management area and was the only Native Hawaiian to ever hold that position. Governor Josh Green temporarily suspended the rules that limit how much water Martin’s companies and other water users can draw from West Maui streams. The state later reinstated Manuel and restored the rules. In a statement to Grist, Tremble said he respects Manuel’s “commitment and his integrity” and said that “the problem is the process, or lack thereof, to provide water to Maui Fire Department and to the community.”
A reservoir owned by one of Peter Martin’s water utilities in the hills outside Lāhainā. The reservoir delivers water to a subdivision built by another of Martin’s companies. Cory Lum / Grist
While there was no evidence that filling the reservoir would have stopped the fire from destroying Lāhainā, and firefighting helicopters wouldn’t have been able to access the reservoir due to high winds on the day in question, there’s a growing consensus among scientists in Hawaiʻi that one factor in its rapid spread was the proliferation of nonnative grasses on former plantation lands — including lands that Peter Martin owns.
Before the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893, before the dominance of the sugar industry allowed plantations to divert West Maui’s streams, Hawaiian royalty lived on a sandbar in the midst of a large fishpond within a 14-acre wetland in Lāhainā, which was known as the Venice of the Pacific.
After plantation owners diverted streams for their crops, the royal fishpond became a stagnant marsh, and later was filled with coral rubble and paved over. Now, Palakiko imagines what it would be like if the streams were allowed to resume their original paths: what trees would grow, what native grass could flourish, what fires might be stopped. He doesn’t think this vision is at odds with the need to address Maui’s housing crisis.
For Palakiko, the fight over the future of water in Lāhainā is about more than just who controls the streams in this section of Maui. It’s also in some ways a referendum on what future Hawaiʻi will choose: one that reflects the worldview of people like Palakiko, who see water as a sacred resource to be preserved, or that of people like Martin, who sees it as a tool to be used for profit.
To Martin, such a shift is unsettling.
“I mean, for a hundred years, you could take all the water, and all of a sudden these guys come in, and say, ‘Oh, you can’t take any water,’” Martin said. “And they made it sound like I’m this terrible person.”
The workers had spent the morning of November 8, 2021, clipping, trussing, and trellising hundreds of thousands of tomato plants that twisted almost four stories into the air. They were inside one of the world’s largest high-tech greenhouses, which sits on more than 60 acres of a former cattle field in Morehead, Kentucky.
As one of the greenhouse workers, who I’ll call Nora, sat down for lunch in the worker canteen, she heard her colleagues whisper about their new task for the day. U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell would be visiting that afternoon to give a speech praising the greenhouse company, AppHarvest. Before he arrived, management had to make sure their Spanish-speaking colleagues disappeared.
“We had very little time,” recalled Nora, whose real name is being withheld because she is subject to a nondisclosure agreement. “We had to get them off the premises and away before he got there.”
Nora watched her coworkers get dismissed, grab their stuff, and leave on white buses bound for a trio of small motels where the largely Mexican contract workers lived four or five to a room. When McConnell arrived, Nora joined her remaining, mostly-white colleagues on the sunny lawn. Their clean T-shirts advertised AppHarvest’s name and logo, intended to invoke both the Appalachian region where they worked and the iconic branding of Apple — Silicon Valley by way of the Middle American upstart.
“We all know the decline of the coal industry only got worse, and so this [AppHarvest] gives us hope,” the senator said, praising the local labor force encircling him. “You are the real leaders, I think, in beginning to fully develop all of Kentucky’s potential.”
It was a familiar message, one that had been touted over and over in nationally televised interviews, public filings, and company reports by AppHarvest’s then-CEO, a Kentucky native and entrepreneur named Jonathan Webb. In 2018, the 32-year-old Webb returned home with the promise of building a dozen high-tech, hydroponic indoor farms across Eastern Kentucky and the surrounding region, growing tomatoes, cucumbers, berries, and lettuce. Not only would he be piloting an advanced form of climate-resilient agriculture, he would also be generating gainful, blue-collar employment in some of the country’s most economically-distressed counties, where he argued that the coal industry’s downfall left a void that could be filled by sustainable industry.
Workers would start at $13 an hour, with hefty productivity bonuses and a track to internal promotions. Then there were the perks: 100 percent employer-paid health insurance premiums for both employees and their families, monthly boxes of farm-fresh produce, and stock options once the company went public. In a region terrorized by the opioid epidemic, AppHarvest also offered jobs to formerly incarcerated people in recovery from addiction.
Webb’s worker-centric pitch raised over $700 million for AppHarvest to get off the ground and catapulted him into the national spotlight, with largely glowing coverage from The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, CNN, and Forbes. It also convinced a number of big names to join the company’s board: Martha Stewart, activist investor Jeffrey Ubben, former Impossible Foods CFO David Lee, and J.D. Vance, the venture capitalist and Hillbilly Elegy author who would later win election to a U.S. Senate seat in Ohio with a Trump-inspired, anti-immigrant message.
McConnell’s speech in Morehead highlighted another major theme in AppHarvest’s advertising: replacing what Webb has called “dirty” agricultural imports from Mexico with safe, nutritious berries, lettuce, and tomatoes from central Appalachia.
Lettuce grows in AppHarvests’s Berea greenhouse.
Courtesy of AppHarvest
Lettuce grows in AppHarvest’s greenhouse in Berea, Kentucky. Courtesy of AppHarvest
Lettuce grows in AppHarvests’s Berea greenhouse.
Courtesy of AppHarvest
“I like the idea of taking the tomato market away from the Mexicans,” McConnell said that afternoon, according to an employee’s video recording of the event. Some workers looked around in surprise. Others seated behind McConnell rocked nervously in chairs, trying to catch the eyes of friends on the lawn. Applause can be heard in the recording, but at least one employee booed. The moment felt rigid and frail, like a ship just beginning to sink below the sea.
“No wonder they sent the f—ing contractors [home],” one worker said, turning to a coworker off-camera.
The discontent that day wasn’t just about optics, or fairness to the contract workers. It was the culmination of a year of frustration with a company that had promised to deliver both Grade A tomatoes and fulfilling rural employment but was falling dramatically short on both counts. Even as Senator McConnell sang the company’s praises, AppHarvest was already well on its way to a spectacular collapse, the full story of which has never been told until now. The celebrated startup’s demise also highlights the dangers of expanding and relying on high-tech, indoor agricultural schemes that promise shortcuts to making farming more climate-friendly.
A worker in an AppHarvest-branded mask in a greenhouse in Morehead, Kentucky. Courtesy of AppHarvest
A year earlier, Nora had seen a billboard for AppHarvest on a state highway. She was hired after hearing a version of the company’s pitch that promised a strict 40-hour week and the opportunity to advance — something she had rarely found in the service jobs she’d worked since graduating high school. The promise was quickly broken: She was almost immediately told she needed to start working weekend overtime or her job would be in jeopardy. She found that her training in tomato caretaking — planting, pruning, harvesting — left much to be desired, and she and other workers were often confused over their job duties and requirements.
By summer, the greenhouse began reaching dangerously high indoor temperatures, and Nora watched coworkers struggle with dehydration and heat exhaustion. Turnover spiked. Nora developed asthma and anxiety, but she stayed the course.
That same summer, the company told investors that low productivity and high turnover at its Morehead greenhouse had led to a $32 million net loss. Stockholders then filed the first of five lawsuits alleging securities fraud, noting that AppHarvest’s own leadership had repeatedly cited “employee training, turnover, and poor work ethic” as the root causes of the company’s failure to reach profitability.
An AppHarvest employee walks between rows of tomatoes in the company’s Morehead greenhouse. Courtesy of AppHarvest
As workers soldiered on over the next two years, AppHarvest’s financial position continued to decline. This summer, lenders started demanding repayment of$182 million. Soon after, Webb was out as CEO, and AppHarvest declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Bankruptcy filings show that the company owes over $1.4 million to at least three agricultural work placement agencies that help farms fill temporary agricultural jobs with foreign nationals. In September, Webb was fired from the company altogether. All of AppHarvest’s five facilities in Kentucky — two in Morehead, and one each in Berea, Richmond, and Somerset — are now in the hands of new owners. (In response to a detailed list of questions for this story, AppHarvest’s chief legal officer, Gary Broadbent, said that the company has no continuing operations and was not in a position to respond.)
A new investigation from Grist finds that what went on inside the company from its earliest days bore little resemblance to the sustainable, worker-friendly operation that Webb publicly touted. State documents obtained through open records requests, including complaints to Kentucky’s Occupational Safety and Health Committee, as well as interviews with 12 former employees from both the flagship Morehead greenhouse and corporate office, reveal issues widespread across AppHarvest’s operations. They expose how unsafe working conditions, negligible training that failed to prepare workers for their job requirements, and an unprofessional workplace doomed the company nearly from the start.
Editor’s note: Due to fear of legal reprisal from AppHarvest, all but three former employees interviewed for this story — including Nora, whose name is a pseudonym — requested anonymity to speak candidly about their experiences; AppHarvest employees signed nondisclosure agreements upon their hire, which have no termination date in the state of Kentucky.
Lights glow through the exterior of AppHarvest’s Somerset greenhouse. Courtesy of AppHarvest
Inside the Morehead greenhouse, the heat index could spike to 155 degrees Fahrenheit, according to worker interviews, leading to dehydration, heat exhaustion, and medical emergencies. The stress of the work environment led to panic attacks, ideation of personal harm, and relapses into addiction. Less than a year after the first seeds had been planted, benefits like employer-paid health insurance ended, company stocks plummeted, harvests failed to yield sufficient Grade A produce, and AppHarvest pivoted from uplifting Appalachia’s blue-collar workforce to bussing in workers from outside the region.
“My whole view of AppHarvest was we were all sold on this beautiful pipe dream,” one corporate worker told Grist. “This is sustainable, this is new, we’re going to make it. It turned out to just be a f—ing nightmare.”
Webb claims a connection to Eastern Kentucky through his ancestors: His great-grandfather died in a coal mining accident in Whitley County, where he says his grandmother grew up on a dirt floor. After graduation from the University of Kentucky’s business school, Webb moved to Washington, D.C., where he worked as a contractor on renewable energy projects under the U.S. Army Office of Energy Initiatives. Then, he read about controlled environment agriculture, or CEA, in a 2017 National Geographic story.
He quickly decided CEA could be as important a climate solution as renewable energy or electric cars — and as good an investment. CEA proponents argue both that farming needs to become less climate-dependent in a warming world and that its land footprint needs to shrink dramatically if the world hopes to preserve biodiversity and carbon sinks like forests. Indoor facilities outfitted with careful climate controls could theoretically accomplish this. For inspiration, Webb looked to the Netherlands, where high-tech greenhouses successfully grow produce for export year-round, on a total acreage that’s only twice the size of Manhattan. Without any prior professional experience in farming, he quit his job and founded AppHarvest the next year.
Jonathan Webb, founder and CEO of AppHarvest, speaks onstage during the Concordia Lexington Summit in April 2022. Jon Cherry / Getty Images for Concordia Summit
Webb was hardly alone in his bullishness on CEA. Congress’ 2018 Farm Bill, which expired earlier this year, expanded support of CEA research and development to mitigate food system risks, creating a federal Office of Urban Agriculture and Innovative Production and distributing over $40 million in grants between 2020 and 2022. Over the last decade, the sustainability argument for CEA has helped the sector raise billions of dollars in private investments for a variety of startups.
Unlike in the Netherlands, where indoor farmers have learned best practices over half a century of trial and error, American startups like AppHarvest have overwhelmingly failed to turn a profit, or even break even. The crux of the problem is that roughly 75 percent of the industry’s costs stem from labor and energy. And while traditional agriculture works because it takes advantage of natural conditions, CEA has to artificially produce optimal growing conditions and power them with electricity. In a world still largely powered by commodified fossil fuels — nearly 70 percent of Kentucky’s grid remains coal-fired — that’s going to be prohibitively expensive in most places.
“It’s the fundamental physics challenge of turning fossil fuel energy into food,” said Bruce Bugbee, a plant scientist at Utah State University.
Even as the U.S. CEA market is predicted to be worth $3 billion by 2024, the high costs of running these facilities have accumulated quickly, leading to a domino of bankruptcies and closures over the last two years. Fifth Season, a Pennsylvania-based indoor farm that raised $35 million to sell salad kits in over 1,200 stores, closed without any warning a year ago, turning off its electricity and leaving its lettuce plants to die. In April, the Florida-based Kalera, which raised $100 million and became the first publicly-listed vertical farm in the U.S., filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Then, in June, even 19-year-old AeroFarms, which had raised hundreds of millions of dollars, filed for bankruptcy, though it claims it will continue some operations while restructuring the business.
“People with billions of dollars became aware of this industry and they think it’s the wave of the future,” said Bugbee, “but it doesn’t mean there’s been a scientific shift. It staggers me how much money they’re putting in.”
Without a viable solution to CEA’s fundamental energy dilemma, AppHarvest took increasingly desperate measures to wring profits out of the problem that has plagued agriculture for as long as humans have been farming: labor.
By the time she turned 30, Ahna Baxter’s life had long been dictated by the demanding hours and low wages of jobs in restaurants and factories. But a temporary gig at a vineyard near her hometown of Frankfort, Kentucky, gave her a glimpse of something different. She learned to press grapes into wine; she grew cucumbers and cantaloupe and admired the sunflowers that waved above her head. For the next few years, she dreamt of starting a small farm of her own.
That dream dried up just before the COVID-19 lockdowns. Baxter had just lost both a friend and family member to suicide, and she became dependent on her prescription Adderall to get through the day and alcohol to sleep at night. She abandoned her fledgling agricultural business, Ahna’s All Naturals, and checked into a 30-day rehab program.
As Baxter got back on her feet after rehab, she found comfort returning from work every day in time to tune into Governor Andy Beshear’s evening updates. The televised talks were like Mister Rogers for adults: a familiar voice for Kentuckians dealing with the confusion, loneliness, and grief brought by the pandemic, not to mention everything else Baxter had just been through.
In the summer of 2020, Beshear announced something that revived Baxter’s hope in a future tied to the land: AppHarvest, a nascent company turning heads with its promise of cutting-edge agritech, was hiring in Eastern Kentucky. The startup was offering the highest wage she’d ever made, opportunities for promotions, and training in agriculture. Baxter immediately went online and applied.
Employee badges hang on a wall near AppHarvest’s West greenhouse on June 14, 2021, in Morehead, Kentucky. Jon Cherry
About a month later, she got a phone call from AppHarvest and met the hiring managers in Morehead. The interview was unlike any she’d had before. Instead of pressing her on why she would be a good fit for the position, AppHarvest seemed to be selling its vision to her. She thought this overt enthusiasm, coupled with a lack of clarity on basic job duties, was odd, but the opportunity was just too good to pass up. She quit her job as a landscape foreman, sold most of her belongings, and moved her RV to a friend’s backyard for her first month of employment before renting a trailer in the Cave Run Mobile Home Park in Morehead during the fall of 2020. After battling addiction, Baxter thought this clean break could help make a better life for herself and her then-16-year-old son, Eli, whom she’d had at 17.
“I sacrificed a lot, but I felt that this was it,” Baxter told me. “I felt like this was the end all be all. This is the company I’m going to be with forever.”
During orientation — a pep rally-style event with loud country music, cheering employees, and team-building games that lasted roughly a week — employees watched the David Attenborough documentary A Life on Our Planet. They learned that while traditional agriculture leaves soils depleted, their work growing produce indoors could save the food system. But the intricacies of working with tomato plants were largely glossed over during orientation, according to worker interviews. While some managers had formerly worked in indoor agriculture, most workers were new to the industry. Nora, who applied around the same time as Baxter after seeing an AppHarvest billboard go up in Morehead, recalled her husband was suspicious.
“He thought it was a bad idea from the get go,” said Nora. “I fed him the same lines they fed me: It’s a start up, it takes time working out the kinks.” Her husband replied that AppHarvest was either the greatest job ever, or it was going to be the greatest con.
But the company culture was contagious. When Nora and Baxter finally started working as clippers — attaching tomato vines to plastic hooks that hung from the ceiling — they were so excited that they often skipped between the rows of plants. Nora told herself she was making a difference.
An employee gestures among the rows of tomato plants and yellow adhesive bands, used to catch flying insects, in AppHarvest’s West greenhouse on June 14, 2021. Jon Cherry
Then, within weeks of the Morehead greenhouse opening in November of 2020, Nora and her colleagues were told they needed to work overtime.
“Ten minutes before the end of the shift they’d come over and say, ‘Due to a lack of attendance we’re doing work continuance until it’s done,’” Nora remembered. “So either you stay and work, or lose your job. You’d be so worn out and overheated and dehydrated you’d do anything they’d want you to do.”
An internal memo circulated to all Morehead employees the following spring confirms the policy. “At any given time an emergency could require immediate mandatory Overtime,” the document read, while attempting to maintain a sunny tone: “Working in a greenhouse has its challenges and one of them is keeping our Plants Happy!” Nora said that when she complained, her supervisor told her that she “needed to learn to sacrifice.”
But no amount of overtime could compensate for their light-touch training and resulting confusion over how exactly to truss, de-leaf, and prune the hundreds of thousands plants in the greenhouse. Plant diseases took hold. Tomatoes started rotting, resulting in almost 50 percent wasted product, according to the securities fraud suit. The bonuses workers were promised felt impossible to earn. Turnover spiked.
“They took people who had never done this before, threw them in a greenhouse, gave us minimal training on how to do it, and expected us to produce Grade A tomatoes when all we’d done was backyard farming,” said Nora. “No one was ever on the same page. No one in any greenhouse used the same techniques, and I think that was 90 percent of their quality issue.”
AppHarvest employees walk in the West greenhouse in Morehead on June 15, 2021. Jon Cherry
While AppHarvest’s failings were becoming clear to its workers even in its early months, Webb and other company leaders were still raising money. After 12 rounds of funding, AppHarvest had secured almost $800 million from funders like the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Rise of the Rest, a D.C.-based seed capital firm focused on Middle American startups. By early 2021, it became the first controlled environment agriculture company in the United States to go public, at $35.69 per share. Webb personally got a $1.5 million bonus for the stock listing and $31 million in stock awards. The company’s initial valuation of $1 billion soon grew to $3.7 billion.
One afternoon during the first summer of AppHarvest’s operation, then-55-year-old Janet Moore threw up at least three times from heat exhaustion in the bathroom outside the greenhouse. Other workers recalled seeing coworkers pass out from heat and leave on steel trolleys — or, sometimes, in ambulances.
Though the position was a financial improvement on the $7 an hour Moore once made working on a tobacco farm, the heat inside the greenhouse turned out to be far worse than an outdoor farm. One worker called it “an absolute grueling hell on earth.” Workers were only allowed to leave the greenhouse if the heat index reached 140 degrees Fahrenheit, according to a worker who helped those suffering from heat exhaustion. Another worker said thermometers were covered in gray trash bags or moved to poles where workers couldn’t see a heat index that the medical assistant said once peaked at 155 degrees Fahrenheit. Once the company began having productivity challenges, it seemed like no temperature was high enough to relieve workers of their greenhouse shifts; according to worker interviews, managers would simply alternate workers in 30-minute increments between the greenhouse and the air-conditioned packhouse.
Starting as early as August 2020, during construction of the Morehead greenhouse, workers filed eight complaints to the Kentucky Education and Labor Cabinet for Occupational Safety and Health. Almost half of those complaints, revealed for the first time in an open records request received by Grist, concerned the heat in the Morehead greenhouse and a second AppHarvest greenhouse in Berea, a town about 80 miles southwest. In July 2021, one complaint said workers were laboring in a heat index ranging from 115 to 136 degrees Fahrenheit.
“For the past few days no one has taken any temperatures,” the labor filing reads, adding that the company doesn’t allow workers to go home early, even though they work in direct sunlight and several suffered heat exhaustion. (While no federal heat standard exists for workers, a heat index — what the air feels like when combining relative humidity and air temperature — above 103 degrees Fahrenheit presents “danger,” according to the National Weather Service, while anything over 126 degrees Fahrenheit indicates “extreme danger.”)
At the Berea farm, a July 2022 complaint said that even on high-humidity, nearly 100-degree days, potable water was only available to production workers if they walked eight minutes to an administrative trailer they could only access during breaks. And because non-potable water wasn’t labeled as such, desperate employees had drawn unsafe drinking water into their bottles when safe drinking water was unavailable.
Other safety concerns detailed in the complaints included the sudden onset of nausea, and on two occasions vomiting, when the plants were sprayed with “something unsafe.” Two more complaints said tearing out mold, dust, and insulation from walls caused eye and lung irritation. Employees reported that they didn’t receive respirators, and during the tear-out one team member went to the hospital for breathing issues, according to the complaints.
Another said guide wires holding tomatoes were snapping from the weight of the fruit. “If someone is working the rows and the wire snaps, over 500 tomato plants will fall on whomever is in the [row],” the complainant told the state safety office. In a separate filing, an employee said guide wires broke over three days in February 2023, and that as wires fell there was the possibility of “taking someone’s head off and/or extremely hurting their bodies.”
An employee stands among the tomato vines in AppHarvest’s West greenhouse on June 15, 2021. Jon Cherry
Moore thinks that the repetitive motion of caring for the tomatoes — removing suckers, topping plants, ripping leaves off the bottom stems — led to carpal tunnel in her hands, both of which required surgery. She said her job was threatened if she felt sick from the heat or had to go to a doctor’s appointment for her hands. Moore and other workers also complained of rashes from the heat, plant matter, and gas agents sprayed to quickly ripen the tomatoes. Baxter, in recovery from addiction, relapsed when she drank a beer at a company field party that offered free drink tickets to workers.
While AppHarvest appeared to shrug off worker complaints in its early days, it publicized employees who represented the values that had earned it the label of a certified B Corp — intended for businesses with high standards of performance, accountability, and transparency, especially when it comes to employee benefits — as well as its designation as a public benefit corporation created to generate social good responsibly and sustainably. Erin Mays, who applied for her job at AppHarvest from the Rowan County Detention Center in February 2021, where she was serving her 10th sentence for drug possession charges, was perfect for the role: She was petite but strong, and she quickly took on the task of lowering plants, a job otherwise done mostly by men.
From the start, Mays was infatuated with AppHarvest; she appeared on the company’s Instagram as a “dedicated team member.” She told her family and friends to buy stock in the company, convinced it was the future for her region. Mays also met her now-spouse on the job, and the two were often asked to speak to greenhouse guests.
“We were used as poster kids,” Mays said. “If there were photo ops or people came in, I feel like they would start to use me or Leo because we were big members of recovery in our community. We were outspoken and well spoken.”
But a couple months into the job, Mays relapsed on Suboxone, a medication for opioid use disorder, which if misused can lead to dependency, addiction, or overdose. She remembered that her hiring packet said she could go to treatment and still keep her job. When she asked human resources, however, they said that if she left for rehab, they couldn’t guarantee her job would be waiting for her. And even if a job was available, she remembers being told, she wouldn’t be eligible for six months.
Mays didn’t want to lose her position, so she used over-the-counter pain relievers to work straight through a month of low-grade withdrawals while continuing her highly physical, monotonous tasks in the scorching greenhouse.
An employee looks out over rows of tomato plants from the top of a lift in AppHarvest’s West greenhouse. Jon Cherry
While standing at the top of her cart to lift and lower plants, which could rise up to 20 feet off the ground, she suffered aches and body chills. She would rush to the bathroom with a bout of diarrhea or to throw up. Because she was on the far west end of the facility, the closest bathroom was a porta potty, and Mays would have to be really sure she had to use it before she left — her bathroom breaks were monitored, and she didn’t want to get written up.
Workers said their jobs were at times so difficult and poorly managed that even physically fit and healthy employees could snap. One morning in August 2021 — the very same day that Webb admitted to investors that AppHarvest was staring down a $32 million net loss — Baxter arrived at work to find that she was in charge of more workers without additional assistance. The outside temperature was hovering in the 80s, she said, but the heat index in the greenhouse was 40 degrees higher, around 120 degrees Fahrenheit. She brought in five water bottles she’d frozen the night before to stay hydrated, along with the inhaler she kept in her locker in case of an asthma attack.
She was irritated, and her manager seemed on edge. He told Baxter to make her employees sweep the greenhouse rows differently three separate times. Because of the heat, they were alternating working between the greenhouse and the air-conditioned packhouse every 30 minutes. Her employees were overheated, and they told her they needed to sit down, drink water, and rest. She told them she knew they were exhausted, but to please pretend they were cleaning.
By mid-afternoon, drenched in sweat, Baxter took stock of the bustling greenhouse around her and the list of tasks still on her mounting to-do list. Overwhelmed, she put down her badge and her notebook, cleaned out her locker, and walked out the front door, quitting not only a job but her dream of making her living off the land. She drove home to the trailer she’d moved into only ten months earlier, let her dogs out, sat on the front stoop, and sobbed. That day, AppHarvest stocks fell 29 percent.
Employees and machinery at work at AppHarvest’s packhouse on June 14, 2021. Jon Cherry
By the end of 2021, AppHarvest had earned only $9 million out of a projected $21 million in revenue. The next year, the company met less than half of its most optimistic sales projections. Beginning in early 2023, company stocks that once peaked above $42 per share never again rose above $1. In the spring, AppHarvest claimed it had only about $50 million on hand. Debt had reached $182 million. In order to remain in business, the company needed additional investors to provide an infusion of cash by October, according to public filings.
Workers who convinced family and friends to buy stocks in the company said those who invested lost thousands of dollars. Meanwhile, former board member Jeffrey Ubben “cashed out,” according to the securities fraud litigation, before the company’s problems were publicly acknowledged in August of 2021. He sold 3 million shares at an average price of $16.50 per share, making $49.5 million.
Baxter tried to get her job back, including by reapplying through Indeed. But she said once she walked out, no one ever contacted her again, or replied to her requests to return. Moore said she quit after she was told by the human resources manager that she couldn’t work while taking pain medicine for a back injury she acquired at work, after slipping on a loose mat meant to sanitize workers’ shoes. Other workers left for jobs that demanded less overtime or paid higher wages. Some were fired after being minutes late to work, and some were handed termination notices during mass layoffs. One corporate employee was walked off their job by a security guard.
“Ironically, in the next round of layoffs, I guess the security guard walked himself out because he got fired,” the employee told Grist.In February 2022, half the office staff and all but one employee in the marketing department were let go in a single day, according to another former corporate employee.
Over the course of 2021 and 2022, while AppHarvest let go of costly employees who drained the company pocketbook with high salaries and wages, health insurance premiums, and requests for promotions, the company hired contract laborers who wouldn’t get any of this. In a November 2021 public filing, AppHarvest noted the tightening nationwide labor market, the cost of training a new workforce, and issues of retention: “In order to forestall any potential labor shortfall, we have hired contract laborers from outside of the region to help complete our next harvest.”
Less than a year after opening, AppHarvest began bringing in contract workers, according to multiple statements by former workers, a Rowan County executive, local residents, and a 2021 public filing. The new workers arrived in Morehead each morning on big white buses, according to Nora. They worked longer hours, sometimes not leaving until midnight, after picking up a second shift in the air-conditioned packhouse, according to multiple worker statements. While paid a similar starting rate to the local workers, according to a visa application filed by AppHarvest for its Pulaski County facility, they didn’t receive benefits like health insurance or stock options, according to worker interviews. An open records request from the Kentucky Education and Labor Cabinet reveals that just over the last year, AppHarvest brought in at least 140 migrant workers at $13.89 an hour at its Madison and Pulaski County farms.
Workers were housed in mobile homes and apartment complexes where the number of laborers appeared to far exceed occupancy levels. In Pulaski County, three mobile homes with an occupancy total of 17 were listed as the housing options for 30 workers. In Richmond, a 15-unit apartment complex with a 61-person limit was listed as the housing option for 90 workers. In Morehead, workers have been housed at the Red Roof Inn, Days Inn, and Comfort Inn, where there are no cooking stations and workers sometimes squeeze five into a two-bed room, according to Anne Colbert, a retired physician who runs a volunteer migrant support group in Morehead.
Colbert said her organization first became aware of migrant laborers at AppHarvest last fall, when a volunteer saw a large group at Walmart. A few days before Thanksgiving, Colbert sent an email to Travis Parman, AppHarvest’s chief communications officer, and told him the group was “recently made aware of the needs of a group of Mexican contracted laborers working at AppHarvest who did not have appropriate winter clothing.” Though the volunteers had already gathered winter clothing to donate to the new workers, Colbert pressed Parman on the company’s plans to ensure that the group’s basic needs were met. “We don’t believe these guests should have to rely on donated goods,” she wrote.
Workers at AppHarvest’s packhouse on June 14, 2021. Jon Cherry
Parman responded the next day, noting he was “not the right person” for her to talk to but “close enough,” and promising to consult with other employees and reply promptly. Colbert never heard anything more. Instead, her group delivered bags of apples and oranges to the motels where workers were housed over Christmas.
Last year, Nora typically had 20 or more contract laborers on her team, and about 12 local people. All the greenhouse workers I spoke to who left in 2022 or 2023 said that, by the time they left, contract workers outnumbered local employees. As of this summer, AppHarvest retained more than 450 of these contract workers, paying them approximately $2.5 million each month.
This change in strategy was a complete departure from AppHarvest’s original pledge to hire Appalachian workers and build up the region with reliable, blue-collar careers. “Traditionally, many agricultural workers in the U.S. have been H-2A, temporary agricultural workers, who at best are offered housing and other perks if they’re seasonal,” the company had noted in a 2020 report. Instead, AppHarvest wrote, as a certified B Corp, the company valued collective benefit over individual gain, along with empowering Appalachians and improving the lives of employees and the community. In a 2021 interview, Webb said, “Prioritizing the employee, that’s just simple human decency.”
Jonathan Webb, then-CEO of AppHarvest, addresses employees during a pre-shift meeting on June 15, 2021, in Morehead. Jon Cherry
Harry Clark, the judge executive of Rowan County, said that Webb only reluctantly pursued contract labor when he couldn’t fill positions locally. But his comments run counter to what former employees say they saw and experienced: A former corporate employee said the work Webb did — talking to reporters, appearing on the news, uplifting the Appalachian labor force — was “all about image.” A former member of the marketing team recalled that photographers were told not to take pictures of the contract workers, most of whom were Hispanic, because the company wanted to show it was employing Appalachians, who were largely white. When the former marketing team member visited the greenhouse, they saw few workers in the thick rows of green tomato vines until a Mexican song came over the shared speaker system and they heard laborers sing along.
“He [Webb] was trying really hard to relate to the blue-collar workforce that we have in Morehead,” said the corporate employee. When I visited the greenhouse to report on AppHarvest for Rolling Stone in 2021, Webb called himself a “resident of Kentucky” who lived in his RV on the Morehead construction site while looking for apartments nearby. But the year before, he had bought a 4,000-square foot house for almost $1.4 million in Lexington, an hour’s drive away, which was later the subject of a home makeover featured on HGTV. (Webb did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story.)
Mays said she felt she was kept on as long as she was to “keep up appearances that they were giving jobs to Appalachian people.” But she was eventually fired over the phone, just a month after she and her fiance had gotten engaged at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and Webb’s personal assistant had offered to pay for their wedding on company grounds. “We legitimately thought these people were our family and they cared about us,” she said.
After two years with AppHarvest, Nora had a long conversation with her husband. She was miserable at work, and she felt her mental health wasn’t prioritized by her employer.
“I’ve been having these thoughts, and I think they’re dangerous,” she told him. “On the way to work every morning, I want to let go of my steering wheel and wreck it so I don’t have to go in. I don’t want to die, but I want to get hurt enough so I don’t have to work.”
Her husband encouraged her not to go back, but Nora felt an overwhelming sense that she owed AppHarvest her labor and her loyalty.
“A long time after I left I said I felt brainwashed,” said Nora. “Maybe they caught my little bleeding heart, and I wanted to save the world. … I think that’s what hooked us, trying to save the world.”
This spring, the faltering promise of CEA as a planetary savior finally dominoed into AppHarvest. A Delaware-based creditor demanded the repayment of over $47 million, while a west coast investor, Equilibrium, alleged the company needed to repay over $66 million, about a third of the company’s $182 million debt, or risk foreclosure. A third creditor staged a mutiny, threatening to evict AppHarvest from its Berea farm.
By mid-July, Webb left his position as CEO, and the company paid almost $2.5 million to its four-man executive team, which included Webb in his short-lived demotion as chief strategy officer. A week later, on July 23, AppHarvest filed for bankruptcy in a Texas court for all 12 of its affiliated businesses. The next day, AppHarvest received notice from Nasdaq that the company’s stock would be delisted; stocks closed at $0.09 per share. Then, on September 29, Webb was fired “without cause.” His severance package included $125,000 plus health insurance coverage, paid out over six months. (At the time of this story’s publication, he still serves on the company’s board.)
These losses, while staggering and sudden, are not surprising to Bugbee, the plant scientist. To make CEA profitable, he said, human labor has to be replaced with robotics to lower the costs of repetitive tasks like planting and harvesting, which are easily automated.
“We want to believe there’s some magic bullet we’re going to discover and all these [climate] problems will be solved,” he added. “But as a scientist, I feel it’s incumbent upon me to say, ‘Wait a minute. This is not a magic bullet.’”
American policymakers, on the other hand, remain bullish on CEA, despite the recent failures.
“It is unfortunate that AppHarvest has had the challenges that it has. But we know that agritech is a big part of Kentucky’s future, and we need to be at the forefront of it,” Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear’s office wrote in an emailed statement attributed to the governor. “Regardless of who is leading the company or who owns the facility, I believe in the end, they will have a bright future; and there are a whole lot of jobs there, so we should all be rooting for it.”
For Nora, it took nine months after she quit to stop crying herself to sleep. Now, she works as a building services technician in Morehead. Other ex-AppHarvest employees are scattered around the town: Some ended up at Buffalo Wild Wings or assembly lines in nearby plastics, cabinet, and barrel stave factories. Mays became assistant manager at the Family Dollar store. Moore went to the Family Dollar Distribution Center down the street from the greenhouse, where a night shift can earn $19.75 an hour. Baxter, who’s been staying at a campground in her RV, which she calls the Dream Capture, is looking for work.
“Other jobs you quit them and you move on. This job I feel like you had to detox from, because after you quit you’re so afraid to say anything because you’re afraid AppHarvest will sue you,” said Nora. “I told my husband I’m tired of hiding from the big, bad AppHarvest. You did me wrong.”
A branded AppHarvest water bottle hangs at the start of a row of tomatoes on June 14, 2021. Jon Cherry
Nora’s worst memory is of her birthday in June 2021, when she had to sweep shattered glass that fell from the greenhouse ceiling. The task triggered nightmares of glass panels that exploded and decapitated her, grow wires that electrocuted her, and tomato stakes that impaled her.
“Any way I could imagine dying in that greenhouse, I dreamt it,” Nora said. In the months before AppHarvest’s bankruptcy, before the facilities were sold, Nora said she felt like when she joined AppHarvest, she’d joined a cult.
“We dress alike, we’re told what to say, what to do, we’re always there, we didn’t have time with family and friends. Our family and friends were AppHarvest,” she said. “How did I not see this? That this was not a good place to be?”
The Research and Development Tax Incentive is estimated to have generated $9.1 billion in economic activity in the Australian biotech sector in the decade to 2021, according to analysis commissioned by the peak industry body. Between 2011 and 2021, each dollar of forgone tax revenue from the biotech industry has generated an average return of…
Cattle play a colossal role in climate change: As the single largest agricultural source of methane, a potent planet-warming gas, the world’s 940 million bovines spew nearly 10 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions — much of it through belches and droppings.
As such, there’s an astonishing amount of time and money being funneled into emission control. On-farm biodigesters, for example, take a back-end approach by harvesting methane wafting from manure pits. A slew of research aims to curb bovine burps by feeding them seaweed, essential oils and even a bovine Bean-O of sorts. The latest endeavor, a $70 million effort led by a Nobel laureate, uses gene-editing technology in an effort to eliminate that pollution by re-engineering the animals’ gut microbes.
Given the world’s growing appetite for meat and dairy, these novel ventures are crucial to inching us toward international and national climate goals. Yet they beg the question: Wouldn’t it be easier to ditch milk, cheese and beef for plant-based alternatives? Why fight nature when there’s an easier solution, at least from a scientific perspective?
Research shows that even a modest skew away from meat-based diets can shrink an individual’s carbon footprint as much as 75 percent. As it turns out, however, untangling cows from the climate equation is enormously complicated — especially in the United States, where the industry, worth $275 billion annually, boasts the world’s fourth largest cattle population and is its top beef and dairy producer. Achieving a cheeseburger-free America faces formidable challenges. Beyond overcoming cultural shifts — the country’s per-capita consumption of mozzarella, to name one example, averages one pound a month — lies the challenge of meeting nutritional demands and rebalancing the intricacies of an agricultural, food and industrial economy inextricably linked to livestock farming.
For these reasons, greener diets are but one prong in a larger set of food-based solutions for curtailing human-caused climate change, said Stephen Sturdivant, an environmental engineer at the Environmental Protection Agency. “We need a comprehensive combination of strategies to achieve a truly sustainable future,” he said. “We can’t just cherry-pick our way to get there.”
Americans love their beef and dairy. Consumption of both has steadily climbed despite the widely known climate implications. Andia/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
The nation’s taste for meat and dairy is undeniable. In addition to a steady, decade-long-rise in beef consumption, which hit 20 billion pounds in 2021, Americans gobbled up 12 percent more cheese, butter and ice cream than in the previous year, continuing an upward trend that started half a century ago.
There’s a fundamental disconnect, though, between our growing demand for animal-based protein and its enormous carbon footprint. Producing a pound of steak generates nearly 100 times more greenhouse gas than an equivalent amount of peas, while cheese production emits eight times the volume of making tofu.
Although the American beef and dairy industries are among the most efficient in the world — due in part to better breeding, genetics and nutrition — they still leave a significant hoofprint. The nation’s 92 million cattle generate 4 percent of the country’s total greenhouse gasses and account for 40 percent of all agricultural emissions.
However, if those herds were to magically disappear, it wouldn’t eliminate the problem entirely. According to a peer-reviewed study, an animal-free agricultural system would shave just 2.6 percent off the country’s total greenhouse gas emissions. Of course, any reduction would be noteworthy given the nation’s outsized role in climate change — that drop would be equivalent to three times Portugal’s annual emissions — though that benefit would come with drawbacks.
With no livestock to feed, the acreage now used to grow silage and hay could be replaced with food crops. Yet because higher value fruits and vegetables require quality soil, specific climate conditions, and ample water infrastructure, most of that land would be limited to growing calorie-heavy, hardy broad acre crops such as corn and soybeans — a system change that would add its own climate impacts.
In fact, agriculture’s current emissions are a result of a certain balance between crops and livestock, said Robin White, a professor of animal and poultry science at Virginia Tech and the lead author of the research. Crops need fertilizer, a resource often provided by livestock, and producing synthetic versions is an energy-intensive process that typically requires fossil fuels and emits methane. Cattle also help keep agricultural byproducts — from fruit peels and pulp to almond hulls and spent brewery grains — out of landfills, reducing the carbon output of crop waste by 60 percent.
Eliminating the nation’s cattle and replacing feed production with food crops would create more food, White said, resulting in a caloric surplus of 25 percent. That abundance, however, would come with deficits in essential nutrients, as plant-based foods tend to fall short in vitamin B12, calcium, iron and fatty acids. (Although existing studies reflect good long-term health in vegetarians, research on those who eschew all animal-derived foods is inconclusive.)
Larger discussions around sustainability tend to overlook these complexities, said White. Food insecurity is often tied to caloric sufficiency, but doesn’t always reflect nutritional needs, particularly those of vulnerable populations. Pregnant, lactating, and elderly women, for example, are susceptible to anemia and low bone density, mainly due to inadequate iron and calcium intake — nutrients readily available in red meat and dairy products, and easily accessible to large swaths of the population.
“These types of nuances get lost,” said White, when we focus exclusively on the broader metrics of diet change. While balanced choices can work for individuals, keeping the country adequately fed and healthy is a complicated endeavor. “There’s an entire agricultural system behind that food production,” she added, and changing the pieces within it requires careful examination.
A team of University of California researchers, including Ermias Kebreab (left) and Matthias Hess, are using CRISPR gene-editing technology in a bid to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of cattle by re-engineering their gut microbes.
Gregory Urquiaga / UC Davis
Given the scale of the beef and dairy industries, the central role they play in feeding people, and the difficulty of removing them from the economy, cattle clearly aren’t moving on any time soon. For that reason, there’s been no shortage of resources aimed at, quite literally, the gut of the emissions issue.
As with most ruminants, cattle make the most of a paltry diet, converting cud, grains and crop waste into muscle and milk. Extracting all that energy from cellulose and plant fibers requires the work of digestive microbes; cow rumens host entire colonies of bacteria, yeast and fungi that ferment complex carbohydrates into microbial protein, which they then absorb, and volatile fatty acids, which they expel as methane and other gasses.
Several dietary supplements have been shown to minimize bovine bloating. A twice-daily garlic and citrus extract can cut emissions by 20 percent, while a red seaweed additive can inhibit them by as much as 80 percent without impacting animal health or productivity or imparting detectable flavor to the resulting proteins. But having a transformative impact will require industrial-scale production and implementation. The promising strain of seaweed, for instance, prefers tropical waters, and developing a supply chain robust enough to serve tens of millions of cattle with a daily intervention leaves a trail of unanswered questions regarding effective farming, processing and distribution techniques.
Ultimately, tinkering with the animals’ digestive system may hold the most scalable answer. Jennifer Doudna, who won the 2020 Nobel Prize in chemistry for pioneering the CRISPR gene-editing tool, is leading a University of California team that hopes to do just that. The recently launched project aims to identify the offending gut bacteria through metagenomics, another breakthrough technology that maps the functions of complex microbial communities, then restructure their DNA to produce less methane. The goal is to develop an oral treatment for calves that, once administered, will continue repopulating their rumen with the genetically modified microflora.
“We’re trying to come up with a solution to reduce methane that is easily accessible and inexpensive,” Matthias Hess, an associate professor at UC Davis and a project lead, said in an interview. It’s a fix that, if successful, could make a serious dent in tamping down cattle emissions the world over.
Their mission launched earlier this year, funded by the TED Audacious Project. Along with livestock, microbiomes generate nearly two-thirds of global methane emissions through landfills, wastewater and rice paddies. If successful, “our technology could really move the needle in our fight against climate change,” Doudna said in a recent TED Talk.
Even as science tries making cows more climate friendly, the tide of consumption has seen a steady shift. In the last two years, the majority of Americans have upped their intake of plant-based foods, with almost half of Millennials and Gen Z-ers regularly going vegan. But there’s also been another notable tip in the scale: Just 12 percent of the country eats half the nation’s beef. And for many in the meat-heavy minority, the perils of climate change seem to do little in nudging them toward planet-friendlier meals.
A global study of factors that encourage greener diets found that climate risk perception is but one influencing factor, along with health implications and economic circumstances. Yet it’s the people around us, said Sibel Eker, the report’s lead author, who hold the most sway in changing individual attitudes, beliefs and values — in other words, there’s power in herd mentality.
“If there are more vegetarians or flexitarians around you, you tend to think that this is the norm in society,” said Eker, a sustainable service systems researcher at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria. “So if you have the intention of changing your behavior, the social cost [to do so] becomes lower.”
In fact, when it comes to influencing environment-related behaviors such as recycling and ditching cars, social norms and comparisons are incredibly effective, far outpacing other drivers such as financial incentives and public appeals, according to a separate study by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. And positive visibility and reinforcement — by individuals, a community or mass and social media — do more to encourage climate action than shaming people who aren’t fully on board, Eker said. Otherwise, it just makes the matter alienating and polarizing.
In the end, the overarching nature of the food system requires a collective approach to shrinking its enormous emissions. While there’s no denying the outsized environmental footprint of animal-based foods, dietary shifts are part of a much larger strategy around food-based climate action, said the EPA’s Sturdivant. Along with improved farming practices such as maximizing yields and minimizing inputs, reducing food loss and waste is just as critical. And for these reasons and more, Meatless Mondays, vegan Fridays, and less polluting cows all have their place in mitigating the role cattle play in warming the world.
The federal government has launched its On Farm Connectivity Program to boost the uptake of AgTech in a bid to boost the productivity, growth and sustainability of Australia’s primary industries. Equipment suppliers will mediate the delivery of $30 million worth of equipment rebates ranging in value from $3,000 to $30,000. Rebates will cover 50 per…
This story is part of Record High, a Grist series examining extreme heat and its impact on how — and where — we live.
On any given summer day, most of the nation’s farm workers, paid according to their productivity, grind through searing heat to harvest as much as possible before day’s end. Taking a break to cool down, or even a moment to chug water, isn’t an option. The law doesn’t require it, so few farms offer it.
The problem is most acute in the Deep South, where the weather and politics can be equally brutal toward the men and women who pick this country’s food. Yet things are improving as organizers like Leonel Perez take to the fields to tell farm workers, and those who employ them, about the risks of heat exposure and the need to take breaks, drink water, and recognize the signs of heat exhaustion.
“The workers themselves are never in a position where they’ve been expecting something like this,” Perez told Grist through a translator. “If we say, ‘Hey, you have the right to go and take a break when you need one,’ it’s not something that they’re accustomed to hearing or that they necessarily trust right away.”
Perez is an educator with the Fair Food Program, a worker-led human rights campaign that’s been steadily expanding from its base in southern Florida to farms in 10 states, Mexico, Chile, and South Africa. Although founded in 2011 to protect workers from forced labor, sexual harassment, and other abuses, it has of late taken on the urgent role of helping them cope with ever-hotter conditions.
It is increasingly vital work. Among those who labor outdoors, agricultural workers enjoy the least protection. Despite this summer’s record heat, the United States still lacks a federal standard governing workplace exposure to extreme temperatures. According to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, the agency has opened more than 4,500 heat-related inspections since March 2022, but it does not have data on worker deaths from heat-related illnesses.
Most states, particularly those led by Republicans, are loath to institute their own heat standards even as conditions grow steadily worse. In lieu of such regulation, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, through its Fair Food Program, has adopted stringent heat protocols that, among other things, require regular breaks and access to water and shade. Such things are essential. Extreme heat killed at least 436 workers of all kinds, and sickened 34,000 more, between 2011 to 2021, according to NPR. Some believe that toll is much higher, and efforts like those Perez leads are providing a model for others working toward broader and more strictly enforced safeguards.
“We look to [the Fair Food Program] for best practices in terms of how can agricultural employers already begin to implement these kinds of protections,” said Oscar Londoño, the executive director of WeCount, which has been pushing for a heat standard in Miami-Dade County. “But we also believe that it’s important to have regulations and forcible regulation that covers entire industries.”
The Fair Food Program works with 29 farms, which raise more than a dozen different crops, and the buyers who rely upon them. In exchange for guaranteeing workers basic rights, participating growers and buyers, including Walmart, Trader Joe’s, and McDonald’s, receive a seal of approval that signals to customers that the produce they are buying was grown and harvested in fair, humane conditions.
To protect workers, the guidelines require 10-minute breaks every two hours and access to shade and water. The program also extended the time frame during which those things must be offered, from five months to eight, reducing the amount of time that workers are exposed to the worst heat of the year. Growers also must be aware of the signs of heat stress and monitor workers for them. Such steps are vital, particularly in humid conditions, to prevent acute heatstroke and safeguard employees’ long-term health. Repeated exposure to extreme temperatures can cause kidney disease,heat stroke, cardiovascular failure, and other illnesses.
“Having time to rest and cool down is very important to reduce the risk of death and injury from heat stress, because the damage that heat causes to the body is cumulative,” said Mayra Reiter, director of occupational safety and health at the advocacy organization Farmworker Justice. “Workers who are not given rest periods to recover face greater health risks.”
A Fair Food Program educator leads a session at a farm in Tennessee. Courtesy of the Fair Food Program
Such risks were very real for Perez, who worked various vegetable farms around Immokalee and along the East Coast before becoming an educator and advocate. Because most farm workers are paid according to how much they harvest, few feel they can spend a few minutes in the shade sipping a beverage.
“The difficulty of the work makes you feel like it takes years off your life,” Lupe Gonzalo, a member of Coalition of Immaokalee Workers, wrote in a public blog post. High humidity makes things worse, and those who rely upon employer-provided housing often find no relief after a day in the fields because many accommodations lack air conditioning, she wrote.
Abusive conditions can compound the deadly conditions. A 2022 investigation by the Department of Labor revealed poor conditions, including human trafficking and wage theft, at farms across South Georgia. Two workers experienced heat illness and organ failure, and others were held at gunpoint to keep them in line as they labored.
Many were workers holding H-2A visas in a program that has its roots in the Mexican Farm Labor Program, launched in 1942, that sponsored seasonal agricultural workers from Mexico. (Currently, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security issues those visas.) Because of their reliance on employers for housing, visa sponsorship, and employment, many workers experience abuse, an investigation by Prism, Futuro Media, and Latino USA found earlier this year.
It doesn’t help that federal labor law, including the National Labor Relations Act, doesn’t cover agricultural workers in the same way it protects employees in other sectors, said James Brudney, a professor of labor and employment law at Fordham University. Additionally, language barriers, fear of retaliation, and workers who come from a variety of backgrounds and cultures keep many from speaking out.
Perez remembers having only bad options for dealing with adverse working conditions: Deal with it, complain and risk being fired, or quit. The Fair Food Program gives workers recourse he never had, and builds on protections against forced labor, sexual harassment, and other abuses it has achieved with workers, growers, and buyers, which have agreed not to buy from farm operators with spotty records, since 2011.
Workers are regularly informed of their rights, and violations can be reported to the Fair Food Program through a hotline for investigation. Heat-related complaints have grown increasingly common in recent years, and often lead to a confidential arbitration process. Such inquiries may lead to mandatory heat safety training and stipulations growers must abide by. Findings of more serious allegations, such as sexual harassment, can lead to a grower being suspended or even removed from the program. Such efforts protect workers, hold employers accountable, and allow the program to know what’s most impacting laborers, said Stephanie Medina, a human rights auditor with the Fair Food Standards Council.
“With the record heat, every summer has definitely, I think, gotten a lot more difficult for workers out there,” Medina said. “I think that is one of the reasons why we put so much emphasis on getting the heat stress protocols together and implemented in the program.”
Growers must report every heat-related illness or injury, which is investigated by Medina’s team or an outside investigator depending on severity. Her team visits every participating grower annually. Many of them go beyond the program’s requirements to ensure worker safety, by, say, providing Gatorade and snacks and regularly checking in on those who have experienced heat-related illness, she said. Workers, too, are being more assertive in protecting themselves, reporting any violations because they know they cannot be retaliated against.
Though no growers or farmer’s associations responded to Grist’s requests for comment, some at least appear happy with the organization’s work. “The Fair Food Program is giving us structure and is a tool for better understanding in a workplace that is multicultural and multiracial,” Bloomia, a flower producer and FFP participant, said in a statement on the program’s website.
Still, some farm workers’ organizations, while supportive of the program’s work, doubt that farm-by-farm solutions will ever be enough to protect a majority of farm workers. Jeannie Economos, of the Farmworkers’ Association of Florida, said comprehensive policy-level solutions are required. She noted that even in Florida nurseries, greenhouses, and other growers of ornamental plants employ thousands of people who are not yet covered by the Fair Food Program. Although they one day may be, federal, state, and local regulations are needed to ensure sweeping safety reforms.
“So what do we think of the Fair Food Program? It’s good,” she said. “But it’s not far-reaching enough.”
Other campaigns are working toward legislative solutions. An effort called ¡Que Calor! in Miami-Dade County, led by WeCount, has been pushing the issue for years, and in many ways is inspired by what the Coalition of Immokalee Workers has accomplished, Londoño told Grist.
“Miami-Dade is on the verge of passing the first county-wide [standard] in the country, and it would protect more than 100,000 outdoor workers in both agriculture and construction,” he said “In the absence of a federal rule, and in the absence of state protections, local governments can play a foundational role in piloting policies that states and the entire federal government can take on.”
¡Que Calor!, has, like the Fair Food Program, been led by workers. Including them in drafting policies can help ensure they are effective because “they know what their risks and the threats to their well being are better than anyone,” Brudney, the Fordham University professor, said
Yet even jurisdictions with strict labor laws can see their protections undercut because they often rely on employees, who may face reprisals, to report violations. Miami-Dade’s proposal skirts that by creating a county Office of Workplace Health with broad powers to receive complaints, initiate inspections, interview workers, and adjudicate investigations.
Amid such victories and a mounting need to protect workers, the Fair Food Program plans to expand its reach. It has cropped up at tomato farms in Georgia and Tennessee; crept up the East Coast to lettuce, sweet potato, and squash farms in North Carolina, New Jersey, Maryland, and Vermont; and sprouted on sweet corn farms in Colorado and sunflower farms in California. Organizers from the Fair Food Program have in recent weeks met with growers and workers in Chile eager to bring its efforts there.
The organization hopes to see its principals embraced more widely, and continues to pressure more companies, including Wendy’s and the Publix supermarket chain, to buy into the effort. Medina says such an effort will require staffing up, but she’s confident in its chances of success.
Many growers willfully neglect the rights and needs of workers, making such efforts essential, Perez said. The need for victories like those already seen on farms that work with the program will only grow more acute as the planet continues to warm. Even if federal heat standards are adopted, Perez believes local worker-led accountability processes will still be needed to ensure growers follow the law.
“What we see the Fair Food Program as is both a method of education and a way to share information with workers about these risks,” he said, “and at the same time as a tool for workers to protect themselves against the worst effects of climate change on a day to day basis.”
This coverage is made possible through a partnershipbetween Grist and WBEZ, the NPR station in Chicago.
If you wanted to point to a tree that can handle climate change, you might start with the bur oak.
When the Earth cooled millions of years ago and tropical species started to die off, the oaks which comprise the Quercus genus began diversifying and moving southward. New species emerged and spread across North America, down into Mexico, and in time diversified further — giving rise to the nearly 300 oak species in North America.
A warming planet will reshape the range where oaks will and can grow. As the family of giant trees — at mature height, a bur oak can clear seven-story buildings — lurches northward, a multistate investigation into the future of oak trees and American forests is underway in three sites across Illinois, Minnesota, and Oklahoma.
Deep inside the Morton Arboretum this fall, a 1,700-acre botanical garden in Chicago’s western suburbs, Andrew Hipp hopped off a golf cart and stepped into a part of the arboretum closed to the public and dedicated to research.
A senior scientist at the Arboretum, Hipp walked past row after row of young bur oaks. More than 1,000 have been planted here, with a third of the oaks grown from acorns collected from near and around Chicago. The rest of the oaks here are in equal parts from Minnesota and Oklahoma.
“This study can give us a good idea of how the most foundational species of our forests are going to evolve as conditions change,” Hipp said. “And with the evolution of the oaks with the migration of the oaks, those will shape the composition of the entire forest in our region.”
Back in 2021, and all at the exact same time, bur oak saplings from Illinois, Minnesota, and Oklahoma were also planted in equal proportion in experimental gardens at The University of Minnesota’s Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve and University of Oklahoma’s Kessler Field Station.
The goal is to see if different populations of bur oaks perform better in their current environment than in environments within the species’ range but still hundreds of miles away. Scientists want to know how the oaks will respond to different climates, and how that could affect forests in the future.
“It’s raining right now, as we talk, we all put on a raincoat. Oaks can’t do that. So they have to be able to respond to the climate that they find themselves in,” Hipp said.
To measure how the oaks respond, the team of scientists planted offspring from a single tree into three states across the oak’s range. The trees from Oklahoma should be adapted to the droughts, and the ones from northern Minnesota should be adapted to freezing conditions. The expectation is that the oaks would do better in their home environments because they have had generations to adjust.
“If it turns out that oaks are strongly adapted to the local environment, that means they’ve had potentially thousands of years to evolve gene combinations that may prove advantageous in the future as climates change,” Hipp said.
Oaks dominate North American forests — approximately 30 percent of American forests, and their presence is even more pronounced east of the Mississippi, which means that this single group of trees provides a scaffolding critical for a diversity of other life forms. There are more insects, more mammals, more birds, more fungi, and more microorganisms that depend on oaks than practically any other tree genus in North America.
What happens to oaks, and how they respond to a warming planet, will have profound implications for what humanity does next to preserve them.
Andrew Hipp is a senior scientist at the Morton Arboretum in the western suburbs of Chicago, where more than 1,000 bur oaks have been planted.
Juanpablo Rameriz-Franco / Grist
Earlier this year, the Species Survival Commission of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, or IUCN, designated the Morton Arboretum as the Center for Species Survival: Trees. It’s one of 11 research institutions worldwide, with only five in North America. The Morton Arboretum is the first to focus exclusively on the existential predicament of trees worldwide.
Silvia Alvarez-Clare, the arboretum’s director of global tree conservation, said nearly a third of the more than 400 oak species around the world are at risk of extinction. This experiment could help scientists determine if the oaks need help migrating to preserve climate-adapted genotypes.
“They may not have time to move through evolutionary time in thousands of years,” said Alvarez-Clare. “It’s all happening so fast that we may have to help them and plant some of them.”
It’s not just the oaks facing an existential crisis. Alvarez-Claire said that trees writ large are facing extreme endangerment. In 2021, the Botanic Gardens Conservation International’s State of the World’s Trees report found that over 17,000 of the world’s 60,000 tree species are at risk of extinction. Alvarez-Clare said that’s more than all threatened mammals, birds, amphibians, and reptiles put together.
While the report points to habitat loss, agriculture and commercial logging as the greatest threats to trees worldwide, it stipulates that climate change is increasingly a concern as suitable habitats migrate.
The United States Forest Service has taken notice.
“Trees can move, given enough time,” said Andrew Bowers, the climate adaptation specialist with the office of sustainability and climate for the U.S. Forest Service. “But the pace of current climate change is about 10 times faster than most tree species can migrate.”
Projects utilizing what scientists call “assisted migration” are already underway at the Forest Service.
At its core, assisted migration is a plan hatched to move a species or a population from one area to another in anticipation of climate change. Bower said it’s now just one of the “tools in the toolbox” when Forest Service specialists are thinking about reforestation and developing resilient forests.
For example, foresters at the Superior National Forest in northern Minnesota recently completed an assisted migration plan with input from tribal representatives, state and local governments. In the Pacific Northwest, in states like Oregon and Washington, Bowers said that some foresters have been working with Forest Service geneticists to identify seeds from warmer areas for ongoing reforestation projects and to begin to account for climate change.
If trees as resilient as the oak can’t keep apace with climate change, that could mean disaster for the communities of life that depend on them
Across the three gardens, Jeannine Cavender-Bares, a plant physiological and evolutionary ecologist at the University of Minnesota, said that some overall results are becoming increasingly clear at the drier, hotter southernmost range of the experiment.
“Each population has the highest survival and its home site,” said Cavender-Bares. “It’s just that in Oklahoma, it’s really, really hard for the Minnesota and Illinois population. They’re just not doing well there.”
If the bur oak’s southern range limit is increasingly inhospitable, Cavender-Bares says scientists may need to intercede on the oak’s behalf and speed up migration. She says that could mean transplanting bur oaks from southern climates farther north to share drought-resistant genotype.
“So in a warming world, how do we maintain healthy forests?” said Cavender-Bares. “We need trees that are adapted, have the right genes, that are adapted to the environments of the future.”
Back at the arboretum, Hipp turns and inspects a leaf from an Oklahoma bur oak. He says that whether the bur oak will need a helping hand is still very much in the air, but it’s something scientists need to know — and the sooner, the better.
“The risk of losing these hard-earned gene copies that have evolved over the course of millions of years, inherited by bur oak and evolving within bur oak,” Hipp said. “When we lose those, we’ve lost this opportunity to solve problems that we can’t even predict in the future. So every tree is a warehouse of potential solutions to evolutionary problems.”
Water is hard to come by on the Rocky Boy’s Reservation, and it has been for a long time. The Chippewa Cree tribe members who live on this reservation in north-central Montana get most of their water from a thin underground aquifer that is insufficiently replenished by occasional rainfall, and they’ve been under some form of water restriction for several decades. There’s only enough groundwater for cooking and hygiene, so residents aren’t allowed to water their yellowing lawns or run sprinklers. It’s illegal to operate a car wash.
“It’s been in place for most of my life,” said Ted Whitford, the director of the tribe’s water resources department. “And if we get a water main break on our main line, what happens is it drains the tanks, and pretty much puts everyone that’s on that system out of water.”
When the tribe reached a deal to obtain water rights for the reservation in 1997, the federal government agreed to pipe in water from a reservoir on the Marias River, almost 60 miles away, replacing the aquifer water. But for more than 20 years, that project proceeded at a crawl, with the government spending only enough money each year to build a small portion of the pipeline. In the meantime, the reservation’s water problems grew more dire with every spell of drought.
That changed last year. The federal Bureau of Reclamation, flush with money from the bipartisan infrastructure bill that Congress passed in 2021, directed $57 million to the Rocky Boy’s Reservation for the project. This year, the Bureau spent another $77 million, allowing construction crews to complete a new water treatment facility at the reservoir and build several miles of pipeline, extending the project closer to the reservation. In the coming years, the feds will pay more than 90 percent of the total project costs.
“When I became familiar with the project, in my mind, it was doomed from the beginning because it was a project that was scheduled to be completed over a 40- to 50-year period,” said Whitford. “We were getting spoon-fed funding. Now we can accelerate that process.” While he once doubted that the pipeline would reach the reservation’s central town of Box Elder in his lifetime, it now looks like the pipe could reach there as soon as 2025.
A looming depletion of groundwater across the U.S. has drawn nationwide attention in recent years, as local officials in states from Kansas to Arizona struggle to manage dwindling water resources even as homes and farms get thirstier. However, the federal government’s surprisingly robust push to address this crisis has drawn far less attention. With little fanfare, the Biden administration is funneling billions of dollars to a suite of infrastructure projects designed to break the country’s dependence on vanishing groundwater. An infusion of money from the 2021 infrastructure bill is now being deployed, reviving long-dormant proposals for pipelines, reservoirs, and treatment facilities in rural areas across the U.S. West.
These rural areas have long relied on underground aquifers as their only source of water, lacking access to the major rivers and reservoirs that sustain cities such as Denver, Colorado, and Los Angeles, California. As climate change leads to worsening droughts, the water level in these aquifers has fallen as there’s less rainfall to recharge them. As a result, many of these communities have suffered dire water access issues: Some have found their aquifers contaminated with unhealthy chemicals, while others have lost water access altogether as irrigated farms drain water away from household wells.
The $8.3 billion in funding from the infrastructure bill should help change that. By building pipelines to import clean water or facilities to treat contaminated groundwater, the administration will help address the sins of over-pumping in rural areas, cleaning up the mess made by a century of intensive agriculture. Under ordinary circumstances, the Bureau of Reclamation, which has managed Western water infrastructure for more than a century, would never have found the money to support big construction projects in cash-poor rural areas. The infrastructure bill has made the math for these projects much easier.
“We have had steady funding for these projects in our discretionary budget, but you need these bursts of investment because of the scope,” said Camille Camimlim Touton, the Bureau’s commissioner, in an interview with Grist. “It’s the octane to getting these done.”
Even though federal, state, and local officials all agree on the need for water projects like the one at Rocky Boy’s, the money for it only arrived thanks to the $550 billion legislative package that Democrats (and a small number of Republicans) passed before losing control of Congress in last year’s midterm elections. The new money is far from sufficient to address all the groundwater issues in the West, and there’s no guarantee that Congress will give Reclamation another burst of funding down the road. In the meantime, though, the Bureau has been able to complete projects that have languished for decades.
The largest of these projects — and the best indication of how Reclamation seeks to use its new windfall — is a $610 million pipeline effort called the Arkansas Valley Conduit. The 130-mile pipeline will deliver melted snow from a reservoir in the suburbs of Denver to a dry valley of southeast Colorado, relieving a long-standing water crisis in that area. Much of the Arkansas Valley’s groundwater contains high amounts of selenium, which can cause hair loss and cognitive impairment, as well as radionuclides that can increase cancer risk if consumed over long periods. Prolonged drought periods made this contamination even worse.
“Almost everybody down there drinks bottled water, because they can’t drink the water out of their faucets,” said Chris Woodka, the senior policy and issues manager at the Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District, which is managing the project. “They have to replace their appliances all the time because they get caked up with minerals. A lot of farmland has disappeared, and in some communities people have had to move out.”
Workers install a segment of pipeline near Pueblo, Colorado, as part of the Arkansas Valley Conduit project. The project is being funded by the bipartisan infrastructure bill Congress passed in 2021.
U.S. Bureau of Reclamation
Congress first tried to tackle this problem more than half a century ago when it authorized the Fryingpan-Arkansas Project in 1962 — then-president John F. Kennedy visited the valley that year to commemorate the effort — but funding for the project never materialized, and Reclamation had to shelve it. Aside from some preliminary construction in the 1980s, there was no progress on fixing the valley’s water issues. The amount of water needed to supply the parched communities was minuscule, but the area’s population was so sparse — most towns along the pipeline’s 100-mile length have just a few hundred residents — that providing the water was insurmountably expensive.
That changed last year when Reclamation announced its first suite of infrastructure grants. The Bureau pledged to fund around 80 percent of the dormant project, finished the final paperwork, and soon there were shovels in the ground. Woodka told Grist that the whole line should be operational by 2031, years earlier than previously projected.
“There are people who’ve been working on this for their careers who didn’t believe that it would happen,” said Touton. “So to be out there with six miles of pipe waiting to be put in the ground was just an amazing feeling.”
The new money has also been a game-changer in the llanos of eastern New Mexico, where federal dollars are helping to build a pipeline that will carry fresh mountain water from a reservoir called Ute Lake to two farming counties on the Texas border. In this case, the issue is quantity rather than quality: As big farming operations have expanded across the area in recent years, farmers have drained the local aquifers at an unprecedented rate, accounting for more than 90 percent of water usage in the area. Many of the area’s 73,000 residents have grown concerned that their wells will soon grow dry. After years of stasis, the local water authority is moving forward on an $666 million, 151-mile pipeline, with the federal government paying around 75 percent of the cost.
Grayford Payne, a deputy commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, speaks at the groundbreaking for the Ute Lake pipeline project in New Mexico. Reclamation allocated $160 million to the project last year. U.S. Bureau of Reclamation
Over the course of the next five years, as Reclamation doles out dozens of new grants, it will reach areas where federal investment is almost nonexistent. The beneficiaries include small towns in central Montana such as Ryegate and Lavina, which have populations of 223 and 136 respectively, and tribal nations such as the Jicarilla Apache, who have fought for water access on their remote New Mexico reservation for decades. Had it not been for the jump in funding, these areas might never have seen long-promised upgrades and repairs.
Even so, Reclamation’s focus on bolstering water supply has critics in some areas, who argue that reservoirs holding surface water are no more reliable than underground aquifers. Many of the Bureau’s projects are holdovers from a previous era when large water infrastructure projects such as dams and pipelines were more common. In recent years, this “water buffalo” policy — a term referring to politicians who solved water issues by seeking out new supplies — has given way to a focus on reducing usage and increasing water recycling.
In the case of the New Mexico pipeline, some in the area think the better solution to the area’s water problems is to reduce irrigation demand rather than importing new supply. Warren Frost, an attorney for rural Quay County, opposes the Ute Lake pipeline and is suing to stop it. He argues that the local governments in the region should buy out some of the farmers and ranchers that are using up the area’s groundwater and repurpose that water for residential use.
“They haven’t taken any steps to buy water rights from the irrigators,” Frost told Grist. “They’re not trying to save their groundwater there. They’re just letting them pump it while they’re building this pipeline.” Frost said that buying out agricultural water rights would be much cheaper than the pipeline, and furthermore that the surface water supply from Ute Lake isn’t reliable given future drought: As has become clear on the Colorado River, even large river reservoirs are vulnerable to overuse and can vanish during drought periods.
Meanwhile, in California, environmentalists have criticized a long-standing proposal to create a new reservoir in the mountains north of Sacramento, arguing it will help perpetuate a pattern of unsustainable water use for farms and ranches. The Bureau has spent $60 million on that effort.
Touton acknowledged that the United States has a water demand problem as well as a supply problem. Even so, she said, the projects will ease or prevent dire health concerns in rural areas that have no other options for firming up their water supplies.
“We’re the largest water deliverer, that’s our mission, and we look to use these tools to meet our mission,” said Touton. “But that also means that we need to have water to deliver, and part of that is recognizing that it has to be a sustainable system.”
Bayer, which profits from various environmentally harmful anddisease-causing chemicals like glyphosate, has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) “to develop resource-efficient, climate-resilient solutions for crops, varieties, crop protection, weed and mechanization”.
The ICAR, an apex public sector institution, is responsible for co-ordinating agricultural education and research in India. Predatory corporations like Bayer attempt to co-opt government agencies that can provide access to extensive networks in order to wield influence and market products. It’s a key business strategy.
And this is not lost on the Peoples’ Commission on Public Sector and Services (PCPSS), which includes eminent academics, jurists, erstwhile administrators, trade unionists and social activists. In a recently released statement, it expressed concern that Bayer will exploit the ICAR’s vast infrastructure to pursue its own commercial plans within India.
And those commercial plans are clear: to boost sales of toxic proprietary products by opening up new markets in India as sales stagnate or plummet elsewhere.
For example, it was reported in July that German-based Bayer expects to take a €2.5bn ($2.8bn) hit due to slower demand for its glyphosate-based products. Penetrating the huge Indian market represents a massive cash cow for foreign corporations, especially if their genetically engineered (GE), herbicide-tolerant food crops get the go ahead. Proprietary GE seeds are designed to be used with agrochemicals like the herbicide glyphosate.
An analysis of a database of 2018’s top-selling ‘crop protection products’ revealed that the world’s leading agrochemical companies made more than 35% of their sales from pesticides classed as highly hazardous to people, animals or ecosystems. The investigation identified billions of dollars of income for agrochemical giants Bayer, BASF, Corteva, FMC and Syngenta from chemicals found by regulatory authorities to pose health hazards like cancer or reproductive failure.
This investigation was based on an analysis of a huge dataset of pesticide sales from the agribusiness intelligence company Phillips McDougall.
Inadequate state funding is driving the ICAR to enter into agreements with companies like Bayer. However, the PCPSS says that such MoUs make a mockery of the stated government aim to boost self-reliance in India’s agricultural sector.
It argues that considering corporations like Bayer promote the use of toxic chemicals in agriculture, a partnership between the ICAR and Bayer of this kind is irreconcilable with the nationwide mission recently launched by Prime Minister Modi to propagate natural farming as a more sustainable alternative. In this respect, the ICAR’s MoU with Bayer is clearly counter-productive and out of place with the stated priority of the government.
The PCPSS notes that there are several ICAR-sponsored research institutions and state-level agricultural universities which are engaged in outstanding research relevant to Indian agriculture. A number of states have launched their own natural farming missions to free debt trapped farmers from the use of costly chemicals and other unsustainable practices. The PCPSS says it is therefore not clear as to why the ICAR should choose to promote Bayer in multiple areas of agricultural research.
Instead of Institutions promoting agrichemical products marketed by Bayer, the PCPSS asserts that the ICAR should shift its focus to agroecological approaches, biological inputs and integrated farming systems, which will help Indian agriculture in the long run.
Although the government revoked the three farm laws passed in 2021 that would have sounded a neoliberal death knell for Indian agriculture, it now seems to be accelerating the marketisation and corporatisation of the sector through other means. The year-long farmers’ agitation led to the government to revoke the farm laws, but these types of MoUs are one way of achieving what the farm laws failed to do.
The PCPSS wants the government to assure farmers a minimum support price for their produce on the lines recommended by the Swaminathan Committee so that farming may become a remunerative activity. It also urges the government to review the ICAR-Bayer MoU and similar agreements entered into by other official agencies with large corporates, not only in agriculture but also in other fields.
One such MoU was entered into by the Indian government in April 2021 with Microsoft, allowing its local partner, CropData, to leverage a master database of farmers. The MoU seems to be part of the AgriStack policy initiative, which involves the roll out of ‘disruptive’ technologies and digital databases in the agricultural sector.
Microsoft is supposed to help farmers with post-harvest management solutions by building a collaborative platform and capturing agriculture datasets such as crop yields, weather data, market demand and prices (data is the financially lucrative ‘new oil’ for those who own it). In turn, this would create a farmer interface for ‘smart’ agriculture, including post-harvest management and distribution.
CropData is to be granted access to a government database of 50 million farmers and their land records. As the database is developed, it will include farmers’ personal details, profiles of land held, production information and financial details. Microsoft will know more about farmers than farmers know about themselves.
The stated aim is to use digital technology to improve financing, inputs, cultivation and supply and distribution. The unstated aims are to impose a certain model of farming, promote profitable corporate technologies and products, encourage market (corporate) dependency among farmers and create a land market by establishing a system of ‘conclusive titling’ of all land in the country so that ownership can be identified and land can then be bought or taken away.
The plan is that, as farmers lose access to land or can be identified as legal owners, predatory institutional investors and large agribusinesses will buy up and amalgamate holdings, facilitating the further roll out of high-input, corporate-dependent industrial agriculture (and the massive health and environmental costs that it entails).
Indian agriculture has witnessed gross underinvestment over the years, whereby it is now wrongly depicted as a basket case and underperforming and ripe for a sell off to those very interests who had a stake in its underinvestment.
The PCPSS says it is not clear as to why the ICAR should choose to promote Bayer in multiple areas of agricultural research, especially given the government’s stated commitment to natural farming.
However, India has submitted itself to the regime of foreign finance, awaiting signals on how much it can spend, giving up any pretence of economic sovereignty and leaving the space open for private capital to move in and capture markets.
That much has been made clear by the Research Unit for Political Economy in the article ‘Modi’s Farm Produce Act Was Authored Thirty Years Ago, in Washington DC’. The piece states that current agricultural ‘reforms’ are part of a broader process of imperialism’s increasing capture of the Indian economy.
A 1991 World Bank memorandum set out the programme for India. At the time, India was still in its foreign exchange crisis of 1990-91 and had just been subjected to an IMF-monitored ‘structural adjustment’ programme that involved shifting 400 million people from rural India to the cities and corporatising agriculture.
The current administration is attempting to dramatically accelerate the implementation of the above programme. The aim is to drastically dilute the role of the public sector in agriculture, reducing it to a facilitator of private (foreign) capital.
There has been an ongoing strategy to make farming financially non-viable for many of India’s farmers. The number of cultivators in India declined from 166 million to 146 million between 2004 and 2011. Some 6,700 left farming each day. Between 2015 and 2022, the number of cultivators was likely to decrease to around 127 million.
We have seen the running down of the sector for decades, spiralling input costs, withdrawal of government assistance and the impacts of cheap, subsidised imports which depress farmers’ incomes.
The PCPSS is not the first to express concern about the deepening penetration of large, profit-hungry corporations. In late November 2018, a charter was released by the All India Kisan Sangharsh Coordination Committee (an umbrella group of around 250 farmers’ organisations) expressing similar sentiments.
The charter also expressed alarm about the economic, ecological, social and existential crisis of Indian agriculture as well as the persistent state neglect of the sector and discrimination against farming communities.
The repeal of the three farm laws in late 2021 was little more than a tactical manoeuvre. The powerful global interests behind these laws did not simply disappear. As big tech giants team up with traditional agribusiness companies like Bayer, the goal to capture and radically restructure the sector remains and is gaining momentum. The farmers’ struggle in India is far from over.
When David Marchant looked at the weather forecast in early July, he had a bad feeling. His 50-acre farm sits in the bend of the meandering Lamoille River in northern Vermont. He watched its banks warily as a steady downpour soaked the landscape. Soon, the river began to rise. By 7:30 the next morning, he and his crew were out in the mud, trying to harvest all they could save.
Two months’ of rain fell in two days. Despite their efforts, Marchant’s River Berry Farm quickly lost upward of 10 acres of crops, with lettuce and summer squash suddenly swimming in the flooded fields. He estimates the torrents cost him around $150,000 in just 48 hours.
The storm wiped out roads and bridges and inundated homes across the state. The catastrophe came at a particularly hard time of year for farmers to face disaster: In early summer, many are heavily invested in their season, but not yet able to harvest. The Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food, and Markets estimates that the state’s food producers lost over $16 million as a result — somewhere between one-third and one-half of all the state’s yield.
As the climate changes, American farmers face a slew of new threats to their harvests and business models. More frequent floods and droughts can wipe out months of work overnight. Rising temperatures are expected to slow plant growth in the Northern Hemisphere within the next decade, while higher carbon dioxide levels reduce the nutritional value of fruits and vegetables. Altogether, a recent NASA study found that some yields could decrease 24 percent by as soon as 2030.
Research from the American Farm Bureau Federation suggests that nationwide, natural disasters caused $21.5 billion in agricultural losses last year. Only about half of those were protected by insurance, the majority of which is sold through federally-backed programs. Their payouts to farmers have increased over 500 percent in the last two decades.
Flood waters remain on destroyed fields in Burlington, Vermont after catastrophic rain in July. AP Photo/Charles Krupa
Back in 2007, a report from the Government Accountability Office, or GAO, called climate change a looming threat to insurance markets, and pointedly noted that while large private insurers were already incorporating it into their risk management, the two major federal insurance programs — for flooding and agriculture — ”have done little.”
That’s a problem not only for food security, but for the people growing the nation’s food. “I don’t think there is an appreciation of how significant the detrimental changes might be, because I think people are thinking things are already bad,” said Jeffrey Amthor, principal scientist at Verisk Analytics, a risk assessment firm that advises insurance and reinsurance companies.
Shortly before this summer’s flooding, Grace Oedel, the executive director of the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont, was helping growers deal with hazardous wildfire smoke from Canada. Before that, a late spring freeze withered buds on apple trees and blossoms on blueberry bushes, costing Vermont farmers $10 million in lost production. The nonprofit has an emergency fund that food producers can apply to, and in the last few years, the organization has seen a surge in such petitions. “It just feels like nothing’s predictable,” Oedel said.
The financial stress this causes can be devastating: One recent study found 60 percent of farmers and their children are experiencing depression — about double the national average. Suicides within farm families are skyrocketing. “It’s definitely intensifying,” Oedel said. “The question is, how long can these farmers hold on before they get some kind of support?”
April 14, 1935, began as a sunny, spring Sunday in Kansas. But by afternoon, a dark cloud billowed over the horizon, so dense it obscured sunlight like an eclipse. It lashed across the plains at 60 mph. People suffocated, their lungs filled with dust. “The onrushing cloud, the darkness, and the thick, choking dirt, made this storm one of terror,” reported the Weather Bureau, now known as the National Weather Service.
The “black blizzard” was formed of displaced topsoil, becoming one of the worst of the Dust Bowl’s storms that drove hundreds of thousands of people off their land in search of other work. A lethal combination of destructive farm practices and an extended drought desiccated the region. In response, Congress authorized the Federal Crop Insurance Program, or FCIP, in 1938. No one was sure it would work. At first, the effort ran into the same hurdles private insurers had: Participation was low because rates were high, yet payouts still greatly exceeded premiums. At the time, the Christian Science Monitorasked, “Will the program become in effect an underwriting of high-risk areas which in fact ought to be retired from farming?”
Nevertheless, by 1980, the federal government decided to bolster its support for crop insurance, eliminating an overlapping disaster payments program. As part of the Federal Crop Insurance Act of 1980, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, or USDA, authorized a small number of private companies to sell these policies, while heavily subsidizing their cost. Today, taxpayers cover about 60 percent of these premiums, more than ever before.
If weather reduces an enrolled farmer’s yield or revenue from a particular crop, the FCIP will issue indemnity payments, essentially guaranteeing a set amount of income. Most of those subsidies are going to commodity crops; corn, soybeans, wheat, and cotton have received 75 percent of all payments in the last two decades. “It’s really concentrated to just a few states, and also just a few crops,” said Anne Schechinger, Midwest director at the nonprofit Environmental Working Group, which recently published a report on crop insurance.
While these average yields are supposed to be set by looking at a grower’s historical output, in practice, bad years are frequently excluded from those calculations, said Schechinger. “That’s something we see a lot in California, Texas, Oklahoma,” she said. A provision called Actual Production History Yield Exclusion allows farmers to ignore up to 15 bad years when calculating typical yields, falsely raising insurance payouts. This misrepresentation is highest in the southern Great Plains — the same region that experienced the worst consequences of the Dust Bowl.
Firefighters battle a large blaze on farm fields near Smithville, Texas in 2011. AP Photo/Erich Schlegel
The FCIP will also pay the same farmers for the same kinds of losses year after year — and it often does. One hotspot for claims is the Mississippi River Critical Conservation Area, a USDA-designated area across 13 states. It has accounted for $1.5 billion of federal payments from flood damage since 2001, which Schechinger says could have instead been used to transition more 300,000 acres of frequently inundated land out of production. Forty unlucky counties, primarily in the Corn Belt, received payouts for losses related to both drought and extreme precipitation every year for the last two decades. Failing to account for these risks in insurance policies raises the chance that today’s potential solutions will become insufficient.
Critics say the crop insurance program is now actually deterring climate adaptation by minimizing the true costs of growing in places that have become unsuitable. In some cases, federal crop insurance is also actually making climate impacts worse: As groundwater declines across the Midwest, for example, farmers may risk losing coverage if they take steps to conserve water, since irrigated crops receive higher payouts. This highlights the need for urgent reforms in the next farm bill, legislation passed approximately every five years that addresses the United States’ agriculture and food systems. “We know the last 20 years aren’t the next 20 years,” Schechinger said.
Last year, federal crop insurance payments topped $19 billion — the highest since 2001, when current subsidy levels were set. (A USDA spokesperson told Grist, “The total amount of losses has increased during that time, but so has the program’s size.”) According to several reports from the GAO, the share of the total costs paid by taxpayers has also increased.
Yet a third of all subsidies for the FCIP are now being paid out not to farmers, but the private companies that sell and service its policies — many of whom are large corporations. In addition to their administrative costs, these companies earn a 14.5 percent return from the government, much higher than similar industries, like property insurance. Reducing that overhead rate could free up financing for the growers who need it most.
This could expand other federal programs like the Whole Farm Revenue Policy, which insures the revenue of all the commodities on a farm, making it more accessible to the kinds of small, diversified operations that grow for farmers markets. “It’s a great policy, but it’s not subsidized as highly,” said Schechinger, “so not that many farmers use it.” She adds that insurance agents are typically compensated based on the value of the premiums they sell, incentivizing them to sell more expensive policies to larger players. The USDA introduced a “Micro Farm” program in 2022, which is intended to be a better fit for small operations, but nationally, there have only been 120 such policies sold so far.
A Texas farmer looks over a cotton crop he shredded and planted over with wheat in Kress, Texas in 2022. Like many other cotton growers, he has walked away from more than 2,000 acres of his bone-dry fields. AP Photo/Eric Gay
Watchdog groups like GAO have long criticized the crop insurance program’s poorly managed approaches — like propping up water-intensive cotton growers in the Southwest desert — but clearly the risks to farmers are also rapidly increasing. Hundreds of cattle died this summer in Iowa as the heat index climbed to 117 degrees Fahrenheit. In addition to extreme temperatures, ongoing drought continues to plague much of the Midwest’s breadbasket. According to recent research from Stanford University, climate hazards have increased annual crop insurance losses by about $1 billion every year since 1991.
The threat of such catastrophes now looms over agriculture across the country. As sweeping changes start to alter what food can be produced where, Schechinger says Congress needs to “really reevaluate how we’re doing business as usual.”
The next farm bill, though its timing is uncertain due to a looming government shutdown, will determine federal agriculture policy for the next five to 10 years. It is expected to be the most expensive in the country’s history. “We choose how we subsidize everytime we make a farm bill,” Oedel, of the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont, said. “That is a policy choice, not a reality about how food has to grow.”
As dawn rises over a field of corn in Illinois, light beads off the collected dew, the horizon stretching out over the rippling stalks. That precious, twinkling moisture is the reason daytime summer temperatures have so far remained fairly stable across the Midwest, “counter to almost everywhere else on the planet,” said Verisk’s Amthor. He recently conducted a report looking at the impacts of climate change on the region’s yields of this commodity. To his surprise, he found that plants in the rolling, endless rows across the Corn Belt are drawing water from the soil and releasing it as vapor at such a scale that it is actually helping keep surface temperatures cooler. This has shielded the area from the poor harvests other places are already facing.
But as the mercury continues to rise, this natural air conditioning won’t be able to keep compensating. “If the Midwest catches up, and it does that in a rapid way, I think we probably don’t appreciate how significantly and negatively that might impact the Midwest,” he said. The U.S. is the world’s largest producer and exporter of corn, so this could have global consequences.
A farmer pulls a carrot from one of his fields near Madras, Oregon in 2021. Due to drought, his farm had gone without irrigation water for weeks. AP Photo/Nathan Howard
The more we can do to slow down these changes, the easier it will be to adapt, Amthor says. It takes time to breed new genotypes of plants that might be able to better endure heat, or bring new technologies into the field. That kind of tinkering is something farmers naturally excel at, says Rich Bonnano, a fourth-generation farmer who’s now the director of the North Carolina State University Extension program. It is, in a way, a form of insurance separate from the traditional financial systems. “I think about avoiding risk all the time,” he said. “You can’t stop a hurricane, but maybe some varieties can handle wet roots and standing water.”
In addition to breeding resilience into crops, Bonnano’s family’s experience suggests that diversifying crops provides its own form of insurance. Much of their 50 acres in Methuen, Massachusetts, flooded in 2006, drowning several plantings of lettuce and spring greens, and ruining acres of plastic mulch and drip irrigation. It cost Bonnano, who was uninsured, an estimated $60,000. He then discovered that agriculture isn’t eligible for the disaster relief loans available for small businesses. “We got nothing,” he said.
But Bonnano had carefully planned a variety of crops to handle exactly that kind of risk. He was able to replant some of his cool season vegetables, including leaf lettuce and other greens. Warm season vegetable starts like peppers and eggplants were still safely in greenhouses, and flowers rounded out his end-of-summer income. “We didn’t have our eggs in one basket,” he said. At the end of the year, the farm’s revenue was only 10 percent less than the previous year. “The more diversified you are, the more you’re able to handle this year-to-year variability,” he explains, even without an insurance policy.
In Vermont this summer, Marchant’s similarly wide-ranging plantings also helped him recover. “We are naturally insured with our diversity,” he says. He had previously looked into the Whole Farm Revenue Policy, and found it too expensive. But he had enrolled in the USDA’s Non-Insured Crop Disaster Assistance Program, which, despite its name, functions a lot like insurance: When enrolled farmers lose more than 50 percent of an expected crop, it begins paying for those losses at 55 percent of their market value, with higher electable coverage for an additional price. This won’t necessarily cover all of his damage, Marchant said, “but the [upfront] cost is incredibly cheap.”
A farm worker watches a plume of smoke from a wildfire in Santa Paula, California in 2017. AP Photo/Jae C. Hong
The disaster assistance program is run through regional governments, in Marchant’s case, Franklin County. Its agents were more familiar with dairies, and in assessing his damages initially thought “lettuce was lettuce,” he said. “Well for us, lettuce is 17 different plantings,” including multiple varieties. He says the county had a “steep learning curve” to handle specialty vegetables, as it needs data on typical crop yields to determine pricing. “It takes a while to build all that, but they are getting better.”
In the meantime, many of his neighbors remain uninsured, due to the systematic gaps that persist for small farmers. In the absence of official coverage, some are turning to crowdfunding platforms like GoFundMe. Following a disaster, such crowdsourcing is at least more immediate, Marchant adds. “You get the money quick,” he said. “It takes forever for the government.”
But such efforts come with complications. Despite their potential, most campaigns fail to meet their goal. Furthermore, receiving funds for specific needs like flood damage can adversely impact eligibility for assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA. (Farms themselves are not eligible for FEMA aid, but residential repairs often are.)
As the growing season draws to a close in Vermont, insurance adjusters await soil testing results, and to see which crops might have recovered from the year’s disasters. The federal government eventually declared Vermont a natural disaster area, making its farmers eligible for expanded low-interest loan programs through the USDA. But that doesn’t really help, Oedel says. “Frankly, nobody wants to take on a loan when they’re already extremely in debt.”
A farmer in Burlington, Vermont holds a bouquet of mud-covered flowers, part of their crop destroyed after severe flooding in July. AP Photo/Charles Krupa
Instead of incentivizing farms like Marchant’s — whose organic approach has been shown to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, improve soil carbon sequestration, and support biodiversity — government support continues to leave out the very farmers who could help improve climate resilience.
As severe weather becomes the norm, the damage of these disasters is usually tallied individually. But when Vermont’s floods were followed by a record-breaking hurricane hitting California’s vegetable farms, which grow a third of the country’s produce, even as a drought shrivels wheat fields across the Midwest, the effect is larger than the sum of its parts. “This flood is not like a ‘flood and done’ experience,” Oedel said. “The economics of it do not work. And that’s really scary.”
Even if your hometown is lucky enough never to be hit by a major catastrophe, our food system is becoming increasingly brittle — and agriculture insurance programs are failing to keep up.
Ralph Chaplin – Cartoon published in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) journal Solidarity on June 30, 1917.
My unlucky countrymen have always had a taste for justice, a taste as inconvenient to them, situated as they always have been, as a fancy for horse-racing would be to a Venetian. — Thomas Moore (1779–1852), Memoirs of Captain Rock: The Celebrated Irish Chieftain, with Some Account of His Ancestors (1824)
The raised or clenched fist is a symbol of unity and solidarity that became associated with trade unionism and the labour movement going back to the 1910s in Europe and the USA. Soon after, it was taken up as a symbol of political unity by socialist, communist and various other revolutionary social movements. The clenched fist is ever more powerful than the individual fingers and in art it has been used as a metaphor for strength in unity of the peoples’ movements.
The painting, Le Soulèvement (The Uprising) by Honoré Daumier (1808–1879) of the French Revolution of 1848 includes a possible early example of a “political clenched fist,” according to curator Francesca Seravalle. She writes: “A raised fist appeared for the first time as a political sign in a painting in 1848 by Daumier representing a woman during the Third French Revolution, until that time fists were just expressions of human nature.”
However, another painting, The Installation of Captain Rock (1834), by the Irish artist Daniel Maclise (1806–1870) in the National Gallery of Ireland, depicts the protagonist with a raised, clenched fist as a political sign fourteen years earlier than Daumier’s revolutionary painting, surely demonstrating that the depth of oppression of colonialism in Ireland had already produced self-conscious radical political groups.
Captain Rock was a fictitious figure that was associated with the militant agrarian organisations in Ireland known as “the ‘Whiteboys’, the ‘Ribbonmen’, and the followers of ‘Captain Steel’ or ‘Captain Right’”.
The Installation of Captain Rock (1834) by Daniel Maclise (1806–1870)
These agrarian groups “issued warnings of violent reprisals against landlords and their agents who tried to arbitrarily put up rents, collectors of tithes for the Anglican Church of Ireland, government magistrates who tried to evict tenants, and informers who fingered out Rockites to the authorities,” and involved many incidents of murder, arson, beatings and mutilation of cattle.The source of the unrest was the hunger and death suffered by Irish families while their landlords shipped harvests and cattle to the English markets. Peter Berresford Ellis writes:
This was the cause of the agrarian unrest among the rural population. Indeed, in 1822 a major artificial famine was about to occur. We have William Cobbett’s horrendous picture of people starving in the midst of plenty in that year. In June, 1822, in Cork alone, 122,000 were on the verge of starvation and existing on charity. How many people died is hard to say. A minimum figure of 100,000 has been proposed. Most likely around 250,000. At the same time, landowners were able to ship 7 million pounds (weight) of grain and countless herds of cattle, sheep and swine to the markets in England.
Captain Rock’s Banditti – Swearing in a new member.
Insurrections occurred in 1822 that involved many thousands of ‘Rockites’ that had armed themselves with pikes and confronted British garrisons. According to Berresford Ellis:
Colonel James Barry, commanding the garrison at Millstreet, reported that upwards of 5,000 ‘rebels’ had surrounded the town and many houses of loyalists between Inchigeelagh and Macroom were destroyed. The local Millstreet magistrate, E McCarty, added: ‘The people are all risen with what arms they possess and crown all the heights close to the town …’ Cork City and Tralee were cut off for two days before troops fought their way through.
‘Captain Rock’ had already made it into Irish literary history in the fictitious book, Memoirs of Captain Rock: The Celebrated Irish Chieftain, with Some Account of His Ancestors (1824) written by the Irish writer, poet, and lyricist Thomas Moore (1779–1852). In these ‘memoirs’ Captain Rock is depicted in a folkloric way, a character who brushes off lightly the dangers of his profession, as he states:
Discord is, indeed, our natural element ; like that storm-loving animal, the seal, we are comfortable only in a tempest; and the object of the following historical and biographical sketch is to show how kindly the English government has at all times consulted our taste in this particular ministering to our love of riot through every successive reign, from the invasion of Henry II. down to the present day, so as to leave scarcely an interval during the whole six hundred years in which the Captain Rock for the time might not exclaim
‘Quae regio in terris nostri non plena laboris?’
or, as it has been translated by one of my family : —
Through Leinster, Ulster, Connaught, Munster, Rock ‘s the boy to make the fun stir!
Similar comparisons can be made with the contemporary Kenyan author, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, who combines social realism of contemporary society with mythical elements as a way of illustrating his radical themes, for example in Devil on the Cross (1980), Jacinta Wariinga, is invited to a Devil’s Feast by a mysterious figure called Munti that turns out to be a business meeting for the Organization for Modern Theft and Robbery.
The high educational level of ‘Captain Rock’ is attributed to his associations with the teachers of the Irish ‘hedge schools’, which were small informal secret and illegal schools set up in the eighteenth and nineteenth century to provide primary education to children of ‘non-conforming’ Catholic and Presbyterian faiths.
According to Maeve Casserly, “the hedge schoolmaster played a pivotal role, as both an educator and prominent member in agrarian society, in encouraging the militant political and social sentiments” and that “in an age which promoted the utilitarian philosophy of Jeremy Bentham and emphasised ‘useful learning’ that subjects like Greek, Latin and Hebrew, which formed an intrinsic part of the hedge school curriculum, were wastefully taught instead of necessary vocation skills.” To direct attention away from their militant leadership roles, the hedge schoolmasters used poor grammar and mis-spelled words. She notes that “William Carleton was of a similar opinion that many of the letters, oaths and catechisms of the Rockite insurrectionists, were the work of village schoolmasters.”
Thus, the very public ‘Installation of Captain Rock’ in Maclise’s painting points to the symbolism of the patriotic movement rather than its reality. The clenched fist represents not only the unity of the gathered crowd but also the passing of responsibility for radical social and political change from the deceased elder leader to the vigorous, radical youth. In the painting Maclise depicts the scene as a joyous occasion within a hall where many groups of ordinary people are busy getting on with life, yet plotting revolution. To the left a group is making a pact signified by their collective hand grasp, while behind them in a dark alcove appears to be a hedge school master surrounded by listeners and readers. To the right of the hall there is much merriment as a man and a woman dance wildly. Our eyes are drawn around a distracting group of young lovers as we suddenly realise that a gun is being pointed right at us by a young man in front who is just about to shoot (signified by a girl putting her hands to her ears), demonstrating that youthful ‘fun’ should never be underestimated and can suddenly turn deadly serious.
The background to Maclise’s painting looks more like a group of people digging their way down to the hall where the secret ceremony is taking place. This signifies the working class aspect of the dangers of mining work (often carried out by children in the nineteenth century), as well as the necessity for literal and metaphorical underground bunkers to hide from the often overwhelming force of the oppressor.
Overall, the people in the painting are portrayed as active, animated, excited, and fearless.
1857 lithograph of Daniel Maclise by Charles Baugniet
Maclise excelled in paintings of large groups of people engaged in various activities grouped around a theme. Maclise had an ongoing interest in the ideology, history, and traditions of ordinary people as can be seen in the subject matter of some of his paintings, for example, Snap-Apple Night (1833) [Hallowe’en traditions], Merry Christmas in the Baron’s Hall (1838) [containing many figures of various ranks and degrees and depicts aspects of the declining traditional Christmas festivities of his time, see my article A Poem for Christmas: Christmas Revels (1838)], The Marriage of Strongbow and Aoife (1854) [depiction of the Norman conquest of Ireland and the death of Gaelic Ireland].
Maclise’s positive portrayal of people is in contrast with the often melancholy depictions of oppressed people around the world, an unfortunate side effect of Social Realism which tried to show the treatment of the poor in all its brutality. However, depictions of the moment of uprising also sows the seeds of hope for a better future, while at the same time providing a fair warning to all elites to beware of the retaliation of a community which has nothing left to lose.
First there was lard. For at least 200 years, a great many Americans fried their potatoes in pork fat. Then, early last century, came the invention of Crisco, a lard look-alike made from cottonseed oil. Procter & Gamble advertised it as healthier — more digestible — than pig grease. The marketing campaign worked. Crisco took off.
Its success gave birth to a new era of cooking fats. Americans today consume a long, golden stream of vegetable oils: soybean, palm, safflower, sunflower, peanut, avocado, coconut, canola, olive. The plants cultivated to make these oils now cover nearly a quarter of the planet’s cropland, and demand for them is still growing. That’s not good news for the Earth. To grow oil crops, particularly palm and soybeans, farming corporations are cutting down carbon-rich forests, threatening climate goals and biodiversity.
But what if there was a cooking oil that didn’t drive deforestation? A California startup called Zero Acre Farms claims to have created just that. Zero Acre hopes its product, called Cultured Oil because it’s made by fermenting sugarcane, will shift American diets like Crisco did, but to a different end. The company says its oil requires 90 percent less land and accounts for 86 percent fewer greenhouse gas emissions than soybean oil, the most widely consumed vegetable oil in the United States.
“If we’re going to continue to satisfy our insatiable desire for oils and fats,” said Stephen del Cardayre, Zero Acre’s co-founder and chief technical officer, “we have to do it more efficiently.”
Zero Acre oil is drizzled over a pan of carrots. Zero Acre Farms
The startup’s new cooking oil is starting to gain attention. Zero Acre has raised millions of dollars from venture capital funds linked to Chipotle Mexican Grill, Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, and the actor Robert Downey Jr. In September, Shake Shack announced it would test Cultured Oil on its fries at two of its New York City restaurants. Grocery stores aren’t selling sleek stainless steel bottles of the oil yet, but you can buy one on Zero Acre’s website for $26.99.
Cultured Oil, which has a soft yellow hue like other oils, is made by microorganisms. Add sugarcane to a vat filled with algae, and the microscopic beings convert the sugar into oil. The result, according to Zero Acre, is a liquid that’s healthier than its counterparts because it’s low in saturated and polyunsaturated fats, the sort that have given seed oils a bad (if possibly undeserved) rap for contributing to chronic inflammation and heart disease.
This probably isn’t the first time you’ve encountered a lab creation that’s advertised with a list of impressive stats about how it will save the planet. Climate-conscious eaters have been under a barrage of new choices stemming from the proliferation of products aimed at replacing cow milk, beef, and other carbon-intensive meats. Whether it’s oat milk, plant-based burgers, or lab-grown chicken, the food sector is awash with claims of sustainability, some of which don’t hold up under scrutiny. Maybe you’ve made up your mind to eat a Beyond Burger instead of a beef one, and now you’re wondering whether to sear the novel meat in novel oil.
Grist spoke with three independent experts about how to assess green claims about new food products like Zero Acre’s oil. Each stressed that the only way is to look at something called a life cycle assessment, nicknamed LCA — the analysis that a company uses to determine the land, energy, and water use associated with its product and to compare it to other products.
“Without the LCA, I can’t make anything of it,” said Sarah Collier, an assistant professor and food sustainability researcher at the University of Washington.
The mere fact that a life cycle assessment has been done, even by a third party (as in the case of Zero Acre), isn’t enough to inspire confidence, experts said. That’s because these analyses can be built in a way that makes a company’s product look better than its competitors’. There are a variety of ways to grow oil crops, and different growing systems use different amounts of land and emit different amounts of greenhouse gases. In the case of Cultured Oil, the kinds of soybean farms or palm plantations that you compare against the sugarcane operations that feed Zero Acre’s microbes could lead to different conclusions.
“If you choose baselines that aren’t really equivalent, you can end up making your practice look really, really good, and you can also end up making a competitor’s practice or a legacy practice very bad,” said Mark Bomford, director of the Yale Sustainable Food Program. “If I wanted to make soy-based land look really bad, I would include the largest estimates around the worst kinds of deforestation.”
Like many companies, Zero Acre has not made its assessment public, so it’s not possible to verify independently how the boundaries of the analysis were drawn. But a spokesperson for the company did say that its comparison with soybean oil relies on data from soybean production in South America, the same region where the sugarcane used to make Zero Acre oil is grown. Del Cardayre told Grist that Zero Acre plans to publicly release its results once the company is bigger and more stable but is keeping the assessment private for now because it contains proprietary information.
“We try to be as transparent as we can,” del Cardayre said. “Our whole goal, the reason we were founded, was to make better oils and fats that were better for the planet, for the body, and for food. It’s what drives us. It’s our North Star. We have no interest in doing something that’s not doing that.”
Independent experts agreed that Zero Acre’s oil holds promise. Joseph Poore, a food sustainability researcher at the University of Oxford, said in an email that the company’s goal to minimize environmental damage and improve human health is “excellent and critical.” Vegetable oil production is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, and rising demand for oil crops like palm has been linked to habitat destruction and biodiversity loss. But Poore and other academics also said that it’s too early to know how much better for the environment Cultured Oil will be.
“A lot of academics are going to be skeptical because we’ve heard it before,” said Julie Guthman, a professor of social sciences who studies food systems at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Two years ago, Guthman co-authored a paper that investigated claims of “dematerialization” in the alternative proteins industry — referring to the idea, pushed by Silicon Valley startups, that edible protein can be made “from (nearly) nothing, drawing on abundant or mundane resources” that presumably have no environmental drawbacks.
In the paper, Guthman and her colleague Charlotte Biltekoff found that the details of how these foods get produced “are largely black-boxed, making any claims to de-materialization appear as magic.” Food-tech companies aren’t necessarily trying to keep consumers in the dark, but they feel pressure, in their quests to woo investors and reshape the world, not to divulge trade secrets. The way they represent their products, Guthman and Biltekoff wrote, obfuscates more than it reveals and makes it “difficult, if not impossible, for the public—or anyone really—to meaningfully assess the promises and their potential consequences.”
