As Arizona struggles to adapt to a water shortage that has dried out farms and scuttled development plans, one company has emerged as a central villain. The agricultural company Fondomonte, which is owned by a Saudi Arabian conglomerate, has attracted tremendous criticism over the past several years for sucking up the state’s groundwater to grow alfalfa and then exporting that alfalfa to feed cows overseas.
Governor Katie Hobbs responded to those calls for action on Monday when she canceled one of Fondomonte’s four leases in the state’s rural Butler Valley and pledged not to renew the other leases when they expire next year. Hobbs, a Democrat who took office earlier this year, said in a statement about the decision that the company “was operating in clear default” of its lease and had violated state laws around hazardous waste. She also pledged to “hold defaulting, high-volume water users accountable” and “protect Arizona’s water so we can sustainably grow for generations to come.”
That will require Hobbs to tackle a problem that is larger than just one company. Agriculture accounts for around three-quarters of Arizona’s water use, and alfalfa is one of the most water-intensive crops in the West. The state may have managed to fend off one egregious company, but fixing the region’s overall water deficit will involve much harder political and economic choices.
“I think the governor was looking for a reason to cancel these leases,” said Kathleen Ferris, a senior research fellow at Arizona State University’s Kyl Center for Water Policy and an architect of the state’s landmark 1980 groundwater law. “But the bigger problem is unregulated use of groundwater in rural areas of the state. That’s the big elephant in the room — we are just not addressing this use of groundwater, and it’s finite.”
Fondomonte’s aggressive water use in Butler Valley has drawn attention to Arizona’s lax groundwater regulations and the high water demand of crops like alfalfa. The state has set limits on groundwater pumping around population centers like Phoenix and Tucson, but companies in rural areas can still pump as much as they want with no restrictions, even if that means sucking water away from neighboring homes and businesses.
To make matters worse, the Saudi-owned company operates on a section of state-owned land in a valley northwest of Phoenix, and it pays just $76,000 per year to lease that land from the state. In most parts of Arizona, it’s illegal to move water from one basin to another, but state lawmakers had marked the Butler Valley in the 1980s as one of two places that might someday send water to thirsty Phoenix. (Saudi Arabia outlawed the production of alfalfa and other crops in 2018 amid a severe water shortage in the country.)
Fondomonte has said it will appeal Hobbs’ decision, but even if Arizona succeeds in forcing out the company, the state will still have a big alfalfa problem. The hay plant is one of the most water-intensive crops in the United States, requiring about five acre-feet of water per acre each year. An acre-foot of water is equivalent to 326,000 gallons, or enough water to supply two average homes for about a year. Fondomonte told the state government in a letter in February that it grows about 7,000 acres of alfalfa in Arizona.
Producing the crop was a big business in Arizona before the Saudis arrived around a decade ago, in large part because the state’s warm climate allows farmers to achieve much bigger yields than they do in other parts of the country. The state produced more than 2 million tons of alfalfa in 2021, or about 8.2 tons for every acre planted. That’s much more than the national average of 3.2 tons per acre. Fondomonte’s production accounted for a small part of that: In its February letter, a company official said the firm produced only 70,000 tons of the crop every year, or 2.5 percent of the state’s overall output.
Tackling the larger water footprint will be far more difficult. Fondomonte was operating on state land that it had acquired at cut-rate prices, but most of the state’s alfalfa production takes place on private land. That’s the case in Cochise County, on the state’s southeast edge, where rural residents have lost out on well water since corporate giant Riverview Dairy started growing alfalfa in the area. Other foreign nations have also gotten in on the business: A United Arab Emirates-based company called Al Dahra grows and exports alfalfa in La Paz County, with support from the state’s own pension fund. Fondomonte itself has other operations on private land in Vicksburg, near Butler Valley.
Hay is dried and stored at the Fondomonte alfalfa farm in Vicksburg, Arizona. The state’s governor canceled multiple Fondomonte leases on state-owned land this week, citing the company’s excessive water usage. Photo by Caitlin O’Hara for The Washington Post via Getty Images
“We have a church that’s just up the road from them in Vicksburg, and they haven’t had water for three years,” said Holly Irwin, a member of the La Paz County Board of Supervisors who has fought Fondomonte. She praised Hobbs for canceling the lease, but worried that the state could lease the same acreage to another company that might take over the farm.
“Moving forwards, they’re going to have to evaluate how things are done, and maybe restrict the amount of water that comes out of each well,” she said.
Foreign corporations aren’t the only ones responsible for Arizona’s groundwater shortage, though. The state exported around 22 percent of its alfalfa crop last year, up from almost none in 2011, but the vast majority of its crop still goes to feed dairy cows within the state or in other parts of the West. Moreover, most of the state’s largest groundwater pumpers, such as Riverview and Peacock Nuts, a massive nut farm operation in the western part of the state, are owned and based in the U.S. Without action from lawmakers, Hobbs can’t do anything about this overdraft on private land, even though these companies may be taking just as much water as Fondomonte.
“Our concern is that one of the things that the governor mentioned in her press release was the idea that the water use was one of the determining factors in canceling those leases,” said Philip Bashaw, the CEO of the Arizona Farm Bureau, which advocates for the state’s farmers. “We are concerned about the precedent this might set for other agricultural leases on state land.” The state leases about 150,000 acres of its trust lands for agriculture, or 1.6 percent of its total acreage.
In a statement to Grist, Fondomonte said the company hadn’t broken the terms of its state lease and vowed to appeal Hobbs’s decision. A spokesperson said the company “remains committed to progressive, efficient agricultural practices on all operations.”
In some cases, locals have fought back against thirsty corporations, but progress has been difficult. Residents of Cochise County voted last year to impose new water restrictions in one overtapped groundwater basin, but the basin’s largest dairy and nut farms would be grandfathered in under the new rules, and they won’t have to slow down their pumping. Another referendum in a nearby basin failed after organizations backed by Riverview mounted a lobbying campaign to oppose it.
There aren’t any other takers right now for the water in Butler Valley, but alfalfa’s water demand presents an acute problem in the state’s population center of Maricopa County, which in 2017 produced around 30 percent more alfalfa than La Paz County, where Fondomonte operates, according to USDA statistics. Farms in the Phoenix area have been draining groundwater for decades to grow alfalfa and other crops, and until the turn of the 21st century they used more water than the county’s 4 million residents did. That’s despite the fact that Phoenix has far stricter groundwater regulations than rural areas like Butler Valley.
It’s not only Arizona that has embraced the crop. California, Oregon, Idaho, Colorado, and Utah all boast alfalfa farms that stretch across thousands of acres, and the crop has guzzled up plenty of water in these states, too. According to one estimate, alfalfa and other silage crops account for as much as 55 percent of water usage in the Colorado River basin, and more than half the water usage in Utah, the nation’s second-driest state.
The reason for this is simple: Alfalfa is a lucrative business. The hay product fetched about $320 per ton in 2022, up from $210 the year before, making it more lucrative than other large-scale crops like wheat. It provides nutritious and healthy feed for cattle and dairy cows, which means there’s significant demand for it both in the United States and overseas in places like Saudi Arabia.
“The vast majority of the alfalfa that’s grown in Arizona is grown to support our local agriculture industry, which is there to support the urban areas,” said Bashaw, adding that the hay feeds cows that produce goods like milk, cheese, and beef, and that more than 70 percent of those goods are sold within the state. “Alfalfa is a really critical part of being able to source dairy products locally for a large metropolitan area.”
For as long as companies can harvest ample water from underground aquifers, or from the Colorado River, they’re likely to keep growing it wherever they can, and water sources across the region will keep dwindling.
“The longer this goes on, the bigger the problem,” Ferris told Grist, “because the more land that gets put into cultivation, the harder it is to do anything to control the depletion. As long as farmers have the ability to pump water, they grow what they think is the most valuable crop.”
M.S. Swaminathan, widely regarded as the father of the Green Revolution in India, recently passed away (28 September) at the age of 98. An agronomist, agricultural scientist and plant geneticist, Swaminathan played a key role in introducing hybrid high yielding varieties of wheat and rice to India and in encouraging many farmers to adopt high-input, chemical-dependent practices.
The mainstream narrative is that Swaminathan’s collaborative scientific efforts with Norman Borlaug helped save India from famine in the 1960s. Following his death, tributes from high-ranking officials, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and commentators have poured in praising his part in (supposedly) saving India from Malthusian catastrophe.
However, there is another side to the story of the Green Revolution, which seldom emerges in the mainstream.
For example, farmer Bhaskar Save wrote an open letter to M.S. Swaminathan in 2006. He was scathing about the impact of the Green Revolution and Swaminathan’s role in it:
“You, M S Swaminathan, are considered the ‘father’ of India’s so-called ‘Green Revolution’ that flung open the floodgates of toxic ‘agro’ chemicals – ravaging the lands and lives of many millions of Indian farmers over the past 50 years. More than any other individual in our long history, it is you I hold responsible for the tragic condition of our soils and our debt-burdened farmers, driven to suicide in increasing numbers every year.”
We will return to this letter later.
To his credit, though, Swaminathan came out against genetically modified organisms in Indian agriculture. In a 2018 paper in the journal Current Science, along with his colleague P C Kesavan, he provided a wide-ranging critique of genetically modified crops to date, questioning their efficacy and need. Perhaps he had become aware that the introduction of technology without proper economic, social, health and environmental impact assessments would produce a domino effect, like the Green Revolution. Of course, he came under attack from industry mouthpieces and industry-backed scientists in the media for his stance.
In the paper “New Histories of the Green Revolution” (2019), Professor Glenn Stone debunks the claim that the Green Revolution boosted productivity and saved India from famine. Indeed, although the media in the mid-1960s carried stories about a famine in India, Stone sees no evidence of famine or an impending famine. Stone argues that all the Green Revolution actually ‘succeeded’ in doing was put more wheat in the Indian diet (displacing other foodstuffs). He argues that food productivity per capita showed no increase or even actually decreased.
Renowned campaigner and environmentalist Vandana Shiva says that the Green Revolution saw 768,576 accessions of indigenous seeds taken from farmers in Mexico alone. She regards the Green Revolution as a form of colonisation:
The ‘civilising mission’ of Seed Colonisation is the declaration that farmers are ‘primitive’ and the varieties they have bred are ‘primitive’, ‘inferior’, ‘low yielding’ and have to be ‘substituted’ and ‘replaced’ with superior seeds from a superior race of breeders, so called ‘modern varieties’ and ‘improved varieties’ bred for chemicals.
This is one aspect of the Green Revolution that is too often overlooked: capitalist penetration of (intact, self-sufficient) peasant economies.
Stone says:
The legend of the Green Revolution in India has always been about more than wheat imports and short‐stalked grains. It is about Malthusianism, with post‐war India supposedly proving the dangers of population growth outpacing food production. It is also about the Neo-Malthusian conviction that technological innovation is our only hope, capable of saving a billion lives when conditions are right.
He says that beneficiaries of the legend have bolstered it and kept it alive and well in our historical imagination. According to recent studies and literature, however, a coherent reinterpretation is emerging that, Stone says, knocks out virtually all of the pillars of this narrative.
We must also consider counterfactual scenarios. What would have happened if India had taken a different route? Stone notes that the influential Planning Commission (PC) was trying simultaneously to create a functional state (after centuries of colonial rule), to avoid becoming a prized Cold War client, and to shape the country’s agricultural destiny. India had plenty of rural labour and organic manures and the PC wanted to capitalise on these resources.
The PC was not opposed to chemical fertilisers but regarded them as highly expensive both to the state and to the farmer. It also believed that concentrated fertiliser use had ecological problems too: chemicals should only be used in combination with bulky organic manures to preserve tilth. What if organic ways of farming had received the funding and research and had been prioritised to the extent the Green Revolution had been?
For instance, in the paper “Lessons From the Aftermaths of Green Revolution on Food System and Health” (in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, 2021) agriculture techniques, such as intercropping, Zero Budget Natural Farming (ZBNF) – with essential principles involving the enhancement of nature’s processes – and the elimination of external inputs, can be practised with excellent results. The state government of Andhra Pradesh plans to convert six million farmers and eight million hectares of land under the initiative of Climate Resilient Zero Budget Natural Farming (ZBNF) because of the impressive outputs obtained in the ZBNF impact assessments in the states of Karnataka and AP.
Moreover, the Green Revolution deliberately sidelined traditional seeds kept by farmers that were actually higher yielding and climate appropriate. Also, in a 2019 paper in the Journal of Experimental Biology and Agricultural Sciences, the authors note that native wheat varieties in India have higher nutrition content than the Green Revolution varieties.
Instead, we are left with a certain model of agriculture that was pushed for geopolitical and commercial reasons and are trying to deal with various deleterious aftermaths.
For example, according to Stone, post-war hand-to-mouth shipments of wheat from the US to India resulted not from Malthusian imbalance but from policy decisions. The ‘triumphs’ of the Green Revolution came from financial incentives, irrigation and the return of the rains after periods of drought, and they came at the expense of more important food crops. Long‐term growth trends in food production and food production per capita did not change in India. Stone concludes that the Green Revolution years, when separated out, actually marked a slowdown.
Much more can be said and has been written about the wider politics of the Green Revolution and how it became and remains enmeshed in modern geopolitics: the Rockefeller Chase Manhattan bank, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization have facilitated the structural adjustment of national economies and agrarian systems, intentionally creating food insecure areas and dependency for the benefit of Western financial, agricultural trade, seed, fertiliser and agrochemical interests.
For instance, many countries have been placed on commodity crop export-oriented production treadmills to earn foreign currency (US dollars – boosting the strength of and demand for the dollar and US hegemony) to buy oil and food on the global market (benefitting global commodity traders like Cargill, which helped write the WTO trade regime – the Agreement on Agriculture), entrenching the need to increase cash crop cultivation for exports.
In effect, what we have seen emerge is a model of agriculture that requires hundreds of billions of taxpayer subsidies annually to sustain the bottom line of big agribusiness. One of the not-so-hidden costs of the Green Revolution, of which there are many: degraded soils, polluted water, rising rates of illness, micro-nutrient deficiencies, less nutrient-dense food crops, unnecessary food insecurity, the sidelining of more appropriate indigenous seeds, the narrower range of crops that humanity now depends on due to changed cropping systems, the corporate commodification and pirating of seeds and knowledge, the erosion of farmers’ environmental learning, the devastation of rural communities, farmers’ debt, corporate-market dependency, etc.
So, with the passing of M.S. Swaminathan, let us return to Bhaskar Save (1922-2015) and his open letter, which touches on many of these issues. Save was not a scholar or an academic. He was a farmer, and his letter was a heartfelt call to action.
M.S. Swaminathan was at the time the chair of the National Commission on Farmers at the Ministry of Agriculture. Save wanted to bring attention to the devastating impacts of the Green Revolution and to encourage policy makers to abandon their policies of importing and promoting the use of toxic chemicals that the Green Revolution had encouraged.
Below is an abridged version of Bhaskar Save’s open letter.
To: Shri M.S. Swaminathan,
The Chairperson, National Commission on Farmers,
Ministry of Agriculture, Govt. of India
I am an 84-year-old natural/organic farmer with more than six decades of personal experience in growing a wide range of food crops. I have, over the years, practised several systems of farming, including the chemical method in the fifties – until I soon saw its pitfalls. I say with conviction that it is only by organic farming in harmony with Nature, that India can sustainably provide her people abundant, wholesome food.
You, M.S. Swaminathan, are considered the ‘father’ of India’s so-called ‘Green Revolution’ that flung open the floodgates of toxic ‘agro’ chemicals – ravaging the lands and lives of many millions of Indian farmers over the past 50 years. More than any other individual in our long history, it is you I hold responsible for the tragic condition of our soils and our debt-burdened farmers, driven to suicide in increasing numbers every year.
I am sad that our (now greyed) generation of Indian farmers, allowed itself to be duped into adopting the short-sighted and ecologically devastating way of farming, imported into this country. By those like you, with virtually zero farming experience!
For generations beyond count, this land sustained one of the highest densities of population on earth. Without any chemical ‘fertilizers’, pesticides, exotic dwarf strains of grain, or the new, fancy ‘biotech’ inputs that you now seem to champion. The fertility of our land remained unaffected.
In our forests, the trees like ber (jujube), jambul (jambolan), mango, umbar (wild fig), mahua (Madhuca indica), imli (tamarind) yield so abundantly in their season that the branches sag under the weight of the fruit. The annual yield per tree is commonly over a tonne – year after year. But the earth around remains whole and undiminished. There is no gaping hole in the ground!
From where do the trees – including those on rocky mountains – get their water, their NPK, etc? Though stationary, Nature provides their needs right where they stand. But ‘scientists’ and technocrats like you – with a blinkered, meddling itch – seem blind to this. On what basis do you prescribe what a tree or plant requires, and how much, and when.?
It is said: where there is lack of knowledge, ignorance masquerades as ‘science’! Such is the ‘science’ you have espoused, leading our farmers astray – down the pits of misery.
This country has more than 150 agricultural universities. But every year, each churns out several hundred ‘educated’ unemployables, trained only in misguiding farmers and spreading ecological degradation.
Trying to increase Nature’s ‘productivity,’ is the fundamental blunder that highlights the ignorance of ‘agricultural scientists’ like you. When a grain of rice can reproduce a thousand-fold within months, where arises the need to increase its productivity?
The mindset of servitude to ‘commerce and industry,’ ignoring all else, is the root of the problem.
Modern technology, wedded to commerce… has proved disastrous at all levels… We have despoiled and polluted the soil, water and air. We have wiped out most of our forests and killed its creatures. And relentlessly, modern farmers spray deadly poisons on their fields. These massacre Nature’s jeev srushti – the unpretentious but tireless little workers that maintain the ventilated quality of the soil and recycle all life-ebbed biomass into nourishment for plants. The noxious chemicals also inevitably poison the water, and Nature’s prani srushti, which includes humans.
Is it not a stark fact that the chemical-intensive and irrigation-intensive way of growing monoculture cash-crops has been primarily responsible for spreading ecological devastation far and wide in this country? Within the lifetime of a single generation!
This country boasted an immense diversity of crops, adapted over millennia to local conditions and needs. Our numerous tall, indigenous varieties of grain provided more biomass, shaded the soil from the sun and protected against its erosion under heavy monsoon rains. But in the guise of increasing crop production, exotic dwarf varieties were introduced and promoted through your efforts. This led to more vigorous growth of weeds, which were now able to compete successfully with the new stunted crops for sunlight. The farmer had to spend more labour and money in weeding, or spraying herbicides.
The straw growth with the dwarf grain crops fell drastically to one-third of that with most native species! In Punjab and Haryana, even this was burned, as it was said to harbour ‘pathogens’. (It was too toxic to feed farm cattle that were progressively displaced by tractors.) Consequently, much less organic matter was locally available to recycle the fertility of the soil, leading to an artificial need for externally procured inputs. Inevitably, the farmers resorted to use more chemicals, and relentlessly, soil degradation and erosion set in.
The exotic varieties, grown with chemical ‘fertiliser’, were more susceptible to ‘pests and diseases’, leading to yet more poison (insecticides, etc.) being poured. But the attacked insect species developed resistance and reproduced prolifically. Their predators – spiders, frogs, etc. – that fed on these insects and ‘biologically controlled’ their population, were exterminated. So were many beneficial species like the earthworms and bees.
Agribusiness and technocrats recommended stronger doses, and newer, more toxic (and more expensive) chemicals. But the problems of ‘pests’ and ‘diseases’ only worsened. The spiral of ecological, financial and human costs mounted!
With the use of synthetic fertilizer and increased cash-cropping, irrigation needs rose enormously. In 1952, the Bhakra dam was built in Punjab, a water-rich state fed by 5 Himalayan rivers. Several thousand more big and medium dams followed all over the country, culminating in the massive Sardar Sarovar.
India, next to South America, receives the highest rainfall in the world. The annual average is almost 4 feet. Where thick vegetation covers the ground, and the soil is alive and porous, at least half of this rain is soaked and stored in the soil and sub-soil strata. A good amount then percolates deeper to recharge aquifers, or ‘groundwater tables’.
The living soil and its underlying aquifers thus serve as gigantic, ready-made reservoirs gifted free by Nature. Particularly efficient in soaking rain are the lands under forests and trees. And so, half a century ago, most parts of India had enough fresh water all-round the year, long after the rains had stopped and gone. But clear the forests, and the capacity of the earth to soak the rain, drops drastically. Streams and wells run dry. It has happened in too many places already.
While the recharge of groundwater has greatly reduced, its extraction has been mounting. India is presently mining over 20 times more groundwater each day than it did in 1950. Much of this is mindless wastage by a minority. But most of India’s people – living on hand-drawn or hand-pumped water in villages and practising only rain-fed farming – continue to use the same amount of ground water per person, as they did generations ago.
More than 80% of India’s water consumption is for irrigation, with the largest share hogged by chemically cultivated cash crops. Maharashtra, for example, has the maximum number of big and medium dams in this country. But sugarcane alone, grown on barely 3-4% of its cultivable land, guzzles about 70% of its irrigation waters!
One acre of chemically grown sugarcane requires as much water as would suffice 25 acres of jowar, bajra or maize. The sugar factories too consume huge quantities. From cultivation to processing, each kilo of refined sugar needs 2 to 3 tonnes of water. This could be used to grow, by the traditional, organic way, about 150 to 200 kg of nutritious jowar or bajra (native millets).
While rice is suitable for rain-fed farming, its extensive multiple cropping with irrigation in winter and summer as well, is similarly hogging our water resources, and depleting aquifers. As with sugarcane, it is also irreversibly ruining the land through salinisation.
Soil salinisation is the greatest scourge of irrigation-intensive agriculture, as a progressively thicker crust of salts is formed on the land. Many million hectares of cropland have been ruined by it. The most serious problems are caused where water-guzzling crops like sugarcane or basmati rice are grown round the year, abandoning the traditional mixed-cropping and rotation systems of the past, which required minimal or no watering.
Efficient organic farming requires very little irrigation – much less than what is commonly used in modern agriculture. The yields of the crops are best when the soil is just damp. Rice is the only exception that grows even where water accumulates and is thus preferred as a monsoon crop in low-lying areas naturally prone to inundation. Excess irrigation in the case of all other crops expels the air contained in the soil’s inter-particulate spaces – vitally needed for root respiration – and prolonged flooding causes root rot.
The irrigation on my farm is a small fraction of that provided in most modern farms today. Moreover, the porous soil under the thick vegetation of the orchard is like a sponge that soaks and percolates to the aquifer, or ground-water table, an enormous quantity of rain each monsoon. The amount of water thus stored in the ground at Kalpavruksha, is far more than the total amount withdrawn from the well for irrigation in the months when there is no rain.
Clearly, the way to ensure the water security and food security of this nation, is by organically growing mixed, locally suitable crops, plants and trees, following the laws of Nature.
We should restore at least 30% ground cover of mixed, indigenous trees and forests within the next decade or two. This is the core task of ecological water harvesting – the key to restoring the natural abundance of groundwater. Outstanding benefits can be achieved within a decade at comparatively little cost. We sadly fail to realise that the potential for natural water storage in the ground is many times greater than the combined capacity of all the major and medium irrigation projects in India – complete, incomplete, or still on paper! Such decentralized underground storage is more efficient, as it is protected from the high evaporation of surface storage. The planting of trees will also make available a variety of useful produce to enhance the well-being of a larger number of people.
Even barren wastelands can be restored to health in less than a decade. By inter-planting short lifespan, medium life-span, and long life-span crops and trees, it is possible to have planned continuity of food yield to sustain a farmer through the transition period till the long-life fruit trees mature and yield. The higher availability of biomass and complete ground cover round the year will also hasten the regeneration of soil fertility.
The actual reason for pushing the ‘Green Revolution’ was the much narrower goal of increasing marketable surplus of a few relatively fewer perishable cereals to fuel the urban-industrial expansion favoured by the government.
The new, parasitical way of farming you vigorously promoted, benefited only the industrialists, traders and the powers-that-be. The farmers’ costs rose massively and margins dipped. Combined with the eroding natural fertility of their land, they were left with little in their hands, if not mounting debts and dead soils. Many gave up farming. Many more want to do so, squeezed by the ever-rising costs. Nature has generously gifted us with all that is needed for organic farming – which also produces wholesome, rather than poisoned food!
The maximum number of people can become self-reliant through farming only if the necessary inputs are a bare minimum. Thus, farming should require a minimum of financial capital and purchased inputs, minimum farming equipment (plough, tools, etc.), minimum necessary labour, and minimum external technology. Then, agricultural production will increase, without costs increasing. Poverty will decline, and the rise in population will be spontaneously checked.
Self-reliant farming – with minimal or zero external inputs – was the way we actually farmed, very successfully, in the past. Our farmers were largely self-sufficient, and even produced surpluses, though generally smaller quantities of many more items. These, particularly perishables, were tougher to supply urban markets. And so, the nation’s farmers were steered to grow chemically cultivated monocultures of a few cash-crops like wheat, rice, or sugar, rather than their traditional polycultures that needed no purchased inputs.
This coverage is made possible through a partnership with Grist and Interlochen Public Radio in Northern Michigan.
Michigan isn’t known for sunny weather. Yet in recent years, it’s seen a strong push for solar energy — including in Traverse City, the largest community in northern Michigan. Along the M-72 highway, rows of huge solar panels gleam in the sun, covering about 30 acres of grassy field.
In the shade underneath the panels are sheep.
This is called “solar grazing,” where livestock are placed on solar installations to keep vegetation in check. Sheep have grazed at the site for the past three summers, eating grass and depositing droppings along the rows of panels.
Bart Hautala, operations manager for Heritage Sustainable Energy, said hosting some 30 sheep is a win-win: Sheep eat the grass, and that prevents foliage from shading the panels.
“It’s a multi-use land now,” he said. “It’s environmentally friendly. We’re helping out a farmer. He’s got more space to put more sheep.”
But across the state and the country, similar collaborations between farmers and companies have faced roadblocks.
Solar power is central to the nation’s transition to renewable energy, including in Michigan, which is aiming for carbon neutrality by 2050. Reaching that goal will require a lot of land, and some solar companies, researchers, and farmers are trying to use land for both agriculture and renewable energy — a practice called agrivoltaics. But local opposition has hampered those efforts, and solar advocates say Michigan is a prime example of how townships can slow renewable energy development.
This debate is playing out around the country, as people grapple with what a transition to clean energy actually means. A May 2023 report by the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University found that across 35 states, there are 228 local restrictions strong enough to stop projects. That opposition has grown steadily, up 35 percent from the year before. And local restraints severely restrict renewable development, according to a 2022 report from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
Michigan exemplifies the tension between solar and local concerns. Since townships decide where renewable energy projects are located, residents have a lot of say and many have placed moratoriums on solar and wind. The Sabin Center found that as of last May, 26 local Michigan governments had delayed or blocked utility-scale developments, the most of any state in the study. It didn’t compare restrictions to the number of existing projects, but 118 wind and solar projects are already operating or under development, according to the state. As more are proposed, much of the focus is on the relationship between solar and farmland.
“Michigan has the most restrictive measures when it comes to siting solar on agricultural land,” said Matthew Eisenson, who authored the May report. “There’s a lot of apples to oranges, but I think Michigan just has the most activity on this issue of anywhere.”
Operations manager Bart Hautala closes the gate at the Heritage Sustainable Energy solar array in Traverse City, Michigan.
Izzy Ross / Grist
Debates over renewable energy have roiled communities in the state. A group called Michigan Citizens for the Protection of Farmland petitioned to block utility-scale solar on agricultural land last spring, though they withdrew it. In some places, residents have recalled officials who approved projects they didn’t agree with.
Milan Township, in southeast Michigan, held a recall election last spring after residents voiced concerns about an ordinance that would have allowed large solar projects on agricultural land. Stephanie Kozar was elected township clerk during that recall. She’s spent her whole life in Milan, and said it was a rough time for the community.
“There have been rifts between friends, between relatives, between acquaintances, because it is such a hot topic, and there are so many strong opinions and emotions about it,” she said.
The township’s original ordinance allowing solar on agricultural land had passed during the height of the pandemic, which Kozar said raised issues of transparency. Since then, she said, more people have started attending meetings and gotten involved in local politics.
“We’re just trying to make the township a place where people want to come, want to live, and keep it in the agricultural spirit,” she said. “It’s about what the majority of our township wants. And that’s our biggest goal, is making sure that their voices are heard.”
Local opposition to renewable projects can often be nuanced, rooted in a wide array of reasons. Those include concerns about a project’s impact on the environment and economy, and extend to governmental failures to consult Indigenous tribes, according to a 2021 study by Science Direct. Some rural communities worry that losing farmland to solar could fundamentally change their culture.
“I think this is a hot-button in most townships, one way or the other,” said Bob Schafer, the supervisor of central Michigan’s Keene Township, who took on the job after his predecessor was narrowly voted out during another recall election held last spring.
Schafer stressed that people there have a variety of opinions on renewable energy — many people support it, and some oppose “mega projects” but not smaller installations.
“All the landowners have some say,” he said. “Both those that are trying to obtain a project and those that may be surrounded by a project. We’re trying to find a balance.”
But that balance is hard to strike, and some Michigan lawmakers are trying to streamline the path to renewables. With a slim Democratic majority, Michigan’s legislature is tackling a heap of ambitious climate legislation this fall.
Abraham Aiyash, a Democrat from Hamtramck, is the house majority floor leader and one of the sponsors of a climate package. He and other lawmakers want the state to have the power to approve utility-scale projects, which he said is necessary to reach their climate goals.
“There is no other way,” he said. “If we are not setting a rapid pace for investing in solar and wind we will not meet the energy centers that we are going to be setting.”
Still, Michigan has a deep history of local decision-making, and for some, the idea of transferring power to the state is unacceptable. Judy Allen, the director of government relations for the Michigan Townships Association, said doing so would create a one-size-fits-all approach.
“It’s not a cookie-cutter situation, and that’s why we think it’s incredibly important that you have that local voice and that local process in terms of location and permitting,” she said — even when it means farmers can’t do what they want with their lands.
Despite those roadblocks, project development hasn’t stopped, and Ohio utilities are on track to meet their renewable requirements, said Matt Schilling, the director of public affairs for the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio and the Ohio Power Siting Board.
“We are continuing to see more development projects come into the power siting board,” he said. “I think time will tell, but the work is still going on.”
States like Minnesota, Illinois, and Wisconsin, have seen local challenges as well. But unlike Michigan, those states have the authority to approve large renewable projects — even if local opinions differ.
In Michigan, township control is a big problem for companies, governments, and individuals trying to develop renewable energy, said Scott Laeser, a senior advisor for the Rural Climate Partnership and a farmer in southwest Wisconsin.
“If the opposition were to continue to advance, I think there would be some legitimate concerns about whether we can meet the renewable energy goals that states like Michigan, and quite frankly, the nation have,” he said.
According to Laeser, who has been involved in renewable energy planning for years, outside interests have also gotten involved in local debates, often spreading misinformation. “Some of the opposition is being funded by fossil fuel energy interests who don’t want renewable energy to succeed,” Laeser said. “So there’s a lot of complex dynamics that are mixed up in all of this.”
One way to turn down the temperature may be through projects that use land for both agriculture and energy production.
Proponents see solar grazing and other farm collaborations as an answer to the debate around land use in Michigan. Some studies back that up; a Springer survey in Houghton, Michigan, and Lubbock, Texas, found that most respondents were more likely to support solar projects if they incorporated agriculture. In practice, however, that can be difficult.
Samantha Craig has worked as a shepherd for about six years, first with her husband, and now their children. The family is based in Van Buren County in southwest Michigan, where they manage Craig Farms Katahdins — and a flock of over 200 sheep.
The pandemic and inflation have made the past few years tough, Craig said, and solar could be a path toward a steady income and long-term viability for farmers, as solar operators pay them to lease land or graze down grass.
Craig is excited about the prospect of sheep as vegetation managers. The farm’s website has a section called “lambscaping,” and the family has partnered with United Agrivoltaics, which works to help solar providers and farmers set up solar grazing. Still, Craig hasn’t been able to get her sheep on any solar farms yet. The logistics can be challenging; sheep need water, routine care, and shelter — things many existing solar sites aren’t built to accommodate — and it can cost a lot.
Local ordinances, zoning, and bureaucracy can also mean a lot of red tape. Craig had hoped to get her sheep onto a nearby solar farm, but she hasn’t gotten far with the local government.
“It was just definitely disappointing not to have the sheep out there this summer,” she said. “We were really hoping that that would come to fruition.”
Increasing tensions around renewables complicate potential partnerships. Craig’s neighboring township voted against solar on agricultural land in August and is now being sued by the solar company. To the east, Milan Township, which held the spring recall election, only wants solar erected in industrial areas, which township clerk Stephanie Kozar said excludes collaborations between large-scale solar and farming.
“We feel solar panels, even with crops or animals of some sort, it’s still a very industrial-looking project,” she said. “And so we feel like the industrial zoned area is probably the most appropriate place for it.”
Despite many hurdles, some still think partnering solar and agriculture will play an important role in debates around land use. Charles Gould is an educator at Michigan State University Extension. He started working at the intersection of farming and renewable energy about a decade ago, when farmers began asking him for advice on solar company lease agreements.
Since then, he’s delved into the dynamics of local governance, farming, and solar power. Gould said many farmers have come to see solar lease agreements as a sort of retirement package, and some consequently bristle at local efforts to restrict solar development, seeing them as a threat to their chances at financial stability.
“It evolved to, ‘This is a takings issue,’” he said. Farmers were asking, “How does a township have the right to tell me how to use my land?”
Of course, farmers are far from united on the issue. Some don’t like the idea of using their land for renewables. Gould agrees that areas like brownfields and right-of-ways should be considered for solar projects before farmland. But he said the many benefits of solar–agriculture collaborations mean it’s imperative to work with local governments and those who have concerns about the impacts of solar on their communities, something echoed in a federal study on successful collaborations.
As Michigan pursues its renewable energy goals, companies will continue to approach communities with these plans, according to the extension service. To help local governments tackle solar planning and zoning, Gould and others created a guide that includes templates for solar-specific ordinances and steps on how to plan for various situations.
The goal of this work is to help communities, solar companies and farmers hash out plans before the panels go up.
“Really, if we want to be successful at this, we need to back up and think ahead of time before that solar project is on board,” Gould said. “Bring all the partners together, have them all sit down and figure out what that’s going to look like.”
This story was originally published in Modern Farmer and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate crisis.
Chris Rauch was strolling past booths at the annual ag show in Spokane last summer when he spotted a large jar full of basalt powder. A nearby sign urged him to spread it on his croplands to help improve soil pH.
Rauch looked at the gray dust and shook his head.
“That’s crazy,” he thought. “Why would I want to put even more rocks in my fields?”
Rauch grows dryland wheat in the rolling gold-brown hills surrounding the Pendleton, Oregon, municipal airport. His farm lies on the Columbia Plateau, a 63,000-square-mile basin formed by ancient basalt lava flows. At the end of the last Ice Age, retreating glaciers scoured the bedrock, leaving a wake of grit and gravel to form the deep loess soil.
Not much rain falls in this grassland habitat. Some years, it’s 9 to 12 inches, but lately, it’s more like 6 to 9. Pre-cultivation, the region owed the healthy pH of its soils to the lucky coincidence of sitting atop a volcanic bed. However, the topsoil is powerless to counteract the acidifying effect of ammonia-based fertilizers. Over the years, this has caused pH levels to drop to 5 and below, according to Dr. Francisco Calderon, director of the Columbia Basin Agricultural Research Center.
“It’s not a widespread problem yet, but it’s rearing its ugly head in some places,” says Calderon.
A few weeks after the ag show, Rauch got the latest results of his soil pH tests: 5.3. He recalled the message from the ag show booth, run by a company called UNDO. The crushed rock raised soil pH levels. And it was free.
His first thought was, why? It seemed too good to be true. Yet the more he read, the more it seemed legit.
“You can’t beat zero,” he finally decided, and gave UNDO a call.
Left: Chris Rauch’s Oregon farm lies on the Columbia Plateau, a region that has seen increasing levels of soil acidity. (Courtesy of Chris Rauch) Right: Virginia farmer Rick Bennett contracted with Lithos Carbon to test ERW on his soybean fields. (Courtesy of Rick Bennett)
Rauch is one of many farmers taking a chance on a new process called Enhanced Rock Weathering, or ERW. Startup companies across the country are bringing crushed volcanic rock to farmers’ fields and spreading it to improve their soils. The rock powder, usually basalt, is often scavenged from local mines or quarries, where it exists as a waste by-product. ERW companies collect the rock powder, sometimes milling it further to reduce the grain size. Then they truck it to farms, where it is used in place of ag lime. Studies show that volcanic rock dust can raise the pH of overworked soils, improving productivity. And because enhanced rock weathering is considered a form of permanent carbon dioxide removal, the startups can sell “carbon credits” to large corporations like Microsoft that want to reduce their carbon footprint and show they are acting on climate change.
The method is based on decades of scientific research that exploits what some call “earth’s thermostat.” Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere naturally reacts with water to form a weak acid. This acid then bonds with minerals in volcanic stone and permanently removes the CO2 from the air. Geochemists discovered that this natural carbon cycle could be accelerated by crushing the rock, which exposes more of its reactive surface. A study published last month by the American Geophysical Union stated that ERW had the potential to sequester more than 200 gigatons of CO2 in a 75-year period. That would put a small but meaningful dent in the world’s CO2 emissions, which currently stand at around 37 gigatons per year.
Saving the world wasn’t on Rauch’s mind as he watched a spreader rumble over his fields, delivering what looked and sounded like dirty sleet. Rauch was worried about seeding, soil compaction and whether he’d end up with one giant gravel pile. To his surprise, the basalt blended with his soil as if it were just one more thing that had blown in on the wind.
According to Zoe Young, UNDO’s local agent in the Pacific Northwest region, Rauch’s skepticism is a common response. At first, farmers think it sounds crazy. Then they want to know why they’re being offered something for nothing.
“It seems sneaky,” she says.
Young attributes farmers’ doubts to their fraught history with well-meaning programs.
“The green industry has taken advantage of farmers in a lot of ways,” she says. Farmers join waitlists for solar panels in exchange for not farming their fields, then the solar companies never show up. Or they’re tricked into signing multi-year contracts.
“Farmers can see the benefit for their farm,” Young explains. “But they say, ‘You’re just cashing in on the new bullshit market.’”
Left: Chris Rauch’s son Andre pulls soil samples from their dryland wheat farm. (Courtesy of Chris Rauch) Right: Dan Prevost is a Mississippi farmer and agricultural consultant for EION, a company that uses olivine to lay down rock dust in the Mississippi River Delta region. (Courtesy of EION)
Michigan, the state shaped like a mitten, has acidic soils up towards its fingertips and alkaline soils down in its palm, where agricultural consultant Jesse Vollmar lives. The clay loam soil there is relatively good, with a natural pH between 6.5 and 7, and rainfall is an enviable 20 inches per year. While these Midwest conditions may sound ideal for farming, years of tilling and heavy fertilizer use have taken their toll.
Vollmar is from a 5th-generation farm family. He began his career helping other farmers enroll in federal sustainable agriculture programs and saw their struggles firsthand. Farmers needed years’ worth of tillage and cover crop records to be eligible. Once enrolled, they were required to conduct regular soil tests. Payout came only after a decade.
Two years ago, Vollmar began working with Lithos Carbon, a small ERW company based in Seattle. He likes that ERW companies do all the soil tests and record-keeping and require only a one-year commitment. Vollmar remains a strong proponent of regenerative farming and believes the two should be practiced together. But in his view, the economics of ERW can’t be beat.
“It’s just a no-brainer for farmers,” he says. “The hardest part is keeping up with demand.”
A few states over in the Piedmont region of southern Virginia, farmer Rick Bennett is a Lithos client. Bennett grows corn, sweet beans, soybeans and cereals on old tobacco land that has seen two centuries of heavy use. The soil, a mixture of silt and clay, is acidic and low in organic matter.
Last spring, Bennett chose a particularly acidic plot and contracted with Lithos to treat it. The company created a series of test strips so that Bennett could observe the difference, and he planted soybeans over the entire area. Five months later, Bennett doesn’t see a great deal of difference, but he says he will know for certain when he puts a combine in the field.
“It’s not about looks but the number of pods and beans in the pods.”
Former professional football player turned farmer Jason Brown also tried basalt powder last spring on First Fruits Farm, his 1,000-acre farmstead in Louisburg, North Carolina. Brown donates much of what he raises to help fight hunger in his community. But he understands the razor-thin budgets of his fellow farmers, which forces many of them to pick and choose which crops they can afford to grow. Enhanced rock weathering can help ease the crunch, says Brown.
“It’s all-around mutually beneficial, but for farmers, this is a really big deal,” Brown explains. “Most times, we have to write very large checks for every amendment we add to our soils. This is one of the rare times when farmers not only get a break but a benefit.”
Brown says that local farmers are waiting to see whether first adopters like him get better soil test results—and, importantly, a check in the mail for allowing liming on their fields.
“Once that happens, I promise you that every farmer from Virginia to South Carolina is going to be waiting in [the] queue to sign up.”
Jason Brown is testing basalt powder on his 1,000-acre farmstead in Louisburg, North Carolina.
First Fruits Farm/Facebook
Basalt is the most common volcanic rock on earth, coating the floors of most seas, underlying areas such as the Columbia Plateau, and jutting out in strange columnar formations such as the Giant’s Causeway in Ireland. But volcanoes spew out many types of molten rock. Another volcanic mineral is olivine, a greenish stone that comprises the majority of earth’s upper mantle. Studies show that olivine has a higher capacity than basalt to capture CO2 and may be quicker—at least initially—to alter soil pH.
The Princeton-based company EION uses olivine to lay down rock dust in the steamy fields of the Mississippi River Delta region. Soils there are old, red and acidic, like soils in the tropics. The landscape is a patchwork of timber, pasture, row crops, hunting habitat, and buffer strips—an ideal model for managing agricultural land for multiple ends, according to Adam Wolf, founder and CEO of EION.
“They have an appreciation for the natural world,” says Wolf. “It’s not as reductionist as in places like California, where you see vast landscapes dominated by one crop.”
Heat and humidity speed the reaction of rock weathering, and EION uses that plus olivine’s high CO2 capture rate to do more with less. The company spreads two to three tons of olivine per acre instead of nine or 10 tons of basalt. However, because local olivine sources don’t exist, EION must import the olivine by ship from Norway. Once it reaches the vast river system of the Mississippi, it can be milled and distributed to farms as far away as North Dakota.
Dan Prevost is a Mississippi farmer and agricultural consultant for EION. He rents patches of “used and abused” land near his home in south-central Mississippi and helps local farmers try out rock dust in their fields.
“I don’t own any land of my own, so I get the land nobody else wanted,” Prevost jokes.
“Rebuilding the soil is my number one priority.”
Like Vollmar, Prevost started in regenerative farming and knows the critical importance of soil pH.
“Once you get a piece of farmland, the very first thing you do is get your pH right,” says Prevost. ‘That optimizes nutrient availability. If you have a low pH, you can put all the fertilizer on that you want, but the nutrients aren’t going to be available.”
Prevost tested olivine on his land last spring. He chose a poor, acidic soil section and laid down two tons per acre, then planted corn on both treated and untreated plots. Although he’s still waiting for final data, Prevost says that the corn on the treated side was “super dark green” compared to the untreated section.
Prevost has plenty of farmers willing to try ERW, but, like Young and Vollmar, he understands their initial reluctance. Farmers are constantly harangued about the latest ‘hot topic,’ he says, from sedimentation and erosion to pesticides, nutrient loading in waterways and declining irrigation aquifers. While all are important, the sheer quantity can be overwhelming.
“Now we’re talking about climate change,” says Prevost. “Next on the list is going to be biodiversity. Farmers get jaded with things pretty quick.”
Climate programs also get a bad rap in the Deep South because they often promise unachievable carbon capture levels. Soil microbes cycle faster there than in colder, drier climates, says Prevost. Their carbon is released back into the atmosphere when they die, defeating the programs’ goals.
Prevost talks about improved pH, micro-nutrients and crop yields in his work with farmers rather than saving the planet.
“Typically, we don’t talk about climate change because that’s just another hot topic,” he says. “But everybody can pretty much agree that things are different. We’re getting more intense weather patterns—drier dries and wetter wets and more frequent hailstorms.”
Across the country, farmers are testing a new method of improving the health and productivity of their soils. From the semi-arid high desert of eastern Oregon to the subtropical floodplain of the Mississippi Delta, they’re partnering with new companies that offer an apparently legitimate something-for-nothing deal. Whether soils are naturally acidic or made so by man, volcanic rock dust appears to help restore healthy soil pH levels and, along with it, soil fertility and productivity.
The next few years should tell whether enhanced rock weathering becomes one more bothersome “hot topic” or catches on as a boon to both farmers and the planet. The lab research proves ERW’s potential; the first field data is coming in with the fall harvest.
Out in Pendleton’s golden wheat fields last month, Chris Rauch received the latest soil pH test results: 5.7-5.8, substantially higher than last year’s reading of 5.3.
Rauch was surprised.
“Whether it’s the rock or that the stars lined up that day, it’s too soon to know for sure,” he says.
Two programs supporting innovative SMEs in the agrifood sector, run by the national science agency CSIRO and federally funded innovation network AgriFutures, have opened to applications. CSIRO’s Innovate to Grow: Agrifood program offers a free 10-week online program to help SMEs learn about how to best advance their “technologies, solutions and ideas through research and…
When Neil Patterson Jr. was about 7 or 8 years old, he saw a painting called “Gathering Chestnuts,” by Tonawanda Seneca artist Ernest Smith. Patterson didn’t realize that the painting showed a grove of American chestnuts, a tree that had been all but extinct since his great-grandparents’ time. Instead, what struck Patterson was the family in the foreground: As a man throws a wooden club to knock chestnuts from the branches above, a child shells the nuts and a woman gathers them in a basket. Even the dog seems engrossed in the process, watching with head cocked as the club sails through the air.
Patterson grew up on the Tuscarora Nation Reservation just south of Lake Ontario near Niagara Falls. The painting reminded him of his elders teaching him to harvest black walnuts and hickories.
“I think, for me, it wasn’t about the tree, it was about a way of life,” said Patterson, who today is in his 40s, with silver-flecked dark hair and kids of his own. He sounded wistful.
“Gathering Chestnuts” watercolor by Ernest Smith (Tonawanda Seneca, Heron Clan), 1938. Courtesy of the RMSC. Rochester, N.Y.
The American chestnut tree, or číhtkęr in Tuscarora, once grew across what is currently the eastern United States, from Mississippi to Georgia, and into southeastern Canada. The beloved and ecologically important species was harvested by Indigenous peoples for millennia and once numbered in the billions, providing food and habitat to countless birds, insects, and mammals of eastern forests, before being wiped out by rampant logging and a deadly fungal blight brought on by European colonization.
Now, a transgenic version of the American chestnut that can withstand the blight is on the cusp of being deregulated by the U.S. government. (Transgenic organisms contain DNA from other species.) When that happens, people will be able to grow the blight-resistant trees without restriction. For years, controversy has swirled around the ethics of using novel biotechnology for species conservation. But Patterson, who previously directed the Tuscarora Environment Program and today is the assistant director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment at the State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, has a different question: What good is bringing back a species without also restoring its traditional relationships with the Indigenous peoples who helped it flourish?
That deep history is not always clear from conservation narratives about the blight-resistant chestnut. For the past four decades, the driving force behind the chestnut’s restoration has been The American Chestnut Foundation, a nonprofit with more than 5,000 active members in 16 chapters. Before turning to genetic engineering, the foundation tried unsuccessfully to breed a hybrid chestnut that looked and grew like an American chestnut but had genes from species native to Asia that gave it blight resistance. “Our vision is a robust eastern forest restored to its splendor,” reads The American Chestnut Foundation’s homepage, against a background of glowing green chestnut leaflets. “Our mission is to return the iconic American chestnut to its native range.”
But the Foundation website’s history of the tree begins during colonial times, suggesting a romantic notion of a precolonial wilderness that ignores the intensive agroforestry that Indigenous peoples practiced. By engineering vanished species to survive harms brought on by colonization without addressing those harms, people avoid having to make hard decisions about how most of us live on the landscape today.
Two unmodified, open-pollinated American chestnut burs, left, grow near hand-pollinated, genetically modified samples, in bags at right, at the State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science & Forestry Lafayette Road Experiment Station in Syracuse in 2019. Adrian Kraus / AP Photo
Bill Powell began working on chestnut genetics when he was a 28-year-old graduate student in Utah, which is actually outside the tree’s natural range. Now in his late 60s, with silvery hair, glasses, and an infectious curiosity about the relationship between tree and pathogen, he’s a leading chestnut restoration expert.
When I met Powell in 2022, he fretted that the chestnut restoration process was taking too long. “Unfortunately, I see retirement on the horizon,” he told me. “But not anytime soon, because I have to get this done.” At the time, Powell was a colleague of Patterson’s, working for the same university and directing the American Chestnut Research and Restoration Project. Since then, as the blight-resistant tree has wound its way through the deregulatory labyrinth of federal agencies including the Environmental Protection Agency, Food and Drug Administration, and Department of Agriculture, Powell has had to step down, recently sharing his diagnosis of terminal colon cancer publicly.
When we spoke, Powell stressed that after the blight-resistant chestnut is deregulated, no Indigenous nations will have to grow the transgenic trees on their lands if they choose not to. But he acknowledged that this does not reassure those who think of Indigenous land not in colonial terms, meaning within reservation boundaries, but instead in terms of treaty rights or cultural practices on historic tribal lands. Indigenous nations, including members of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy such as the Tuscarora Nation, have long argued that even when they ceded land to colonial governments, they did not cede their rights to access and care for plants and animals on those lands.
Bill Powell, stands in a lab at the State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science & Forestry in 2019. Adrian Kraus / AP Photo
The nuts of the American chestnut are small, sweet, and nutritious. They were an important part of the varied diet that sustained Patterson’s ancestors for millennia; in return, people cared for groves of the trees across thousands of miles. When the United States pushed Indigenous peoples throughout the chestnut’s range off their lands, and the American chestnut became functionally extinct, an ancient reciprocal relationship vanished, too.
“We were instructed to pick those nuts,” Patterson said. “And when we don’t pick them, the plant goes away.”
With craggy bark and shaggy branches of feathery leaves, the American chestnut could reach 100 feet tall during its heyday. Its trunk could be 13 feet wide. The trees huddled along the Gulf Coast for some 8,000 years during the most recent ice age, sheltering in the relatively warm stretch from Florida to the Mississippi River, because mountain peaks even in the southernmost part of the Appalachians were too cold for chestnut trees to grow. Then, as the snow receded northward 20,000 ago, the trees slowly migrated from their coastal refuges. They worked their way up the Appalachian Mountains — helped by Indigenous peoples, whom they helped in turn.
The trees dropped an avalanche of chestnuts to the forest floor each year. According to historian Donald Edward Davis, people burned low fires that dried the nuts and killed off chestnut weevils. By suppressing other plants, fires helped the chestnut trees spread, and the nuts became staples of Indigenous diets — a reliable source of nutrition that people stored in earthen silos or pounded into flour for chestnut bread and other foods. The human-tended groves also fed animals such as elk, deer, bison, bears, passenger pigeons, panthers, wolves, and foxes. Chestnut logjams in streams created deep, clear pockets of water where fish could thrive. Several species of invertebrates relied on chestnut trees for habitat; after the trees died out, five species of moths went extinct.
An 1885 print from L. Prang & Co. shows the American chestnut (Castanea vulgaris, var. Americana). Library of Congress
European settlers forced Indigenous peoples along the chestnut’s range from much of their homelands, severing access to plants and animals they’d long interacted with. Meanwhile, settlers cut down chestnuts for many reasons — to clear space for towns and farms; to build fence posts, telegraph poles, and railroads; or just to gather the nuts more easily.
Nevertheless, the chestnut survived for centuries. Enslaved people gathered chestnuts to supplement meager meals and to sell. White Appalachian communities came to rely on chestnuts as free feed for their hogs and other livestock, and as a cash crop.
Then, in the late 1800s, horticulturalists imported trees carrying the fungal blight Cryphonectria parasitica to the United States. The blight spread by wind and splashing rain; it also hitched rides on insects and birds. Once it landed on the bark of a new tree, it dug in through weak spots — old burn injuries, insect wounds, or scars left from woodcutting — and dissolved the tree’s living tissue with oxalic acid, creating angry orange streaks and open cankers on trunks. The trees would die back to their roots, resprout, and die back again, like botanical zombies. The blight killed at an astonishing pace. All told, a tree whose ancestors evolved millions of years ago died out in less than 50 years.
A 1912 article from the Sun describes the American chestnut tree blight. Courtesy of The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundation / Library of Congress
In turn, the chestnut lost the people whose practices helped it thrive. Patterson told me that some Indigenous nations even lost their word for the chestnut tree, because chestnuts disappeared at the same time that the U.S. government took Indigenous children, including at least one of Patterson’s own relatives, and placed them in boarding schools. In part, this was another strategy for coercing tribes to give up territory. Many children didn’t survive the schools, which were often run by Christian organizations. Those who did were forced to give up their languages, religious beliefs, and traditions. But chestnuts still inhabit Indigenous creation stories and religious calendars, and Patterson believes that a reciprocal relationship can be reestablished between Indigenous nations and the tree. He’s just not convinced that releasing the transgenic chestnut will restore those connections.
The Tuscarora Nation, of which Patterson is an enrolled citizen, is one of six Indigenous nations that today comprise the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, also known as the Iroquois Confederacy. The Haudenosaunee creation story, Patterson said, is “a cycle of loss, grieving, and recovery all the time, just like ecological succession.” By creating a genetically engineered chestnut, Patterson argues, scientists are avoiding the part of the cycle where people grieve and learn from their mistakes.
On the timescale of Haudenosaunee history, the losses still feel new. “It’s been 100 years — but that’s not long,” Patterson observed. Then he reconsidered. “That’s long for research scientists, or a plant technology innovator. It’s too long.”
To Patterson, what’s not being restored — treaty rights to access and care for plants and animals on the landscape — is telling.
“If you want to restore this, like, ‘primordial’ forest, don’t you also want to restore our relationship with that forest?” he asked. “Like — what’s your relationship to a transgenic chestnut?”
An undated archival photo shows a grove of blighted American chestnut trees in Page County, Virginia.
Library of Congress
By the time Patterson first saw Ernest Smith’s artwork in the early 1980s, the Tuscarora Nation was going through a cultural renaissance. Patterson’s mother made her children speak Tuscarora at home to keep the language alive. His family and other Haudenosaunee community members participated in political acts such as the occupation of Alcatraz Island by Indigenous people from across the U.S., in part as a response to post-World War II termination policies aimed at curtailing tribal sovereignty and revoking territory. Murals on the walls of Patterson’s state-run elementary school showed Tuscarora people hunting, fishing, trapping, and gathering, even as non-Indigenous people contested those traditional activities outside of reservation lands, from the local to the national level.
Over time, Patterson was taught that the Haudenosaunee Confederacy never ceded its “reserved rights,” or rights that are not explicitly mentioned in treaties or court cases. Today, the Confederacy maintains that it still holds rights to care for and access the species growing on its ancestral homelands and in ancestral waterways — even in territory ceded to settlers. But both the state of New York and the federal government have chipped away at those reserved rights through court cases, and often won. In this legal context, harvesting chestnuts, like the family in Smith’s painting, is not only a cultural practice; it’s an exercise of tribal sovereignty.
Neil Patterson studies a small chestnut, right, in the woods outside Syracuse. The main trunk has been killed by blight, but the roots keep sending out shoots. Julia Rosen / Los Angeles Times
Patterson works to rebuild tribal access to many plants and animals that are culturally important for Haudenosaunee peoples. Because those plants and animals often live outside of reservation lands, his work can be difficult. New York State maintains that, except on reservation lands, Indigenous peoples have the same rights as non-Indigenous peoples, and have to follow the same regulations regarding when, where, and how much they hunt, fish, or gather, such as hunting seasons or fishing licenses — regulations the Tuscarora have been fighting in court for decades. So to Patterson, the question of whether to grow transgenic trees isn’t really the most urgent one. He’s more concerned about upholding a way of life that restores traditional ecological relationships.
“Aside from the whole issue of being transgenic, this is just about access and care of place,” he told me. In New York’s state lands, he added, there are almost no provisions for gathering medicines, collecting food, or growing food in traditional territories. Yet that reciprocity helped chestnuts spread and thrive across thousands of miles and thousands of years.
The Haudenosaunee Confederacy began making treaties with white settlers more than 400 years ago. The two-row wampum belt, made of rows of white beads run through with two rows of purple beads, documents a 1613 agreement between the Haudenosaunee and Dutch settlers to live in parallel, not interfering with each other’s ways of life. In 1794, during George Washington’s presidency, the Haudenosaunee and the United States signed the Treaty of Canandaigua, affirming the Confederacy’s sovereignty on its territory. In the Nonintercourse Act, a series of statutes passed in the late 1700s and early 1800s, Congress also barred states from purchasing lands from Indigenous nations without federal approval. When states’ land purchases are approved, Indigenous nations don’t lose any other rights on those lands, such as hunting, fishing, or gathering, unless the treaty specifically cedes those rights, explained Monte Mills, who directs the Native American Law Center at the University of Washington.
Nonetheless, states including New York still try to assert control over tribes or tribal resources, and in many cases, succeed. In one 2005 case, Patterson himself was the defendant, charged by the state of New York for ice fishing without properly labeling his gear. Patterson brought a copy of the Treaty of Canandiagua to court, explaining to the judge that as a member of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, he had the right to fish in the state park, formerly Seneca territory, without regulation by the state of New York. Patterson lost that case.
The Supreme Court of the United States has also limited Haudenosaunee reserved rights, though from a different angle. In City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York, decided just a few months before Patterson’s case, the Supreme Court ruled that although the Oneida Nation, which is part of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, never gave up certain rights on its ancestral land, it had essentially waited too long to exercise them.
This particular case centered around whether tribes had to pay local and state taxes on ancestral land that they bought back on the real estate market. In the majority opinion, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg wrote that both Indian law and the need to treat people equally “preclude the Tribe from rekindling embers of sovereignty that long ago grew cold.” According to Mills, the Supreme Court essentially said that Oneida had let too much time pass to assert its sovereign rights, and therefore had lost them.
“It’s one of the worst decisions from foundational Indian law court,” Mills said. Although the case was about property taxes, Mills said that it could be a precedent for preventing Indigenous nations from exercising reserved rights. “The state would probably point to Sherrill and say, ‘No, you can’t have those rights, because you haven’t asserted them for so long,’” he added.
But Mills also pointed out that sometimes, tribes and states have been able to work together to come up with mutually beneficial ways for tribes to exercise their reserved rights. If states are interested in recognizing tribal sovereignty, he said, there are models out there for how to do it.
For its part, the state of New York has been working recently to improve its relations with Indigenous nations. In 2022, the state and the federal government agreed to return more than 1,000 acres to the Onondaga Nation. That same year, Governor Kathy Hochul’s administration created an Office of Indian Nation Affairs in the Department of Environmental Conservation, the same department that 20 years previously ticketed Patterson and fought him in court over reserved fishing rights. Peter Reuben, who is enrolled in the Tonawanda Seneca Nation, is currently serving as the first director of the new office.
To Reuben, the creation of his position by the department “really shows that they are serious about us,” he said. Reuben is working to create a productive and respectful consultation process between the region’s Indigenous nations and the state of New York on environmental issues, and to hash out agreements over hunting, fishing, and treaty rights.
“If it’s in the state’s interest — which it seems like it would be — to have more support and additional resources for natural resource management, then why not work with tribal folks to support a program where they’re able to continue to do what they said they’ve been doing all along?” Mills said. “It’s probably going to lead to a better end result anyway.”
Holly Stapleton / Grist
For now, while transgenic American chestnut trees are still highly regulated, one of the best places to see one is at the Lafayette Road Experimental Field Station on the southern outskirts of Syracuse. Powell met me there on a sunny July morning two summers ago.
On fields that glowed bean-pod green in the upstate humidity, thousands of chestnut trees grew in varying stages of reproduction, healing, and death. White paper bags festooned the taller trees, their flowers covered to manage fertilization.
The transgenic chestnuts contain wheat DNA that lets the tree create an enzyme that fights off Cryphonectria parasitica, the fungal blight. The blight cankers on these trees don’t grow big enough to girdle them.
Rows of strappy transgenic saplings, some as tall as Powell, waited in holding plots fenced to keep out hungry deer. “We’re planting them on very close spacing, and we can only hold them for about three years, and then they get root-bound,” Powell said. As the permitting process drags on, time is running out to replant these young trees.
A lab manager records data while a student researcher pollinates flowers on an American chestnut tree at a field research station in Syracuse in July 2022. Lauren Petracca / The Washington Post via Getty Images
I asked Powell why he thought restoring the chestnut was important. Chestnuts produced a stable crop of nuts for wildlife, because they flowered late enough in the year that they escaped flower-killing frosts, he said. “It was just an important part of our ecosystem, and for our heritage, too,” he added. “The railroads that were made in the East used ties that were made out of chestnuts because they were rot resistant. And people used to say, chestnuts used to follow you from cradle to grave, because the wood was used in everything from cradles to coffins.”
Although he’s retired, Powell is working to create a research center that would develop transgenic versions of other native species going extinct from blights, insects, and other introduced pests. He imagined growing transgenic versions of everything from elms, killed off by Dutch elm disease and the elm yellows pathogen, to ash trees, which are currently being devoured by iridescent green beetles called emerald ash borers.
People who hope to use technology to resurrect extinct species, whether the American chestnut or even the woolly mammoth, are sometimes considered ecomodernists. According to Jason Delborne, who studies biotechnology and environmental policy at North Carolina State University (where I previously worked, in the English department), “There are people who are environmentalists at their core, but sick of losing, and interested in the promise of technology to solve the ecological and environmental problems we are facing.” Part of that interest, he said, comes from a sense of responsibility to “fix what you broke.”
Dead leaves hang on a non-transgenic American chestnut tree, caused by a blight canker further down the trunk, at a field research station in Syracuse in July 2022. Lauren Petracca / The Washington Post via Getty Images
Indeed, Jamie Van Clief, the southern regional science coordinator for The American Chestnut Foundation, explained to me that she got interested in working for the organization because her field, environmental science, was depressing.
“There’s a lot of disaster, there’s a lot of dismay, and to have this foundation with such a positive and impactful mission just attracted me immensely,” she said. “To be able to work towards something when it kind of feels hopeless sometimes — and to be part of restoration on the scale that we’re doing — is incredible.”
As Powell and I gazed at a diseased, non-engineered chestnut sapling, its yellowing leaves hanging limp in the sun, I reflected that eastern forests weren’t exactly flush with any other giant trees. Almost all old growth has fallen to human endeavors. Conservation efforts also have to take into consideration climate change, which may shift suitable chestnut habitat north into Canada — and shift plant diseases’ habitats as well. Root rot, or Phytophthora cinnamomi, is another introduced pathogen. It only infects chestnuts in the South right now, because root rot dies during winter freezes. The American Chestnut Foundation estimates root rot will spread to New England in the next 50 years as the region warms. Plus, there are few places available for a new chestnut forest to grow, except perhaps forest remediation sites such as old Appalachian coal mines. The fact is, releasing blight-resistant chestnuts into the wild won’t guarantee them a landscape where they can survive.
Because biotechnology alone can’t restore the American chestnut to the numbers that its supporters are envisioning, Powell anticipates relying on citizen scientists. After deregulation, he imagines The American Chestnut Foundation sending transgenic pollen to interested people, who could pollinate the flowers of wild mother trees growing nearby. They could plant the nuts the trees grow or pass them on to other chestnut fans.
Genetically modified chestnut embryo clusters are stored in a lab at the State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science & Forestry in Syracuse. Adrian Kraus / AP Photo
The health and ecological risks of introducing the transgenic chestnut into the wild are likely to be low, according to Delborne; its signature wheat gene is commonly found in many major food crops. But at heart, Delborne argues, the debate isn’t just about chestnuts. “It’s also about a category of technology that could find its way into the world,” he said.
Even if the chestnut recovery doesn’t work out, the approval of the engineered chestnut for unregulated growth could open the door to a new era of biotechnology in U.S. forestry — such as a pest-resistant poplar tree, which kills forest insects by expressing genes from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis, and already grows commercially in other countries.
The debate about blight-resistant chestnuts isn’t really about trees or even genetic engineering; it’s about who gets to make decisions on the land. Conservation is framed in European cultures as an objective goal, but it’s a worldview that other people may not share, explained Katie Barnhill-Dilling, a North Carolina State University social scientist who researches environmental decision-making. “Some of the people I’ve talked to from the Haudenosaunee Environmental Task Force would contest that humans are here to accept the gifts as they are now,” she said.
Some Indigenous nations in the chestnut’s historic range, such as the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, or EBCI, and the Seneca Nation of Indians, are considering growing genetically engineered chestnuts on their reservation lands after the trees are deregulated. To EBCI Secretary of Agriculture and Natural Resources Joey Owle, restoring the American chestnut is another way for the tribe to exercise its sovereign rights, more than a century after the tree’s disappearance.
“It’s one project of many projects that we work on to enhance our sovereignty as a tribe, to work to establish a culturally significant resource that provided a bountiful harvest for our ancestors and wildlife,” he said. “It’s just cool to be part of it.” Based on feedback from EBCI committee members, Owle said that planting transgenic trees, while an option, is the “last option that we would like to pursue” to restore the species. For now, the EBCI is scouting out wild chestnuts that survived the blight, and planting hybrid trees on its land in partnership with The American Chestnut Foundation.
Holly Stapleton / Grist
On a crisp fall day a couple of years ago, Patterson and Powell arranged for around 15 people to gather chestnuts in upstate New York. The grove grew on a hilly slope on state land that used to be an agricultural field. “It was just a beautiful little spot,” Patterson recalled. The 12 or so American chestnuts were young; Patterson estimated they were perhaps 20 years old and no more than 25 feet tall.
The group, a mix of Haudenosaunee Confederacy members and non-Indigenous scientists, toted assorted equipment to gather the prickly nuts: ladders, homemade pickers, plastic buckets, sturdy leather shoes, and gloves. But first, they stood in a circle in the grove and discussed the future of the American chestnuts. According to Patterson, things quickly became adversarial.
Powell and Patterson had long been collegial: Patterson first tasted an American chestnut after he microwaved some that Powell handed him in the campus building where they both had offices. Meanwhile, Powell’s students learned from Patterson about the parallel expulsion of Indigenous peoples from their lands and the disappearance of chestnut trees.
Powell has constantly reached out to tribes for input and to understand their perspectives, Patterson said. And unlike other biotechnology researchers, Powell has focused on technology for environmental restoration, not for personal profit. “I admire the idea that this is about technology for restoration — whatever that is,” Patterson added.
But their relationships with plants remain fundamentally different. For example, Powell has talked about keeping the price of the transgenic chestnuts low, just to raise enough money to cover the costs of getting them out to people. In contrast, when I asked Patterson why he never bought or sold seeds from traditional food plants for his home garden, he sounded incredulous. “That’s like selling people,” he said. “That’s life. … Why would you sell somebody?”
That fall day, Patterson began worrying that if the restoration succeeds and transgenic chestnuts grow across the land, releasing pollen into the wind, people won’t be able to tell transgenic trees apart from non-transgenic trees. Scientists in the group assured everyone that in the future, people would be able to tell the trees apart through genetic testing.
“It was this privileged standpoint, which is, ‘Well, technology will figure it out for us.’ But it’s not as if I’m going to hand that technology to my son or nephews or my grandsons before they go off to gather,” Patterson said. “It just seemed like it was so simple to them.” He wondered why the non-Indigenous scientists and conservationists had been able to plant this grove on state land in the first place, when his nation was largely prevented from accessing or caring for plants there.
The group got tense. “The conversation turned to fear, and to moral opposition,” Patterson recalled. Patterson realized this standoff wasn’t the right frame of mind for the trip. “Well,” he exclaimed, “let’s go pick some nuts!”
As he collected chestnuts, Patterson couldn’t help but think of Ernest Smith’s painting. “It was a fulfillment of that scene,” he told me. Patterson reflected on his ancestors, wondering how they’d gathered the prickly nuts without his contemporary tools. He felt that by collecting chestnuts, he was doing what he was supposed to do. He hoped that in the future, he’d be able to find more wild chestnuts and organize more gathering trips, taking care to bring Haudenosaunee kids along. But he could see that the masting trees were struggling with the blight and weren’t going to survive much longer. Some of the young trees were already more than half dead, leaves brown and wilted.
He and his wife, who also attended the trip, were struck by a realization: If the federal government deregulated the blight-resistant trees, letting their pollen float freely through the air, this trip might be one of the last times they could gather wild American chestnuts with certainty.
Cows are often described as climate-change criminals because of how much planet-warming methane they burp. But there’s another problem with livestock farming that’s even worse for the climate and easier to overlook: To feed the world’s growing appetite for meat, corporations and ranchers are chopping down more forests and trampling more carbon-sequestering grasslands to make room for pastures and fields of hay. Ruminants, like cattle, sheep, and goats, need space to graze, and animal feed needs space to grow. The greenhouse gases unleashed by this deforestation and land degradation mean food systems account for one-third of the world’s human-generated climate pollution.
Environmental advocates have long argued that there’s a straightforward solution to this mess: Eat less meat. Convincing more people to become vegetarians is a very effective way to limit emissions. Getting rid of meat is one question; replacing it is another. A paper published on Tuesday seeks to address both, finding that giving up meat in favor of meat-like plant products would yield significant benefits for the climate, biodiversity, and even food security in coming decades.
Swapping 50 percent of the world’s beef, chicken, pork, and milk consumption with plant-based alternatives by mid-century could effectively halt the ecological destruction associated with farming, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, China, and Southeast Asia, according to the study in Nature Communications. Such a dietary shift could also lead to a 31 percent reduction in agricultural greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, the study found. That’s the equivalent of not burning 1.8 trillion pounds of coal each year between 2020 and 2050.
Climate policies and investment focus heavily on fossil fuels and the energy sector, but slashing agricultural emissions is also crucial to keeping planetary warming below catastrophic levels, said Lini Wollenberg, the study’s co-author.
“There’s enough evidence to show that if we don’t shift our diets, then we will not meet the 1.5 degree Celsius target by 2100,” said Wollenberg, who researches climate change and food systems at CGIAR and the University of Vermont. “Agriculture has to be addressed.”
Most of the emissions saved by a shift to plant-based foods, like oat milk and Impossible Burgers, would come from staving off agricultural expansion and preserving land. Under a model that assumes the status quo continues, demand for meat would continue to rise globally, and overall land devoted to agriculture would grow by 4 percent — 219 million hectares, about seven times the size of Germany — by 2050. But if people replace half of the meat and milk that they eat with analogs made from plants over the same time period, land used for feeding and keeping livestock would shrink by 12 percent — 653 million hectares, roughly twice the size of India. Sparing that land also would help limit biodiversity loss and conserve water, the researchers found.
“It was interesting to see how powerful this dietary change can be and to see all these impacts across the spectrum of sustainability outcomes or objectives,” said Marta Kozicka, an agricultural economist at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria and the paper’s lead author.
The study doesn’t provide a detailed roadmap for overhauling the world’s diet. The United Nations projects that people around the world will be eating 14 percent more meat in 2030. Even as plant-based foods take up more shelf space at grocery stores in the United States than they did five years ago, the foods still make up less than 2 percent of the meat sold in the United States (though a bit more – 15 percent – of the country’s milk).
The paper’s authors acknowledge that replacing half the world’s meat and milk consumption by 2050 “will be challenging and may require a range of technological and policy interventions,” though they conclude that such a scenario “is a realistic one, especially if the novel plant-based alternatives may be combined with traditional plant-based products and other novel meat substitutes, whether cell-based or insect-based.”
Raychel Santo, a food and climate researcher at the World Resources Institute who was not involved in the study, pointed to three areas where people are working to help ease global demand for meat: getting public schools, prisons, and other institutions to substitute meat on their menus with more climate-friendly options; adding labels to food products to indicate their carbon (or methane) footprints; and increasing public funding for research and development of alternative proteins.
“Right now there is very limited public investment in alternative proteins,” Santo said, noting that other climate solutions, like renewable energy and electric cars, have gotten considerably more financial backing from the U.S. government. Santo called the goal of cutting the planet’s meat consumption in half by 2050 a “tall order,” but she also pointed out that previous research has found that just lowering the consumption of ruminant meat alone could halt agricultural expansion and deforestation. That leaves room for replacing red meat with chicken — a shift that many Americans have made in recent decades, mostly due to health concerns.
Some advocates hope that advances in technologies like fermentation and cultivated meat will help displace demand for animal flesh. Chicken patties grown in labs may pick up where beet-bleeding burgers left off.
“Writing off alternative proteins today would be like writing off solar power in the 1980s or writing off electric vehicles in the early 2000s,” said Emma Ignaszewski, associate director at the Good Food Institute, a think tank that promotes meat and dairy alternatives, in an email to Grist. “Transforming the $1 trillion dollar global meat market will take time and continued innovation. Getting to 50 percent market share by 2050 would be a moonshot. But by no means would it be impossible.”
Whenever Ram Amar explains his idea for mitigating climate change, people usually look at him strangely and ask if he’s crazy. It’s easy to see why.
His startup, Rewind, wants to sequester a gigaton of carbon each year — about 10 percent of what climate scientists deem necessary each year to reach net zero by 2050 — in a remarkably simple way. The elevator pitch goes like this: Gather millions of tons of agricultural waste and send it to the bottom of the Black Sea, where it won’t decay. Wilder still, an ancient Greek ship that sank 2,400 years ago helped inspire the idea.
At first glance, the proposal might seem counterintuitive. The carbon that plants absorb from the atmosphere through photosynthesis is released when they decompose (or, alas, are compressed over eons to make fossil fuels). This is where the Black Sea comes in. Unlike most other large bodies of water, it is mostly anoxic, meaning there is precious little oxygen — and almost none at all at depths beyond 300 feet or so. It takes a long time for anything to biodegrade down there, which explains why dozens of intact shipwrecks litter its floor.
After selling his software company to Google in 2019, Amar pondered growing seaweed to sequester carbon, but realized that anything it captured would eventually return to the atmosphere. He put the sequestration idea aside until he met Peter Kroust, a German marine biologist who suggested stashing carbon in the Black Sea — something that occurred to him after cycling along the Danube and seeing tons of agricultural waste headed downriver. “And at that point, it was just like a click,” Amar said with a laugh. After getting initial funding (he wouldn’t say how much), they launched Rewind in Tel Aviv last year.
It’s an intriguing idea, and Rewind, which employs 12 people, just wrapped up a year-long experiment in the Black Sea and the Sea of Galilee (portions of which are anoxic) that suggests it could work. The research team left a bit more than 650 pounds of hardwood submerged in a linen bag at a depth of 820 feet. The material retained 97% of its biomass over the 12 months that followed. “We saw that there is some degradation over the first three months, and then from three months on it stayed mostly consistent,” Amar said. “That’s really great.”
In their control of pine submerged in normal water, the researchers recorded 10 percent degradation in six months. The reduced rate of decay in anoxic water can be attributed to lignin, a key organic polymer, found in the tissue of most plants, that does not break down without oxygen. Amar’s team plans further experiments at depths of 3,200 feet, followed by two deposits to be made more than a mile down.
Kobi Kaminitz, the chief technology officer at Rewind, prepares an underwater camera for testing organic matter in the sea. Photo courtesy of Rewind
Similar tests with wheat stalk, corn stover and grapevines revealed varying levels of decay, but Amar said this small amount of degradation won’t be a problem 7,200 feet beneath the surface. “Whatever does break down will stay in the deep Black Sea and will not mix and float back up into shallower layers where it can come in contact with the air,” he said.
According to Amar, carbon dating shows that the deepest parts of the Black Sea haven’t had contact with the air in two millennia, making it an excellent carbon (and methane) sink. The company is confident the science stacks up, but because Rewind hopes to fund the project by selling carbon credits, its process must be vetted by independent experts to ensure it works.
There are several potential pitfalls, the biggest of which is carbon sequestration being difficult to measure. There also is little recourse should something go wrong. “Once you put material in the deep sea, it is almost impossible to get it back again without a huge expense,” said Martin Palmer, a geochemistry professor at the National Oceanography Center in South Hampton, England. “So you need to be 100% confident that the process is safe”
Palmer also notes that although organic matter is better preserved in anoxic environments, it still undergoes degradation that results in some level of methane production. “You would need to be very sure that you would not exceed the methane solubility in the Black Sea waters, or there could be problems,” particularly in an area that is seismically active, Palmer told Grist.
And then there are the logistical challenges, including where to source so much biomass. However, the Black Sea is bordered by six agriculturally productive countries that generate a lot of waste. Much of it is usually burned, or shipped down the Danube and dumped into the sea at depths above the anoxic zone, where it degrades and releases carbon. Given the existing infrastructure for moving all that material, Rewind calculates that the carbon needed to transport it far from shore to dump it at an appropriate depth would amount to no more than 3% of the carbon that could be sequestered. With a volume of more than 131,000 cubic miles, there is plenty of space to do the job.
However, stashing a gigaton of carbon a year will require such large quantities of biomass that it will demand geopolitical coordination. That means convincing politicians, policymakers, and the public. Communicating the idea that his startup isn’t simply dumping waste in the sea — something Amar calls that the “understanding gap” — won’t be easy, especially in such a politically tense region. Rewind remains in the early phases of those discussions with government agencies and officials, but is confident it can sell them on the idea.
“As humanity, we’re a huge intervention to the planet,” he says. “So we’re trying to fix the biggest intervention we’ve made, with a smaller intervention.”
His idea, though perhaps counterintuitive, may not be as crazy as it first sounds.
This story was originally published in Modern Farmer and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate crisis.
Eerily empty, abandoned fields stretch across the coast of the southeast United States, replacing once sprawling fields of golden wheat, corn, and soybeans.
For centuries, farmers have favored the rich soil of coastal areas during the growing season. “It’s very fertile soil, especially in some areas that are called the ‘black lands.’ These are really deep organic soils that formed on the coast over millennia,” says Michael Gavazzi, coordinator of the USDA Southeast Climate Hub coordinator and natural resource specialist.
It’s a different story when the floods come in. Hurricanes and tropical storms bring torrential rain and powerful winds that cause storm surges—abnormally large waves that can tower up to 25 feet in height. The aftermath of such disasters is devastating. Crop damage and equipment loss can rack up to thousands of dollars for farmers, even with insurance. The spread of invasive species hinders future growing seasons of certain crops. And most of all, flooding risks long-term consequences to soil health and the geological makeup of farms that could force farmers to permanently abandon their land.
Take, for instance, 2018’s Hurricane Florence. The slow-moving Category 4 giant ravaged southeast coasts, with wind gusts as high as 100 miles per hour, rainfall that exceeded 10 inches in most coastal regions (Swansboro reported 34 inches of total rainfall) and $24 billion in damages—more than Category 5 Hurricane Matthew and Category 4 Hurricane Floydcombined. The initial $1.1-billion damage cost calculation was conservative, and it didn’t account for damages from soil salinization. Even worse, climate scientists say that rainfall estimations were worsened by climate change, an indication that future storms could follow similar patterns.
The storm rocked North Carolina’s agricultural industry to its core. Five of six top agricultural counties of the state were in the most storm-vulnerable areas. Most eastern farmers’ fields were obliterated; the storm came right before peak harvest season for tobacco, corn, and cotton. Crop insurance didn’t cover all the damages incurred, especially not the long-term costs.
“Fresh water [non-saline] flooding from intense rainfall events can [have] short- and long-term consequences,” says Gavazzi, “but the land will usually recover.” However, ocean-driven storm surge flooding is saltwater, and crop productivity can be negatively impacted. Repeated flooding can permanently reduce forest, range, and agricultural production of these coastal areas.
Soil salinization occurs when seawater from floods eventually evaporates but leaves behind its salt content, which accumulates over years in the soil. With enough flooding, the soil on farms could become so salinized that crops can no longer be grown on that land.
More often known as saltwater intrusion, soil salinization can also impact local water quality; the salt eventually makes contact with freshwater aquifers, thus salinizing them. Many local communities source water from wells that draw from these aquifers. Aquifer salinization forces these communities to drill new wells deeper and further inland, which further depletes underground freshwater and creates a self-enforcing loop.
This process isn’t immediately noticeable: One hurricane season isn’t enough for farmers to see the effects. But several years later, farmland productivity starts to plummet. Crop yields never return to previous rates, and there is only so much farmland owners can do to rid the salt before another hurricane comes along.
The issue, although having long been a concern among agronomists, started to rapidly proliferate in the past couple of years, as hurricanes and natural disasters become more frequent and more severe as a result of human-caused climate change. While not solely to blame for extreme weather, scientists agree that the burning of fossil fuels is supercharging normal weather patterns.. “It seems like it’s become more of an important issue in the last five to 10 years as [soil salinization] started to impact more land,” says Gavazzi.
“What they can do is hope for rain. Rain before a storm surge can fill up the soil pore space and prevent saltwater from entering the soil. Additional rain that occurs with a hurricane can also flush the standing saltwater off the land and kind of return it back to its previous non-saline state.”
As sea level increases due to climate change, the difference between ocean water levels and soil elevation is decreasing, making post-storm water runoff more difficult. Although the rain can eventually help flush out salt content in soil, long-term accumulation of salt far exceeds what natural precipitation can remove. Small farmer owners can also use water to flush out salt on their own, but this solution is far from viable for medium to large farm owners.
Another issue, which is essential to mitigating damage, is that salinization is harder to spot than expected. “[It’s] not always obvious on the surface,” explains Gavazzi. “Sometimes, it washes away, but the salinity of the soil can be increasing … There’s noticeable declines in productivity with that, but it’s kind of quiet after the event.” Farmers not equipped with the proper resources and knowledge to understand this are at particularly high risk of losing farmland.
“We’ve talked to some farmers that have constructed dikes to try to keep the water out,” he says. But infrastructure also comes with certain drawbacks. “Dikes are good for keeping out some flooding, but when water gets behind them, they hold that water and it also changes the natural landscape [of the area].”
To support coastal agriculture, the USDA, in partnership with regional and national organizations, provides financial and technical assistance to farmers in order to aid during recovery, post natural disaster. Research studies on future mitigation and resilience strategies are also well underway at universities. A research group formed jointly by scientists from Duke University and the University of Virginia recently published their findings mapping saltwater intrusion across the eastern coast in high-profile journal Nature. They found that between 2011 to 2017, “salty patches”, an indication of saltwater intrusion, have doubled in frequency across Delaware and in parts of Virginia and Maryland. Up to 93 percent of the farmlands analyzed were shown to be in proximity to the salinized areas. The economic implications of such changes were estimated to run as high as $107.50 million annually.
Other research efforts that revolve around salt-tolerant crop development and cover crop planting practices are beginning to gain traction among farmers. Michelle Lovejoy, a climate resilience manager at the Environmental Defense Fund, says that today’s farmers are more willing to adapt such mitigation practices.
“We are starting to see that shift as the next generation starts to take over the farm and as farmers are noticing ‘I’m getting more wet years,’” says Lovejoy.
Lovejoy emphasizes that the impacts of flood damage reverberate throughout state-wide communities, as well as local agricultural ones. When flooding disrupts crop production, especially of staple crops such as corn, wheat or potatoes, grocery stores and farmers’ markets take a hit.
She explains that, particularly in states that are responsible for producing large amounts of a staple crop, flooding can result in supply chain collapses. Food disappears off store shelves and already food-insecure communities are left to grapple with devastating food shortages.
“That’s where, collectively as a nation, we need to make sure there’s redundancy in the system, but we, as a society, have made decisions historically that looked at efficiencies and cost,” says Lovejoy, referring to practices that ensure no singular agricultural community is responsible for producing the majority of a crop supply for the rest of the country.
She draws a comparison to a similar occurrence during the pandemic. “During [COVID-19] when we watched the supply chains collapse, we made decisions that said, ‘We don’t need those redundancies,’” says Lovejoy. “But now we’re realizing [that] part of resilience is having redundancies in the system. That’s a local level conversation that needs to happen.”
While Japan’s discharge of nuclear waste waters into the Pacific from its Fukushima nuclear plant has been drawing flak across the Pacific, a high-powered delegation of Chinese ocean and marine scientists and Asia-Pacific scholars from Shandong Province visited Fiji to promote South-South cooperation to mitigate climate change — the Pacific island nations’ biggest security threat.
Facilitated by the Chinese Embassy in Suva, Shandong Province and Fiji signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to exchange scholars and experts from the provincial institution to assist the Pacific Island nation in the agriculture sector.
At the signing event, Agriculture Minister Vatimi Rayalu said Fiji and China had a successful history of cooperating in agriculture.
He told the Fiji Broadcasting Corporation that this initiative was critical to agricultural production to promote heightened collaboration among key stakeholders and help Fiji connect to the vast Chinese market.
Shandong Province has a 3000 km coastline with a population of 100 million. It is China’s third largest provincial economy, with a GDP of CNY 8.3 trillion (US$1.3 trillion) in 2021—equivalent to Mexico’s GDP.
The province has also played a major role in Chinese civilisation and is a cultural center for Confucianism, Taoism and Chinese Buddhism.
On August 30, during a day-long conference at the University of the South Pacific under the theme of sustainable development of small island states, scholars from Shandong Province and the Pacific exchanged ideas on cooperation in the sphere of the ocean and marine sciences, and education, development and cultural areas.
Chinese assistance welcomed
In a keynote address to the conference, Fiji’s Education Minister Aseri Radrodro welcomed China’s assistance to foster a scholars exchange programme and share best practices for improved teaching and learning processes.
He said: “We are restrategising our diplomatic relations via education platforms disturbed by the pandemic.”
Emphasising that respect is an essential ingredient of Pacific cultures, he welcomed Chinese interest in Pacific cultures.
Also, he invited China to assist Fiji and the region in areas such as marine sciences, counselling, medical services, IT, human resource management, and education policies and management.
“Overall, sustainable development for Small Island States requires a realistic approach that integrates social, economic, and environmental considerations and collaborations among governments, civil society, international organisations, and the private sector that is essential for achieving sustainable development goals,” he told delegates.
Radrodro invited more Chinese scholars to visit the Pacific to increase cultural understanding between the regions and suggested developing a school exchange programme between Fiji and China for young people to understand each other.
The Chinese ambassador to Fiji, Zhou Jian, pointed out that China and the Pacific Island Countries (PICs), were connected by the Pacific Ocean and in a spirit of South-South cooperation, China already had more than 20 development cooperation projects in the region (he listed them) and 10 sister city arrangements across the region.
Building a human community
Pointing out that his province’s institutions have some of the prominent scholars in the world on climatic change action and marine technology, the Vice-Chairman of Shandong Provincial Committee, Wang Shujian, said he hoped that these institutions would help to build a human community with a shared future in the Pacific.
Many Chinese speakers reflected in their presentations that their cooperative ventures would be in line with the Chinese government’s current international collaboration push known as the “Global Development Initiative”.
This initiative has eight priority areas: poverty alleviation, food security, pandemic response and vaccines, financing for development, climate change and green development, industrialisation, digital economy, and connectivity in the digital era.
Jope Koroisavou of the Ministry of iTaukei (indigenous) affairs explained that the “Blue Pacific” leaders in the region talk about is a way of life that “bridges our past with our future,” and it was important to re-establish the balance between taking and giving to nature.
He listed three takeaways in this respect: cultural resilience and preservation, eco-system stewardship and conservation, and community component and inclusive decision-making.
Professor Yang Jingpeng from the Centre for South Pacific Studies at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications acknowledged that they needed to learn from indigenous knowledge, where indigenous people were closely connected to the environment.
Bio-diversity, climate action, South-South cooperation “They play an important role in protecting biodiversity,” he noted. “Their knowledge of nature will be greatly beneficial to address climatic change”.
He expressed the wish that under South-South cooperation, their centre would be able to work with this knowledge and scientific methodologies to mitigate climatic change.
Mesake Koroi of the FBC noted that Pacific Islanders needed to get over the idea that because indigenous villagers practice subsistence farming, they were poor when, in fact, they were rich in traditional knowledge, which was important to address the development and environmental challenges of today.
“Using this traditional knowledge, people don’t go out fishing when the winds are blowing in the wrong direction or the moon is not in the correct place”, he noted.
“In my village, 10,000 trees will be planted this year to confront climatic change.”
On an angry note, he referred to Japan’s dumping of nuclear-contaminated water to the Pacific Ocean using a purely “scientific” argument, which he described as “inexcusable vulgar, crude and irresponsible”.
He asked if science said was so safe, why did they not use it for irrigation in Japan?
Nuclear tests suffering
Koroi lamented that historically, major powers had used the Pacific for nuclear testing without respect for the islanders’ welfare — who had to suffer from nuclear fallouts.
“The British, French, and Americans are all guilty of these atrocities, and now the Japanese”, noted Koroi.
Since China was coming to the Pacific without this baggage, he hoped this would transform into a desire to work with the people of the Pacific for their welfare.
Professor He Baogang, of Deaking University in Australia, noted that though the Chinese mindset acknowledged that dealing with climate change was a human right (health right) issue, it still needed to be central to their approach to the problem.
“This should be laid down as important, ” he argued, and suggested that this could be demonstrated by working on areas such as putting green shipping corridors into action.
“China and Pacific Island countries need to look at an agreement to decarbonise the shipping industry,” he argued. “This conference needs to address how to proceed (in that direction)”.
Pointing out that there was a long history — going back to more than 8000 years — of Chinese ancestry among some Pacific people, pointing out that some Māori traditional tattoos were similar to the Chinese tattoos, Professor Chen Xiaochen, executive deputy director, Centre for Asia-Pacific Studies, East China Normal University, noted “now we are looking for common ground for Pacific development needs”.
Knowing each other better
In an informal conversation with IDN, one of the professors from China said that the time had come for the people of China and the Pacific to come to know each other better.
“Chinese students hardly know about Pacific cultures and the people,” he told IDN, adding, “I suppose the Pacific people don’t know much of our cultures as well.”
He believes closer collaboration with universities in Shandong Provincial would be ideal “because it is a centre of Chinese civilisation”.
“Now the Pacific is looking north,” noted Professor Xiaochen, adding, “my flight from Hong Kong was full of Chinese tourists coming South to Fiji”.
Kalinga Seneviratne is a visiting consultant with the University of the South Pacific journalism programme. IDN-InDepthNews is the flagship news service of the nonprofit Inter Press Syndicate. Republished in collaboration with Asia Pacific Report.
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 punishingly hot August morning, Jake Price walked through his rows of citrus trees, tucked in the back corner of a field behind an elementary school. They looked like an image right out of a commercial for Florida orange juice: lush, leafy trees, many of them laden with plump fruit.
Only this wasn’t in Florida, it was in Georgia.
Price is an extension agent for the University of Georgia in Lowndes County, and his trees are in Valdosta, about half an hour from the Florida border. He’s growing several kinds of small citrus fruit, including a type of mandarin known as a tango, one of the easy-to-peel varieties that’s easy to throw in a kid’s school lunch.
“Look how much fruit this tree has,” Price said, approaching one of the tango trees. “There’s probably 25 pounds per tree on these.”
University of Georgia extension agent Jake Price walks through the rows of citrus trees he’s growing in Valdosta, Ga. to study how different varieties withstand the cold. Grist / Emily Jones
Citrus is a new crop for Georgia, one that’s taking root thanks to the combined forces of climate change, crop science, and disease in Florida. Although that citrus powerhouse is just to the south, historically it’s been just enough colder in Georgia to discourage farmers from growing citrus. Freezing was considered too big a risk, a threat that could take out the fruit just as it’s ripening.
But a new citrus industry in Georgia is growing rapidly. There were very few citrus trees in the state a decade ago. Now, there are more than 500,000 trees across nearly 4,000 acres.
The burgeoning industry faced its biggest test yet last winter. Around Christmas, citrus trees in southern Georgia had to weather six days below freezing. Many of their leaves shriveled up and died. By January, the frigid air had killed limbs and split huge wounds into trunks and branches, weakening them permanently. Farmers worried the freeze could hurt their new crop.
But Price isn’t a farmer. He’s a scientist, so the cold snap became an experiment.
Most citrus trees are hybrids: a delicious fruit like tangos grafted onto the roots of a variety with other desirable traits, like a manageable size or resistance to pests and diseases. Price is conducting a study to find out which rootstocks weathered the freeze well and which took a lot of damage or are struggling to bounce back.
A tango tree grows in Georgia.
Grist / Emily Jones
“It’s kind of a rare opportunity to get some data on which rootstocks give the best cold protection on these tangos, so I’m gonna get it while the getting’s good,” Price said.
Farmers will be able to use his findings to ensure they’re planting trees that can weather Georgia winters, which aren’t as cold as they used to be.
“I just remember being cold a lot,” Price said of his childhood in the 1970s. “You would be cold in October. But now, October, we’re still in the 90s sometimes.”
Climate change is heating up winters especially fast. The average winter temperature in Albany, Georgia, has risen 6.5 degrees Fahrenheit since 1970, according to Climate Central. That means fewer sustained freezes, so Georgia is increasingly fertile ground for citrus.
Farmer Justin Jones decided to take advantage of these changes when he was looking to diversify his crops. He was growing the Georgia staples of pecans and cotton at his farm near Albany, in southwest Georgia, but wanted to add something new to the mix.
“It goes back to the old adage, just don’t put all your eggs in one basket,” he said. “Spread out your risk a little bit.”
Farming always involves risk from the weather, diseases, insects, and all kinds of other factors that can affect crop yields. And climate change is throwing new curveballs at growers.
This year, Georgia peaches are in crisis. An unusually warm January and February coaxed peach trees to bloom early. A typical seasonal freeze in March then devastated the blossoms. The federal government declared a natural disaster in 18 Georgia counties following the freeze, to help farmers cope. Similar dynamics have also slammed Georgia blueberries in the past few years, even though blueberries are usually one of the top 10 crops in the state.
In his bid to spread out his risks by diversifying, Jones found citrus appealing because it has the potential to make good money: Each tree can bear a lot of fruit, so farmers can get a lot of revenue out of each acre. Because the industry is so new in Georgia, he was also able to open a packing house — an additional revenue stream. Jones now grows satsumas and navel oranges.
“We have a piece of fruit that looks like it’s grown in California, but tastes like it’s grown in Florida, which is what everybody wants,” he said.
A map from the University of Georgia shows the southern counties where farmers are growing citrus. University of Georgia
Georgia growers like Jones are also taking advantage of an opening in the citrus market created by disease. Citrus greening, caused by bacteria spread by a bug known as the Asian citrus psyllid, has devastated Florida’s citrus industry since it first arrived in 2005. As of 2022, the state had less than half the citrus acres it did in the 1990s.
“Unfortunately, in the farming community, in the farming world, somebody has to do bad for somebody to do good,” said Jones.
Growers in Georgia are taking steps to keep out the disease that’s decimated Florida’s citrus, and Senator Jon Ossoff, a Georgia Democrat, is now pushing for the state to have a seat on a national panel on citrus disease.
“We have to be conscious of what we’re doing here in Georgia, in order to protect not only our industry, but our sister state industry,” said Lindy Savelle, president of the Georgia Citrus Association.
Despite the disease and the recent growth of Georgia citrus, Florida still has about 100 times the citrus acreage Georgia does. And the nascent industry is an even smaller fraction of Georgia’s overall agricultural output, which boasts more than a million acres of cotton, over 600,000 acres of peanuts, and about 20,000 acres of blueberries, compared to just 4,000 acres of citrus.
Still, the industry is gaining steam. This year, the state legislature established a citrus commodity commission, a signal it’s becoming a big enough crop to need research and marketing.
Last winter’s sustained freeze will likely hurt this year’s citrus crop, as trees that took heavy damage expend their energy regrowing limbs and leaves instead of producing fruit. But because citrus ripens in late fall and winter, Price and other experts said the trees have time to recover and regrow — unlike the peach trees that had their delicate blooms destroyed by the later freeze in March.
Now that Georgia’s small citrus growers have shown they can survive a bad winter, Savelle said, bigger farms are getting interested.
“The confidence level of our growers is continuing to go up,” she said. “They realize, ‘Well, my gosh, if I can handle 17, 15 degrees for four days, that’s a 30-year weather event. I think I can do this.’”
Even though the freeze may hurt this year’s crop, Savelle said it was also a big test — and Georgia citrus passed.
This story is part of Record High, a Grist series examining extreme heat and its impact on how — and where — we live.
Inflation is finally easing. Americans are paying less for gas than they were a year ago. Furniture, television, and airfare prices have all fallen since last summer. Even the used car market is cooling off after its meteoric rise. But one unsuspecting staple in many American kitchens has become a prominent outlier: olive oil. The price of the already pricey liquid fat has soared to a record high this summer.
It’s the latest chapter in the annals of heatflation — when scorching temperatures harm crops and push food prices up. A yearlong drought and a spring of extreme heat in Spain, the world’s largest olive oil producer, devastated the country’s olive groves. Spanish olive oil production fell by a half — from an estimated 1.3 million to 610,000 metric tons — over the past year. Now fears are mounting over the very real possibility that the country’s inventory will run out before the next harvest begins, in October.
“For Spaniards, this is a real crisis,” Bloomberg columnist Javier Bias recently wrote. “We generously coat our food in olive oil.”
It’s also a big deal for the rest of us, given that something like half of the world’s olive oil comes from Spain. As barrels run dry, cooks around the world are paying an almost unheard of premium for the nutty, liquid gold that makes lettuce more palatable and bread more nutritious. Worldwide, olive oil now costs $8,600 per metric ton, more than twice as much as it did a year ago and nearly 14 times more than crude oil. (It would set you back around $720 to fill up the typical car’s 12-gallon tank with olive oil found on Amazon.)
What’s happening is “not normal at all,” said Kyle Holland, a vegetable oils analyst at Mintec, a food market research firm. “It was just too hot and too dry for too long.”
Olive oil is one of many foods — one of many condiments, even — that are threatened by the severe and unpredictable weather brought on by climate change. As the global temperature ticks up, droughts are occurring more frequently, heat is getting harder for farmers to manage, and wildfires and floods are becoming more menacing to growers around the world. As a result, grocery store shelves aren’t getting stocked and food prices are going up. Ultra-dry conditions in Mexico have withered peppers, leading to a sriracha shortage in the United States. Record warming has decimated Georgia’s famed peaches, which require a few weeks of cool weather each winter to blossom. Ketchup, coffee, and wine all could end up on the chopping block, too.
Olive trees are no strangers to heat, and they don’t need much water compared to other crops, like tomatoes. Humans have been cultivating them in the Mediterranean’s warm climate — and crushing them for oil — for at least 6,000 years. But even hardy olives have their limits. Temperatures above 86 degrees Fahrenheit can impair their ability to convert sunlight into energy, and prolonged dry spells can keep them from producing shoots, buds, flowers, and fruit.
Growers in the Mediterranean, a region warming 20 percent faster than the rest of the world and the source of 95 percent of olive oil production, are especially vulnerable. Drought caused Tunisia’s grain harvest to decline by 60 percent this year. And dry conditions led to poor yields for wheat and rice farmers last year in Italy, whose produce has helped build the country’s legacy of pizza, pasta, and risotto. This summer, they’ve had to contend with extreme heat, historic floods, and freak hailstorms, according to Davide Cammarano, a professor of agroecology at Aarhus University in Denmark. With such variability in weather, “it becomes very hard to manage a crop in the Mediterranean,” he said.
In a study published last year, Cammarano and his colleagues found that rising temperatures could cut the production of processing tomatoes — the sort used to make tomato sauce and ketchup — by 6 percent in Italy, the U.S., and other countries within the next three decades.
Perhaps no one this year has had it as bad as olive growers in Spain. Between October and May, the country received 28 percent less rain than usual, with the driest conditions in southern, olive-growing areas. “It’s a catastrophe,” Primitivo Fernandez, head of Spain’s National Association of Edible Oil Bottlers, told Reuters in March. Spain experienced its hottest April on record, with temperatures rising above 100 degrees F. And the heat has only gotten more punishing since, with the country now in the midst of its third heat wave of the year.
As a result, researchers predict that drought and heat waves associated with climate change will continue to take their toll on olives from the Iberian Peninsula to Lebanon. Hot and dry conditions last year scorched groves not only in Spain but also in Italy and Portugal, two of the world’s top four olive oil producers.
In the United States, too, severe weather is a concern for olive farmers, although unlike orchards in Spain that rely on rainfall, most in the U.S. are irrigated, which makes them more resistant to drought. Producers in California, the state that churns out the most olives but still contributes less than 3 percent of the olive oil consumed in the U.S., reportedly harvested one-fifth less than their historic average this season, following years of little rain that made some farmers’ wells go dry.
Winter and spring storms last spring in California eased the drought, but the cool weather and heavy precipitation slowed flowering and potentially lowered the amount of oil in each olive, according to Jim Lipman, chief operating officer at California Olive Ranch in Chico, the country’s biggest olive oil producer.
In an email to Grist, Lipman said that the high prices in Europe have increased demand for California oil and that California Olive Ranch has a strong crop heading into the upcoming harvest season, which starts in October. That said, early warming followed by frost has resulted in crop disasters in two of the last five seasons.
At Burroughs Family Farm in Denair, California, production has been fairly steady over the past few years, but “this year we are on the lower side” possibly as a result of an “incredible” amount of rain, said Benina Montes, managing partner at the regenerative almond and olive farm in California’s Central Valley. In a good year, the farm’s 10 acres of olives produce up to 40 tons of oil. This year, they yielded about three-quarters of that amount.
Montes said she hadn’t been following news of the shortage in Europe. But she figures the rise in demand caused by Spain’s low inventory might have helped her business. “No wonder our olive oil has been selling well on Amazon.”
The swarms were so thick they obscured the sun. Mohammed Adan, a farmer in northeastern Kenya, watched the horde of desert locusts first descend in late 2019. He’s been grappling with their legacy ever since.
Adan and 61 other farmers grow tomatoes, mangoes, watermelon, and other crops on Taleh Farm, a 309-acre property outside Garissa, a remote town not far from the Somali border. When the locusts first touched down, Garissa’s villagers resorted to traditional mitigation methods like drumming and banging pots and pans together — anything to make loud noise that might disperse the swarm. Women and children shouted at the descending crush, but their endeavors were largely fruitless.
Billions of ravenous, short-horned grasshoppers alighted, devouring every bit of living plant matter in their path. Between February and June 2020, Taleh Farm was eaten to the ground. Adan’s son, Abubakar Mohamed, who goes by Abu, estimated that the locusts caused $2,000 worth of damage that season — a devastating sum in an area where the average annual salary is below $300.
“We’ve heard about locusts from our fathers and grandfathers,” Adan, who is in his mid-50s, recalled. “But we’ve never had to deal with anything like this ourselves.”
Swarms of desert locusts fly above crops in Katitika village, Kitui County, Kenya in January 2020. Ben Curtis / AP Photo
While locust swarms spread across 10 countries over the course of early 2020, Kenya was particularly hard hit — one of the swarms feeding off the country stretched to three times the size of New York City. Three million people across the country, many of them small-scale farmers, were at risk of losing their entire season’s harvest. A legion of international organizations, including the United Nations’ World Food Programme and Food and Agriculture Organization, or FAO, marshaled support in collaboration with Kenya’s Ministry of Agriculture. Throughout the locust invasion, the FAO raised more than $230 million, which allowed it to acquire 155,600 liters of synthetic pesticides that were used to treat nearly 500,000 acres.
To handle ground-spraying operations, the Kenyan government enlisted both its army as well as members of the National Youth Service, a voluntary, government-funded vocational and training organization for young Kenyans. Meanwhile, the FAO contracted charter airline companies to conduct aerial spraying. An issue of apocalyptic scale required all hands on deck.
Farmers like Adan were relieved that the government and aid organizations were stepping in to help. “We wanted those pesticides,” he told Grist. “Otherwise, we would have lost everything.”
A community volunteer uses a motorized sprayer to disperse pesticide in February 2020 at a desert locust hatch site in eastern Kenya. TONY KARUMBA / AFP via Getty Images
But Adan didn’t know at the time that the FAO and other humanitarian groups had procured pesticides that were either already banned in the U.S. and Europe or soon would be. The synthetic pesticides in question — part of a chemical class known as organophosphates that includes chlorpyrifos, fenitrothion, malathion, and fipronil — have been known to cause dizziness, nausea, vomiting, watery eyes, and loss of appetite in humans who come into contact with them. Long-term exposure has been linked to cognitive impairment, psychiatric disorders, and infertility in men.
Subsistence farmers in Garissa believe they were accidentally poisoned while using these chemicals — and they’re still dealing with the ramifications. Adan has been suffering from a host of health maladies since 2020, including infertility and incontinence, and he has undergone five surgeries in the last few years.
Mohammed Adan, a farmer whose crops have been ravaged by locusts in past years, stands near a mango tree on Taleh Farm.Kang-Chun Cheng
Mohammed Adan showing the scars left from multiple surgeries due to urinary tract issues he believes are related to pesticide poisoning.Kang-Chun Cheng
Internal FAO documents show that the agency was aware of widespread environmental and public health problems that resulted from its distribution of pesticides. The agency’s own assessment found that the toxic chemicals were handed to farmers without any protective equipment, such as gloves and coveralls, or adequate training on how to use them safely. Christian Pantenius, a former FAO staff member who worked as an independent expert adviser to help the agency coordinate its 2020 spraying campaign in Kenya and Ethiopia, said he saw hundreds of FAO-recruited National Youth Service members handling toxic chemicals in northern Kenya without sufficient training or protective equipment.
“I was shocked,” he told Grist. “I was furious about it. Can you imagine this happening in Europe?”
In April 2020, at the height of the locust upsurge, the Taleh farmers attended an emergency training hosted by staff of the Ministry of Agriculture’s Garissa County office. During an informal three-day demonstration, Adan said they were briefed on pesticide-spraying techniques. (Ahmed Sirat, a retired agricultural extension officer who worked with the Taleh farmers at the time, confirmed the training took place.)
After receiving their allotted chemicals, the farmers set off to salvage their crops. Adan said they were warned during the training that the pesticides are dangerous to humans, but they were not provided with specific chemical profiles or protective equipment.
Mohammed Adan stands with a donkey on Taleh Farm. Kang-Chun Cheng
The farmers burned through the first round of pesticides within a matter of days. This fenitrothion-heavy batch came in 500-milliliter bottles, which Sirat had shown them how to mix with water. Fenitrothion is an inexpensive, hazardous pesticide widely used in countries like Brazil, Japan, and Australia. However, it has not been approved for use in the U.S. because it can cause nausea, dizziness, and confusion at low exposures — and respiratory paralysis and even death at high exposures. The pesticide was so strong that some of the locusts died upon contact, falling right off the fruit trees. Clearly, the chemicals were working. But the farmers needed more.
On behalf of his farming committee, Adan requested more pesticides from the county agricultural extension officers. This time, they came in 20-liter cans. “There was a picture of an airplane on the can,” Adan recalled. In retrospect, he believes they were given chemicals meant for aerial spraying, rather than ground operations.
A person in protective gear loads pesticide into an airplane before taking off to spray over a swarm of desert locusts in Meru, Kenya in 2020. YASUYOSHI CHIBA / AFP via Getty Images
The farmers agreed to spray as a team, moving in sync. Adan remembers crouching as he mixed the chemicals with water, as instructed. He then poured the pesticide into a knapsack sprayer, a device consisting of a pressurized container that disperses liquid through a hand-held nozzle. As he was preparing to hoist the sprayer on his back, Adan accidentally hit the nozzle, spilling its contents across his stomach and back and down his groin and legs. He didn’t think much of it; the immediacy of the locust hordes captured his full attention. Adan repeated the operation and only washed the chemical off his body with water after attending to his crops.
The farmers’ efforts eventually paid off. They were able to protect some of their crops and sold them after harvest. But the farmers have since been suffering from a range of health effects that they attribute to pesticide exposure. For months after spilling chemicals on himself, Adan felt sick. A year later, in April 2021, the malaise culminated in an inability to pass urine. His muscles grew weak, and he often found himself easily fatigued.
Hussein Abdi and Adan Hussein Yusuf, who also work on Taleh Farm, were exposed to milky clouds of the pesticide when they were spraying their mango trees in 2020. The chemicals irritated their eyes, and both farmers have since had eye surgeries at hospitals in Garissa. Abdi still struggles with light sensitivity and wears shades nearly all the time, even on overcast days.
Hussein Abdi holds some of the mangos grown on Taleh Farm. He says he was exposed to pesticides while spraying mango trees for locusts in 2020. Kang-Chun Cheng
In response to Grist’s questions about the Taleh farmers’ health issues, Garissa County officials denied issuing pesticides to farmers. Ben Gachiri, an officer with the Garissa County communications office, said that it was “impossible that the farmers could have been instructed to do this themselves.” In a written statement, he claimed that no farmer or volunteer was ever issued locust-control pesticides or lodged complaints about pesticide exposure.
The FAO’s assessment, however, tells a different story.
Massive locust surges have threatened farmers throughout the ages, but the swarms have been escalating in recent decades. Desert locust outbreaks require the perfect brew of weather, moist soil, and vegetation conditions. Researchers have found that increases in temperature and rainfall in desert regions, as well as high wind speeds during tropical cyclones, create an ideal environment for locusts to breed and migrate. The fact that many of these conditions have been amplified by climate change has only made locust outbreaks more likely.
The FAO has supported synthetic pesticides as the primary method of locust control since their popularization in the 1980s. A 2021 analysis of FAO pesticide purchase data by the environmental news website Mongabay found that more than 95 percent of the pesticides the agency delivered to East African nations during the locust outbreaks were proven to cause harm to humans and animals. Chlorpyrifos, which the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had already determined to have no safe level of exposure, made up more than half of the haul. (Scientific evidence linking chlorpyrifos to a slew of neurodevelopmental harms ultimately led the U.S. agency to ban its domestic use in 2021.)
A cow carcass lies in the dirt on Taleh Farm. Kenya has endured multiple failed rainy seasons in a row, which has taken a toll on humans and animals alike. Kang-Chun Cheng
The FAO is well aware of the harmful health effects of chlorpyrifos and other organophosphate pesticides, which it categorizes as “extremely hazardous.” According to an internal 2020 FAO report, which Grist obtained through an officer at Kenya’s Ministry of Agriculture, FAO staff and consultants observed spray sites across 18 counties in Kenya from July to September of that year. (The FAO has not replied to queries about why the document is not publicly available.)
The report found the agency failed to conduct a full environmental and social impact assessment as required under Kenya’s environmental laws, given the state of emergency produced by the massive locust outbreak. Most of the decisions made with regard to locust mitigation efforts remained opaque to the communities most affected, who received little to no guidance on the pesticides’ toxicity and were not briefed on their health or environmental effects. At several operation sites in Kenya’s far north, “communities complained of lack of information and communication” during locust control operations within their vicinity, the report noted.
In Samburu County, northwest of Garissa in Kenya’s Great Rift Valley, FAO monitoring found that “non-trained personnel” took the lead on ground-spraying operations, leading to rampant user errors. The Locust Pesticide Referee Group, an independent body of experts that advises the FAO on pesticide use, recommends that knapsack-sprayers distribute 1 liter per hectare of land, which is roughly 0.11 gallons per acre. But the report noted that the untrained volunteers had sprayed about 3.63 gallons per acre — more than 30 times the recommended amount — on a rainy day when pesticides are likely to run off and pollute soil and water sources.
Young men on a boda boda, or motorbike, drive past a locust response center in Garissa, Kenya. Kang-Chun Cheng
In Lodwar, northwestern Kenya’s largest town, the FAO had trained a crew of 106 National Youth Service members on pesticide management and safety. Still, some crew members “complained of itchiness on skin during spraying,” the report noted. FAO monitoring staff noted that young children were seen playing next to carelessly disposed gloves, masks, gumboots, overalls, safety goggles, and uncollected pesticide drums.
The scathing report found that farmers and community members weren’t properly informed about when spraying occurred, how long it would last, or what the chemicals’ effects were on human and animal health. As a result, around Oldonyiro, a heavily sprayed area in Isiolo County a few hundred miles northwest of Garissa, local Ministry of Agriculture authorities did not collect accounts of cow, camel, and goat mortalities that came from community members.
Members of the National Youth Service spray pesticide on locusts at a farm in Elburgon, in Nakuru County, Kenya in March 2021. Brian Inganga / AP Photo
Less harmful alternatives to synthetic pesticides exist and have proven their efficacy, but they are not yet in widespread global use. Biopesticides developed from Metarhizium acridum fungal spores were first tested in 1989 under a private research program, after a particularly vicious three-year locust plague in East Africa. After years of painstaking testing, a commercial product finally hit the market in 2005. The FAO first used a version of the biopesticide on an operational scale in Tanzania in 2009, and later in Madagascar and Central Asia.
In 2020, Metarhizium-derived biopesticides were used on a large scale with great success in Somalia. The effectiveness was comparable to that of synthetic pesticides: 60 percent mortality after 10 days, increasing to 83 percent after 14 days. Though biopesticides have a higher initial cost than synthetics, researchers found that this was quickly offset by low environmental damage and the elimination of disposal costs. As a bonus, biopesticides can boost honey production, a common livelihood in East Africa, since they are far gentler on pollinators than synthetic chemicals.
Despite their proven track record, companies have largely been unwilling to invest in such biopesticides. That’s because the products are highly targeted and cannot be used on as wide a range of pests. And because they are derived from nature, producing identical batches has proven tricky.
“Economically it’s not as viable, and therefore not of interest to governments –– or companies,” said Pantenius.
FAO representatives declined to speak directly with Grist about the agency’s pesticide procurement procedure, or to elaborate on how decisions were made concerning its locust campaign in Kenya. To this day, the FAO has declined to publicly release reports about documented user error and exactly how much of each pesticide was sprayed.
But in an emailed statement from the FAO’s East Africa regional office, the agency emphasized that it was up to individual countries to select which pesticides they would authorize for use, and that locust control measures were “closely monitored to minimize risks to people and communities.” The FAO denied that farmers or any other untrained community members participated in spraying. The statement added that the FAO encouraged countries to use biopesticides, but that limited production of these alternatives made them insufficient for the scale of the outbreak.
Pantenius said that the FAO has worked to protect crops from being devoured by locusts in cost-effective ways while also considering environmental damage. However, he believes that it and other international humanitarian organizations must put more pressure on governments to make better-informed decisions. “It’s time that we get to a point where we draw a line and say, ‘We’re willing to help you, but won’t provide chemical pesticides,’” he said.
“By the time locusts cross over the crops, it’s already too late [to consider alternatives],” Pantenius added. “Once the plague is over, everyone quickly moves on to more pressing issues.”
Three years after the locusts first arrived, Adan has realized that he could be dealing with effects from pesticide exposure for the rest of his life.
“I’m a lot better now, but it still hurts to stand up,” he explained, lightly pounding the muscles around his thighs. Until recently, he had also been struggling with incontinence.
Adan shows medical bills and paperwork related to his illnesses. Kang-Chun Cheng
To date, Adan has undergone five surgeries, inserting and removing catheters, in an attempt to address a series of urinary tract complications from the accident. He estimates that the hospital bills have racked up to nearly $10,000 — he was forced to sell 14 camels at approximately $400 each to help cover the costs, and neighbors and relatives pitched in.
Adan’s infertility — a known ramification from exposure to synthetic organophosphates such as chlorpyrifos — has been an even greater blow, given local cultural expectations. “When one stops procreating, one’s life is effectively over,” his son Abu explained.
As of early this year, Adan’s health had deteriorated. He started having trouble passing urine again and may need a sixth surgery. Abu said that they are considering applying for a medical visa to India, with the hopes that overseas expertise might solve his lingering urinary tract issue.
Mohammed Adan reaches up to touch one of the fruit trees on his property. Kang-Chun Cheng
On a sweltering day under the equatorial sun late last November, Adan stood beneath the shade of overgrown mango trees with his friends Abdi and Yusuf. He recalled a local saying about locusts, revealing the enduring nuisance that the pests have been in the region — existing as mere folklore for some generations, a living nightmare for others.
“Anyone, even a cow, who eats too much, you’re said to be eating like an ayah — a locust.”
Adan remains concerned about future outbreaks. If a better preparedness plan is not put in place, “It will cause more damage than this,” he said. “This is something that comes with God’s plan — that can’t be predicted by a human being.”
Anthony Langatcontributed reporting to this story.
Nobody really knows how the fungus Bipolaris maydis got into the cornfields of the United States. But by summer of 1970, it was there with a vengeance, inflicting a disease called Southern corn leaf blight, which causes stalks to wither and die. The South got hit first, then the disease spread through Tennessee and Kentucky before heading up into Illinois, Missouri, and Iowa — the heart of the corn belt.
The destruction was unprecedented. All told, the corn harvest of 1970 was reduced by about 15 percent. Collectively, farmers lost almost 700 bushels of corn that could have fed livestock and humans, at an economic cost of a billion dollars. More calories were lost than during Ireland’s Great Famine in the 1840s, when disease decimated potato fields.
Really, the problem with Southern corn leaf blight started years before the 1970 outbreak, when scientists in the 1930s developed a strain of corn with a genetic quirk that made it a breeze for seed companies to crank out. Farmers liked the strain’s high yields. By the 1970s, that particular variety formed the genetic basis for up to 90 percent of the corn grown around the country, compared to the thousands of varieties farmers had grown previously.
That particular strain of corn — known as cms-T — proved highly susceptible to Southern corn leaf blight. So, when an unusually warm, wet spring favored the fungus, it had an overabundance of corn plants to burn through.
At the time, scientists hoped a lesson had been learned.
“Never again should a major cultivated species be molded into such uniformity that it is so universally vulnerable to attack by a pathogen,” wrote plant pathologist Arnold John Ullstrup in a review of the matter published in 1972.
And yet, today, genetic uniformity is one of the main features of most large-scale agricultural systems, leading some scientists to warn that conditions are ripe for more major outbreaks of plant disease.
There are several strains of corn blight, which can affect crops. Southern corn blight was blamed for the corn shortfall of 1970. Northern corn blight, seen here, produces different markings on the diseased leaves. Getty Images
“I think we have all the conditions for a pandemic in agricultural systems to occur,” said agricologist Miguel Altieri, a professor emeritus from the University of California, Berkeley. Hunger and economic hardship would likely ensue.
Climate change adds to the danger — shifting weather patterns are on track to shake up the distributions of pathogens and bring them into contact with new plant species, potentially making crop disease much worse, said Brajesh Singh, an expert in soil science at Western Sydney University in Australia.
Incorporating biodiversity into large-scale farming could move agriculture away from this crisis. Here and there, some farmers are taking steps in this direction. But will their efforts become widespread — and what will happen if they don’t?
Things were not always this way. As the 1900s dawned in the United States, for instance, food was produced by humans, not machines — more than 40 percent of the American workforce was employed on a multitude of small farms growing a wide range of crop varieties. The British Empire sparked the shift toward today’s industrialized food system, said historian Lizzie Collingham, who wrote the book Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food.
By the early 1900s, the British Empire had learned that it could “basically treat the whole planet as a resource for its population,” Collingham said. It acquired cocoa from West Africa, meat from Argentina, and sugar from the Caribbean, for example. Suddenly, food was not something to be bought from the farmer down the street, but a global commodity, subject to economies of scale.
America grabbed hold of this idea and ran with it, according to Collingham. First came the New Deal — President Roosevelt’s plan for pulling the country out of the Great Depression included raising the standard of living for farmers, partly by bringing electricity to rural life. In 1933, farm country was characterized by outhouses, iceboxes, and a complete lack of street lights. By 1945, all that had changed.
An 1805 botanical illustration from London that depicts corn blight.
Sepia Times / Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Once they were on the power grid, farmers could buy equipment such as electric milk coolers and feed grinders that let them scale up their operations, but such things are expensive — only by expanding could farmers afford them. “It all makes sense if you rationalize it for economies of scale and make your farm into a factory,” Collingham said.
Then World War II hit, and much of agriculture’s workforce had to go off to fight. At the same time, the government had an army to feed and the general public to keep happy, so it really needed to keep the food supply coming. Machines were the answer — the war era solidified the shift from humans to tractors. And machines do best when they only perform one job, like harvesting a single crop, acre after acre.
Monocultures can be very efficient when they’re not contracting diseases, and that efficiency is part of what got the United States through the war. In fact, the system worked so well that “soldiers doing their training in America got fatter,” Collingham said. “A lot of them had never eaten so well in their lives.”
A botanical illustration that shows wheat rust on the left and corn blight on the right.
DeAgostini / Getty Images
Soon, small-scale farms growing diverse crops had largely retreated into the past in the Midwestern U.S. It’s not that anyone intended for the practice to be lost. It was simply “in many people’s minds, rendered obsolete,” said agronomist Matt Liebman, who recently retired from Iowa State University.
One might think the realization that biodiversity protects plant health is a new one, given that it wasn’t that long ago that biodiverse farming became a rare practice. But in fact, scientists and farmers have recognized this connection for at least centuries, and probably longer, said evolutionary biologist Amanda Gibson from the University of Virginia.
The basic concept is simple enough: A typical pathogen can only infect certain plant species. When that pathogen ends up on a species it can’t infect, that plant acts like a sinkhole. The pathogen can’t reproduce, so it’s neutralized, and nearby plants are spared.
Disease-resistant plants can also alter airflow in ways that keep plants dry and healthy and create physical barriers that block pathogen movement. Especially if they’re tall, resistant plants can act like fences that diseases have to hop over. “Somebody did a nice experiment taking dead corn stalks and just plopping them in the bean field,” said plant pathologist Gregory Gilbert from the University of California, Santa Cruz. “And that works, too, because it’s just keeping things from moving around.”
In nature, this dynamic between plants and pathogens can be part of healthy ecosystems. Pathogens spread easily between stands of the same species, killing off plants that are too close to their relatives and making sure landscapes have a healthy degree of biodiversity. As “social distancing” is restored between susceptible hosts, the disease dies down.
In monocultures, there are no sinkholes or natural fences to stem the spread of pathogens. Instead, when a disease takes hold in a crop field, it’s poised to burn through the entire thing. “We create amplification rather than dilution,” said Altieri.
New technology has driven home these old lessons: Over the last decade, it’s become possible for scientists to isolate a broad swath of the microbes found within a particular niche — like an ear of corn or a stalk of wheat — and use DNA sequencing to create a census-like list of everything that lives there.
The results have been unsettling, but not always unexpected. Plants in cultivated lands carry a significantly larger variety of viruses than those in adjacent biodiversity hotspots, plant and microbial ecologist Carolyn Malmstrom from Michigan State University and her colleagues found in one study.
Conversely, they later found that some fields of barley and wheatwere largely devoid of viruses, but that could also be a sign of problems to come. Pesticides may be keeping virus levels low — “So we might think, okay, yay, we’re protecting our crops,” Malmstrom said. But not all microbes are bad.
Wheat grows in a field along Mertz Road in Maxatawny Township, Pennsylvania.
Ben Hasty / MediaNews Group / Reading Eagle via Getty Images
“By pulling our crop systems out into a virus-free situation, we may also be removing them from some of the richness of the biodiversity of microbes that’s beneficial,” she added.
The bigger the farm, the more serious the disease problems, at least in the case of a pathogen called Potato virus Y,which leads to low potato yields. When researchers looked at the amount of simplified cropland surrounding a potato plant, they found that the prevalence of the pathogen went up steadily as the percentage of surrounding area covered in cropland increased. Unmanaged fields and forests, on the other hand — carrying wild mixes of plants — seemed to have a protective effect.
In natural landscapes, increasing biodiversity lowers the number of virus species present. But increasing biodiversity along the edges of crop fields doesn’t seem to have the same effect, plant ecologist Hanna Susi from the University of Helsinki found.
Fertilizers and other chemicals leached from the crops might affect the susceptibility of nearby plants to infection, she and her coauthor postulated. Beneficial microbes found on wild plants may be keeping many of these viruses from causing disease, but if the same viruses get into crops that lack that protection, “We don’t know what may happen,” she said. Farmers could find themselves dealing with new kinds of crop diseases.
On Altieri’s farm in the Colombian state of Antioquia, he mixes many plants — corn with squash, pineapples with legumes — and “We don’t have the diseases that neighbors have, that have monocultures,” he said.
The results of recent DNA sequencing experiments are familiar to him because traditional Latin American farmers have long used biodiversity to protect their crops. “These papers are good ecological research,” he said. “But actually, they’re basically reinventing the wheel.”
This old wheel does have to get over a new hill, however. Climate change is redistributing pathogens, bringing them into contact with new crops, and changing weather patterns in ways that foster disease.
Already, Liebman has seen the effects of climate change firsthand in Iowa, where tar spot disease — an infection that kills the leaves on corn plants — is on the rise. “We have warmer nights and more humid days,” he said. The tar spot pathogen loves the new weather.
Predicting exactly how much climate change will increase crop disease is difficult, said Singh. But there are some general conclusions he can draw.
Rising temperatures will likely favor certain pathogens that cause disease in major crops. A wheat-infecting fungus called Fusarium culmorum, for example, is likely to be replaced by its more aggressive and heat-tolerant relative, Fusarium graminearum. That could spell bad news for Nordic countries, where wheat crops could suffer.
Hotter temperatures will likely knock back other pathogens. A fungus that infects the herb meadowsweet, for example, has already begun dying out on islands off the coast of Sweden. In general, however, Singh thinks regions that are currently cold or temperate will likely see increases in crop disease as they warm.
For regions that are already warm, rising humidity could cause trouble. For example, parts of Africa and South America are among the regions that will probably see increases in fungus-like pathogens called Phytophthora. Food insecurity is already prevalent in some of these areas, and if nothing’s done to stop disease spread, that’s likely to get worse. “We need a lot more information,” Singh said. “But I agree that that is one of the scenarios that is a possibility.”
Jason Mauck farms “every which way,” in his words. The head of Constant Canopy Farm likes experimenting, seeing what works and what doesn’t. And on about 100 out of the 3,000 acres he tends to in Gaston, Indiana, one of his experiments involves a strategy called intercropping.
Intercropping with rows of corn planted alongside coffee at a farm in Brazil.
Lena Trindade / Brazil Photos / LightRocket via Getty Images
Intercropping means growing two or more crops in the same field, by alternating rows or mixing the crops within the same rows — it’s a modern reimagining of age-old techniques like those Altieri uses, and one way of introducing biodiversity into large-scale agriculture. In Mauck’s case, he’s planting wheat with soybeans. The wheat seeds go into the ground in October, and by February the plants are poking up through the soil. Then in April, he adds soybeans between the rows. The two crops grow together until the harvest, right around July 1.
Unlike the wheat Mauck grows in a monoculture, he doesn’t spray the intercropped wheat with fungicides at all — they simply don’t need the help to stay healthy. The combination of crops likely encourages air flow that dries moisture and prevents fungus from growing, Mauck said. With climate change bringing more extreme storms to the region, he welcomes the help.
Mauck’s experiences are far from unique. When biologist Mark Boudreau from Penn State Brandywine reviewed 206 studies on intercropping across a wide variety of plants and pathogens, he found that disease was reduced in 73 percent of the studies.
In China, farmers have been experimenting with intercropping for decades, and it’s catching on in Europe and the Middle East, Boudreau said. But in the American Midwest, Mauck said intercropping makes him “kind of a weirdo.” He speaks at about 20 conventions every year to spread the word about this and other sustainable farming practices, plus he has a lively social media following. He’s convinced some of his fellow farmers to try intercropping, but progress is slow.
Lack of equipment is a big part of the problem, said extension agronomist Clair Keene from North Dakota State University. Farm equipment companies haven’t invented the machine that will let farmers harvest mixed crops separately, and farmers usually don’t have the time to do multiple harvests. That would be an easy enough problem for farm equipment companies to solve, Boudreau thinks, if farmers put a bit of pressure on them.
In North Dakota, the humble chickpea might just provide the motivation farmers and farm equipment companies need. In recent years, the profit margin on chickpeas has been two to three times that of spring wheat — a common crop for the region. But there’s a problem: Chickpeas are very susceptible to a disease called Ascochyta leaf blight. “It can just wipe out the field. Like, there will be no chickpeas left to harvest,” Keene said. To avoid this fate, farmers spray their chickpeas with fungicides between two and five times a year, and the cost of the fungicides really cuts into the profit margin.
Intercropping could be an affordable alternative. Keene and others have found that Ascochyta leaf blight drops by at least 50 percent when chickpeas are grown along with flax. Like in Mauck’s fields, Keene thinks flax promotes airflow around the chickpeas, reducing moisture and preventing the blight-causing fungus from growing.
When Keene looks across the expansive crop fields that characterize her home state of North Dakota, she sees two sides to modern agriculture. On the one hand, monocultures have given many people a vital source of calories. “We as Americans — we’re using our landscape to provide a quality of life that, at least writ large, wasn’t ever dreamed of by generations before us,” she said. “And who’s making that happen? Farmers. We owe them a lot.”
But the same agricultural system has impacted the landscape dramatically, from the native plants that used to thrive in Midwestern prairies to the microbes that populate the soil. Changes are brewing in earth’s climate, and a system we’ve come to rely on may start to falter. Modern agriculture has offered humans comfort, “but,” Keene asked, “at what ecological cost?”
Electric vehicles are becoming more and more commonplace on the nation’s roadways.
The federal government wants nearly two-thirds of all cars in the United States to be EVs within the next decade. All the while, EVs are breaking sales records and manufacturers are building charging stations and production plants to incentivize a shift away from fossil fuels in the transportation sector.
With EVs taking the streets by storm, an unlikely industry now wants a piece of the pie.
Trade associations, fuel producers, and bipartisan lawmakers are pushing for biogas, fuel made from animal and food waste, to start receiving federal credits meant for powering electric vehicles.
The push for biogas-powered EVs would be a boon for the energy sector, according to biogas industry leaders. Environmental groups and researchers, however, say the fuel has yet to prove itself as a truly clean energy source. Biogas created from agriculture has been linked to an increase in waterway pollution and public health concerns that have disproportionately exposed low-income communities and communities of color to toxic byproducts of animal waste.
With the nation needing more ways to power fleets of Teslas and Chevy Bolts, the use of livestock manure to power EVs is still in limbo.
For biogas, there are, broadly speaking, three sources of waste from which to produce fuel: human waste, animal waste, and food waste. The source of this fuel input can be found at wastewater treatment plants, farms, and landfills.
At these locations, organic waste is deprived of oxygen, and a natural process known as anaerobic digestion occurs. Bacteria consume the waste products and eventually release methane, the main ingredient of natural gas. The gas is then captured, piped to a utility, turned into electricity, and distributed to customers.
Fuel created from animal waste isn’t a new concept. Farms around the country have been cashing in on biogas for decades, with a boom in production facilities known as anaerobic digesters expected after funding for their construction made it into the Inflation Reduction Act.
A man demonstrates a model Anaerobic digester in 2003 in Burlington, Vermont, where one of the nation’s largest dairy farm cooperatives announced plans to use manure from its thousands of cows to power a new fleet of milk-delivery trucks.
Toby Talbot / AP Photo
At the end of June, the Environmental Protection Agency finalized its Renewable Fuel Standard, or RFS, which outlines how much renewable fuels — products like corn-based ethanol, manure-based biogas, and wood pellets — are used to cut greenhouse gas emissions, as well as reduce the use of petroleum-based transportation fuel, heating oil, or jet fuel.
Under this program, petroleum-based fuels must blend renewable fuels into their supply. For example, each time the RFS is updated, a new goal for how much corn-based ethanol is mixed into the nation’s fuel supply is set. This prediction is based on gas and renewable fuel industry market projections.
These gas companies and refineries purchase credits from renewable fuel makers to comply with the mandated amount of renewable fuel that needs to be mixed into their supply.
An ethanol plant stands next to a cornfield near Nevada, Iowa, in 2013.
Charlie Riedel / AP Photo
A currency system tracks which renewable fuels are being produced and where they end up under the RFS. This system uses credits known as RINs, or Renewable Identification Numbers. According to the EPA, a single RIN is the energy equivalent of one gallon of ethanol, and the prices of the credits will fluctuate over time, just as gas prices do.
Oil companies and refineries purchase credits from renewable fuel makers to comply with the mandated amount of renewable fuel that needs to be mixed into their supply. The unique RIN credit proves that an oil seller has purchased, blended, and sold renewable fuel.
Currently, the biogas industry can only use its RIN credits when the fuel source is blended with ethanol or a particular type of diesel fuel. Outside of the federal program, biogas producers have been cashing in on low-carbon fuel programs in both California and Oregon.
With the boom in demand for renewable electricity, biogas producers want more opportunities to sell their waste-based fuels. EVs might get them there.
During recent RFS negotiations, the biogas industry urged the EPA to create a pathway for a new type of credit known as eRINs, or electric RINs. This pathway would allow the biogas and biomass industry to power the nation’s EVs directly. While the industry applauded the recent expansion of mandatory volumes of renewable fuels, the EPA did not decide on finalizing eRIN credits.
Patrick Serfass is the executive director of the American Biogas Council. He said the EPA could approve projects that would support eRINs for years, but has yet to approve the pathway for biogas fuel producers.
“It doesn’t matter which administration,” Serfass said. “The Obama administration didn’t do it. The Trump administration didn’t do it. The Biden administration so far hasn’t done it. EPA, do your job.”
Late last year, the EPA initially included approval of eRINs in the RFS proposal. Republican members of Congress who sit on the Energy & Commerce Committee sent a letter to the EPA, saying that the RFS is not meant to be a tool to electrify transportation.
“Our goal is to ensure that all Americans have access to affordable, available, reliable, and secure energy,” the committee members wrote. “The final design of the eRINs program under the RFS inserts uncertainty into the transportation fuels market.”
The RFS has traditionally supported liquid fuels that the EPA considers renewable, the main of which is ethanol. Stakeholders in ethanol production see the inclusion of eRINs as an overstep.
In May, Chuck Grassley, a Republican Senator from Iowa, introduced legislation that would outlaw EVs from getting credits from the renewable fuels program. Grassley has been a longtime supporter of the ethanol industry; Iowa alone makes up nearly a third of the nation’s ethanol production, according to the economic growth organization Iowa Area Development Group.
Serfass said biogas is a way to offset the nation’s waste and make small- and medium-sized farms economically sustainable, as well as local governments operating waste treatment plants and landfills. When it comes to animal waste, he said the eRIN program would allow farmers to make money off their waste by selling captured biogas to the grid to power EVs.
Buildings housing generators and an anaerobic digester are seen at Homestead Dairy in Plymouth, Indiana on July 13, 2015. The family-run farm invested in a biogas recovery system to transform cow manure and other waste into electricity.
MIRA OBERMAN / AFP via Getty Images
“There’s a lot of folks that don’t like large farms, and the reason that large farms exist is that as a society, we’re not always willing to pay six to nine dollars for a gallon of milk,” Serfass said. “You have farm consolidation so that farmers can just make a living.”
Initially, digesters were thought of as a climate solution and an economic boom for farmers, but in recent years, farms have stopped digester operations because of the hefty price tag to run them and their modest revenue. Biogas digesters are still operated by large operations, often with the help of fossil fuel companies, such as BP.
In addition to farms, Serfass said biogas production from food waste and municipal wastewater treatment plants would also be able to cash in on the eRIN program.
Dodge City, Kansas, a 30,000-person city in the western part of the state, is an example of a local government using biogas as a source of revenue. In 2018, the city began capturing methane from its sewage treatment and has since been able to generate an estimated $3 million a year by selling the fuel to the transportation sector.
Serfass said the city would be able to sell the fuel to power the nation’s EV charging grid if the eRIN program was approved.
The EPA’s decision-making will direct the next three years of renewable fuel production in the country. The program is often a battleground for different industry groups, from biogas producers to ethanol refineries, as they fight over their fuel’s market share.
Of note, the biomass industry, which creates fuel from wood pellets, forestry waste, and other detritus of the nation’s lumber supply and forests, also wants to be approved for future eRIN opportunities.
This fuel source has a questionable track record of being a climate solution: The industry has been linked to deforestation in the American South, and has falsely claimed they don’t use whole trees to produce electricity, according to a industry whistleblower.
The EPA did not answer questions from Grist as to why eRINs were not approved in its recent announcement.
“The EPA will continue to work on potential paths forward for the eRIN program, while further reviewing the comments received on the proposal and seeking additional input from stakeholders to inform potential next steps on the eRIN program,” the agency wrote in a statement.
An employee checks pressure vessels containing biomethane for electric buses at the Rostocker Straßenbah depot in Germany.
Jens Büttner / picture alliance via Getty Images
Ben Lilliston is the director of rural strategies and climate change at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. He said he supported the EPA’s decision to not approve biogas-created electricity for EVs.
“I think the jury is still out around biogas from large-scale animal operations about how effective they are,” Lilliston said.
He wants more independent studies to determine what a growing biogas sector under the eRIN program would mean for the rural areas and communities of color that surround these facilities.
Predominantly Black and low-income communities in southeastern North Carolina, have been exposed to decades of polluted waters and increased respiratory and heart disease rates related to the state’s hog industry, which has recently cashed in on the biogas sector.
In Delaware, residents of the largely rural Delmarva peninsula have become accustomed to the stench of the region’s massive poultry farms. These operations now want to cash in on their waste with the implementation of more biogas systems in a community where many residents are Black, or immigrants from Haiti and Latin America who speak limited English, according to The Guardian.
“I think that our concern, and many others, is that this is actually going to increase both emissions and waste and pollution,” Lilliston said.
Aaron Smith, a professor of agricultural economics at the University of California Davis, said electricity produced from biogas could be a red herring when it comes to cheap, clean energy.
“There’s often a tendency to say, ‘We have this pollutant like methane gas that escapes from a landfill or a dairy manure lagoon and if we can capture that and stop it from escaping into the atmosphere, that’s a win for the climate,’” Smith said. “But once we’ve captured it, should we do something useful with it? And the answer is maybe, but sometimes it’s more expensive to do something useful with it than it would be to go and generate that energy from a different source.”
Smith’s past research has found that the revenue procured by digesters has not been equal to the amount of methane captured by these systems. In a blog post earlier this year, Smith wrote that taxpayers and consumers are overpaying for the price of methane reduction. He found that the gasoline producers have essentially subsidized digester operations by way of the state’s low-carbon transportation standards. To pay for this, the gasoline industry offloads its increased costs by raising the price of gas for consumers.
“I think we do need to be wary about over-incentivizing these very expensive sources of electricity generation under the guise of climate games,” Smith told Grist.
This story is part of Record High, a Grist series examining extreme heat and its impact on how — and where — we live.
Josh Payne planted chestnut trees six years ago. The rows of nut trees haven’t fully matured yet, but he’s banking on the future shade they’ll provide to shield his animals from sweltering heat.
“We started with that largely because we want to get out of commodity agriculture,” Payne said. “But also because I’m worried that in our area it’s getting hotter and drier.”
Payne operates a 300-acre regenerative farm in Concordia, Missouri, an hour outside of Kansas City, where he raises sheep and cattle. By planting 600 chestnut trees, he is bracing for a future of extreme heat by adapting an agriculture practice known as silvopasture. Rooted in preindustrial farming, the method involves intentionally incorporating trees on the same land used by grazing livestock, in a way that benefits both. Researchers and farmers say silvopastures help improve the health of the soil by protecting it from wind and water, while encouraging an increase of nutrient-rich organic matter, like cow manure, onto the land.
It also provides much-needed natural shade for livestock. According to the First Street Foundation, a nonprofit climate change research group, chunks of America’s heartland — including Kansas, Iowa, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Missouri — could experience at least one day with temperatures of 125 degrees Fahrenheit or hotter by 2053.
When temperatures rise above 80 degrees, the heat begins to take a toll on animals, which will try to cool themselves down by sweating, panting, and seeking shelter. If they are unable to lower their body temperature, the animals will breathe harder, becoming increasingly fatigued, and eventually die.
Research shows that as the planet warms, livestock deaths will increase. Last year, when temperatures exceeded 100 degrees in southwestern Kansas, roughly 2,000 cattle in the state died; the Kansas Livestock Association estimated each cow to be worth $2,000 if they were market-ready, equaling an economic loss of $4 million. And so far this year, the trend is continuing, with livestock producers in Iowa already reporting hundreds of cattle deaths in the latter half of July alone.
According to the United States Department of Agriculture, or USDA, the ideal temperature for beef and dairy cows ranges between 44 and 77 degrees. Above those temperatures, heat stress causes cattle to produce less milk and decreases their fertility.
Payne’s family farm is a microcosm of American agriculture’s monocrop past and its changing future. He inherited the land from his grandfather, who spent decades tearing trees out of the ground in favor of growing corn and soybeans, using chemical fertilizers for years. His family was hardly alone in doing so: Along with cattle, corn and soybeans make up the top three farm products in the U.S., according to the industry group American Farm Bureau.
Missouri produced nearly $94 billion of agricultural products last year — an economic driver under threat from climate change, which has brought more intense floods and droughts to the state. Last year, the Mississippi River, which flows through Missouri, reached severely low water levels in the face of a historic drought, stopping the barge travel that supports the country’s agricultural economy. When Payne spoke to Grist in July, he was hoping for rain to come soon amid the humid 98-degree heat.
To prevent harm to his 600 sheep and 25 cattle, Payne currently uses portable structures to provide artificial shade while he waits for his chestnut trees to mature. This technology acts like a big umbrella that can be moved as a herd moves, but it doesn’t protect animals from reflected heat and sun rays from the sides the same way a tree canopy can.
In addition to the shade his future nut trees will provide, they’ll be a source of income, too. Payne said it’s likely he’ll make more money on 30 acres of chestnut trees than he would on 300 acres of row crops like corn.
“We’re rethinking the farm process based on climate predictions,” Payne said. “Here we are planting trees in our pastures, so that in 10 to twelve years we can have dappled shade.”
Planting trees in a field seems almost too simple as a way to keep livestock safe and healthy in a hotter world. But Ashley Conway-Anderson, a researcher at the University of Missouri Center for Agroforestry, knows better. She said of all the USDA’s land management systems used to blend forest and livestock, silvopasture is the most complicated, as it requires a delicate balance between planted trees, natural forests and brush, and livestock.
But she will admit the practice is common sense.
“Trees provide shade. That’s the place where you want to be when it’s hot, right?” Conway-Anderson said. “The idea behind a well-managed silvopasture is your taking that shade and dispersing it across the field.”
Conway-Anderson said farmers are adapting their land to silvopastures at a time when agriculture as a whole is wrestling with its role in climate change. The sector accounts for roughly 11 percent of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions, according to the USDA.
In addition to mitigating extreme heat risks and promoting soil health, trees planted on pastures and fields act as a way to sequester carbon out of the atmosphere through the process of photosynthesis. Project Drawdown, a nonprofit known for its expansive list of practices to prevent further climate harm, estimates that silvopastures could sequester five to 10 times the amount of carbon than a treeless pasture of the same size.
Notably, however, while carbon accounts for the main source of human-caused greenhouse gasses, agriculture’s role in a warming planet largely comes from methane produced by livestock and their waste. But silvopastures help combat that — animals that move around to graze end up trampling on their waste, working it into the soil where it’s repurposed as a natural fertilizer; in contrast, most farm operations pool all livestock waste together in large ponds from which a concentration of methane is then emitted.
Conway-Anderson said agroforestry and silvopastures aren’t always a one-size-fits-all solution. She said farmers are having to “get big or get out,” and aren’t always able to invest the time or money in planting trees or revitalizing woodland they might already own.
“We’ve created an economic system where we have incentivized and subsided specific crops, products, and ways of doing farming and agriculture that has really sucked the air out of the room for smaller, diversified operations,” she said.
On the other hand, she said silvopasture practices can be successful because of their flexibility. Farmers can use trees they already own. They can graze goats, pigs, sheep, cattle, and more under the shade of nut trees, fruit trees, and trees whose trimmings and branches can be harvested and sold to the lumber industry.
“Silvopastures are not a silver bullet,” Conway-Anderson said. “But at this point, I don’t think we have any silver bullets anymore.”
At Hidden Blossom Farms in Union, Connecticut, a rural town located near the border of Massachusetts, Joe Orefice has been methodical in his implementation of silvopasture.
Orefice, a Yale School of the Environment professor of agroforestry, raises tunnel-grown vegetables, figs, and roughly two dozen grass-fed cows that enjoy the shade of apple trees on a 134-acre farm. He said there are currently only two acres of fruit trees the cattle use for cover.
Despite the small acreage, Orefice said, he has focused primarily on soil health, a key aspect of silvopasture management. Without properly maintained grasses and soil, trees won’t grow, and there wouldn’t be any shade for his cattle.
“You need to manage the grasses so young trees will grow,” he said.
In addition to land management and soil health, Orefice said the animal welfare benefits of shade were top of mind.
“I don’t want to eat a big meal if I’m sitting in the sun on a hot and humid day, and we want our cattle to eat big meals because that’s how they grow or keep their calves healthy by producing milk,” he said.
Orefice said a common misconception about silvopasture leads to farmers just taking livestock they own and putting them in the forest without any additional management. He said this can damage soil when livestock, especially pigs, aren’t routinely moved. While it might seem counterintuitive, he said one of the first steps of creating a proper silvopasture from an existing forest is to trim trees and till the soil.
While he only raises 25 beef cattle, Orefice said he’s seen larger farms begin to implement silvopasture practices. He said raising tree crops, like nuts or figs and other fruits, is a boon for farmers who switch to more diversified crop operations versus large, concentrated animal-feeding operations.
For example, Orefice noted that if farmers in the Corn Belt, who are facing continued droughts and an extreme heat future, switched to tree crops, the upfront costs might be expensive and hard. Still, they would eventually make more money on tree crops than on corn or soybeans. The problem, as he sees it, is there is no incentive or safety net for farmers to begin to adopt these practices at the same rate as they have mainstream ones.
“The question isn’t really, ‘Is silvopasture scalable?’” Orefice said. “The question is, ‘Does our economy allow us to scale pasture-based livestock production?’”
As rural Arizonans face the prospect of wells running dry, foreign firms are sucking up vast amounts of the state’s groundwater to grow hay for Saudi Arabia and other wealthy nations. Now it turns out that a key investor in this water transfer scheme is Arizona’s own employee retirement fund. In La Paz County, a rural community about 100 miles west of Phoenix, Al Dahra Farms USA has been running a…
Cruising by on a boat, it’s easy to miss Jake Patryn’s farm, which looks like nothing more than an unassuming row of red and white buoys floating just off the coast of Machias, Maine. The crop he and co-founder Morgan-Lea Fogg gather each spring lies just below the surface: long lines of slick brown sugar kelp. After growing nearly 10 feet during the winter — amassing vitamins, minerals, and fatty acids along the way — the kelp is primed for its moment in the sun. A quick taste test proves it true: Their crop is ready to harvest.
This marks Patryn’s sixth year as a seaweed farmer, but he’s been working on the water for much longer. Hailing from a commercial lobstering family in Maine, Patryn sees cultivating this marine crop as a lifeline for a community threatened by fishing’s uncertain future. While he still casts his traps on occasion, farming kelp by hand and selling it as snacks and seasonings has become his main focus.
It may seem quaint compared to the industrial operations that grow most of the world’s food, but outfits like Patryn’s Nautical Farms are poised to skyrocket in number over the next few years. Now seen as a “future-proof” material, seaweed is a hardy, fast-growing protein source useful for everything from biofuel to petroleum-free plastic to consumer goods like utensils, soap, clothing, and of course, food. The World Bank said raising this versatile crop in just 5 percent of U.S. territorial waters would produce as much protein as 2.3 trillion hamburgers and sequester the carbon emissions of 20 million cars.
Although China, Indonesia, South Korea, and the Philippines still account for more than 95 percent of global production, farms in North America – particularly British Columbia, Alaska, and Maine – are cropping up to meet demand. But just like industrial agriculture on land, such operations can harm the environment – and given the role kelp forests play in sequestering carbon, the climate. Monocropping, the introduction of non-native species, and poor management have led the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration to declare “commercial kelp harvesting is potentially the greatest threat to long-term kelp stability nationwide.”
In response, cultivators are calling for more policies to govern their business and protect waterways and marine ecosystems. This climate work is no less critical than reducing the world’s demand for beef or easing its dependence on fossil fuels because this ubiquitous plant provides essential habitat for hundreds of marine species, offers protection from storms and coastal erosion, and draws millions of tons of carbon out of the atmosphere each year. Marine algae also provide around 50 percent of the planet’s oxygen. Seaweed is, in many ways, already saving the world. People like Patryn want to make sure their growing industry doesn’t do anything to mess that up.
“I don’t think it would be a good idea to have thousands of kelp farms all up and down the coast of Maine, peppered in every single bay,” he said. “Growing this industry overnight would be a good way to to tarnish it before it even gets off the ground.”
Jake Patryn harvests sugar kelp from his farm, Nautical Farms, in Englishman Bay off the coast of Machias, Maine.
Leia Marasovich
Thousands of species of seaweed fill the world’s oceans, but only a handful are cultivated for human consumption. In North America, kelps, which thrive in cold, shallow, nutrient-rich waters, are the most commonly farmed varieties.
In the wild, thick ribbons of the stuff stretch up to 200 feet long, sheltering a wide variety of sea life. Rumor has it that the sheer size of South American kelp forests led Charles Darwin to remark, “I can only compare these great aquatic forests with the terrestrial ones in the inter-tropical region. Yet if in any country a forest was destroyed, I do not believe nearly so many species of animals would perish as would here, from the destruction of the kelp.”
Growing the stuff is remarkably straightforward: Farmers cast seedlings out on ropes and submerge them until they’re ready to harvest a few months later. It’s also relatively cheap. Seaweed is a “zero-input crop,” meaning it doesn’t need any additional food, fertilizer, or freshwater to grow. Bren Smith, who started the regenerative ocean farming company GreenWave, writes in his book Eat Like a Fishthat anyone with $20,000 and a boat has enough to start harvesting 10 tons of kelp per acre — and net as much as $120,000 per year doing it, given they find the right buyer.
When Patryn and Fogg started Nautical Farms back in 2017, they were lucky to grow a few hundred pounds in a season. Now, they’re managing a 5-acre sea farm in Englishman Bay and cultivating thousands of pounds of kelp in the process. They used to sell their harvest to a few buyers, but these days they have as many as half a dozen part-time employees helping them dry sugar kelp, skinny kelp, and alaria themselves to make nearly a dozen different snacks and other goods.
Most of the nation’s seaweed farming occurs in their home state of Maine, with its abundance of cold, clean water and working waterfronts, and in Alaska, which has those things and the nation’s longest coastline. The two states account for more than 85 percent of the U.S. supply of edible seaweed. The 27 operations within Atlantic Sea Farms in Maine, for example, harvested nearly 1 million pounds last year. A 100-acre Alaskan operation owned by Premium Aquatics, which sells its bounty under the brand Seagrove Kelp Co, has become the largest kelp farm in the U.S in the four years since its founding.
The nutrient-rich and biodiverse waters around Vancouver provide another thriving location for kelp cultivation. Cascadia Seaweed, also founded in 2019, operates eight farms covering 62 acres. It plans to have 1,235 acres under cultivation by 2025 (and that many more pending development) as it looks to expand more than tenfold in the next decade. Government funding has given the company a good head start: It has provided two grants worth $5.8million to help build a new farm and processing facility.
Since most U.S. seaweed farms sit within a few miles of shore, they are governed by state laws, which can vary widely. Maine limits farm size from 400 square feet to 100 acres depending on the lease, for example, while Alaska strictly regulates where species may be grown. Still, there are no national regulations monitoring seaweed farming. Canada doesn’t have much in the way of rules, either. There are currently no policies around farm size or native seed collection in British Columbia.
Harvesting sugar kelp from Sea Quester, a farm off the coast of Juneau, Alaska.
Salwan Georges/The Washington Post via Getty Images
While this piecemeal approach has worked out so far, industry insiders wonder how it will hold up as farms become larger and drift further from shore. Growing enough seaweed for the biofuel needed to meet the nation’s energy needs, for example, will require more than a few buoys in a bay.
Amanda Swinimer of Dakini Tidal Wilds, who has been wild-harvesting seaweed off the west coast of Vancouver Island since 2003, believes the seaweed industry has already started sneaking up on policy — with potentially costly results. “There was no need to have regulations around seaweed farming before because nobody was doing it before,” she said. “But now, if both the feds and the provincial government are throwing the kind of money at it that they are, policymakers should be doing primary research and putting some basic regulations in place.”
One question looming over the North American seaweed market is how big is too big. Large-scale monoculture outposts covering 100 acres or more could starve the surrounding ecosystem of nutrients, obstruct wildlife migration patterns, or prevent sunlight from reaching other flora and fauna. Massive seaweed operations in Asia offer a cautionary tale. In China, where farms can cover 15,000 acres, pests and bactia infections present a growing concern. Some diseases are triggered by abiotic factors: Unfavorable conditions like too much or too little light have provided the conditions they need to spread rapidly, ruining an estimated 25 to 30 percent of annual seaweed harvests and changing the microbial structure of nearby ecosystems.
“There’s always going to be a point where you get too much of a good thing,” Scott Lindell, a marine farming researcher at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, said. “And we don’t know where that breaking point is.”
The introduction of non-native species also could pose a risk. Seaweed farmers choose strains that are resilient, fast-growing, and tolerant to many conditions — precisely the traits, scientists warn, that could allow them to overwhelm their habitat and crowd out other species. Varieties that are new to an area also can carry dangerous “hitchhikers.”
“You can’t guarantee that you’re just importing the seaweed,” said marine biosecurity researcher Elizabeth Cottier-Cook. “There will be other things like microorganisms attached to that seaweed that could then cause disease and spread to wild native strains as well.”
Seaweed farms can also be vehicles for food-borne diseases when improperly managed, as seen with a Salmonella outbreak traced to a Hawaiian seaweed farm in 2016.
Rapid growth of an industry that gets ahead of market demand could lead to significant waste issues, too, said Anoushka Concepcion, who works in marine aquaculture for NOAA’s Sea Grant program in Connecticut. She points out that the reason government-funded farms in China or Korea can stay afloat is because they feed populations accustomed to eating seaweed many times a day. The average American palate doesn’t have the same taste for the sea veggie, so barring quick innovation on the biofuel and bioplastic fronts (still very much in their infancy), huge seaweed farms in the West could leave whole lot of product left to rot.
Finally, Swinimer, who makes her living harvesting wild seaweed, worries about the risk of farmed seaweed mixing with wild strains. Seaweed hybridization has already happened off Oslofjord, an inlet of Southeast Norway, to unknown consequence.
“There are fewer boundaries in the ocean than there are on land,” Swinimer said, introducing the threat of genetic intermingling. Given the essential role seaweed, particularly kelp forests (often called the sequoias of the sea), plays in sequestering carbon and providing oxygen, Swinimer is worried about the risks industrial-scale cultivation has on this invaluable organism.
“Seaweed is already saving the world from climate change,” she said. “If we mess with that, we are going to be in big, big trouble.”
A seaweed harvest at a kelp farm in Rongcheng, Shandong Province of China.
VCG/VCG via Getty Images
When considering how to regulate the seaweed industry to mitigate potential climate pitfalls, Cottier-Cook points to a “restorative aquaculture” model that would incentivize ecologically beneficial farming. Governments could, for example, pay farmers for the carbon their crops capture; a new type of blue subsidy. Smith’s company GreenWave is testing this idea with its Kelp Climate Fund, which awards farmers up to $25,000 per season for the carbon and nitrogen capture and reef restoration they provide.
Encouraging the growth of hyper-native seaweeds will also make sense in some places. Alaska leads the way here, with state laws that require farmers to collect their kelp seeds from within 50 kilometers (about 31 miles) of their grow site each year to ensure their crops share their genetic makeup with local wild stocks. Laws that prohibit altering the marine ecosystem in any way, like Maine’s strict regulations that fine farmers for abandoned gear, could also help keep quell aquaculture’s environmental impact.
While the process to secure an seaweed farming lease is closely regulated by a state’s department of marine resources or environmental conservation, government involvement fades once the first lines are dropped in the water. While Concepcion notes that some states are talking about enforcing more rigorous inspections and penalties, it’s a slow process in a new industry that still has so many question marks. “Agencies are hesitant to establish a policy because they don’t know what to expect,” Concepcion said. “They don’t want to add additional requirements to farmers that make it harder to get involved. But at the same time, they want to be cautious because they don’t want an accident to happen. So right now it’s still a lot of vetting of information, and a lot of discussion.”
The most important decisions have not yet been made. The regulations policymakers pass in the next few years ultimately will determine not only how and where seaweed is grown, but whose hands (or if the techies get their way, robotic appendages) grow it. Will the farms of the future be owned by massive corporations, or by local cooperatives? Those in coastal communities whose livelihoods hinge on ocean health would argue for the latter.
“The people who I think should be in kelp farming are fishermen who already know how to work on the water, already have a boat, and already have another generation coming up underneath them to raise on the water,” said Patryn.
Dune Lankard, an Eyak Athabaskan Native of the Eagle Clan from Cordova, Alaska, also transitioned from fishing to kelp farming after watching local fisheries collapse. He started the non-profit Native Conservancy to help other Native peoples start kelp farms in order to maintain food sovereignty and cultivate a resource that has long been a part of their ways of life.
If passed, the federal Coastal Seaweed Farm Act of 2023 would help further this mission by establishing an Indigenous seaweed farming fund and publishing a report outlining how to responsibly scale seaweed in the U.S. with the help of Indigenous knowledge.
A spokesperson for U.S. Representative Mary Peltola of Alaska, who introduced the bill with Representative Jared Huffman of California in March, said it has received positive feedback and the lawmakers hope it will be included in this year’s farm bill.
As seaweed inhabits the liminal space between land and sea, it holds the opportunity to build a new food sector that is more equitable, efficient, and environmentally informed than those that came before it. By incentivizing restoration, prioritizing native planting, taking a precautionary approach to expansion, and centering coastal community knowledge, the industry can grow in a fast yet controlled and methodical way. In short, it can grow like seaweed itself.
Amanda Swinimer of Dakini Tidal Wilds heads for her wild seaweed “garden” off the coast of Vancouver Island.
Emma Geiger
This story was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.
Five homeschoolers pick fist-size garlic cloves, green jalapeños, strawberries, squash and kale on a breezy Thursday morning in late June. They’re volunteering at a local food garden where bright orange marigolds attract bees from a local keeper’s hive.
The 1-acre garden has yielded about 10,000 pounds of produce for six food pantries since it began harvesting in April 2022. Texan by Nature, which manages the garden and was founded by former First Lady Laura Bush, estimates it has served approximately 2,000 people per month in Limestone, Freestone and Leon counties.
Located in Freestone County about 60 miles east of Waco, NRG Dewey Prairie Garden is a part of a massive effort to restore a 35,000-acre lignite coal mine, which stretches mainly into the town of Jewett and used to fuel NRG’s Limestone Electric Generating Station, a 1,688-megawatt power plant. An NRG spokesperson said the coal plant began running on cleaner-burning coal from Wyoming in 2016.
That’s when the company halted mining locally after more than three decades.
Debbie Glaze, a lead gardener for Texan by Nature, says it’s hard to imagine the garden was once a coal mine. The company has set aside 9 more acres to expand the garden, which was started as a pilot project.
Volunteers prepare fresh vegetables donated by the Dewey Prairie Garden for distribution at the Lord’s Pantry of Leon County in Buffalo.
Joe Timmerman/The Texas Tribune
“You wouldn’t think that this could happen,” Glaze said. “I think it is amazing that the ground is actually growing all these vegetables after all that mine digging.”
The Jewett mine’s manager, Michael Altavilla, said he hopes the garden can show how the industry can work with local communities for everybody’s benefit.
“The mining industry has always been seen like we’re the bad guys, we’re destroying the Earth,” Altavilla said. “We want to take people out and show them this form of reclamation, a second purpose, not only mining the coal for energy, but utilizing the ground afterward.”
Company set aside $112 million to restore mine
Lignite was first mined in Texas during the 1850s and was produced primarily from underground mines, but declined in the early 1950s as the oil and gas industry grew in the state. Around the same time, companies began surface mining — which includes strip mining and open-pit mining — to provide fuel for power plants and the concrete industry.
The new mines harvested lignite coal, a form of soft coal that often lies close to the surface. Lignite mining led to bulldozing forests, burying streams, destroying wildlife habitat and leaving the ground contaminated with arsenic, lead and other toxins considered unsafe for human exposure after the mines closed.
In 1975, the Texas Legislature authorized the Texas Railroad Commission, which oversees Texas’ oil and gas industry, to regulate surface coal mining. In 1977, the federal government created a fund to help pay for cleaning up old mines and required companies to restore the land to its prior condition after closing a mine.
A truck drives on a dirt road that winds through a section of the NRG Jewett Mine that is undergoing environmental reclamation.
Joe Timmerman/The Texas Tribune
As part of the federal law, a new agency, the Surface Mining and Reclamation Division, was given responsibility to enforce all the new regulations. The Railroad Commission began requiring companies mining coal in Texas to get a state permit and post a bond for each mining site they operate in the state to pay for restoration later.
But the agency has been criticized for allowing companies to do the bare minimum in cleaning up contaminated soil and water at mining sites and failing to enforce the law, according to a 2019 investigation by The Texas Tribune and Grist.
NRG has bonds totaling $112 million to restore the Jewett mine, a process that began in 1986, a year after mining began. Companies commonly do reclamation work even as they’re still mining a site. The reclamation process can take eight to 12 years.
So far, the company says it has replanted 3,500 acres with native grasses, is creating 700 acres of wetlands and has fully reclaimed 5,590 acres at the Jewett mine.
Moving dirt and replanting old mine pits
About 8 miles from the garden at another end of the mine site, Joe Harris, a 56-year-old Jewett mine reclamation specialist, wears a reflective vest and a hardhat as he prepares to jump into his pickup truck to snap progress photos of the restoration work.
Harris drives up and down the slopes around mining pits to where the dragline, a massive excavator with a bucket, is working. There’s a clear divide in the ground, from the orange-brown dirt at the surface to the gray deposits down in the pits where coal was extracted. The 300-foot-tall excavator, with a bucket the size of a two-car garage, has the first and most crucial step in returning the land to its original form — refilling those holes.
Mark Payne, who’s been working at the mine for 37 years and operating the dragline for 17 years, wears denim on denim and black sunglasses as he operates the machine from an air-conditioned control room inside the machine’s body. Using levers that look like something from an old arcade game, Payne moves about 150 tons of dirt at a time as country music plays on the radio.
Dragline operator Mark Payne excavates and moves tons of dirt at the mine, where he has worked for 37 years.
Joe Timmerman/The Texas Tribune
“We’ve been in this part of the mine trying to fill the hole in for almost a year. It takes quite a long while,” Payne said.
Once the pit is filled with soil, the company is required to plant grasses and vegetation similar to what’s growing nearby.
“During the springtime, we plant bermuda grass, in the summer millet and in the fall they plant rye grass,” Harris said.
Once the seeding is done, the company enters a five-year monitoring period during which the soil and water is regularly tested to check for toxic materials.
Inspectors from the Railroad Commission’s Surface Mining and Reclamation Division make monthly visits to mine sites to review test results and check that the company is following reclamation regulations.
The area that includes the garden was monitored for years, and the bond money was released back to the company in 2013, close to 10 years before the garden began harvesting produce. Recent soil reports submitted to the state show the soil is fertile with no toxic-forming materials present.
Dewey, the farm cat, cools off in the dirt while volunteer gardeners pick vegetables from the Dewey Prairie Garden in Donie.
Joe Timmerman/The Texas Tribune
At another portion of the mine where seeding has already happened, enormous stretches of grasslands are marked by white PVC pipes that have defining stripes: A green stripe means it is under evaluation, while red stripes mean the site has been fully reclaimed.
Harris said the best part of working at the Jewett mine for the past three decades is seeing the land being restored after being here when it was initially scraped to harvest the coal.
“I’ve seen the mining, the clearing, to everything,” Harris said. “I take a lot of pride in this. We want it to look like it was never mined before so when I bring my grandchildren and great-grandchildren, I can say, ‘Look, there was once a mine here.’”
Garden feeds local families
About 16 miles from the mine, garden volunteers deliver zucchini, kale and other produce to a food pantry in Buffalo, a town of about 1,700 where residents have few grocery store options.
Amy Windham, a 37-year-old pantry client and single mother of three, says she always tries to be the first one here because she wants first dibs on the fresh-picked produce.
Volunteers and employees at the Leon Community Food Pantry and Clothes Closet in Jewett work together to cart food to a client.
Joe Timmerman/The Texas Tribune
“Moving up here from Houston, it was such a culture shock because down [in Houston] there is a grocery store on every corner and here it’s only Brookshire [Brothers],” she said. “So that’s the one thing I appreciate about this pantry. The produce is better, you can tell.”
She grabs a cart, and Richard Dahlgrem, 80, a pantry volunteer, helps her pick out groceries. There’s a limit on how much each customer can take depending on the size of their household, but everything is free.
Dahlgrem said it’s nice to see resources from the old mine being poured back to help the community, especially those who are struggling to feed their families.
“What was brought in today is a good indication of what can come from people purposely doing something to help somebody,” he said.
Disclosure: NRG has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.
A Saudi-owned farm in the middle of the Arizona desert has attracted national attention and criticism since Reveal’s Nate Halverson and Ike Sriskandarajah first broke this story eight years ago. The farm is using massive amounts of water to grow hay and export it to Saudi Arabia in the midst of a water crisis in the American West.
Since then, megafarms have taken hold here. And the trend isn’t fueled just by foreign companies. Many people have no idea that their retirement funds are backing massive land deals that result in draining precious groundwater. Halverson uncovers that pension fund managers in Arizona knew they were investing in a local land deal, which resulted in draining down the aquifer of nearby communities. So even as local and state politicians have fought to stop these deals, their retirement fund has been fueling them.
And it’s not just happening in Arizona. Halverson takes us to Southern California, where retirement money also was invested in a megafarm deal. This time, the farm was tapping into the Colorado River to grow hay and ship it overseas. And it was happening as the federal and state governments have been trying to conserve river water.
Halverson’s investigation into water use in the West is just one slice of his reporting into a global scramble for food and water, which is featured in an upcoming documentary, “The Grab” by director Gabriela Cowperthwaite. “The Grab” will be coming soon to a theater or screen near you.
This story was originally published by Modern Farmerand is republished with permission.
Hans Schmitz, an Indiana wheat farmer, made a difficult decision this year. In a last-minute call, he planted only 100 acres of wheat, roughly half the amount of seed he usually grows. The soil just wouldn’t allow for any more.
“We felt it was too dry. And when we did get rain right at the end of the planting window, we had some issues with flooding,” he says.
Instead, Schmitz opted to plant soybeans—a less lucrative crop. “We sacrificed on the scale of 100 bucks an acre.”
Schmitz isn’t the only farmer challenged by a changing climate. So far, however, those challenges have not resulted in lower crop yields. Just the opposite. American farmers are producing more than ever, USDA statistics show.
The United States saw record yields across the board in 2021 at 894 pounds per acre—a 21-percent increase from the year before—according to the USDA. Yields were down slightly from those record figures in 2022, but they were still above average.
Crop production has improved by multiple metrics, says Ariel Ortiz-Bobea, an applied economist who studies the impact of climate change on agriculture at Cornell. “What you really want to know is how all the outputs are growing relative to the inputs [such as water and fertilizer],” he says. “That gives you a measure of how productive you are.”
Even by this measurement, agricultural productivity is on the rise, says Ortiz-Bobea, citing USDA data. Farm output is even outpacing population growth, he says, meaning farmers are still producing more than enough to feed everyone in the United States.
But researchers wonder how long those technologies and innovations can stay ahead of a warming world. A 2021 Cornell study, for example, found that farmers have lost seven years of productivity growth over the last 60 years because of climate change.
Ortiz-Bobea notes climate change decimated cropland in parts of the global south, leading to widespread malnutrition and mass migration, and he hopes the struggles in those regions are not a harbinger of what is to come in the United States as the world grows hotter and dryer.
How does climate change impact crops?
Production has trended upward in recent years, even as drought ravaged the southern sun belt and heavy spring rains overwhelmed midwestern fields. Farmers and experts attribute increased production to advances in agricultural techniques and a better understanding of how crops handle bad weather.
“Farmers have large, high-speed GPS-controlled planters, and they can plant a lot of crops in a short amount of time even though the window to plant might be shorter,” says Fred Below, a crop physiologist and professor at the University of Illinois.
Still, according to Below, “The weather is the number one factor that influences crop yield.”
In some ways, a warming world helps farmers. Warmer weather extended planting seasons by between 10 and 15 days in the Midwest. But the harmful conditions far outweigh any benefits, experts say.
“We’re seeing warmer lows,” says Dennis Todey, director of the USDA Midwest Climate Hub. “Nights are not cooling down as much and that has a different look than if you have warmer daytime highs.” Higher nighttime temperatures stress crops. Soybeans, for example, grow more quickly in warmer conditions, which reduces yields.
“We see warmer temperatures in February and March, and small grains such as winter wheat will grow and enter reproductive stages earlier. Then you get a cold spell in April or May and you can see frost damage because [the plant is] triggered to grow earlier than it should,” says Laura Lindsey, a soybean and small grain agronomist at Ohio State University’s extension service.
But one of the most difficult changes to cope with is rainfall. As the climate changes, spring rains are growing more intense and summers are experiencing more prolonged droughts.
Total rainfall is rising in some parts of the country, but periods of rain are growing fewer and further between—rather than 15 days with two inches or rain, regions such as the midwest might experience 10 days with four inches of rain.
“One of the biggest things we’re seeing in Illinois is an increase in rainfall and rainfall intensity,” says Illinois State Climatologist Trent Ford. “It’s about five inches wetter, which wouldn’t be a big deal if patterned out in the right way. A lot of that is coming in increasing intensity, with really large amounts of rain.”
To make matters worse, soil can only absorb so much water and the excess erodes into nearby rivers and streams, taking expensive fertilizer with it.
“You’re left with a fraction of your fertilizer for the crop,” says Ford.
Agricultural resilience
Experts note that American farmers have an advantage over growers in less developed nations because the United States has a department of agriculture that researches growing conditions and land grant universities in every state, with extension services working directly with farmers. The USDA also offers monetary help such as crop insurance that gives farmers financial assurances.
Crops such as corn and soybeans are also bred to use less water or to grow to a shorter height, making it less vulnerable to the intense winds that come with climate change.
“There are marker-assisted genetics in corn that impart some water use traits,” says Below. “These contain marker-assisted genes that optimize water use.”
However, experts like Ortiz-Bobea warn that the same planting techniques helping farmers adapt now could hurt them in the future if drought proliferates. For example, corn farmers are planting rows of corn closer together to squeeze the highest yield out of limited acres.
In some respects, this strategy works. However, when roots are closer together, competition for scarce water intensifies, making the crop more vulnerable to drought, says Ortiz-Bobea.
How long can technology overtake climate?
Researchers disagree over whether or not the increase in crop yields is sustainable with climate change hovering over the agriculture industry like the sword of Damocles.
“Climate change is not the destroyer of agriculture in Illinois,” says Ford. “The negative impacts are making things a bit more complicated. It’s changing things, and so it really requires a broad perspective of how we’re doing agriculture in the Midwest and maybe we can do it more effectively in the face of these changes.”
However, data shows that a warming planet has made a difference. In a study of crop production last year, researchers at Cornell concluded that yields would be 21% higher over the past 50 years if the weather was consistent from year to year.
And the extreme rain and prolonged drought vexing farmers are only projected to get worse.
“These very bad years are going to become more frequent,” says Ortiz-Bobea.
While some experts are hopeful, no one can say with certainty that advances in science and technology will continue to make up for the increasing frequency of drought and extreme rain.
If the temperature and precipitation continue to change at the pace growers have seen in recent years, a warming world may eventually outpace farmers’ capacity to adapt to it.
A new kind of food may soon be arriving on grocery store shelves: climate smart. Under the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities, a nascent U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) program, this amalgam of farming methods aims to keep the American agricultural juggernaut steaming ahead while slashing the sector’s immense greenhouse gas footprint.
This spring, the Biden administration began allocating $3.1 billion to hundreds of agriculture organizations, corporations, universities, and nonprofits for climate-smart projects. These entities will pass most of the money on to tens of thousands of farmers, ranchers, and forest owners, including growers who manage thousands of acres and underserved and disadvantaged farmers who often have much smaller operations. The first agreements have now been signed; the money is starting to flow.
The USDA estimates that the 141 funded projects will, collectively over the project’s five-year lifetime, eliminate or sequester the equivalent of 60 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions, on par with removing more than 2.4 million gas-powered cars from the road over the same period. They will achieve this by paying growers to adopt practices thought to either reduce greenhouse gas emissions or capture carbon dioxide from the air. These practices include reducing or eliminating tilling of soil, planting “cover crops” that grow during the off-season and are not harvested, improving how farmers use fertilizer and manure, and planting trees.
More importantly, the agency aims to catalyze new, premium markets for products such as climate-smart corn, soybeans, and beef, which it hopes will spur farmers to continue these practices far into the future. “People want to know that when they’re spending their dollar at the grocery store that they’re not hurting the environment; they want to be helpful,” Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said last December when announcing projects that received funding. The emerging market for climate-friendly products, he added, represents “a transformational opportunity for U.S. agriculture.”
The idea has enthusiastic supporters. The market that Vilsack envisions “is potentially massive — much bigger than any federal program could be,” says Ben Thomas, senior policy director for agriculture at the Environmental Defense Fund. “And it’ll last as long as the conditions that create the market still exist.”
But the high-profile effort has also come under fire. Some researchers fear that the agency lacks a workable plan for measuring and verifying the impacts of the practices federal dollars will be paying for. Others say science has yet to prove that climate-smart practices truly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. “We don’t have that understanding yet for most climate-smart management practices,” says Kim Novick, an environmental scientist at Indiana University.
The program’s harshest critics assail it as a giveaway to rich corporations that will do little to rein in climate change — and might even exacerbate it. “This program is just pork for big polluters,” says University of Iowa economist Sylvia Secchi. “It’s a greenwashing scheme. It’s going to allow nothing to get done.”
For decades, efforts to cut fossil fuel emissions have focused on power plants, factories, and automobiles, not farmland. “Agriculture has just not been at the table in a meaningful way,” says Thomas.
But it should be. For all of industrial farming’s success at feeding people and livestock and producing biofuel, the sector is also a major polluter, accounting for roughly 10 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions and roughly a quarter of emissions globally. The main greenhouse gases emitted by U.S. agriculture today are nitrous oxide, which comes mainly from soil microbes that digest nitrogen fertilizer, and methane, burped by the nation’s roughly 92 million cows. Both warm the atmosphere far more, per molecule, than carbon dioxide.
Farmland itself was also once a major source of atmospheric carbon dioxide as farmers cleared carbon-rich forests and plowed up prairie soils, releasing carbon from trees and the ground. Now, climate-smart agriculture aims to recapture some of that carbon.
Ryan MacKay raises beef, pork, lamb and poultry using natural, sustainable methods on his Hudson, MA farm.
John Tlumacki/The Boston Globe via Getty Images
Unlike with organic farming, climate-smart farming has no list of allowed or prohibited practices. “There is no single definition of climate smart,” says Omanjana Goswami, an interdisciplinary scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists. Instead, it comprises a mélange of practices that, studies show, can either reduce farms’ greenhouse gases emissions or increase the amount of carbon stored in their soils.
Funded projects are receiving up to $95 million over five years to help farmers take up these practices and to create monitoring and marketing programs that, it’s hoped, will keep farmers on the climate-smart track after the program ends. That all-carrot, no-stick strategy is intentional and necessary to reduce agriculture’s climate impact, says Robert Bonnie, under secretary for farm production and conservation at USDA and one of the program’s chief architects and champions.
“A voluntary, collaborative approach is the only approach that works here,” says Bonnie. “Regulation isn’t very good at asking people to adopt new practices.”
The department says the program will deliver benefits to underserved and disadvantaged farmers, a group that includes farmers of color, women, veterans, and small and beginning farmers who have, in the past, struggled to access USDA funding streams and have sometimes been intentionally excluded from them. Many of the projects whose signed agreements have been made public, for example, will direct at least 20 percent of funds to underserved farmers.
Champions of the program also note that expected benefits go beyond increasing carbon sequestration and reducing greenhouse gases from farm fields. By encouraging farmers to reduce tillage, plant cover crops, and take other measures, “we’re improving water quality; we’re reducing erosion,” says Adam Kiel, executive vice president of AgOutcomes, which is managing a $95 million climate-smart partnership led by the Iowa Soybean Association.
But as the climate-smart commodities program gets underway, many experts are warning that even its most-touted practices often fall far short. For example, some cover crop studies have found that the practice did not sequester significant amounts of carbon in soils, while other studies that did find gains also had gaps or methodological problems that diminished confidence in the results. And an analysis published in May in Nature Sustainability found that yield losses resulting from cover crops in the United States could erase as much as 70 percent of their climate benefits if farmers cut down trees elsewhere or plow up grasslands to compensate for those losses.
“I wouldn’t say we should pause everything, because there are some real benefits to cover cropping,” says David Lobell, a food security researcher at Stanford University and a coauthor of the Nature paper. “But I think we should be much more vigilant about maintaining productivity” as more farmers start using cover crops.
Other projects aim to reduce the greenhouse gas footprint of beef and dairy herds by more carefully managing how these animals graze pastures, so their manure can feed perennial grasses and other plants whose roots pull carbon deep into the soil. But grass-fed cows can also emit significantly more methane over their lifetimes than those that spend more of their lives in feedlots. Some projects plan to feed cows experimental additives that could reduce those methane emissions.
Measuring and modeling nitrous oxide emissions accurately is also notoriously difficult. And practices thought to reduce such emissions — like applying some fertilizer in the spring, just before planting, rather than applying all fertilizer in the fall — sometimes backfire. In fact, few long-term assessments of any climate-smart practices have been conducted on working farms, says Novick, making it hard to tailor practices to particular soil types, climates, and situations.
“It doesn’t appear that funding decisions from this program were necessarily made in a way that maximizes climate mitigation,” says Novick, who led a team that last fall authored a report on how science can inform nature-based climate solutions. “Ideally we would have first invested in the data tools necessary to understand when and where a practice is likely to succeed as a climate solution.”
There’s also the question of how to measure the program’s benefits. Funded groups are required to take measurements that will allow the USDA to assess the impacts of the practices farmers are implementing. But the agency is also relying heavily on a computer model that was designed to estimate greenhouse gases for planning large-scale projects and that cannot accurately quantify emissions and carbon capture from individual farms, notes Jon Sanderman, a soil scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center.
Bill Hohenstein, director of the USDA’s Office of Energy and Environmental Policy, acknowledges that the science behind climate-smart agriculture remains a work in progress. But he says it’s mature enough to take action. “We could wait a decade and probably understand these benefits better,” Hohenstein says. “But our view is that we would end up with generally the same recommendations.”
In addition to the technical challenges of measuring carbon and greenhouse gas changes, the Climate-Smart program will have to get farmers to stick with new practices after payments have ended. Officials say that payments to cover the startup costs for enrolled farmers are essential. “If this stuff was free, folks would already be doing it,” Bonnie says. But once they’ve bought equipment like seed drills for no-till planting and climbed the learning curve, he and Hohenstein say, reduced input costs, yield increases resulting from healthier soils, and premiums for climate-smart products will start to pay for themselves.
Many experts view such projections as overly optimistic. Hanna Poffenbarger, a soil scientist at the University of Kentucky, says it may take a decade for cover crop benefits, such as reduced need for fertilizer and increased soil organic matter, to translate into profits. That aligns with the experience of early adopters like Trey Hill, a farmer in Maryland who says that even after planting cover crops for more than 20 years, he’s still seeing yield losses in some of his corn fields and an unclear impact on his bottom line. “When you talk about improving soils,” he says, “we’re talking about a 10-year commitment before you would really even see anything significant.”
Details on the projects themselves have been slow to emerge. Though the projects receiving the bulk of the funding were announced last September, the USDA has so far shared fewer than a quarter of the signed agreements on its website. For the remaining projects, the department has published scant information. For example, a $61-million project led by the agribusiness giant Tyson to create and market “climate-smart beef” comes with only a two-sentence description that does not explain what practices will make beef climate smart. In response to an interview request, a Tyson representative linked to a blog post lacking substantive information on how the company’s claims will be verified.
The vagueness troubles observers like Goswami, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, who says that without clear standards, companies will define “climate smart” in different ways, potentially confusing customers. “If Tyson comes in and says farms and ranches who we’re buying cows from have implemented X amount of cover cropping, does that make their beef climate smart?” she asks.
Even people who received funding fear that the program could overwhelm or confuse farmers who are suddenly inundated with competing climate-smart offers. “In Iowa alone, there are 17 different climate-smart projects” that will be recruiting farmers, Kiel notes. At the same time, another branch of the USDA, the Natural Resources Conservation Service, has been tasked with disbursing nearly $20 billion injected by the Inflation Reduction Act into farm programs, including ones that pay farmers to grow cover crops or set aside land for conservation. Private-sector carbon markets are also courting farmers. And many of these initiatives require that farmers not take money from competing programs, to avoid double counting of climate benefits. “There’s going to be farmer confusion,” Kiel says. “It’s unfortunate, but at least there’s going to be lots of choices.”
Secchi, meanwhile, questions why some of the wealthiest corporations and individuals in industrial agriculture are receiving additional federal money. She would have instead liked to see the government insist that growers already receiving government subsidies through other programs do more to reduce their climate impact. “Why can’t we ask farmers who are getting crop insurance subsidies to plant cover crops at zero extra cost for the taxpayer?” Secchi asks. She’d also like to see more of the funds directed toward minority, Indigenous, and other disadvantaged farmers.
Bonnie, the USDA undersecretary, responds that catalyzing large-scale change requires working with companies big enough to reach thousands of growers farming millions of acres. Building a program that will create new markets rather than new regulations and policies, he adds, insulates climate-smart agriculture from future Congresses and administrations that may be less climate friendly.
One thing is certain: As the government looks to steer the ocean liner that is American farming in a direction that’s climate friendlier yet still highly profitable, a lot of eyes — both hopeful and skeptical — will be watching closely.
This story was originally published at Prism. A significant piece of legislation most voters have likely never heard of will spend the summer sitting on the cutting room floor of Congress. When the legislation is ready for a vote, it will ensure people aren’t sentenced to hunger for lack of income, dictate international trade policies, and provide support to a farm system that—depending on who you…
This story was originally published by Modern Farmer and is republished with permission.
It starts out as unnoticeable, lying dormant for two or even four years. It’s undetectable. But slowly, the signs come out. Individual branches on a tree point to signs of a nutrient deficiency or perhaps overwatering. Branches will start to yellow and weaken, turning shriveled. Then, the fruit will turn, becoming small and refusing to ripen and, sometimes, dropping early. The fruit is safe for human consumption, but it tastes like battery acid.
And once the tree reaches that point, there’s no coming back. The tree will die within a few years no matter what intervention you try. That’s why when growers see trees infected with Huanglongbing, known as HLB or citrus greening, they immediately look to remove the tree. There’s no other option.
“We’re destroying all the trees that get infected. We’re monitoring and eradicating those where we can. We’re using biological controls with the loss. We’re using every tool in the bag,” says Jared Plumlee, senior vice president of farming at Booth Ranches, in Orange Cove, CA. Plumblee oversees about 7,000 acres in the central San Joaquin Valley, growing navel oranges, valencias, mandarins and even some lemons and grapefruits. There’s no sign of HLB in the Booth orchards yet, and Plumlee aims to keep it that way. The ranch also has its own packing house onsite, where they pack only their own product. That’s both to foster trust with consumers, so they know every piece of fruit in a Booth box came from that farm, and to keep potentially infected fruit out.
HLB is a disease spread by the insect Asian citrus psyllid, which infects trees with a slow-growing bacteria while it feeds on their shoots. It’s commonly spread as the insect travels across borders in fruit or tree cuttings, but a warming climate is speeding things along. The transmission of citrus greening depends on temperature—both to ensure that the psyllid survives and that the host trees are at their most vulnerable. Temperatures between 60 and 90 degrees Fahrenheit allow the disease to thrive. Research has shown that areas that stay within that range for at least half of the year have the most cases of HLB.
As global temperatures rise, citrus greening infestations can—and will—move further north. Tracking the spread of HLB is, in some ways, tracking the warming climate.
Growers can often, unknowingly, graft an infected tree limb onto their otherwise healthy stock. That’s how citrus groves in Texas, and most especially Florida, fell victim to the disease. HLB was first discovered in Florida in 2005, where it promptly tore through the state’s orange and grapefruit groves, infecting close to 90 percent of the citrus. Nearly 20 years later, last season’s orange production is a mere 16 percent of the yield in 2003. And overall citrus production continues to fall, every year for the past five years. This year’s orange yield is predicted to be 25 percent lower than last years’ final production.
Citrus grower Peter Spyke of Arapaho Citrus Management holding a greening HLB (huanglongbing) symptomatic citrus and a healthy one in a citrus grove, where he has planted a few dozen different tree varieties to study which one will best tolerate disease, in Fort Pierce, Florida on November 21, 2019.
GIANRIGO MARLETTA/AFP via Getty Images
Across the country, California growers have paid close attention to what their colleagues in Florida experienced, and they have no desire to go down the same road. “We see those numbers [from Florida], and it’s very, very frightening,” says Plumlee. As California’s annual temperatures fall squarely in the range for optimal HLB transmission, growers are as proactive as possible, even getting state legislation passed that allows citrus growers to essentially tax themselves and put the money towards research and eradication programs. “We’ve been fairly successful thus far; it still hasn’t been found in commercial orchards,” says Plumlee.
California is home to roughly 300,000 acres of citrus production across the state. There have been infected trees found in California, throughout Los Angeles and Orange counties and along the coast near San Diego. But, so far, the bacteria has stuck to residential trees or others easily removed.
“Last year, some nursery stock was sent from South Carolina from a nursery that had citrus canker,” says Victoria Hornbaker, director of the Citrus Pest and Disease Prevention Division at the California Department of Food and Agriculture. “But our team was able to react incredibly quickly to get out to those locations, collect that nursery stock, destroy it and do a one-mile survey of all citrus around those locations to make sure that we didn’t see any symptoms of citrus canker in the environment. So, that is a good example of how quickly we can mobilize and respond to potential issues regarding citrus.”
The citrus industry isn’t just important within California but across the country. Florida may be known for oranges, but it’s primarily grown oranges for juice. California has historically been the home of fresh citrus, growing 85 percent of the nation’s table fruit. “If we lose California citrus, we also lose our national and international market,” Hornbaker says. That means importing more citrus from outside the country, raising prices, and losing a tremendous amount of revenue all around.
That’s why California growers have such a focus on proactivity, and why there’s an incredible amount of research into citrus greening coming out of California institutions. University of California, Riverside is working on a treatment that effectively kills the bacteria, although it’s still being tested within industry. Growers are experimenting with higher-density planting, putting more trees in the ground per acre, to get a higher yield in a shorter amount of time. Although, as Plumlee explains, that also has a significant drawback. “The longevity of planting like that might not be 50 years; it may only be 25. Because once the trees fill in, you kind of hit this plateau on what your production level can be. So, in the face of HLB, you’re going to turn the ground over faster.”
Breeders are also working to find new varieties that are less susceptible to HLB. The Sugar Belle mandarin, the hybrid of a clementine and a Minneola, has shown promising resistance. The new variety was born out of research from the University of Florida and released to growers across the state in 2009. More than a decade later, the Sugar Belle is among the top-grown varieties in the state.
Oddly, there does seem to be a correlation between the size of the citrus and the resistance to the bacteria, although it’s not clear if size is a determining factor or simply a coincidence. But Neil McRoberts, a professor of plant pathology at University of California, Davis, says that grapefruit and large oranges are less resistant to the disease, with smaller mandarins showing more disease resistance. “Because our citrus comes from so few different progenitor lines, they don’t have any natural resistance to the bacterium. So, none of our favorite citrus types and varieties have much resistance in general,” McRoberts explains.
There could be a cure out there. But it won’t be on the horizon in five years or even 10. “I can see that, maybe in 20 years, we’ll be in a position where, if we don’t actually have a cure, we’ll at least have citrus that is able to stand up and keep producing a crop,” says McRoberts. “There are some promises out there, but it’s slow work.”
In the meantime, Plumlee and other growers have no choice but to keep going and keep growing. “You can’t just throw up your hands and quit. You keep doing the science and the trials and try to solve this puzzle. But, in the short term, there’s not a whole lot that you can do that we haven’t already done.” Growers like Plumlee have a crop that’s vital to the state and the nation and a disease that they are fighting to keep at bay. For now, they simply have to hold on—for a decade or two—until more effective methods are available.
“That is the scary part,” says Plumlee. “If we had something today, right out of the lab that works, we’re still 10 or 15 years from proving it out that it actually works. And then another 10, probably before it’s all implemented out in the industry. So, we know that time is not our friend.”
This story was originally published by the Guardianand is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Marginal improvements to agricultural soils around the world would store enough carbon to keep the world within 1.5C of global heating, new research suggests.
Using better farming techniques to store 1 percent more carbon in about half of the world’s agricultural soils would be enough to absorb about 31 gigatons of carbon dioxide a year, according to new data. That amount is not far off the 32 gigaton gap between current planned emissions reduction globally per year and the amount of carbon that must be cut by 2030 to stay within 1.5C.
The estimates were carried out by Jacqueline McGlade, the former chief scientist at the UN environment program and former executive director of the European Environment Agency. She found that storing more carbon in the top 30 centimeters of agricultural soils would be feasible in many regions where soils are currently degraded.
McGlade now leads a commercial organization that sells soil data to farmers. Downforce Technologies uses publicly available global data, satellite images, and lidar to assess in detail how much carbon is stored in soils, which can now be done down to the level of individual fields.
“Outside the farming sector, people do not understand how important soils are to the climate,” said McGlade. “Changing farming could make soils carbon negative, making them absorb carbon, and reducing the cost of farming.”
She said farmers could face a short-term cost while they changed their methods, away from the overuse of artificial fertilizer, but after a transition period of two to three years their yields would improve and their soils would be much healthier.
She estimated it would cost about $1 million to restore 40,000 hectares (99,000 acres) of what is currently badly degraded farmland in Kenya, an area that is home to about 300,000 people.
Downforce data could also allow farmers to sell carbon credits based on how much additionalcarbon dioxide their fields are absorbing. Soil has long been known to be one of Earth’s biggest stores of carbon, but until now it has not been possible to examine in detail how much carbon soils in particular areas are locking up and how much they are emitting. About 40 percent of the world’s farmland is now degraded, according to UN estimates.
Carbon dioxide removal, the name given to a suite of technologies and techniques that increase the uptake of carbon dioxide from the air and sequester the carbon in some form, is an increasing area of interest, as the world slips closer to the critical threshold of 1.5C of global heating above pre-industrial levels.
Arable farmers could sequester more carbon within their soils by changing their crop rotation, planting cover crops such as clover, or using direct drilling, which allows crops to be planted without the need for ploughing. Livestock farmers could improve their soils by growing more native grasses.
Hedgerows also help to sequester carbon in the soil, because they have large underground networks of mycorrhizal fungi and microbes that can extend meters into the field. Farmers have spent decades removing hedgerows to make intensive farming easier, but restoring them, and maintaining existing hedgerows, would improve biodiversity, reduce the erosion of topsoil, and help to stop harmful agricultural runoff, which is a key polluter of rivers.
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Slabs of chicken meat grown from cells nurtured by scientists, rather than from birds raised and slaughtered by farmers, can now be sold in the United States. The U.S. Department of Agriculture greenlit two kinds of lab-grown chicken for the first time on Wednesday. The move makes the United States the second country in the world, after Singapore, to allow cultivated meats on the market. Although the poultry (or poultry-esque) products — by Upside Foods and Good Meat — won’t be on the shelves at your local grocery store anytime soon, the approval marks a milestone for alternative proteins.
The innovative meat, grown from cell cultures fed amino acids, sugars, salts, and vitamins, has generated intrigue among investors, animal rights advocates, and fancy-food connoisseurs. One of cultivated meat’s key selling points, beyond mere novelty, is that it could be a salve for global warming. Growing meat in a lab doesn’t involve livestock or land for grazing and cuts out the greenhouse gas emissions associated with raising cows, chickens, and pigs for food — 11 percent to 14.5 percent of global climate pollution. By some estimates, cultivated meat could reduce those emissions by 92 percent.
“The key thing here is that it’s all about efficiency,” said Elliot Swartz, a scientist at the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit that promotes alternative proteins. Culturing cells in a lab is roughly three times more efficient at converting nutrients into meat than conventional chicken farming, Swartz said. “This efficiency means you need less crops to grow, which translates to less land.” That, in turn, means more land that could be used to store carbon through rewilding and habitat restoration, Swartz added.
The story doesn’t end there. As with other emerging technologies, there’s uncertainty about the climate implications of cultivated meat. While feeding stem cells, muscle cells, or fat cells, doesn’t generate methane — the potent greenhouse gas belched by cows — a lot of energy goes into manufacturing the ingredients to feed those cells and maintaining the right conditions, like temperature, to nurture them. Some research suggests that replacing methane emissions from cattle with the carbon dioxide generated from meat cultivation could be worse for the planet in the long run.
“For lab-grown meat, most of the emissions are associated with energy inputs,” said Marco Springmann, a senior researcher at the University of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute. Given how energy intensive the process is, Springmann expressed skepticism about the claims that cultivated meat is significantly better for the environment than the cuts you’d get today at the supermarket. A study by researchers at the University of California, Davis indicates that meat cultivation would have to become more energy efficient to compete with conventional meat from a climate standpoint. (Swartz said he sees potential issues with assumptions underlying that research, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, such as that cultivated meat producers have already adopted energy-saving practices not reflected in the study).
One big advantage to cultivated meat, according to both Springmman and Swartz, is that it can be powered by renewables. Cows are always going to burp methane. But the carbon dioxide that comes from growing meat in a lab can be dialed back with wind or solar. “The manufacturer of cultivated meat has a lot of control over the carbon footprint,” Swartz said.
A host of questions remain about how manufacturers will scale up their products and what their emissions will look like. One thing that’s settled, according to Springmann, is that a better climate solution than growing meat in labs is eating less meat in favor of more vegetables. “It’s very unlikely you can design a product that can be more environmentally friendly than legumes.”
Papua New Guinea’s Trade Minister Richard Maru has complained that his country’s trade deal with Australia has been skewed in Canberra’s favour for decades, and suggests the country will trade more with China.
Minister Maru said Beijing should be PNG’s focus for trade and investment opportunities because not enough was being done to assist PNG’s agriculture exports to Australia.
Maru is particularly unhappy with agriculture exports, which account for less than two percent of PNG’s exports to Australia, while minerals dominate.
“Enough is enough,” he said. “Starting this year, we are moving on. We will partner with whatever country that will help us achieve that.
“We are friends to all and enemies to none. We are not interested in geopolitics.
“Our main priority is securing the future of our people.”
Australia is supporting bolstering PNG’s agriculture exports, with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese earlier this year promising assistance to improve the biosecurity regime that would enable farmers and producers to access international markets.
To deepen trade with China, a feasibility study is underway to assess the possibility of a free trade agreement (FTA).
While Australia is PNG’s largest trade partner, China is a close second, coupled with PNG enjoying the largest trade surplus of any of its other trade partners.
Australia is also pursuing an FTA with Port Moresby, with its own feasibility study to be concluded this month.
Bougainville flexes legal muscles Meanwhile, the President of the autonomous Papua New Guinea region of Bougainville says his government will not allow foreign investors to breach its laws to exploit its people and resources.
President Ishmael Toroama made the statement as the Bougainville Executive Council refused to grant a mining licence application for a joint-venture involving Wyndale Holdings and its local partners.
The joint venture wanted to mine in the Eivo/Torau areas as well as the Jaba River middle to lower tailings areas.
The Bougainville government said in a statement that Wyndale was a private Australian company with links to Australian Nic Zuks which, it said, claimed to have been issued mining licences by the autonomous government.
President Toroama said the applicants failed to meet the requirements provided by the Bougainville Mining Act 2015.
He said the ABG would not entertain companies and individuals which used “duplicitous means” to exploit Bougainville’s mineral resources.
The President also cautioned investors to be wary of being misled and that the ABG would not be held liable for losses incurred as a result of fraudulent misrepresentations.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
This story was originally published by Next City and is reproduced here with permission.
On a dead-end street in Cleveland’s Kinsman neighborhood, on 18 acres of land that previously served as an illegal dumping ground, an entire food ecosystem has emerged and thrived under the leadership of local residents.
Rid-All Green Partnership started with a single hoop house erected in February of 2011; now acres of farmland support a community kitchen and farmer’s market. All food waste is turned into compost, which supports the farm and is sold across Cleveland. A training program and paid apprenticeships bring community members in, while an aquaponics and hydroponics system generates local jobs. Specialized programs emerged to serve veterans and youth.
“We’ve created a circular economy,” says Keymah Durden, a Rid-All co-founder who grew up in the neighborhood. “Piece by piece, we’ve built this business with things that complement each other.”
Durden is one of three co-founders, all childhood friends who grew up on Cleveland’s east side. Rid-All’s name comes from late co-founder Damien Forshe’s company, Rid-All Exterminating Corporation, which he operated for 15 years before transitioning to agriculture. He was inspired by a research report written by co-founder Randy McShepard that advocated for building urban farms in vacant land following the 2009 foreclosure crisis. (Cleveland had one of the highest foreclosure rates in the country, with many of the vacated homes demolished.)
The trio secured 1.3 vacant acres in Kinsman, a neighborhood struggling with disinvestment and entrenched poverty. They prompted the county and others to clean the illegal dumping ground; more than 2,000 tires, burned out cars and abandoned refrigerators were removed. They participated in a five-month training program at the Milwaukee urban farm Growing Power and were inspired by two things: creating their own soil to replace the contaminated soil in their lot, and investing in fish farming, which could become an income generator to support a larger urban farm.
Courtesy of Rid-All Green Partnership
In addition to building a hoop house to begin growing plants and vegetables, they collected food waste from local businesses around Cleveland, creating compost for their farm and selling it. They built a self-sustaining hydroponics system to grow fish in tanks and vegetables on a connected top tier, with the fish waste fortifying the plants and the plants supporting clean water for the fish. In the first three years, they grew and sold 10,000 tilapia fish out of one greenhouse.
It was enough success to secure an investment to build a 7,200-square-foot urban fish farm, which now grows 70,000 tilapia that Rid-All sells to local restaurants. “These two critical pieces of our business — the fish farm and the compost — came from our early learnings and realizing there was a market for both,” explains McShepard.
As Rid-All grew, the nonprofit secured adjacent land. It is now an 18-acre campus with two greenhouses, six hoop houses, a commercial composting station, and a rain catchment pond. The nonprofit was also named the official tree nursery site of the Cleveland Tree Coalition and will be growing and selling at least 5,000 trees over the next few years as part of a larger effort to reforest the city.
“We’ve looked at ways to stay current and evolve over time,” says Marc White, a founding partner who serves as operations manager. “We didn’t want to be stuck just growing vegetables, we wanted to grow community.”
To that end, Rid-All introduced workshops, trainings and apprenticeship programs, including specific programming for youth and veterans. The farm now employs 18 people, many of whom are from the neighborhood, and offers summer employment for young people.
Its two latest developments cemented Rid-All’s circular economy model. In the summer of 2020, Rid-All began operating a farmer’s market in Maple Heights, a suburb bordering Cleveland that’s considered a food desert. This was Rid-All’s first opportunity to sell produce at scale. “Whatever we grow at the farm we can sell at the market and any produce that doesn’t sell we bring back and it becomes compost,” says McShepard. A chef sets up in the market once a month to share meals and recipes using the produce currently for sale.
A view of Rid-All’s Cleveland operation. Rid-All Green Partnership
In the spring of 2021, Rid-All opened a new building on its campus to serve as a community kitchen, market and restaurant facility. Similarly to the market, anything grown by Rid-All is cooked up and sold in the community kitchen, any food waste becomes compost. “This is a full, closed-loop ecosystem now,” McSheperd says.
Durden oversees the community kitchen. “The building is styled like a log cabin, which is such a unique feature to inner-core Cleveland, that it’s almost become a showpiece,” he says. On Tuesdays and Fridays they sell meals cooked by rotating guest chefs; Kinsman residents often eat alongside local government officials and professional athletes.
Rid-All hosts cooking and nutrition classes here and rents the space out for meetings and special events. They also plan to use the kitchen as an incubator for emerging food businesses and staging facility for food products that require processing and packaging.
Durden calls the farmer’s market and community kitchen “game changers” in that “everything we grow here at the farm, we can translate to our market and our kitchen.”
“This is a real Cleveland story,” he says. “It’s as local as it gets — three kids who grew up on the east side who now represent this good-faith and hopeful messaging around agriculture that shows what can be possible.”
