Why is much modern food of inferior quality? Why is health suffering and smallholder farmers who feed most of the world being forced out of agriculture?
Mainly because of the mindset of the likes of Larry Fink of BlackRock – the world’s biggest asset management firm – and the economic system they profit from and promote.
In 2011, Fink said agricultural and water investments would be the best performers over the next 10 years.
Fink stated: “Go long agriculture and water and go to the beach.”
Unsurprisingly then, just three years later, in 2014, the Oakland Institute found that institutional investors, including hedge funds, private equity and pension funds, were capitalising on global farmland as a new and highly desirable asset class.
Funds tend to invest for a 10-15-year period, resulting in good returns for investors but often cause long-term environmental and social devastation. They undermine local and regional food security through buying up land and entrenching an industrial, export-oriented model of agriculture.
In September 2020, Grain.org showed that private equity funds – pools of money that use pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, endowment funds and investments from governments, banks, insurance companies and high net worth individuals – were being injected into the agriculture sector throughout the world.
This money was being used to lease or buy up farms on the cheap and aggregate them into large-scale, US-style grain and soybean concerns. Offshore tax havens and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development had targeted Ukraine in particular.
Western agribusiness had been coveting Ukraine’s agriculture sector for quite some time. That country contains one third of all arable land in Europe. A 2015 article by Oriental Review noted that, since the mid-90s, Ukrainian-Americans at the helm of the US-Ukraine Business Council have been instrumental in encouraging the foreign control of Ukrainian agriculture.
In November 2013, the Ukrainian Agrarian Confederation drafted a legal amendment that would benefit global agribusiness producers by allowing the widespread use of genetically modified seeds.
In June 2020, the IMF approved an 18-month, strings-attached $5 billion loan programme with Ukraine.
Even before the conflict, the World Bank incorporated measures relating to the sale of public agricultural land as conditions in a $350 million Development Policy Loan (COVID ‘relief package’) to Ukraine. This included a required ‘prior action’ to “enable the sale of agricultural land and the use of land as collateral.”
It is interesting to note that Larry Fink and BlackRock are to ‘coordinate’ investment in ‘rebuilding’ Ukraine.
An official statement released in late December 2022 said the agreement with BlackRock would:
… focus in the near term on coordinating the efforts of all potential investors and participants in the reconstruction of our country, channelling investment into the most relevant and impactful sectors of the Ukrainian economy.
With more than $813.5 billion invested in arms manufacturing companies, BlackRock is in a win-win situation – profiting from both destruction and reconstruction.
BlackRock is a publicly owned investment manager that primarily provides its services to institutional, intermediary and individual investors. The firm exists to put its assets to work to make money for its clients. And it must ensure the financial system functions to secure this goal. And this is exactly what it does.
Back in 2010, the farmlandgrab.org website reported that BlackRock’s global agriculture fund would target (invest in) companies involved with agriculture-related chemical products, equipment and infrastructure, as well as soft commodities and food, biofuels, forestry, agricultural sciences and arable land.
According to research by Global Witness, it has since indirectly profited from human rights and environmental abuses through investing in banks notorious for financing harmful palm oil firms (see the article The true price of palm oil, 2021).
US$560 million in assets under management, holds shares in a number of the world’s largest food companies, with agrifood stocks making up around 75% of the fund. Nestlé is the funds’s largest holding, and other agrifood firms that make up the fund include Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Walmart, Anheuser Busch InBev, Mondelez, Danone, and Kraft Heinz.
The article also states that BlackRock’s iShares Core S&P 500 Index ETF has $150 billion in assets under management. Most of the top publicly traded food and agriculture firms are part of the S&P 500 index and BlackRock holds significant shares in those firms.
The author of the article, Professor Jennifer Clapp, also notes BlackRock’s COW Global Agriculture ETF, has $231 million in assets and focuses on firms that provide inputs (seeds, chemicals and fertilizers) and farm equipment and agricultural trading companies. Among its top holdings are Deere & Co, Bunge, ADM and Tyson. This is based on BlackRock’s own data from 2018.
Jennifer Clapp states:
Collectively, the asset management giants – BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, Fidelity, and Capital Group – own significant proportions of the firms that dominate at various points along agrifood supply chains. When considered together, these five asset management firms own around 10%–30% of the shares of the top firms within the agrifood sector.
BlackRock et al are heavily invested in the success of the prevailing globalised system of food and agriculture.
They profit from an inherently predatory system that – focusing on the agrifood sector alone – has been responsible for, among other things, the displacement of indigenous systems of production, the impoverishment of many farmers worldwide, the destruction of rural communities and cultures, poor-quality food and illness, less diverse diets, ecological destruction and the proletarianization of independent producers.
Due to their size, according to journalist Ernst Wolff, BlackRock and its counterpart Vanguard exert control over governments and important institutions like the European Central Bank (ECB) and the US Federal Reserve. BlackRock and Vanguard have more financial assets than the ECB and the Fed combined.
BlackRock currently has $10 trillion in assets under its management and to underline the influence of the firm, Fink himself is a billionaire who sits on the board of the World Economic Forum and the powerful and highly influential Council for Foreign Relations, often referred to as the shadow government of the US – the real power behind the throne.
Researcher William Engdahl says that since 1988 the company has put itself in a position to de facto control the Federal Reserve, most Wall Street mega-banks, including Goldman Sachs, the Davos World Economic Forum Great Reset and now the Biden Administration.
Engdahl describes how former top people at BlackRock are now in key government positions, running economic policy for the Biden administration, and that the firm is steering the ‘great reset’ and the global ‘green’ agenda.
Fink recently eulogised about the future of food and ‘coded’ seeds that would produce their own fertiliser. He says this is “amazing technology”. This technology is years away and whether it can deliver on what he says is another thing.
More likely, it will be a great investment opportunity that is par for the course as far as genetically modified organisms in agriculture are concerned: a failure to deliver on its inflated false promises. And even if it does eventually deliver, a whole host of ‘hidden costs’ (health, social, ecological, etc) will probably emerge.
And that’s not idle speculation. We need look no further than previous ‘interventions’ in food/farming under the guise of Green Revolution technologies, which did little if anything to boost overall food production (in India at least) but brought with it tremendous ecological, environment and social costs and adverse impacts on human health, highlighted by many researchers and writers, not least in Bhaskar Save’s open letter to Indian officials and the work of Vandana Shiva.
However, the Green Revolution entrenched seed and agrichemical giants in global agriculture and ensured farmers became dependent on their proprietary inputs and global supply chains. After all, value capture that was a key aim of the project.
But why should Fink care about these ‘hidden costs’, not least the health impacts?
Well, actually, he probably does – with his eye on investments in ‘healthcare’ and Big Pharma. BlackRock’s investments support and profit from industrial agriculture as well as the hidden costs.
Poor health is good for business (for example, see on the BlackRock website BlackRock on healthcare investment opportunities amid Covid-19). Scroll through BlackRock’s website and it soon becomes clear that it sees the healthcare sector as a strong long-term bet.
And for good reason. For instance, increased consumption of ultra-processed foods (UPFs) was associated with more than 10% of all-cause premature, preventable deaths in Brazil in 2019 according to a recent peer-reviewed study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
The findings are significant not only for Brazil but more so for high income countries such as the US, Canada, the UK, and Australia, where UPFs account for more than half of total calorific intake. Brazilians consume far less of these products than countries with high incomes. This means the estimated impact would be even higher in richer nations.
Due to corporate influence over trade deals, governments and the WTO, transnational food retail and food processing companies continue to colonise markets around the world and push UPFs.
In Mexico, global agrifood companies have taken over food distribution channels, replacing local foods with cheap processed items. In Europe, more than half the population of the European Union is overweight or obese, with the poor especially reliant on high-calorie, poor nutrient quality food items.
Larry Fink is good at what he does – securing returns for the assets his company holds. He needs to keep expanding into or creating new markets to ensure the accumulation of capital to offset the tendency for the general rate of profit to fall. He needs to accumulate capital (wealth) to be able to reinvest it and make further profits.
When capital struggles to make sufficient profit, productive wealth (capital) over accumulates, devalues and the system goes into crisis. To avoid crisis, capitalism requires constant growth, expanding markets and sufficient demand.
And that means laying the political and legislative groundwork to facilitate this. In India, for example, the now-repealed three farm laws of 2020 would have provided huge investment opportunities for the likes of BlackRock. These three laws – imperialism in all but name – represented a capitulation to the needs of foreign agribusiness and asset managers who require access to India’s farmland.
The laws would have sounded a neoliberal death knell for India’s food sovereignty, jeopardized its food security and destroyed tens of millions of livelihoods. But what matters to global agricapital and investment firms is facilitating profit and maximising returns on investment.
This has been a key driving force behind the modern food system that sees around a billion people experiencing malnutrition in a world of food abundance. That is not by accident but by design – inherent to a system that privileges corporate profit ahead of human need.
The modern agritech/agribusiness sector uses notions of it and its products being essential to ‘feed the world’ by employing ‘amazing technology’ in an attempt to seek legitimacy. But the reality is an inherently unjust globalised food system, farmers forced out of farming or trapped on proprietary product treadmills working for corporate supply chains and the public fed GMOs, more ultra-processed products and lab-engineered food.
A system that facilitates ‘going long and going to the beach’ serves elite interests well. For vast swathes of humanity, however, economic warfare is waged on them every day courtesy of a hard-edged rock.
Last month, right before the holidays, nearly 200 countries announced a breakthrough deal to protect Earth’s plants and animals. Of the 22 targets established at the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, or COP15, one stood out: an agreement to conserve 30 percent of land and seas by the year 2030.
The goal, commonly known as 30×30, has been around for a few years, slowly gaining traction in environmental circles since it was first proposed in the journal Science Advances in 2019. It draws inspiration from research by famed biologist E.O. Wilson that at least half the planet needs to be conserved in some way to protect 80 percent of species. The formal adoption of 30×30 by nearly all of the world’s governments at COP15 turned it into the official guiding star for the global conservation movement, with some leaders comparing it to the Paris Agreement in terms of significance.
Now, with negotiators at home and a new year underway, countries face the monumental task of figuring out what one of the most ambitious goals in conservation history actually means, in practice.
One of the toughest questions yet to be answered is: What exactly counts towards the 30 percent? Can certain conservation-minded agricultural methods that protect soil and promote a diversity of crops be included, or do only strictly protected areas like national parks count? To what degree will Indigenous territories be considered conserved land? And how will areas that connect fragments and contain the rarest, most species-rich ecosystems be prioritized under the goal? The final language in last month’s global agreement was vague on many of these topics.
“Underneath that [30×30] number is a huge amount of complexity,” said Claire Kremen, a conservation biology professor at the University of British Columbia who researches how to reconcile biodiversity conservation with agriculture. “It all depends on where and how you do this protection and there hasn’t been a lot of clarity on these points.”
The United States, while not technically part of last month’s global pact (the Senate since 1993 has refused to join the biodiversity convention), has been wrestling with these same questions independently. President Biden committed to the 30×30 goal within U.S. borders via executive order during his first week in office. And many states have also committed to the target, including California, Maine, New York, Hawaii, and New Mexico.
Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve is a national park in northern Alaska.
Sean Tevebaugh, National Park Service
Just as negotiators at COP15 struggled to come to an agreement about what types of ecosystems and actions should count towards the global goal, the U.S. government has yet to define what “conserved” land and sea means under 30×30.
Currently, the U.S. has a variety of different protected area designations that are regulated in different ways. Most federal land, which makes up 27 percent of the country, is managed under some form of conservation, be it national parks and wilderness areas or, more commonly, a “mixed-use” mandate that allows for what the government determines to be sustainable levels of extractive activities like forestry and grazing. Add state parks and private land under conservation easements to the mix, and we’ve easily already met the 30 percent target, says Forrest Fleischman, a professor of environmental policy and forest governance at the University of Minnesota.
But most 30×30 advocates don’t think that all those lands should count towards the target, whose main goal is to protect biodiversity. While the U.S. Geological Survey’s Protected Area Database considers more than 31 percent of the country’s land under some form of protection, only 13 percent has strict mandates for biodiversity protection that don’t allow for any extractive activity.
“There’s habitat value to be found in all sorts of lands,” said Helen O’Shea, an expert on land-use and conservation issues at the Natural Resources Defense Council, “but the 30×30 effort is about creating a system that’s protected and ecologically representative. A connected system that’s going to link up areas that are solely being looked at for conservation purposes.”
For others, however, the answer isn’t as simple as just increasing the amount of land under strict protection. “If the goal is to move another 17 percent of the U.S. into something equivalent to a national forest or wilderness area, that seems unrealistic,” said Fleischman, who is part of group of experts working to understand the social implications of 30×30, funded by the Science for Nature and People Partnership.
When the 30×30 goal was first announced in the U.S., it received significant pushback from ranching communities and private landowners, who were concerned about impacts to rural economies like grazing and logging. Many also argued that certain productive land uses, especially when planned with biodiversity in mind, are compatible with conservation of species and ecosystems. While the white spotted owl can’t live in logged forests of the Pacific Northwest, for example, open grazing helps to maintain prairie habitats. Some grassland birds also thrive in the early successional forests that grow after timber harvest.
“It’s a very complicated, site-specific issue,” said Tom Cors, director of U.S. government relations for The Nature Conservancy. “Some places might have adequate ‘protection,’ but they need more management,” he added, referencing the need to conduct more prescribed burning to support ecosystem function in Western forests.
Mixed variety cover crops on a farm near St. John, Washington protect and enrich the soil.
VW Pics/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Globally, the most significant critique of the 30×30 initiative has come from Indigenous peoples, who warn that the protected area conservation model has allowed governments and nonprofit groups to seize control of natural resources and, in many cases, violently remove Indigenous peoples from their lands, from the Democratic Republic of the Congo to Nepal to Peru. Tribes in the U.S. that have historically been excluded from conservation planning, decision-making, and funding wanted to make sure the country’s 30×30 goal didn’t repeat these patterns.
In an effort to address those concerns, the Biden administration framed its 30×30 pledge as a “collaborative and inclusive approach to conservation,” with topline goals of honoring tribal sovereignty, supporting the priorities of tribal nations, respecting private property rights, and supporting the voluntary efforts of landowners, all with science as a guide. A May 2021 report from the Department of the Interior emphasized the concept of “conservation” rather than “protection,” “recognizing that many uses of our lands and waters, including of working lands, can be consistent with the long-term health and sustainability of natural systems.”
An interagency working group is trying to account for different types of land uses while building the American Conservation and Stewardship Atlas, a tool to represent the amount and types of lands and waters that are currently conserved or restored. Part of the group’s mandate is to figure out how contributions from farmers, ranchers, and forest owners, as well as the conservation strategies of Tribal Nations, will count toward the 30×30 goal. A December 2021 progress report did not include a number for how much land and water is currently managed for conservation; in an email to Grist, a Department of the Interior, or DOI, spokesperson had no updates on the Atlas timeline.
Beyond “what actions count,” land managers are also thinking about “which lands and waters should be protected?” towards the 30-percent target. Biodiversity tends to be concentrated in certain areas and ecosystem types, so where land protection happens is important. In its comments on the Atlas, The Nature Conservancy recommended distributing conserved areas among 68 ecoregions of the U.S. — the Central Appalachians, Northern tallgrass prairie, and California central coast, for example — and protecting 30 percent of each.
In the U.S., it’s private lands that contain most of the country’s biodiversity; these also play a role in connecting protected areas, which conservation groups have emphasized as an important priority for the Atlas, as habitat connectivity has been shown to be critical for species’ survival. In addition, the Biden administration wants the tool to promote equity, increasing access to nature in historically marginalized communities, often in urban areas. Yet as the DOI itself notes, “there is no single metric — including a percentage target — that could fully measure progress toward the fulfillment of those interrelated goals [of doing better for people, for fish and wildlife, and for the planet].”
The 30×30 target established at the U.N. biodiversity conference is global, meaning that countries can sign onto it without necessarily committing to conserve 30-percent of land and waters within their borders. Still, many countries have issued their own 30×30 commitments, including Canada, Australia, Costa Rica, and France. The United Kingdom has been criticized for claiming to protect 28 percent of its land when the included national parks and “areas of outstanding natural beauty” fail to address poor farming practices, pollution, and invasive species. In July, Colombia announced that it had already met the target for land and sea.
The final agreement reached at COP15 nodded to the inclusion of working lands and the importance of protecting ecologically-representative and high-biodiversity habitats, without setting clear guidelines. It “recognized and respected” the rights of Indigenous peoples, who steward 80% of the world’s biodiversity on their lands, without establishing their territories as a specific category of conserved area, leaving them vulnerable to human rights violations.
For Fleischman, having a “political slogan” without a clear meaning isn’t necessarily helpful for achieving biodiversity and environmental justice goals. “Advocates say, ‘Look beyond the numeric spatial target at the language which is about finding ways to pursue conservation at a whole landscape level while taking into account social equity issues such as [urban] parks,’” he said. “But if that’s the case, what is the point of saying ‘30 x 30’? ‘Healthy nature everywhere’ might be a better goal.”
Russia’s war on Ukraine, climate change-intensified drought, and other factors drove global food prices to a record high and worsened hunger around the world in 2022, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization said Friday.
The FAO Food Price Index—which tracks monthly changes in the international prices of grain, vegetable oils, and other commonly traded food commodities—averaged 143.7 points last year. That marked the highest level since records began in 1961 and an increase of 14.3% over the 2021 average, according to the Rome-based U.N. agency.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February exacerbated a food crisis because the two countries were leading global suppliers of wheat, barley, sunflower oil, and other products, especially to nations in parts of Africa, the Middle East, and Asia that were already struggling with hunger.
In the month of December, the FAO Food Price Index fell to an average of 132.4 points, a slight decrease from the previous year. The U.N. attributed most of the decline to a recent drop in the price of palm, soy, rapeseed, and sunflower oils. Lower vegetable oil prices, which hit an all-time high in 2022, came as a result of reduced global import demand, expectations of a seasonal boost in soy oil production in South America, and declining crude oil prices, according to the FAO.
While world prices of wheat and maize surpassed previous records in 2022, the price of both cereals declined slightly in December, the organization said, thanks to ongoing harvests in the Southern Hemisphere, which increased global supply.
The price of rice, however, rose last month, as did the price of sugar and cheese, FAO noted. Beef and poultry prices fell slightly in December, but that came at the end of a year in which dairy and meat prices reached their highest levels since 1990.
“Calmer food commodity prices are welcome after two very volatile years,” FAO Chief Economist Maximo Torero said in a statement. “It is important to remain vigilant and keep a strong focus on mitigating global food insecurity given that world food prices remain at elevated levels, with many staples near record highs, and with prices of rice increasing, and still many risks associated with future supplies.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
Now the state’s weather has taken a violent swing in the other direction. A series of powerful “atmospheric river” storms — so called because they look like horizontal streams of moisture flowing in from the Pacific — have brought record-breaking precipitation to the Golden State over the last two weeks, dropping almost a foot of rain in the San Francisco Bay Area, overwhelming the state’s rivers, and bringing several feet of snow to the Sierra Nevada mountain range in the eastern part of the state. The storms have caused widespread devastation, destroying critical roadways in the Bay Area and killing at least five people.
Though it has come at a tremendous cost, the past few weeks of rain have helped to refill the reservoirs that supply much of the state’s water, and snowpack levels in the Sierra Nevada are now well above their average levels for this time of year, meaning that major rivers will be much more robust after the snow melts in the spring. Barring a major dropoff, this year will be much wetter than the last few.
“I’m cautiously optimistic,” said Jered Shipley, the general manager of the Anderson-Cottonwood Irrigation District, which provides water to pasture owners in the northern part of the state. “It gets us on track.” Shipley’s district takes water from Lake Shasta, the state’s largest reservoir, which all but bottomed out during the drought but has started to rebound over the past month.
If the reservoirs fill up as predicted, that will be great news for farmers and cities up and down the state, from Chico all the way to San Diego. Come spring and summer they’ll release the stored-up precipitation to cattle ranchers, nut farmers, and local water utilities around the state, ending a three-year spell of privation.
“To put it very bluntly, it’s been total devastation,” said Shipley. “This drought was a natural disaster. You may not have seen apartment buildings on fire or communities underwater, but [there were] displaced families, migrant workers not having jobs, businesses closing because nobody needed to service their tractors, feed stores closing.”
Even if 2023 does end up a wet year, it won’t prevent an ongoing water crisis, because surface precipitation is only one pillar supporting the state’s water needs. Since the reservoirs can’t hold more than a year of water, officials don’t have the option of holding it back to conserve for future years. And the other two pillars ensuring regular water availability in the Golden State — groundwater and the Colorado River — are facing crises that even a wet year won’t fix.
“This will fill our reservoirs, so that’s the good news,” said Jeffrey Mount, a senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California’s Water Policy Center, who studies atmospheric rivers and their impact on California’s water. “But we have been in a really dry period for the last 20 years, and that hasn’t come to an end yet.”
A false-color satellite image shows the flooding caused by an “atmospheric river” rain event that struck California around New Year’s Day. NASA Earth Observatory
In the agriculture-heavy Central Valley, for instance, many farmers rely on water deliveries from a federal canal that funnels water westward from the Sierra Nevada. But households in this area also depend on groundwater withdrawn from underground aquifers, and recent research shows that these aquifers are drying up at an alarming rate. This dropoff has led to a surge in the number of dried-up wells in recent years and has forced some towns to rely on deliveries of bottled water.
A deluge of snow may help recharge the reservoirs that supply major Central Valley irrigators, but it won’t refill the underground aquifers in the region, in part because most valley communities don’t have the ability to store excess water. In other parts of the country like Arizona, officials can bank water from wet years in underground aquifers, but any extra rainfall in the Central Valley just gets lost.
Cities in the Los Angeles metropolitan area face a similar two-pronged challenge. The region gets about a third of its water from the State Water Project, a canal system that diverts water from the reservoirs in the northern part of the state, and these deliveries have declined in recent years, forcing some cities to make drastic cuts.
The current bout of rain will help fill up those reservoirs, but the rest of the water used by these cities comes from the Colorado River, which snakes through the arid western United States. The river’s two main reservoirs in Nevada and Arizonaare both in danger of bottoming out this year, and the federal government may soon slash California’s water allotment to stop that from happening. The rainfall from this week’s atmospheric river event won’t do anything to alleviate that crisis, although it will make the most dire scenarios for Los Angeles much less likely.
“Our focus tends to be on filling of surface reservoirs, and everybody declares the drought over,” said Mount. “That’s just fundamentally wrong.”
Atmospheric river storms like the one that struck California this week account for as much as half of all West Coast precipitation even in normal years, which makes them critical for bringing the region out of prolonged drought periods. The most recent forecasts suggest that this year’s wetter trend will persist through the winter, but there’s still a small chance that “the door slams shut,” as Mount puts it, and rain stops altogether. The northern Sierras also saw high precipitation totals in November and December of 2021, but then the rain flatlined in January and February of last year, leaving the state well short of average rainfall.
“It doesn’t look like that right now,” Mount told Grist. “None of the models I’m aware of are saying that it’s going to stop.”
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has proposed new standards for how much of the nation’s fuel supply should come from renewable sources.
The proposal, released last month, calls for an increase in the mandatory requirements set forth by the federal Renewable Fuel Standard, or RFS. The program, created in 2005, dictates how much renewable fuels — products like corn-based ethanol, manure-based biogas, and wood pellets — are used to reduce the use of petroleum-based transportation fuel, heating oil, or jet fuel and cut greenhouse gas emissions.
The new requirements have sparked a heated debate between industry leaders, who say the recent proposal will help stabilize the market in the coming years, and green groups, which argue that the favored fuels come at steep environmental costs.
Below is a Grist guide to this growing debate, breaking down exactly what these fuels are, how they’re created, and how they would change under the EPA’s new proposal:
The fuels
Renewable fuel is an umbrella term for the bio-based fuels mandated by the EPA to be mixed into the nation’s fuel supply. The category includes fuel produced from planted crops, planted trees, animal waste and byproducts, and wood debris from non-ecological sensitive areas and not from federal forestland. Under the RFS, renewable fuels are supposed to replace fossil fuels and are used for transportation and heating across the country, and are supposed to emit 20 percent fewer greenhouse gasses than the energy they replace.
Under the new EPA proposal, renewable fuels would increase by roughly 9 percent by the end of 2025 — an increase of nearly 2 billion gallons. The new EPA proposal will set a target of almost 21 billion gallons of renewable fuels in 2023, which includes over 15 billion gallons of corn ethanol. By 2025, the EPA hopes to have over 22 billion gallons of different renewable fuel sources powering the nation.
The United States is the largest producer of corn, which can be seen being harvested and stored in grain silos. With 40 percent of the corn produced used for ethanol, environmental groups argue that increased corn production leads to more fertilizer use and pollution.
YinYang/Getty Images
Advanced biofuel, a type of renewable fuel, includes fuel created from crop waste, animal waste, food waste, and yard waste. This also includes biogas, a natural gas produced from the methane created by animal and human waste. Advanced biofuel can also include fuels created from sugars and starches, apart from ethanol.
In its newest proposal, the EPA suggests a roughly 14 percent increase in the use of these fuels from 2023 to 2024 and a 12 percent increase the year after that. The EPA wants roughly 6 billion gallons of advanced biofuel in the marketplace by this year.
Nestled inside of the advanced biofuel category is biomass-based diesel, a fuel source created from vegetable oils and animal fats. This fuel can also be created from oils, waste, and sludge created in municipal wastewater treatment plants. Under the new EPA proposal, the agency is suggesting a 2 percent year-over-year increase in these fuels by the end of 2025, which equals a final amount of nearly three billion gallons.
Cellulosic biofuel, another type of renewable fuel, is a liquid fuel created by “crops, trees, forest residues, and agricultural residues not specifically grown for food, including from barley grain, grapeseed, rice bran, rice hulls, rice straw, soybean matter,” as well as sugarcane byproducts, according to the 2005 law.
“In the interim period, there’s going to be a need for lower carbon, renewable liquid fuels”
The EPA’s recent proposal aims for nearly double the amount of the use of these fuels by 2024. Then a 50 percent increase the year after, equivalent to 2 billion gallons.
“We are pretty pleased with what the EPA proposed for 2023 through 2025,” Geoff Cooper, president and CEO of the Renewable Fuel Association, an industry group whose members primarily include ethanol producers, but also represent biogas and biomass producers, told Grist.
Cooper said that the EPA and the Biden administration recognize that alternative fuels are a growing and needed sector while the country tries to move away from fossil fuels. Setting standards for the next three years will help the biofuels industry grow, said Cooper, who predicted more ethanol, biomass, or biogas producers will emerge in the coming years.
“I think the administration recognizes that you’re not going to electrify everything overnight,” Cooper said, “and in the interim period, there’s going to be a need for lower-carbon, renewable liquid fuels.”
The controversy
While renewable fuel standards have gained a stamp of approval from industry producers and the federal government, environmental groups see increased investment in ethanol, biomass, and biogas as doubling down on dirty fuel.
“It’s not encouraging because it continues on the false premise that biofuels, in general, are a helpful pathway to meeting our climate goals,” Brett Hartl, government affairs director for the nonprofit environmental group Center for Biological Diversity.
Biomass wood pellets are a fuel source made from wood debris and lumber, and are a booming industry in the American South. The new Renewable Fuel Standard proposal calls for an increase in this fuel source, despite opposition from environmental groups.
Anadolu Agency / Getty Images
Hartl argues that investing in increased corn production to fuel ethanol will continue harmful agricultural practices that erode soil and dump massive amounts of pesticides on corn crops, which causes increased water pollution and toxic dead zones across the country and the Gulf of Mexico. The United States is the world’s largest producer of corn, with 40 percent of the corn produced used for ethanol.
A study released earlier this year from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that when demand for corn goes up, caused by an increase in blending requirements from the RFS, prices increase as well, which causes farmers to add more fertilizer products, created by fossil fuels, to crops. The EPA’s own internal research has also shown greenhouse gas emissions over the next three years will grow with the increase in blending requirements from the federal mandate.
22.68 billion
the number of renewable fuel gallons the EPA hopes to have by 2025
The Center for Biological Diversity has been critical of the EPA’s past support of renewable fuel without a calculation of the total environmental impacts of how the fuel is produced and is currently in legal battles with the federal agency. They’re not alone in their critiques.
Tarah Heinzen, legal director for Food & Water Watch, a nonprofit environmental watchdog group, said in a statement that an increase in both industrial corn production and biogas, a fuel created from animal and food waste, are not part of a clean energy future.
“Relying on dirty fuels like factory farm gas and ethanol to clean up our transportation sector will only dig a deeper hole,” Heinzen said. “The EPA should recognize this by reducing, not increasing, the volume requirements for these dirty sources of energy in the Renewable Fuel Standard.”
Alternative fuels, like biogas and biomass (a fuel created from trees and wood pulp), have gained steam thanks to the ethanol boom of the renewable fuel category. The biogas industry is set to boom thanks to tax incentives created by the Inflation Reduction Act.
Biomass is a growing industry in the South, with wood pellet mills popping up in recent years. Scientists from across the globe have decried the industry’s suggestion that burning trees for electricity is carbon neutral, with 650 scientists signing a recent letter to denounce the industry’s claims.
The world’s largest producer of wood pellet biomass energy has come under fire from a whistleblower who said the company uses whole trees to create electricity, despite the company’s claims of sustainably harvesting only tree limbs to produce energy. Wood pellet facilities have faced opposition from local governments and federal legislators, with community members in Springfield, Massachusetts successfully blocking a permit for a new biomass facility in November.
Despite concerns from environmental groups, the forecasted demands of the EPA show that the nation is pushing for more of these fuels in the coming years. This past spring, a bipartisan group of Midwestern governors asked the EPA for a permanent waiver to sell higher blends of ethanol year-round, despite summer-time smog created by the higher blend of renewable fuel. More recently, Missouri officials sought the same waiver
What are those fuels again?
Renewable fuel is an umbrella term for the bio-based fuels mandated by the EPA to be mixed into the nation’s fuel supply. The category includes fuel produced from planted crops, planted trees, animal waste and byproducts, and wood debris from non-ecological sensitive areas and not from federal forestland. Under the RFS, renewable fuels are supposed to replace fossil fuels and are used for transportation and heating across the country, and are supposed to emit 20 percent fewer greenhouse gasses than the energy they replace.
Advanced biofuel, a type of renewable fuel, includes fuel created from crop waste, animal waste, food waste, and yard waste. This also includes biogas, a natural gas produced from the methane created by animal and human waste. Advanced biofuel can also include fuels created from sugars and starches, apart from ethanol.
Nestled inside of the advanced biofuel category is biomass-based diesel, a fuel source created from vegetable oils and animal fats. This fuel can also be created from oils, waste, and sludge created in municipal wastewater treatment plants.
Cellulosic biofuel, another type of renewable fuel, is a liquid fuel created by “crops, trees, forest residues, and agricultural residues not specifically grown for food, including from barley grain, grapeseed, rice bran, rice hulls, rice straw, soybean matter,” as well as sugarcane byproducts, according to the 2005 law.
During World War II, Hitler’s campaign of violence had disastrous consequences not only for the millions of civilians and soldiers who were killed, but also for the environment itself — driving the declines of bumblebees and other wildlife in the U.K. and continental Europe. Now, it seems that Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine might have a similar effect, sparking a drive to increase food production…
The extreme weather that has battered much of the U.S. in 2022 doesn’t just affect humans. Heat waves, wildfires, droughts and storms also threaten many wild species — including some that already face other stresses. I’ve been researching bee health for over 10 years, with a focus on honey bees. In 2021, I began hearing for the first time from beekeepers about how extreme drought and rainfall were…
We’re living through a daunting time in our national politics. Election denial, overt racism, and pernicious attacks on the pillars of civil society—from school boards to local election officials—accompany a general coarsening of discourse and increasing threats of violence. As we head toward the 2024 presidential election, authoritarianism looms.
And yet, in the middle of all this ugliness, as racist political advertisements connecting a Black U.S. Senate candidate to violent crime blanketed the airwaves in Wisconsin ahead of November’s midterm elections, and giant Trump banners waved over cornfields in rural parts of the state, I found myself traveling to talk to groups of people about the unlikely friendship between farmers and undocumented immigrants. I felt the warmth among groups of voters, many of them Republicans, toward the undocumented Mexican immigrants who do most of the work on Wisconsin’s dairy farms.
Despite all the ugly, anti-immigrant rhetoric flying around in this election year, stories like Tecpile’s bring tears to the eyes of listeners—Republicans and Democrats alike.
John Rosenow, a dairy farmer from Cochrane, Wisconsin, was there with his employee Roberto Tecpile, who grew up in Astacinga, a tiny village in the mountains of Veracruz, in southern Mexico. So was Stan Linder, a dairy farmer from Stockholm, Wisconsin, who has been driving down to Mexico regularly for the last twenty years, taking van loads of other farmers to visit the families of their Mexican workers and to admire the homes and businesses the workers have built with the money they’ve made milking cows up north. Shaun Duvall, the high school Spanish teacher from Alma, Wisconsin, who first had the idea to take groups of farmers to Mexico, was there, too. So was Mercedes Falk, who now runs Puentes/Bridges, the nonprofit group Duvall founded to build cultural understanding between Midwestern dairy farmers and the Mexican workers who comprise more than half of the workforce on the dairy farms of the Upper Midwest.
One farmer, Chris Weisenbeck, describes his visits to the small villages of rural Mexico as stepping into a scene from his own past, when tight-knit rural communities were thriving. Watching a group of neighbors working to build a house together, he commented, “It’s about neighbors helping neighbors and everybody working together. Small town Mexico, small town U.S.A.—same thing.”
“It’s an agrarian society,” Rosenow explains. “They find working on a farm honorable, where most Americans don’t consider working on a farm honorable. You’d take public assistance before you’d work on a farm.”
At the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire, after a panel discussion of my book, Tecpile and I spent a day speaking to classrooms full of students about the growing Mexican immigrant population in their area. In a couple of the classes, conducted in Spanish, Tecpile addressed the group directly, without a translator. It was elevating for him, speaking at a university, part of what he describes as his amazing journey of success.
He recalled how, when he was eight years old, he and his family were living in a wooden shack with a plastic tarp for a roof. A hail storm came and tore off the roof, pelting the family with hail as they huddled together. It was then, he said, that he promised his mother he would build her a better house.
Today, after working in the United States for twenty of his forty-three years, Tecpile has built a solid, cement-block house for his parents, and another one next door for his wife and children.
Despite all the ugly, anti-immigrant rhetoric flying around in this election year, stories like Tecpile’s bring tears to the eyes of listeners—Republicans and Democrats alike. Most of the dairy farmers who rely on Mexican workers are Republicans. Republican politicians, taking their cue from Donald Trump, have become increasingly harsh in their attacks on immigrants this year. (Consider the political stunts by Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott, the Republican governors of Florida and Texas, respectively, who lured Latin American asylum seekers onto airplanes and flew them to Martha’s Vineyard, in Massachusetts, and Washington, D.C., in a mean-spirited effort to embarrass liberals in those sanctuary communities by shamefully manipulating bewildered families, treating them like human refuse meant to litter the beach and the White House lawn.) Yet many rural voters in Wisconsin have developed a sense of kinship with the undocumented immigrants without whom they would lose their farms and way of life. National politics don’t reflect the full complexity of that reality.
There is so much wrong with our politics and our broken immigration system, which forces people like Tecpile—who are carrying the entire dairy industry, among other U.S. industries, on their backs—to work without the protection of a legal visa. There is no such thing as a year-round visa for low-skilled agricultural work in this country. Yet we have depended heavily on the year-round work of undocumented immigrants for decades. It’s one of many cruel and unjust policies that make the workers who sustain U.S. agriculture, not to mention food service, construction, and hospitality, extremely vulnerable.
At the same time, rural Americans have become increasingly drawn to the politics of resentment, voting in large numbers for Trump and the election deniers and xenophobes who now run the Republican Party, out of a sense of grievance, abandonment, and fear.
Wisconsin is the number one state in the nation for farm bankruptcies. When President Bill Clinton signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1993, it accelerated the “get big or get out” trend in agriculture. We’ve lost more than half of our family farms in Wisconsin since 2004. The farms that stayed in business did so by expanding rapidly and hiring Mexican workers. Contrary to the rightwing canard about a “great replacement” of U.S.-born workers by immigrants, farmers in this area tried hard—and failed—to find Americans willing to take jobs milking cows and shoveling manure every day at 4 a.m.
Thus, two groups of rural people, from the United States and Mexico, were brought together.
There are many questions raised by their stories—about migration, labor, the demands of the global economy, and the human and environmental costs of massive consolidation in agriculture. But what stands out the most to me this year, as I travel around talking about my book, is the way the relationship between two groups of rural people who were thrown together by global economic forces beyond their control feels like an antidote to toxic partisanship.
The us-versus-them mentality that is gripping our country, pitting urban against rural, white against Black and brown, conservatives against progressives, doesn’t capture the deep economic and social interdependence of U.S. farmers and undocumented Mexican farm workers.
Watching people who were moved to tears as Tecpile described his journey, I thought, what a difference it makes to meet people individually, to see each other’s humanity, to imagine ourselves in someone else’s place. And to realize that, ultimately, we are all in the same boat.
We’re going to need a lot more of that in the years to come.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
Here’s the basic problem for conservation at a global level: food production, biodiversity and carbon storage in ecosystems are competing for the same land. As humans demand more food, so more forests and other natural ecosystems are cleared, and farms intensify and become less hospitable to many wild animals and plants. Therefore global conservation, currently focused on the COP15 summit in Montreal, will fail unless it addresses the underlying issue of food production.
Fortunately, a whole raft of new technologies is being developed that make a system-wide revolution in food production feasible. According to recent research by one of us (Chris), this transformation could meet increased global food demands by a growing human population on less than 20% of the world’s existing farmland. Or in other words, these technologies could release at least 80% of existing farmland from agriculture in about a century.
Around four-fifths of the land used for human food production is allocated to meat and dairy, including both range lands and crops specifically grown to feed livestock. Add up the whole of India, South Africa, France and Spain and you have the amount of land devoted to crops that are then fed to livestock.
Brazil’s enormous soy farms mostly produce food for animals, not humans. lourencolf / shutterstock
Despite growing numbers of vegetarians and vegans in some countries, global meat consumption has increased by more than 50% in the past 20 years and is set to double this century. As things stand, producing all that extra meat will mean either converting even more land into farms, or cramming even more cows, chickens and pigs into existing land. Neither option is good for biodiversity.
Meat and dairy production is already an unpleasant business. For instance, most chickens are grown in high-density feeding operations, and pork, beef and especially dairy farming is going the same way. Current technologies are cruel, polluting and harmful to biodiversity and the climate – don’t be misled by cartoons of happy cows with daisies protruding from their lips.
Unless food production is tackled head-on, we are left resisting inevitable change, often with no hope of long-term success. We need to tackle the cause of biodiversity change. The principal global approach to climate change is to focus on the cause and minimise greenhouse gas emissions, not to manufacture billions of parasols (though we may need these too). The same is required for biodiversity.
So, how can we do this?
Cellular agriculture provides an alternative, and could be one of this century’s most promising technological advancements. Sometimes called “lab-grown food”, the process involves growing animal products from real animal cells, rather than growing actual animals.
If growing meat or milk from animal cells sounds strange or icky to you, let’s put this into perspective. Imagine a brewery or cheese factory: a sterile facility filled with metal vats, producing large volumes of beer or cheese, and using a variety of technologies to mix, ferment, clean and monitor the process. Swap the barley or milk for animal cells and this same facility becomes a sustainable and efficient producer of dairy or meat products.
Animal cruelty would be eliminated and, with no need for cows wandering around in fields, the factory would take up far less space to produce the same amount of meat or milk.
The cultivation room at California-based Upside Foods which uses cellular agriculture to produce meat. David Kay / Upside Foods
Other emerging technologies include microbial protein production, where bacteria use energy derived from solar panels to convert carbon dioxide and nitrogen and other nutrients into carbohydrates and proteins. This could generate as much protein as soybeans but in just 7% of the area. These could then be used as protein food additives (a major use of soy) and animal feed (including for pets).
It is even possible to generate sugars and carbohydrates using desalination or through extracting CO₂ from the atmosphere, all without ever passing through a living plant or animal. The resulting sugars are chemically the same as those derived from plants but would be generated in a tiny fraction of the area required by conventional crops.
What to do with old farmland
These new technologies can have a huge impact even if demand keeps growing. Even though Chris’s research is based on the assumption that global meat consumption will double, it nonetheless suggests that at least 80% of farmland could be released to be used for something else.
That land might become nature reserves or be used to store carbon, for example, in forests or the waterlogged soils of peat bogs. It could be used to grow sustainable building materials, or simply to produce more human-edible crops, among other uses.
Gone too will be industrial livestock systems that produce huge volumes of manure, bones, blood, guts, antibiotics and growth hormones. Thereafter, any remaining livestock farming could be carried out in a compassionate manner.
Longhorn cattle on a rewilding project in England: if we got most of our protein and carbs through new technologies, this sort of compassionate and wildlife-friendly farming could be scaled up. Chris Thomas, Author provided
Since there would be less pressure on the land, there would be less need for chemicals and pesticides and crop production could become more wildlife-friendly (global adoption of organic farming is not feasible at present because it is less productive). This transition must be coupled with a full transition towards renewable energy as the new technologies require lots of power.
Converting these technologies into mass-market production systems will of course be tricky. But a failure to do so is likely to lead to ever-increasing farming intensity, escalating numbers of confined animals, and even more lost nature.
Avoiding this fate – and achieving the 80% farmland reduction – will require a lot of political will and a cultural acceptance of these new forms of food. It will require economic and political “carrots” such as investment, subsidies and tax breaks for desirable technologies, and “sticks” such as increased taxation and removal of subsidies for harmful technologies. Unless this happens, biodiversity targets will continue to be missed, COP after COP.
The second-largest tar sands oil spill in the country — which left a black pockmark on Kansas grasslands a few weeks ago — will be harder to clean compared to past oil spills.
In early December, nearly 14,000 barrels of oil known as diluted bitumen spilled in north-central Kansas, three hours outside of Kansas City, Kansas. The cleanup is still underway, with at least 4,000 barrels now cleared from a waterway known as Mill Creek. But as time goes on, environmentalists and infrastructure experts worry about the oil that will be more difficult to clean.
According to TC Energy ,the Canadian operator of the Keystone Pipeline responsible for the spill, other sections of the pipeline have been restarted at reduced pressure. At the time of the spill, the pipeline was operating at 80 percent of the maximum recommended rate, which is allowed under a 2007 permit granted to the pipeline company by the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, or PHMSA. Normally, crude oil pipelines can’t operate above 72 percent of this rate. To be granted the exception, TC Energy had to “construct the pipeline using higher-grade steel,” according to a report from the Government Accountability Office.
Diluted bitumen, or dilbit, is a natural oil sand found in sand deposits. It’s composed of sand, water, and bitumen, a sticky, black petroleum. According to an Inside Climate News analysis, dilbit is the heaviest of the crude oils used today and 50 to 70 percent of its composition is likely to sink in water, compared to the less than 10 percent of most crude oils. The oil inside the Keystone Pipeline is transported from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada — the globe’s third largest petroleum reserve — to refineries in the Midwest and the Gulf Coast. The leak occurred on a section of the Keystone Pipeline completed in 2011.
“It is troubling to see so many failures and so much oil spilled from any pipeline, but it is especially troubling from such a relatively new pipeline,” Bill Caram, executive director of the nonprofit pipeline watchdog group Pipeline Safety Trust, said in a statement.
According to a report from the National Academy of Sciences, dilbit is harder to clean, coats and adheres to landscapes and animals more than other crude oils, and has a smaller window of opportunity for proper cleanup. This study was commissioned by Congress after the infamous 2010 Kalamazoo, Michigan oil spill, where nearly 42,000 barrels of dilbit spilled into a tributary of the Kalamazoo River from an Enbridge-operated pipeline. This oil spill, which took four years and billions of dollars to clean up while also prompting the evacuation of hundreds of homes, was the worst tar sands oil spill in the nation’s history.
So far, 71 fish and four mammals have been confirmed killed in the Kansas oil spill, with one beaver saved by rescue crews, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA. After the initial spill, TC Energy created two dams to prevent any continued spread and has since been working to remove the tar sands oil from surface water. According to the EPA, no drinking water wells were affected by the spill, but the federal agency and the Kansas Department of Health and Environment have urged people and animals to avoid the contaminated creek.
“We continue to prioritize the safety of people and the environment,” TC Energy said in a statement. “We are working with wildlife assessment crews including state and federal wildlife trustees and have trained professional responders onsite to identify any impacts to wildlife.”
The company has previously paid over $300,000 in fines related to damage caused by the Keystone Pipeline.
The Keystone Pipeline, and its now-defunct offshoot Keystone XL, have sparked battles from local communities and Indigenous people in the nation’s prairie lands since its inception. In 2011, then-Nebraska Governor Dave Heineman urged the federal government to stop the expansion of the pipeline through his state to protect water. When the Keystone XL segment was announced, federal and local law enforcement began to strategize about how to stop Indigenous protests in Montana, South Dakota, and Nebraska “by any means.”
The ruptured Kansas segment of the pipeline remains closed during the cleanup process. In a statement, TC Energy said it continues to work with the PHMSA to determine the cause of the ruptured line. President Joseph Biden recently released 2 million barrels of oil from the nation’s strategic reserve to various refineries in hopes of preventing “potential supply disruptions” caused by the spill.
*Correction
This story has been updated to describe Pipeline Safety Trust as a nonprofit public watchdog group.
Midwest soil is eroding at an alarming rate according to new, first-of-its-kind research.
Researchers at the University of Massachusetts found that the rate of soil erosion in the Midwestern US is 10 to 1,000 times greater than it was before modern agriculture practices reigned supreme across the region. The study found that before modern agriculture, the rate of soil erosion was vastly smaller than what is now deemed an acceptable amount of erosion by the United States Department of Agriculture, or USDA.
“The Midwest is losing soil, for most of these sites, about 100 times faster than it’s forming,” Isaac Larsen, a geoscience professor at the University of Massachusetts and a study co-author, told Grist.
Larsen, an Iowa native, said the loss of soil is a concern across the board, from the fragility of food production to concerns over groundwater pollution. He said the rich soil the Midwest is known for has been eroding and replaced with synthetic chemicals like fertilizers and pesticides.
A different study, released earlier this year by Larsen, found that the Midwest lost roughly two millimeters of soil per year—which is double what the USDA deems acceptable—in the last 160 years.
University of Massachusetts researchers found a method to get data on how much soil has been lost since before mass machinery and man disrupted the Earth’s surface.
By studying the amount of beryllium-10, a rare element found in stardust that makes its way to the Earth’s surface after distant stars explode, scientists were able to find untouched Midwestern fields and prairies with rich amounts of space dust. When compared to fields used for corn and soybean production across the Midwest, which included sites in Iowa, Minnesota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas, the tilled fields had far less concentration of beryllium-10.
Larsen said the Midwest has lower, natural erosion rates compared to other regions, but agriculture has sped up these rates drastically.
“If we can find ways to still have agriculture but with erosion rates that are comparable to these long term erosion rates, we’re able to sustain thick, organic, rich soil,” Larsen said.
The push for climate-smart agriculture and farming solutions has grown. Millions of dollars have poured in from private corporations and nonprofits in recent years and now the federal government is pushing for $20 billion for farmers to adopt “climate smart” practices.
Generally, two methods seen to help protect soil health are cover crops, fusing vegetation not meant to be harvested in between harvested crops to protect the soil from erosion, and no-till farming, where growers try not to disturb the soil during planting and harvesting as much as possible, to ensure nutrients stay locked into the ground and erosion doesn’t occur.
Both of these methods are used in combination with changes to harvests, such as planting perennial crops, across the country as the nation’s agricultural industry adapts to a warming climate. While the effectiveness of popular methods like cover crops has been challenged, despite more and more Midwest farmers using them, agriculture advocates continue to push for more farmers to adopt less intrusive methods to stop erosion.
Dr. Cathy Day, climate policy coordinator for National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, or NSAC, an advocacy organization, said climate adoption and soil health vary by region, from the growth of agroforestry to a push for no fertilizer, but across the board, more funding is needed for farmers to learn and adopt practices to prevent soil loss. She said federal legislation was at the top of her mind to help farmers and growers look to change their methods.
“We’re asking that they put a priority on soil health, and put a priority on climate mitigation and adaptation as well,” Day said.
The small community of Laketown, Wisconsin, home to just over 1,000 people and 18 lakes, is again at the center of a battle over how communities can regulate large, industrial farming operations in their backyards.
The town, which is half an hour from the Minnesota border, is the target of a lawsuit supported by the state’s largest business lobbying group, which claims the town board overstepped its role when it passed a local ordinance to prevent pollution from confined animal feeding operations, or CAFOs.
Filed in Polk County Circuit Court in October, the lawsuit pits local farmers against the municipality, where decisions are made by a single town chair and two supervisors. Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, or WMC, a lobbying group that defines itself as the state’s “largest and most influential business association” is representing the residents suing the town through its litigation center.
Early this year, WMC sent a letter to the town board that they would see legal action if the ordinance was not repealed. The notice of claim, sent in April, argues the town passed an ordinance with various illegal provisions under state law. The Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce Litigation Center, who have previously filed lawsuits to rollback state protections against water pollution, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
“They see this ordinance, if not challenged, as something that may become more the norm around the state,” Adam Voskuil, staff attorney for the nonprofit law office Midwest Environmental Advocates, told Grist. This law office has issued its support for Laketown’s ordinance in the past but is not representing the municipality in this ongoing litigation.
As the agricultural industry increasingly forces farmers to “get big or get out,” CAFOs have become plentiful across Wisconsin and the country at large, with more and more animals living on CAFO operations in recent years. The size of these farms varies within a state but generally are seen as operations with 2,000 or more pigs, 700 or more dairy cattle, or over 1,000 beef cattle.
The growth of these operations has been linked to public health problems like various cancers as well as infant death and miscarriages, caused by water contaminated with waste runoff from farms. On the other side of Wisconsin, residents in Kewaunee County have seen manure coming out of their faucets from one the largest CAFOs in the state, who sued the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resource last year when they were denied a request to nearly double their size.
As more confined animal feeding operations, like the hog farm pictured, pop up across the country, towns and counties have attempted to regulate their growth.
chayakorn lotongkum / Getty Images
When communities try to respond with local-level enforcement, both industry interests and a lack of power at the local level cause townships to get creative with their responses.
Every state has some form of a “right to farm” law, which stops farms from being targeted for nuisances related to the daily operations of the industry, such as odor, noise, and effects on the environment. From there, each state has some form of a regulatory process that outlines how large farms are allowed to operate.
In Iowa, which leads the country in CAFOs, the state government sets all regulatory requirements and local towns and counties are out of luck when it comes to enforcement, according to John Robbins, Planning and Zoning Administrator for Cerro Gordo County, Iowa. He said the county once had a restrictive ordinance for CAFO zoning on the books, but after a state law took control, counties now have “very limited authority.”
Last year, when a Missouri hog farm spilled 300,000 gallons of waste into nearby waterways, two counties attempted to regulate CAFOs differently than the state government. Those counties had to sue to challenge state-level laws and are now awaiting trials in the state Supreme Court.
Further West, Gooding County, Idaho has seen the whole gambit of what Wisconsin towns could be facing. In 2007, the central Idaho county named after a famed state sheep rancher passed an ordinance regulating CAFOs in the county limits. A month later, industry groups Idaho Dairymen’s Association and Idaho Cattle Association started a court battle with the county that ended two years later, with the state supreme court ruling in the county’s favor. Gooding County’s legal representatives did not respond to a request for comment.
Wisconsin’s Livestock Facility Siting Law generally restricts how local municipalities can stop or slow new CAFOs or expansions to current facilities. This law is at the crux of arguments in opposition to Laketown and other surrounding communities’ proposed or passed ordinances.
Other Wisconsin communities have enacted local level ordinances to regulate these large farms. In 2016, northern Bayfield County enacted a CAFO ordinance that imposed a one-time fee and required operators to have increased manure storage options. After a large hog farm estimated to produce over 9 million gallons of manure a year was proposed in Polk County a few years ago, the county attempted a moratorium on CAFOs, but the measure did not pass.
Since then, at least five neighboring towns of Laketown have passed similar ordinances.
“This is one of the first times I’ve seen a town refuse to back down to some of these letters”
Adam Voskuil, Midwest Environmental Advocates staff attorney
The Laketown ordinance that sparked the lawsuit is an operations ordinance, unlike Bayfield’s ordinance which focused on zoning. Laketown CAFO operators are asked to file a one-time fee equal to a dollar for every animal unit as well as give detailed plans of how they will prevent ground and air pollution stemming from their facilities. Passed in 2021, the ordinance states it is based upon Laketown’s obligation to “protect the health, safety and general welfare of the public.”
All along the way, industry groups Venture Dairy Cooperative and the Wisconsin Dairy Alliance, its website features the slogan “Fighting for CAFOs Every Day,” have sent threatening letters to towns that passed ordinances or moratoriums, with the help of WMC.
“This is standard operating procedure for the Big Ag boys,” said Lisa Doerr, a Laketown resident of over 20 years who raises horses and commercially farms hay and alfalfa with her husband.
Doerr has been involved at the local level in opposition to CAFO since Polk County learned of a proposed 26,000-hog farm. Doerr, who worked with the Large Livestock Town Partnership, a multi-town committee that examines the environmental impact of CAFOs, said she worried that the landscape of the town and county would change if local action wasn’t taken.
“The name of our town is Laketown because we’ve got lakes everywhere,” she said. “We still have a middle class farming community. We haven’t had corporate ag take over everything.”
In its recently filed response letter, Laketown’s attorney said WMC’s argument falls flat as it is based solely on the state-level zoning law, while the town’s ordinance regulates the operations and conduct of a facility. They also noted that since the ordinance passed, no facilities have applied for a permit, which means the town has not yet enforced any actions WMC says are unlawful. Laketown board chair Daniel King declined to comment, citing the ongoing lawsuit.
Midwest Environmental Advocates attorney Voskuil said he was heartened to see that Laketown has been holding its ground. “This is one of the first times I’ve seen a town refuse to back down to some of these letters,” he said.
Farther south in Wisconsin, another county is reeling from letters threatening legal action. Crawford County, which borders Iowa, enacted a CAFO moratorium in 2019 but did not renew the moratorium after studying the issue for a year. Forest Jahnke, a coordinator with the Crawford Stewardship Project, said the decision to not renew the moratorium was highly influenced by the deluge of similar threats of litigation and backlash, which had a “chilling effect” on efforts to move forward.
“The fear of litigation is a very strong and deep one in our local municipalities and county governments,” Jahnke, who was a member of the committee studying the CAFO moratorium in Crawford County, said.
Since the moratorium rolled back, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources greenlit a Crawford County hog farm, home to 8,000 pigs and expected to generate 9.4 million gallons of manure each year.
Last week, the federal government announced it will spend a quarter of a billion dollars over four years to clean up what remains of the Salton Sea, a lake in southern California that has been shrinking due to climate change-driven drought.
For decades, communities living near the sea have been afflicted by health problems caused by algae blooms and dust storms spurred by wind kicking up drying sediment from the sea’s ever-widening shores. The government’s new plan aims to help remediate some of those health impacts while simultaneously encouraging farms in the region to reduce their reliance on water from the Colorado River.
The $250 million will come from $4 billion earmarked for drought funding in the Inflation Reduction Act, the climate and energy security bill passed by Democrats and signed by President Joe Biden in August. The new money is meant to complement more than half a billion dollars the state of California has already committed to restoration and dust-suppression projects in the area.
The Salton Sea, a body of water that formed by accident more than a hundred years ago when the Colorado River overtopped an irrigation channel and flooded an empty lake bed, has become a controversial flashpoint in California’s ongoing efforts to conserve its increasingly limited water supply from the Colorado River basin.
For around half a century, the brimming Salton Sea attracted tourists, anglers, and celebrities like the Marx Brothers and the Beach Boys to its shores. But the sea was only directly fed by the Colorado River for a period of two years starting in 1905. Since then, it has been sustained indirectly by agricultural runoff from farms in the Imperial Valley that use water from the Colorado River to irrigate their crops. As water evaporates from the sea’s surface into the atmosphere, the body of water has become more concentrated with pesticides and other farming byproducts, and algae have proliferated in its tepid, shallow waters. The approximately 650,000 people living nearby suffer from headaches, nosebleeds, asthma, and other health issues.
The Department of the Interior, the government agency that is managing the restoration agreement, has made it clear that there are strings attached to the federal funding. The department’s Bureau of Reclamation will provide California with $22 million in new funding between now and the end of next summer to spend on restoration projects around the sea, conduct research on current and future cleanup projects, and hire two representatives from the Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indian Tribe to help implement those projects.
The remaining $228 million is contingent on the state following through on its commitment to conserve 400,000 acre-feet of Colorado River water every year starting in 2023. Specifically, the Imperial Irrigation District, or IID, the public utility that supplies the Imperial Valley and its 500,000 acres of farmland with Colorado River water, will need to take on additional conservation measures in order to help California meet that target. A day after the Interior Department announced its $250 million plan, the IID board voted 3-2 to approve it, signaling that the district agrees, at least for now, to conserve 250,000 acre-feet of river water per year as part of the state’s wider goal.
“This landmark agreement demonstrates much-needed federal commitment to the Salton Sea and IID’s commitment to improving Basin resilience,” Michael Cohen, senior associate at the Pacific Institute, a water conservation think tank, said in a statement.
Conserving all that water comes with tradeoffs for the Salton Sea. An IID projection shows that by 2027, the measures will expose an additional 8,100 acres of dusty shoreline. That’s where the funding for restoration and cleanup from the federal government comes in.
Jenny Binstock, a senior campaign representative at the Sierra Club, told Grist that she considers the new funding a “shot in the arm” for the efforts to fix the sea’s problems, though she said more can be done. Binstock wants federal and state agencies to thoroughly consult surrounding communities before approving new projects and, looking further ahead, figure out a way to pump new water into the sea. “Moving forward it will be essential that federal partners continue to work with the state, water agencies, and local communities to ensure that the Salton Sea remains a major priority as part of the complex water challenges facing the Western U.S.,” she said.
Every September for the last 25 years, thousands of people have descended on a field in southeast Ohio to celebrate North America’s largest edible native tree fruit: the pawpaw. With custard-yellow flesh that tastes like a cross between a mango and a banana, pawpaws are eaten raw, worked into sauces and chutneys, or brewed into beer at the Ohio Pawpaw Festival, a celebration of both the fruit’s flavor and its history in Appalachia.
This year, more people than ever before came to learn about the plant, crowding around a cooking demonstration to watch local chefs craft a pawpaw salsa and even buying seedlings to plant in their backyards. A few dozen gathered under a white tent to hear Brian Koscho, an Ohio-based artist and creator of an Appalachian history podcast, talk about the Indigenous roots of the plant. Pawpaws, he said, have an “impact both here in this area, but also far, far beyond.”
When the COVID-19 pandemic jammed up agricultural supply chains, interest in local foods skyrocketed and the pawpaw quickly emerged as a tasty symbol of a more resilient food system. Known in some circles as the “hipster banana,” the green, fist-sized fruit made its way to rooftop gardens in Brooklyn, cocktail lists in bars and national magazines, and amateur fruit growers in California, well outside its native range. The industry expanded from foragers and a handful of independent producers selling their fruit at farmers markets to a growing number of small farms in states from West Virginia to Massachusetts.
The annual Ohio Pawpaw Festival attracts thousands of people every year.
Diana Kruzman / Grist
But just as this fruit finds its place in the growing local-foods movement, it is being threatened by a changing climate and more extreme weather patterns. Plant biologists at the University of Georgia recently found that while rising global temperatures will open up new suitable areas for pawpaws to grow, these changes will likely take place too quickly for the wild plants to adapt.
“It’s not just more warming — it’s more temperature extremes too,” said Sheri Crabtree, a pawpaw researcher at Kentucky State University, reflecting on the various challenges to the plant’s future. Pawpaws are flowering about two weeks earlier in the spring than they did several decades ago, but temperature fluctuations can lead to hard freezes after they flower, causing crop loss.
Pawpaws currently grow across more than two dozen states, stretching from the eastern U.S. to parts of Nebraska, Kansas, and Texas. But their heartland is Appalachia, where they’ve been mentioned in songs and incorporated into regional recipes for generations; at least six states have named towns after the fruit. Before British colonization, Indigenous people in this region harvested pawpaw fruits and used the tree’s bark for building materials; tribes such as the Shawnee that were forced to move westward during the nineteenth century as Americans sought to settle on their lands have since planted pawpaws on reservations in Oklahoma, maintaining a connection to ancestral foodways.
Plants have a wide range of strategies for adapting to climate change, from developing drought resistance to migrating to new areas, thanks to pollinators and animals that disperse their seeds. But these adaptations take time — and establishing new populations is especially difficult for the pawpaw, whose pollinators, like flies, beetles, opossums, foxes, and raccoons, don’t typically travel long distances.
The University of Georgia researchers also found that because of low genetic diversity, it’s not clear whether the pawpaws that do manage to establish themselves elsewhere will have the same kind and quality of edible fruits as the ones we know today. A 2015 report from the U.S. Forest Service came to a similar conclusion.
Pawpaws need a period of cold for their seeds to germinate in the spring; toward the southern end of their range, they likely won’t get that as temperatures rise. In most places, though, growers expect the plants to thaw, blossom, and ripen earlier in the year, requiring them to plan out their harvest times accordingly. Ron Powell, the former president of the North American Pawpaw Growers’ Association, or NAPGA, said he’s already noticed changes: His grove of about 500 trees are ripening weeks earlier than usual some years. And a drought that hit his area of southwestern Ohio in late July reduced his crop to about a third of its normal size.
Pawpaws sit out on display at the 2021 Ohio Pawpaw Festival.
Diana Kruzman / Grist
Foragers, who still make up a sizable chunk of harvesters, might be particularly vulnerable as shifting weather patterns affect where pawpaws are found in the wild, said Chris Chmiel, the founder of the Ohio Pawpaw Festival and a grower of the fruit. The plants prefer low elevations and the nutrient-rich, moist soils along creeks or rivers, a habitat that’s already been diminished by urbanization and large-scale agriculture in much of the Midwest and Appalachia. And climate change is expected to bring both more extreme droughts and heavy rains to the region — neither of which is good for pawpaws, Chmiel said.
Harvests can of course vary from year to year, Chmiel said, but he’s also noticed changes recently, with a third of his trees dying. He says he’s not sure why it’s happened, but noted that heavy rains could have been a factor. He’s working with scientists at Ohio State University to figure it out.
“We’ve had a lot of rain events [where] instead of getting two inches, we’re getting four or six inches,” Chmiel said. “And a couple of years ago, we had a spring where it rained nonstop for six weeks. And I look at that, and I think these pawpaw trees were really stressed out.”
Still, growers like Powell aren’t too worried, at least in the short term. The core of the pawpaws’ range in Appalachia will most likely remain suitable for the next century, while strategies like irrigation can help stave off the impact of more frequent droughts.
Researchers are also working on breeding new varieties of the plants that can better adapt to changing conditions, Crabtree said. Her lab at Kentucky State University is developing varieties that flower later, to avoid damage from late-spring frosts, and ripen earlier, to accommodate a shorter growing season in more northern climates. Both of these could help growers deal with the impacts of climate change on their crops.
“I think they’re going to survive,” Powell said. “They’ll probably adapt better than we will to climate change.”
Fifteen of the world’s largest meat and dairy companies emit roughly the same amount of methane as the entire European Union, according to new research.
The study, which concentrated on five meat companies and 10 dairy companies, was commissioned by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy and the Changing Markets Foundation. It comes ahead of a planned update on the global methane pledge on Saturday at this year’s United Nations climate conference.
In the United States, Tyson Foods, the world’s second-largest meat company, releases roughly the same amount of methane as all livestock in Russia, while the national milking industry organization, Dairy Farmers of America, releases the same amount of methane as all livestock in the United Kingdom, according to the new study.
Shefali Sharma, European Director of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy and study co-author, said the combined emissions of all 15 companies equal more than half of all of the United State’s methane emissions.
“That’s a staggering finding,” Sharma told Grist in an email. “If governments are serious about meeting their global methane pledge, then these companies should be number one on their list to regulate.”
Methane is a natural gas and also a greenhouse gas that is produced by a variety of human and animal activities, like waste production. Methane accounts for 20 percent of all global greenhouse gas emissions. According to the study, methane remains in the atmosphere for a decade but has 80 times more warming potential than carbon dioxide and, under current policies, emissions are expected to rise by 30 percent between 2015 and 2050.
The Biden administration has previously outlined plans to reduce agricultural methane production, with the majority of those plans focused on increased funding for waste digesters, which convert waste from large-scale dairy, poultry, hog, and other operations into methane. This technology, which is set to boom under the Inflation Reduction Act, is criticized by environmental and agriculture groups who see it as a way to continue propping up large, industrial agriculture that pollutes neighboring communities and emits tons of greenhouse gasses.
Sharma said the best way to cut livestock methane emissions is to reduce the number of animals that are produced, processed, and shipped around the world.
“This means incentivizing less and far better meat on well-maintained pasture, organically produced, farms that are good to their animals and treat them well,” she said. “In the U.S., this means supporting local, state and national policy that encourages this type of production, builds smaller and decentralized food supply chains that get to consumers.”
Study authors urged for increased government policy on methane regulation and tracking, including the monitoring of indirect emissions caused across the supply chain, known as scope 3 emissions. The newly released study found that none of the 15 companies investigated, from Nestlé to JBS Foods, the world’s largest producer of beef, chicken, and lamb, track methane emissions found across their supply chains.
Climate conditions are putting upward pressure on global food prices, as people around the world chafe under levels of inflation not seen in decades. A prolonged drought this autumn is parching the Mississippi River watershed, pushing up the cost of producing key crops in the U.S. agricultural heartland.
The lack of rain is not only hindering farm output, it’s also causing the Mississippi to slow to a trickle along parts of the massive waterway, which is burdening global supply chains by significantly slowing barge traffic critical to the global food system, a U.S. government report warned last week.
“River levels are typically lower in the fall, but this year they are even lower than normal, which is causing significant issues as [the] fall harvest is well underway,” noted the study from the National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS).
In recent years, the Mississippi River basin has been responsible for producing 92 percent of U.S. agricultural exports, including 60 percent of annual U.S. grain exports, which are shipped down the river through the Port of New Orleans. The river also typically ferries 78 percent of exports in livestock feed to global markets.
But the volume of goods currently being transported on the Mississippi is down 45 percent, the NIDIS report said. Barges face stricter limits on the amount of goods they can haul when water levels are low because they run a greater risk of running aground in shallow water when carrying more than a certain amount of weight.
As a result of increased farming and shipping costs, people around the world are being priced out of food they desperately need. Since the start of last year, countries in the Americas, Europe, Africa and Asia have been suffering from a cost-of-living crisis triggered by global supply chain problems that developed during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the U.S., for example, the rate of inflation was above 8 percent in May for the first time since 1981.
The crisis was exacerbated earlier this year by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the geopolitical fallout from the incursion. Grain markets were hit particularly hard, with both Russia and Ukraine serving as major wheat exporters in peacetime. U.S. farm goods were, therefore, in relatively high demand around the world before the Midwest and Great Plains were stricken by drought.
Certain data suggest that poor people living in countries governed by right-wing politicians will suffer most as a result, with global increases in the cost-of-living appearing to be driven by laissez-faire economic policies. Bolivia, for example, has been able to keep inflation low thanks to its socialist government’s management of the economy. State-run energy and retail operations keep consumer prices stable in the South American country by releasing supply reserves to the market when excess demand persists. Meanwhile, in countries run by governments that have embraced the neoliberal approach to deregulation in recent decades — countries such as the U.S., the U.K.and Canada — price levels have grown in concert with corporate profits, which are at record levels.
Profit incentivizes increased industry output only when markets are competitive, and monopoly power has been growing over the past two decades in higher-income countries. The corporations that dominate markets for food have been among the companies in the U.S. that have been able to pass on recent increases in costs to consumers while making a healthy profit for themselves, as a report published on November 1 by The New York Times detailed.
Whatever the cause, the trend of higher price growth is being exacerbated by a warming planet, which is creating the conditions for extreme weather events like the ongoing drought causing vegetation dependent on the Mississippi River basin to wilt. To make matters worse, the full extent of the Midwestern drought damage is unknown. AccuWeather predicted that rainfall won’t return river traffic to normal until January, and that logistical disruptions have already added $20 billion to commercial transportation costs. Low levels of precipitation over the coming months could also threaten crops that haven’t even been planted yet, NIDIS warned.
“If fall moisture is not replenished, the risk for drought continuing is increased for the next growing season, as improvements to soil moisture are limited over the winter, particularly to the north where soils are mostly frozen,” the agency said. Arid conditions have already hurt wheat, corn and soybean yields.
While the Mississippi River basin goes through regular drought cycles, scientistssay climate change causes such cycles to be more frequent and intense. Warmer conditions are also stoking historic drought conditions around the world, including in the western U.S., which has been facing a two-decade-old ongoing “megadrought” that intensified since the start of 2020. Europe, China and India are also being plagued by record low levels of rainfall, which is contributing to lower supplies and higher prices for staples like rice on world markets.
“An index of grains and soybeans is trading almost 40% above the five-year average and the surge in crop prices has been a major contributor to global inflation,” Bloomberg warned in late August. “Already, food shortages helped lead to the downfall of Sri Lanka’s government earlier this year when the country ran out of hard currency needed to pay for imports.”
Recently published studies have added to the mounting pile of evidence showing that global warming looks set to make food production a challenge in the future. A study published in Nature on October 29 found that vegetable crops can be “highly sensitive to environmental change” and that temperatures higher than 30 degrees Celsius, or 86 degrees Fahrenheit (30°C / 86°F), are “detrimental to crop yield.” Another report published on October 19 by the Environmental Defense Fund found that days with “killing-degree” heat, temperatures that begin around 84°F, are set to increase significantly throughout the U.S. agricultural heartland in the coming decades.
In other words, people in the U.S. and around the world can expect more events that put upward pressure on food prices, like the ongoing Midwestern drought. The likelihood of their occurrence will only diminish if there’s a reduction in the carbon emissions causing climate change, and the harm done to people around the world will only be minimized if governments rein in corporate power.
“With each fraction of a degree of warming, tens of millions more people worldwide would be exposed to life-threatening heat waves, food and water scarcity, and coastal flooding while millions more mammals, insects, birds and plants would disappear,” TheNew York Times noted in its report on the U.N warning. The world is currently getting a preview of what some of this will look like all along the Mississippi River.
When Maria Payan’s son was screened for cancer, she knew he had to leave home.
The Payan family lived in Delta, Pennsylvania, a rural community of fewer than 1,000 people near the southern edge of the state, bordering Maryland. Payan, a Pennsylvania native, said she wanted her son Michael to grow up in a small, idyllic community like she did when she was young, making Delta an attractive place to raise a family.
Then the farm across the road changed hands and became a concentrated animal feeding operation, or CAFO, home to thousands of poultry and cattle, churning out a steady supply of manure and animal waste.
“It just changes your entire life,“ Payan told Grist. “Kids can’t play outside. You have to call them inside with the level of stench because you understand it’s not just odors.”
The proliferation of CAFOs across the country has harmed the quality of life for neighboring small communities for decades, with environmental groups now suing the Environmental Protection Agency over the agency’s failure to regulate groundwater pollution stemming from factory farms.
When a farm produces massive amounts of animal waste, the waste must go somewhere. Generally, farms have pits of manure that hold the waste, uncovered and outdoors, which increase methane emissions and contribute to more ammonia in the air, as well as pollution from nitrates and phosphorus. The waste also contains hydrogen sulfide, a chemical that causes a strong odor and inflammation in the eyes, skin, and lungs.
Some of these massive farms cash in on fuel from this waste, known as biogas.
When food and animal waste are deprived of oxygen, which occurs in landfills and manure lagoons, a natural process known as anaerobic digestion occurs. Bacteria consume the waste products and eventually release methane, a widely used natural gas. The process occurs on farms inside air-tight containers known as digesters.
These digesters capture methane that would otherwise be emitted into the atmosphere, making biogas one avenue to reduce methane emissions. The burning of methane does release carbon into the atmosphere, but the use of biogas for energy now allows the nation to cut the equivalent of carbon dioxide emissions equivalent to taking 1.3 million cars off the road in a year.
The energy production process causes farmers to enclose or cover manure pits, but just because the manure isn’t visible doesn’t mean it isn’t causing problems.
In rural areas, well water is a primary source of drinking water for residents, and nitrate contamination from animal waste has been linked to a variety of cancers as well as infant death and miscarriages.
Payan said she remembers seeing her son’s body covered in red, irritated wounds after taking a shower, which exposed him to the chemicals found in the region’s groundwater.
The Payan family moved to Sussex County, Delaware soon after to get away from CAFO pollution, but the industry has exploded throughout the region. Payan, who now works with the Socially Responsible Agriculture Project, said a “gold rush” of more massive farms is popping up in Delaware, with facilities affecting the quality of life for families in this rural county, which has a large Black and Latino population.
“It’s got to stop. We can’t just do business as usual,” Payan said.
But based on this year’s historic climate legislation package, biogas is set to boom.
Maria Payan, formerly of Delta, Pennsylvania, stands next to the Delta farm her family moved away from after its operations began polluting the community. Payan, who participated in the documentary “Right to Harm,” now advocates against factory farms and biogas in the northeast region. “Right to Harm” / Hourglass Films
The Inflation Reduction Act, signed into law this past August, includes a sweeping $369 billion investment in various clean energy technologies and credits for consumers to purchase greener technologies. One of those industries is biogas, an energy source that captures methane emissions from large-scale farms. Biogas facilities, which are billed as a “renewable energy source” in the industry, will receive various tax credits and investments from this legislation, prompting industry leaders to look into expanding and constructing facilities across the country.
“It’s almost giddy,” said Timothy Baye, professor of Business Development and State Energy specialist at the University of Wisconsin. “It’s like waking up not expecting Christmas and finding a Christmas tree.”
Animal waste, like cow manure, and agriculture have been identified as significant contributors to the planet’s warming temperatures, with agriculture accounting for 24 percent of global emissions of carbon, methane, and other gasses. Over 100 countries have signed a pledge to cut global methane emissions by 30 percent by 2030. Methane emissions also come from the fossil fuel industry and have seen historic rises in recent years.
The biogas industry has grown exponentially over the past two decades, primarily thanks to California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard, which was adopted in 2006. The standard created a market for “low-carbon and renewable alternatives” to gasoline and diesel, driving new biogas operations around the country. According to the EPA, electricity generated from biogas more than doubled between 2010 and 2020.
The IRA will give tax credits of up to 30 percent — the same investments given to large clean industries like solar and wind — to biogas facilities built by the beginning of 2025. In addition, this legislative package will also invest roughly $2 billion in the United States Department of Agriculture’s Rural Energy for America Program, or REAP, which provides loans and grants to farmers and businesses in the energy efficiency and renewable energy sector, which includes biogas facilities.
In October, a bipartisan group of Senators from across the Midwest and Great Plains sent a letter to the EPA, urging more pathways for “electricity generated from biogas” to be brought to the energy market.
Apart from the IRA, the Biden administration has made biogas a focal point of its clean energy goals, with the planned creation of new public-private partnerships to encourage more biogas facilities as a part of its Methane Emissions Reduction Action Plan.
When food and animal waste are deprived of oxygen, a natural process known as anaerobic digestion occurs and eventually creates methane. The gas is captured on farms inside these air-tight containers known as digesters. Faba-Photography / Getty Images
“The biggest impact that the IRA has had on the industry is it has started to levelized the playing field among different renewable energy technologies,” Patrick Serfass, executive director of the American Biogas Council, told Grist.
Serfass said the industry is at a similar moment that both wind and solar were years ago. When a windfall of federal funding helped those sectors in years past, the industries exploded. Since then, he said those involved in the renewable energy sector have looked to Congress to create a “more fair marketplace” for biogas plants to compete in selling and making renewable energy.
“(The IRA) has helped to get more biogas systems developed, and if you care about reducing carbon emissions and producing renewable energy, then that’s a really good thing,” Serfass said.
States with large agricultural sectors are likely to see an increase in biogas facilities, but biogas is not just dependent on animal manure. Landfills and wastewater treatment plants also make up a large portion of the industry. California, Texas, and North Carolina have the biggest potential to make biogas, as estimated by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
This month, a $25 million loan project in Stanislaus County, California, which includes the city of Modesto, was approved. The funding, part of REAP, will provide loans for dairy farms in the region to construct six biogas facilities to connect to a local ethanol plant. Additionally, the loans will also fund natural gas pipeline projects, commonly used in the biogas industry as a way to move the created gas from farms to a refinery without the need for large tanker trucks and costly shipping.
Communities that already live with large animal farms and biogas facilities could be a cautionary tale for regions that are expanding or building more digesters. In counties across southeastern North Carolina, predominantly Black and low-income communities have been fighting against the state’s massive hog industry-turned biogas producers for years.
Dr. Sacoby Wilson, a leading expert on environmental justice for rural and agricultural communities, said biogas investments may help decrease methane emissions, but neighboring residents are still exposed to a variety of compounding health hazards.
“They’re not getting the co-benefits that supposedly come from capturing methane, burning methane, or digesting waste,” Wilson told Grist.
Wilson said that biogas is not a clean energy source. While he appreciates the Biden administration’s recent advancements and commitments to environmental justice, the massive funding push for biogas inside the IRA is “one step forward and two steps back.”
He said there should be more significant investments in solutions to the source problems of methane emissions, such as massive agricultural operations that have grown across the country, rather than propping up an industry that relies on destructive practices.
“Why not invest in sustainable, regenerative agriculture?,” Wilson said, “which will actually be more beneficial to local communities, to the local economy.”
Agriculturally focused states are seeing increased pushes for more manure digester facilities. Greenleaf, Wisconsin, an unincorporated community less than 20 miles south of Green Bay, is now home to a massive digester facility. The new facility claims to be among the largest in the nation, converting nearly a million gallons of manure into methane daily. The gas produced here will be pumped into a national pipeline system and used to fuel natural gas vehicle requirements in states on the other side of the country, like California and Oregon.
Early this year, the prospect of a new digester in Rock Valley, Iowa, was heralded as a sustainable solution for nearby farming communities in the northwest corner of the state. But soon after it opened, the facility leaked 376,000 gallons of manure into nearby waters.
“What we’re seeing is essentially factory farm, biogas, and anaerobic digesters being used in tandem with large factory farm operations, which obviously is raising a lot of concern and opposition from communities,” John Aspray, a Food & Water Watch senior organizer in the state, told Grist.
The Bloody Run Creek, also in the northern part of the state, has experienced increased farm run-off from a digester-turned-large animal operation in recent years. Iowa is now seeing an increase in digesters, with nine new facilities granted permitting last year and seven existing ones approved for expansion. State legislators have tried to curb nitrate pollution from agriculture by proposing a ban on new CAFOs, but just last year, state officials incentivized the creation of more digesters at large-scale farms with state funding.
“It’s not going to revolutionize agriculture in a way that makes it more sustainable,” Aspray said. “These are a false solution to climate change.”
This story is part of the Grist seriesParched, an in-depth look at how climate change-fueled drought is reshaping communities, economies, and ecosystems.
In theory, the federal government can unilaterally cut water deliveries from the Colorado River’s two main reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, which release more than 2 trillion gallons of water to farms and cities across the Southwest each year. In reality, this has never happened: Previous cuts have always been negotiated between the federal government and the seven states that use the river.
Late last week, however, the federal government sent its strongest signal yet that it is willing to single-handedly impose water cuts on the Colorado for the first time in history, as the U.S. West stares down the consequences of a climate-change-fueled megadrought that has parched the river.
The Department of the Interior, the federal agency that manages water in the Colorado River basin, announced on Friday that it would look into changing the rules for how it operates Lake Powell and Lake Mead, which are located in southern Utah and southern Nevada, respectively. This would pave the way for the department to impose sharp cuts on major water users in Arizona, Nevada, California, and Mexico, which receives water pursuant to a 1944 treaty.
In effect, the letter is a formal warning to the river states, telling them that if they fail to make the major cuts necessary to prevent the reservoirs from bottoming out, the feds won’t hesitate to unilaterally cut their water deliveries to do so.
The Interior Department said in its Friday letter that it would conduct an environmental review before changing the rules to impose new cuts on the states. This will give states one more chance to come up with their own voluntary reductions before the government enacts its own. According to John Fleck, a professor of water policy at the University of New Mexico, the upshot of all this is that unprecedented water reductions are all but guaranteed next year.
“Whether those cuts are imposed by a government action, or voluntary action by the states, or the fact that the reservoirs are fucking empty, they will happen,” he told Grist.
The new review comes after months of tense negotiations between the federal government and the seven basin states: California, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico, Nevada, and Arizona. Earlier this year, as water levels in Lakes Powell and Mead fell to historic lows, officials at the Interior Department’s Bureau of Reclamation ordered states to reduce their water consumption. The Bureau wanted a total reduction of between 2 and 4 million acre-feet — roughly a third of all water usage on the river.
The states have not even come close to meeting that goal. Major water users in California, which is the thirstiest of the seven states by far, agreed last month to cut water withdrawals by about 400,000 acre-feet, a decision that will have major implications for the agriculture-heavy Imperial Valley as well as the Los Angeles metro area. Arizona has reduced its Colorado usage over the past two years in compliance with pre-existing drought restrictions from the feds. The four states that comprise the river’s “upper basin” — Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Wyoming — have not announced any concrete steps to cut their water usage.
Meanwhile, the outlook for the river’s two main reservoirs has continued to worsen. As runoff from melting snow in the northern Rocky Mountains works its way down through the Colorado River’s tributaries and into the river’s mainstem, the Bureau of Reclamation stores this water in Lake Powell, which sits on the border of Utah and Arizona. The Bureau then releases some of this water further down the river to Lake Mead in Nevada, and then further on to water users in the Southwest.
The ongoing, two-decade drought has reduced overall precipitation and evaporated more Rockies snowmelt before it can reach the river, which has reduced inflow into both reservoirs. They now sit three-quarters empty, and the most recent federal projections show that they could each decline below a critical threshold in the next two years. In the worst scenarios, it’s possible that the reservoir dams might cease to generate hydropower, or that the water level in the reservoirs would fall lower than the pipes that release it from the dams. This would make it impossible for the Bureau to move water through the river system.
The Interior Department’s Friday announcement brought home the gravity of the situation, albeit in somewhat bureaucratic language.
“The Department currently lacks analyzed alternatives and measures that may be necessary to address such projected conditions,” wrote Tommy Beaudreau, the department’s deputy secretary. He added that the conditions “pose unacceptable risks” to the river system, and that a solution needs to be “expeditiously developed.”
The federal government technically has the authority to make changes to the amount of water it releases from the reservoirs without consulting the states, but it has never had to test that authority: the current shortage guidelines were the product of a yearslong negotiation process between the Interior Department and the states. The feds are now threatening to alter that agreement on their own, and the Interior Department’s announcement helps lay the groundwork for such an intervention. If the government does modify its guidelines, it could set a new threshold for when to stop releasing water from Lakes Powell and Mead, imposing deeper and earlier cuts than states have endured so far. The review process puts the feds on firmer legal footing in case a state water user sues over the new reductions.
The losers in such a scenario would be the lower basin states — California, Nevada, and Arizona — which rely on water that the government releases from Lake Mead, as well as Mexico, where decades of overuse caused the river delta to disappear during the twentieth century. The states use the bulk of this water for agriculture, but a significant share also flows to major cities. The upper basin states draw water from the river before it reaches the reservoir, so they would be insulated from changes to the reservoir rules.
The government’s review won’t conclude until next summer, but new rules could take effect immediately, which means painful new cuts may arrive in the Southwest as the region’s farmers are preparing for peak growing season.
“It’s never been this bad in my career,” Butler Miller of St. Louis-based barge company Robert B. Miller and Associates told St. Louis Public Radio. “The last time the river levels were this low was in the 1980s. Rain is really the only thing that will fix it.”
The low water levels are caused by the nation’s ongoing drought, which has left the region without rain for weeks. The lack of rain has dried up the Mississippi, and even revealed human remains and lost shipwrecks across the river.
Barges have been stalled or slow-moving across the river for weeks, causing major disruption in the agricultural industry at a time when farmers generally expect to move harvested grains.
Before the Mississippi dried out, grain was booming in the U.S. While Ukraine typically exports tens of millions of pounds yearly, the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war has caused the global supply of grains to stagnate. Amidst this conflict, U.S. grain prices soared early in the year, but now the main way of transporting these commodities has stalled, causing supply to build up at ports and prices to drop. According to Bloomberg, corn shipments in the Mississippi are declining by the week, with more than 2,000 ships waiting to move down the river.
Soybeans and other commodities have been left to rot outside of grain storage elevators, according to industry reports. As more and more farmers try to offload harvest commodities, space is running out as the wait to move downriver is slow moving.
“I’ve never been in a harvest where I was hoping for a hurricane. But this year, it wouldn’t hurt my feelings,” Southern Illinois farmer Adam Thomas told Farm Week Now, a division of the Illinois Farm Bureau.
The Mississippi is a crucial waterway where droughts and floods have pinpointed monumental years along its 2,300 miles. A drought in 1988 dropped water levels in the Mississippi to their previous record low, which lasted nearly two years. Three years ago, the river flooded in the summer, causing $2 billion in damages, and was the longest-lasting flood the river has seen in recent history.
According to the United States Geological Survey, climate change is causing more extreme weather events—such as regions oscillating between droughts and floods.
Weather predictions from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration show that ongoing droughts across the Corn Belt and the West will continue into January, with little to no rain in sight. These predictions are already hampering growers who normally plant winter crops, such as winter wheat in Kansas and Oklahoma.
In addition to supply chain and agricultural woes, concerns over drinking water contamination have begun. The Gulf of Mexico is rising with sea levels, causing saltwater to make its way into the currently barren Mississippi.
This story is part of the Grist seriesParched, an in-depth look at how climate change-fueled drought is reshaping communities, economies, and ecosystems.
For Anje Duckels, Florida was home. Duckels, 41, was born in the Sunshine State; her family had lived there for generations. But housing prices in Fort Myers just kept rising, so she and her wife decided to find somewhere cheaper to raise their three children. Duckels volunteered to help restore a rural estate with a small farmhouse in the Willcox Basin of southeast Arizona, near the U.S.-Mexico border. After a few years in the area, they bought the property, which was located in a Cochise County neighborhood called Kansas Settlement.
Calling the Willcox Basin “remote” would be an understatement: 2,000 square miles of sand and scrub, strewn with crop fields and lined with dusty single-lane roads, it’s nothing like the subdivided coastal paradise that Duckels was used to. Most residents live at least 30 minutes from the closest store or gas station. Many live several miles from their nearest neighbor. In most of the county there are no public services or utilities. The most famous housing development in local history was a land-fraud scam that marketed empty desert tracts to gullible northerners — a sham version of snowbird refuges like the one where Duckels had grown up.
Anje Duckels’ home in Cochise County, Arizona. Grist / Eliseu Cavalcante and Roberto (Bear) Guerra
The day the family moved to Kansas Settlement, they lost their water. When Duckels turned on the faucet, she heard a spitting noise, but nothing came out. It didn’t take long to find the source of the issue: The aquifer beneath her house had dropped below the bottom of her well. The pump was pulling on dry dirt. Duckels soon learned that many of her neighbors had lost water as well, and they’d found themselves forced to haul in jugs of water on their pickup trucks or else pay thousands of dollars to drill their wells deeper.
“Not only was our well dry, but pretty much everybody in this area has a well that was dry, or going dry, or had been dry and had to be re-drilled,” Duckels told Grist.
Anje Duckels checks on plants at her home in Pearce, Arizona. Grist / Roberto (Bear) Guerra
In times of crisis, people tend to look for a villain. It didn’t take long for Duckels to find one: Surrounding her property on all sides are farms owned by a massive dairy operation called Riverview. Over the previous decade, the Minnesota-based company had gobbled up more than 50,000 acres in Cochise County to build an expansive network of farms and feedlots, according to High Country News, which has covered Riverview and the local opposition it has engendered extensively. The dairy’s wells were far deeper than the one on Duckels’ property, and she assumed the firm was sucking all the water out from beneath her.
Riverview is hardly the only reason for the area’s water crisis — the desert aquifers had never been very robust, and a climate-change-fueled drought had made the area drier than ever — but Riverview and other large farms growing nuts and alfalfa are by far the area’s largest water users. Duckels started to look at the irrigated fields around her with fear and resentment.
“That Riverview man is literally going to try to starve us out of water,” Duckels told me, referring to the Riverview board member who runs the company’s operations in the area. “I hope every single property he owns is set on fire by someone. I hope that someone salts his ground so that nothing grows.”
Cows at the Riverview Dairy, LLC-owned Coronado Dairy farm near Willcox, Arizona.
Grist / Roberto (Bear) Guerra
Cows look out from the Riverview-owned Coronado Dairy farm near Willcox, Arizona. Grist / Roberto (Bear) Guerra
Irrigation equipment stands over Riverview Dairy.
Grist / Roberto (Bear) Guerra
A cloud of dust floats behind a hay truck passing between two Riverview-owned crops, left. Irrigation equipment, right, sprays water over the dairy’s crops. Grist / Roberto (Bear) Guerra
A cloud of dust floats behind a hay truck passing between two Riverview Dairy-owned crops.
Cows look out from the Riverview-owned Coronado Dairy farm near Willcox, Arizona. Grist / Roberto (Bear) Guerra
Duckels’ neighbors all feel the same way. The mounting water crisis has created a groundswell of anger in the Willcox Basin. Libertarian-minded locals who might once have kept to themselves have banded together against the dairy and other large nearby farms, channeling their frustration over dry wells into a political battle against big agriculture. Interviews with almost two dozen residents in the area paint a picture of a once-sleepy community that has erupted into turmoil: Residents have shown up at public meetings to shout at Riverview representatives, sparred in comment wars in local Facebook groups, and flown rogue reconnaissance flights over dairy facilities.
The growing water shortage is driving freedom-loving denizens of the Willcox Basin to a radical solution: state regulation. In two weeks, basin residents will vote on whether to establish new restrictions on large groundwater wells, the first such referendum in state history. If voters approve the new rules, it would constitute a sea change in Arizona water politics. Not only would it be one of the first times a rural community has voted to restrict its own water usage, but it would also be a rare example of rural voters succeeding in limiting the power of large-scale agriculture.
The backlash may portend a broader political shift in the arid U.S. West. Farms are by far the largest water users in the region, and rural communities from California to Texas are watching these operations suck the water from beneath their homes. Places like Cochise County have relied on agriculture as an economic anchor, but the water crisis is drawing battle lines between rural populations and the large agricultural firms that sustain them.
“Back in the day, we used to get a lot more rain, and the theme with water was: If it’s not affecting you personally, nobody’s really gonna care,” said Esteban Vasquez, a lifelong Cochise County resident who has managed local water systems. “Now that people actually see it happening, the conversation has opened. It’s something that has hit close to home.”
Unlike the sprawling Phoenix suburbs 200 miles away, Cochise County remains mostly an undeveloped desert, almost as rural today as it was when the first prospectors and miners arrived to dig for copper more than a century ago. Most residents who spoke with Grist said they moved to the area because they wanted solitude and privacy, even if that meant roughing it. In a county where the population density is a quarter of the national average, they often see more rattlesnakes than people.
“People have to be a little bit courageous or at least ambitious,” said Christian Sawyer, who moved out to the area a few years ago in search of a quiet place where he could pursue various creative projects. “It’s people who want to do their own thing, build their own house, farm their own crops. It’s this kind of back-to-the-land libertarianism, with a bit of a hippie-type of mentality as well.”
Christian Sawyer stands inside a greenhouse at the former mineralogist’s compound where he lives outside of Douglas, Arizona. Grist / Roberto (Bear) Guerra
Cochise County has a unique “opt-out” permitting system, which allows people who own more than four acres of land to build structures without having to submit to a county building inspection. This has enabled some unorthodox abodes: Some residents have built houses with composting toilets, walls made out of volcanic rock, and frames made out of straw bale.
If the absence of local regulations made Cochise County an attractive retreat for loners and libertarians, it also made it an ideal target for large farms. There have long been small cotton and alfalfa operations in the county, but over the past ten years a number of large conglomerates have moved in to grow nuts and alfalfa; several vineyards have opened as well. The growers needed a place where they could pump water with no restrictions whatsoever, and the Willcox Basin fit the bill.
These conglomerates could afford to dig groundwater wells that are much deeper than standard residential wells, giving them a de facto monopoly on the region’s aquifers. Producers have also snapped up land in unregulated localities elsewhere in the state — like the town of Kingman, where a Saudi-backed company grows alfalfa for export back to the Middle East, and Hyder, where a conglomerate called Integrated Ag has invested $90 million to grow Bermuda grass.
Riverview-owned crops fan out near Kansas Settlement Road near Willcox, Arizona. Grist / Eliseu Cavalcante and Roberto (Bear) Guerra
Riverview made the biggest splash in the Willcox Basin. Starting around 2014, the company built or bought out several separate dairy operations in the area to the tune of $180 million, beginning in Kansas Settlement and spreading out from there. With operations in five states and hundreds of thousands of cows, Riverview is one of the largest dairy firms in the country. In other states the company has been accused of muscling out family farmers by flooding local milk markets and then underpaying desperate farmers to buy them out and swallow up their acreage.
Much of the land Riverview bought had already been used for farming, but the firm dug dozens of new wells at depths of more than 1,000 feet and pumped millions of gallons of water to grow food for its large herd of heifers. State records show that Riverview owns more than 600 wells in Cochise County. The majority were drilled before the company arrived, but the wells that Riverview drilled in recent years are by far the deepest, with some of them reaching more than 2,000 feet into the earth — so deep that the water is hot from proximity to the earth’s crust. This year alone, the company has bought or drilled at least a dozen thousand-plus-foot wells.
A groundwater well stands along Kansas Settlement Road near Riverview’s base of operations. Grist / Roberto (Bear) Guerra
Unlike other aquifers that are fed by rivers and streams, the aquifers in the Willcox Basin depend on rainfall alone for replenishment, so they have always been vulnerable to depletion during drought. But it wasn’t until large operations like Riverview moved in that residents started to notice their water disappearing. Groundwater accretes underground in basins, so if one user pumps a lot of water from a deep well, they can cause water to drop for other wells even several miles away. The best way to visualize this is to imagine two or three straws stuck in the same milkshake; the straw that plunges down deepest will get the last of the milkshake, even as the ones positioned higher end up coming up dry.
“The amount of groundwater pumping has increased exponentially because of what’s been happening with this dairy. And as that has happened, people’s wells have gone dry,” said Kathy Ferris, a research fellow at Arizona State University’s Kyl Center for Water Policy. Ferris was one of the architects of Arizona’s landmark 1980 groundwater law, which limited underwater pumping in the state’s main population centers.
“I think we know what the problem is,” she added. “It’s not rocket science.”
Materials used by the Arizona Water Defenders to support regulation of groundwater in both the Willcox and Douglas Basins. Grist / Roberto (Bear) Guerra
A 2018 report from the state water department found that groundwater levels declined by at least 200 feet between 1940 and 2015 in the parts of the Willcox Basin with the most agricultural pumping — and that was before Riverview moved in. An Arizona water official who spoke to High Country News last year said the rate of decline has increased since the dairy arrived.
Other farming-heavy regions across the West are seeing similar stress on their aquifers from unrestricted agricultural pumping and an ongoing megadrought. California has recorded 1,287 dry well reports across the state this year, a 50 percent increase since 2021. One town in the Golden State’s Central Valley may run out of water altogether by the end of the year. The massive Ogallala Aquifer that runs from Nebraska to Texas has also shown signs of severe stress in recent years.
In the Willcox Basin, the groundwater crisis began in the immediate vicinity of Kansas Settlement, but it’s since spread out across the county as Riverview and other large farms expand farther out and draw from new sections of the aquifers that run through the county. The crisis has even started to affect the town of Willcox itself, one of the only incorporated settlements in the area, which is ten miles from Riverview’s operations. Esteban Vasquez spent five years helping manage the town’s water system, and he told Grist that even the town’s deep municipal wells were seeing stress as a result of agricultural pumping.
Esteban Vasquez stands by a road in Willcox, Arizona. Grist / Roberto (Bear) Guerra
“There’s seriously something going on down there,” he said. “We were dropping about nine feet a year. People used to think that since we were miles away [from the dairy], that wasn’t really going to affect us and our aquifers, but it was only a matter of time.”
When Vasquez left his job with the town of Willcox and started working for a company that manages small water systems across the county, he encountered the same dry well crisis everywhere he went. According to High Country News, at least 100 wells in the basin went dry between 2014 and 2019.
The proliferation of water issues has cast a pall over the area, making life darker and more difficult for all those who live there. Everyone knows someone whose well has gone dry, or who’s had to deepen their well, or who’s taken to hauling water rather than try to find it on their own property. Many of the haulers are elderly people who live on fixed incomes and can’t afford to invest in wells, so they haul water instead, filling up jugs at a water facility in Willcox and driving them back home multiple times a week. In a county where the median household income is just 70 percent of the national figure, options for those who suddenly find themselves without water are limited.
Even for those who still have water, the effects of the crisis are all too visible. In some parts of the basin, the overpumping of underground aquifers has led to the emergence of fissures in the ground that are dozens of feet deep, some of which have split apart roadways and forced local officials to close them for weeks. Dozens of people have left areas like Kansas Settlement over the past few years after losing water and finding themselves saddled with worthless properties. Vasquez said he knows at least 20 people who’ve left the county due to the recent water issues; Duckels gave a similar estimate.
Overpumping water can increase the risk of land fissures, right, a hazard noted by a sign, left, near the intersection of Dragoon and Cochise Stronghold roads near Cochise, Arizona. Grist / Eliseu Cavalcante and Roberto (Bear) Guerra
“A lot of people have abandoned their houses,” said Duckels. “You drive up and down our streets over here. You can see houses that are just decrepit, because the people have literally just had to leave their investments to rot.”
Even as the water crisis grew for years, many locals didn’t understand the scale of the problem. Because the population of the basin is so spread out, many people were not totally aware of the growth of agribusiness in the area. Opposition to megafarms was initially limited to just a few committed locals.
Julia Hamel, who lives about six miles north of the town of Willcox, was one of those people. She refers to dairy owners as “crooked bastards” and sees their expansion as part of a campaign to force out longtime residents like herself.
“These folks at the dairy have forced out families that have been there five generations,” she said of Riverview. “They can’t sell their land because no one wants it without water. Meanwhile [the dairy has] bought miles and miles of land. We’re the ones who get tromped on.”
About ten years ago, as a dairy company called Feria was expanding its operations in the Willcox Basin, Hamel and two of her friends decided to go on offense. They piloted a small plane from a nearby hangar to conduct aerial reconnaissance on Feria’s feedlots, looking out for potential health code violations. Hamel’s friends photographed large ponds she said were full of urine, as well as burning piles of manure, both of which she could smell from miles away. They tried to show the photos to local representatives, but nothing came of it. A few years later, Riverview acquired Feria. (Riverview representatives did not respond to Grist’s multiple requests for comment.)
Stunts like these were rare, but in recent years more people have come over to Hamel’s side. The local “Willcox chit chat” Facebook group has exploded with debates over how much of the responsibility for dry wells can be pinned on agriculture, with many residents blaming Riverview. Vandals have defaced some of the dairy’s signage, and residents have shown up at county meetings to berate public officials for supporting the dairy.
Anje Duckels said she’s concerned that violence will erupt in the area if water supplies continue to drop.
“You get people who see their moms cry because they’re too old to mortgage their house to pay for another well,” said Duckels. “These people are gonna get desperate and crazy. These people are frightening, they’re poor, and they’ve got weapons.”
Ironically, one major demonstration of this outrage was a pressure campaign against a proposal to actually increase local water access. In the years after Riverview arrived, a group of county politicians started to push for the creation of a municipal water district that could ease the burden on individual wells. Rather than having everyone pump water on their own property, the new district would pump water from a deep communal well and pipe it out to households.
A new billboard opposing the AMA was recently placed along I-10 just outside of Willcox, Arizona. Grist / Roberto (Bear) Guerra
But many residents view the proposed district with suspicion or outright hostility — not because they think it wouldn’t deliver water, but because it is supported by Riverview. Gary Fehr, a member of Riverview’s board of directors and grandson of the dairy’s founder, is one of the lead organizers behind the effort.
The water district doesn’t advertise its association with Riverview, and vice versa. But Peggy Judd, a member of the Cochise County Board of Supervisors and a supporter of the water district, told Grist the district wouldn’t have been possible without Fehr and Riverview, which she said has helped finance outreach efforts and donated office space for the endeavor.
“The power and the brainpower behind the district is the dairy, and they’re keeping it quiet. But if we didn’t have them, we wouldn’t have that gift,” she said.
As a result, many locals consider the water district part of a ploy to make the entire Willcox Basin dependent on Riverview for water access. Rumors have swirled that Fehr is laying the groundwork to build a massive new suburban development in the area: First he’ll dry out everyone’s wells, the logic goes, and then he’ll create a new water district to support the residents of his planned community.
A sign marks property for sale along Kansas Settlement Road. Grist / Roberto (Bear) Guerra
At a series of public meetings about the water district earlier this year, numerous residents cast blame for the crisis on Riverview, suggesting the dairy couldn’t be trusted to solve a problem it had allegedly created.
“The only reason we’re here today is because our water table is going down, and the biggest single reason that water table is going down is because of agricultural pumping,” said one.
“Neighborliness is one of our values in this valley, and good neighbors don’t suck their neighbors’ wells dry,” he added to laughter and applause.
For the moment, the water district project appears to have stalled amid local opposition; the volunteer committee hasn’t held a meeting since June. Fehr did not respond to Grist’s requests for comment.
Even as residents of the Willcox Basin have spurned the dairy’s proposed water district, many have embraced a far more radical solution: strict regulations on groundwater usage. Decades of anti-regulation sentiment have given way to an unprecedented grassroots campaign for restrictions on new groundwater wells. These restrictions could jeopardize the future growth of industrial farming operations like Riverview.
When Arizona lawmakers drafted the state’s landmark 1980 groundwater law, they were trying to solve an over-pumping problem that had begun to threaten development around the major cities of Phoenix and Tucson. Because most of the state’s population lived in these metropolitan areas, lawmakers focused on slowing new well drilling in urban rather than rural areas. The 1980 bill established so-called “active management areas,” or AMAs, in those two cities, as well as in the agriculture-heavy county that lay between them.
For four decades now, farms and large subdivisions in these areas have been subject to stringent limits on how much groundwater they can pump. Outside these three counties, however, unlimited pumping remained fair game. People in areas like Cochise County didn’t want restrictions on their water, and the potential for overdraft in many of Arizona’s more remote regions was less immediate.
Many families in Wilcox say the supply for their wells, like this pivot well on a small alfalfa farm, have been threatened by Riverview’s water usage. Grist / Roberto (Bear) Guerra
“We knew that there are areas of the state where problems are worse than other areas,” said Ferris, the water expert who helped craft the law. However, “in many rural areas, they just said, ‘go away.’ They didn’t want regulation. They didn’t want us to be managing their groundwater.”
But buried within the 1980 law was a provision that allowed for the possibility that rural communities might change their mind: If residents of a groundwater basin gather enough signatures, the law allows them to propose a ballot question about whether to establish an AMA. If the ballot question wins a majority vote, the state then appoints a committee to supervise groundwater in the basin. The committee can impose restrictions on new irrigation activity, capping the amount of land in the basin that is fed by groundwater.
The proviso has never been used — until now.
In Cochise County, a local librarian and textile artist named Bekah Wilce learned about the clause a few years ago. She had started to worry about the impact of agricultural pumping on her town, Elfrida, which sits in the water basin adjacent to the Willcox Basin. Wilce’s husband, an independent journalist, started to talk with Arizona’s state water department about how large water users could be regulated. Those conversations led him to the 1980 statute, and to the clause allowing communities to form their own AMAs.
Wilce soon got involved with a group of local groundwater activists known as the Arizona Water Defenders. The group had been looking for a solution to the dry-well problem for a few years, and Wilce pitched them on gathering signatures for an AMA ballot question, something that had never been tried in Arizona before.
The Arizona Water Defenders want to create new Active Management Areas that will regulate groundwater in both the Willcox and Douglas Basins. Grist / Roberto (Bear) Guerra
When Wilce first started working on the AMA campaign, her neighbors warned her that it would be a long shot. Cochise County residents tend to be quite conservative — Donald Trump carried the county by 20 points in the 2020 election — and many are averse to the very idea of regulation. So Wilce was surprised that she and her fellow volunteers had no trouble getting enough signatures. In fact, they submitted 250 more signatures than they needed to get an AMA vote on the ballot — not just in the Willcox Basin but also in the neighboring Douglas Basin, where Wilce lives. Wilce told Grist that the massive growth of big agricultural interests in the area has woken up people who might not have engaged in the past.
“It’s true that it’s a fairly conservative area — and even those on the left side of the spectrum don’t really want a lot of government interference — but I do think we see the need for common-sense limits,” she said. “The dairy has been in place now for a number of years, and people have become increasingly concerned. It’s just been this snowballing tragedy, so there’s this fear.”
The scale of support for the AMA has also surprised Vasquez, the former water systems manager, who said he’s been trying to warn locals about groundwater for years without success.
Irrigation infrastructure sprays water at a family farm near Willcox, Arizona. Grist / Eliseu Cavalcante and Roberto (Bear) Guerra
“I feel like nobody really cared about water before,” he told Grist. “Water conservation was the last thing I felt in people’s minds when it came to this community. So when the AMA got a lot of positive backing behind it, I’m thinking to myself, ‘Well, that’s crazy, because everybody that I’ve talked to beforehand didn’t give two shits about water.’”
The campaign has deepened the fault lines between farmers — including many small-scale growers unaffiliated with larger newcomers like Riverview — and the rest of the county’s residents. Now that the AMA question is on the ballot, the state has paused all new irrigation in the area until the election, freezing the growth of local agriculture. It isn’t clear how strict the AMA’s ultimate restrictions would be: Should the ballot question pass, the state will appoint a committee that will study the aquifers in the basin and decide what kinds of pumping need to be curbed. Individual households wouldn’t be subject to restrictions, since their wells are too small to meet the legal threshold for regulation, but family farmers might face limits on future growth, and they would need to go through a permitting process to drill new wells. The largest operations would likely be unable to expand at all.
Jacob Collins, a fourth-generation alfalfa farmer who lives just southeast of the town of Willcox, said that the region’s farming community is very worried about new limitations on water usage. Collins farms about 360 acres in total,and there’s a chance an AMA might place a ceiling on the amount of land he can irrigate.
“There’s a lot of fear surrounding a loss of water in the valley, and there’s a lot of fear [about] having our water controlled by an outside entity that isn’t here,” he told Grist. “If we want the valley to continue to be farmable, we do have to do our best to make sure that we’re not using more water than we need, [but] there’s not really anything farmers can do to make a drought not happen.”
Jacob Collins at work on the family farm near Willcox, Arizona.
Grist / Roberto (Bear) Guerra
Fourth-generation alfalfa farmer Jacob Collins stands in front of a tractor on his family’s land in Arizona. Grist / Roberto (Bear) Guerra
Irrigation infrastructure at the Collins family’s farm near Willcox, Arizona.
Cows look out from the Riverview-owned Coronado Dairy farm near Willcox, Arizona. Grist / Roberto (Bear) Guerra
Jacob Collins, right, drives a piece of equipment on his family’s farm, left, near Willcox, Arizona. Grist / Roberto (Bear) Guerra
Jacob Collins work on his family’s farm near Willcox, Arizona.
Grist / Roberto (Bear) Guerra
These sentiments in the local farming community have led to a backlash against the pro-AMA campaign. A group called Rural Water Assurance, which was co-founded by the president of the county farm bureau, has put up billboards by the Interstate urging a ‘no’ vote on the ballot question. The Willcox Facebook group has seen a proliferation of posts warning of draconian water restrictions. Rural Water Assurance even filed a lawsuit against the Douglas Basin AMA effort in June, alleging that the signatures the group had collected were invalid. A court dismissed the lawsuit in August, finding that the plaintiffs had “wholly failed to demonstrate any legal basis” for the challenge.
Wilce feels confident the AMA vote will pass in the Willcox Basin, and a large chunk of the county’s most engaged voters seem to be on her side. If the outlook for the AMA campaign is bright, though, the outlook for the county’s groundwater is far darker, regardless of which way the vote goes next month.
Even the most stringent regulations might not save people like Duckels from having to leave the valley. At its strongest, the AMA can restrict almost all new pumping, but it can’t order current users to stop drawing water, which means Riverview would get grandfathered in. The dairy wouldn’t be able to expand its operations any further, but it could keep withdrawing water at its current rates. And the groundwater levels in the basin will likely keep dropping.
“You’re just trying to stop the hemorrhaging,” said Ferris.
The depletion of area aquifers will make life harder and harder for people like Duckels. More residents will have to haul water, or spend tens of thousands of dollars to dig new wells, or walk away from their homes and move somewhere else. In the absence of a water district like the one proposed by Riverview, there will be more new dry wells every year, and more people leaving the area. Plus, new limitations on large groundwater pumping will deter new farms and businesses from moving to the county, further sapping its already sluggish economy.
The irony, according to Ferris, is that the dairy can always move somewhere else if it loses water access. There’s a lot of land in the United States, and it’s a lot easier to move cows around than people. The absence of water regulations in the Willcox Basin has allowed Riverview to run down the clock on the area’s future, and the new political backlash against these companies is arriving too late to change that trajectory. Even if residents manage to stymie Riverview, there’s no guarantee the community will survive.
“Industrial ag moved into that basin, and industrial ag can move out of that basin. But everybody else is kind of stuck,” Ferris told Grist. “They’re living there, they invested their livelihood there, and I think the potential outlook is really grim. I think, unless something changes, it becomes a ghost town.”
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For years, Americans have been served an image of an idyllic family farmer who is responsible for the food that makes its way to our homes. Unfortunately, for the majority of the food we eat, that image is not based in reality. The truth is that food production, especially industrial animal agriculture, is causing an ecological crisis in our waterways that further perpetuates the legacy of environmental racism. And it needs to stop.
The overwhelming majority of today’s U.S. food systems are dominated by a handful of international corporations. These profit-driven enterprises often employ industrialized methods, such as concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, where animals are “produced” in incredibly cramped and unsafe facilities.
CAFOs are a formidable threat to the health of our nation’s waterways, representing one of the largest unaddressed sources of nitrogen and phosphorus pollution in the United States. Their uncontrolled — and mostly unregulated — discharges into waterways lead to harmful algal blooms, which in turn impair drinking water supplies, fisheries and recreational waters across the country. Look no further than Lake Erie, the Chesapeake Bay, the Mississippi River Basin, North Carolina’s coastal estuaries, and many other inland and coastal waters that are already gravely affected. Aside from the damages done to safe drinking water and human health, it’s also really expensive. Harmful algal blooms alone can negatively impact economies by as much as $4 billion a year.
Just one of these animal factories can produce as much animal waste as a large city with millions of people. According to a 2013 study, it adds up to 1.1 billion tons of animal waste every year. At many of these facilities, the animal waste is stored in unlined lagoons that inevitably pollute groundwater. In many cases, the excess waste is applied to agricultural fields far beyond what is needed to grow food, resulting in pollution of nearby surface waters and groundwater. Some facilities even go so far as to haphazardly spray the excess waste onto fields, creating a hellish experience for the neighboring communities.
Picture homes, schools and parks covered in airborne liquified animal waste. Imagine windows shut tight in the middle of the summer because of the overwhelming odors. Consider the countless lives burdened by respiratory diseases. Think of all the rivers and streams poisoned with pathogens.
It is worth noting that CAFOs are not found everywhere. Instead, they are predominantly located in rural areas, often in communities of color. They are purposefully located here because these frontline communities often lack the political clout to stop them. The CAFOs are constructed quickly, with minimal community input and, once operational, are ostensibly shielded from any kind of transparency, oversight or consequences. For example, in North Carolina, General Statute 106-24.1 shields the state’s agriculture industry by making any information collected or published by the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services classified from the public. But it’s not just North Carolina. There are “ag-gag” laws on the books in several states.
The CAFO crisis is funded by huge corporations, such as Smithfield Foods, and abetted by politicians who choose to look the other way. Like so many of the catastrophes affecting frontline communities and waterways, it’s a nightmare of our government’s own making, which means we also have the power to correct it. We always have a choice, and it’s possible to make the changes we need.
The most effective way to legislatively confront the CAFO crisis would be for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to use the Clean Water Act to prevent uncontrolled discharges of untreated animal waste into our nation’s water by requiring these facilities to obtain permits that contain real limits. The Clean Water Act has had so many successes during its 50 years, just imagine what could happen if we fully implemented and enforced it. Unfortunately, the EPA has thus far failed to respond to pressure, so environmental groups are suing in order to force the regulator to take action on clean water rules governing factory farms.
We can also urge our members of Congress to go further and pass real legislation, such as the Farm System Reform Act, which would help rein in the monopolistic practices of the agriculture industry, invest billions in a more resilient food system, and finally start transitioning us away from CAFOs to more regenerative practices by truly independent farmers and ranchers.
Finally, we can and should encourage the industry to change their ways by pulling our purse strings. As the saying goes, money talks, and these companies must be forced to listen. We don’t always have to purchase food from corporations that are contributing to this CAFO crisis. For those who are able to pay a little bit more at the grocery store, just think of all you can save.
Colombian President Gustavo Petro denounced climate inaction and called for an end to the war on drugs in his impassioned speech to the United Nations general assembly on September 20, reports Ana Zorita.
Israel-based Grace Breeding says it can improve grain yields by 18 percent and biomass by 16 percent, reducing the need for synthetic fertilizer and the environmental impact of conventional farming methods.
If Grace Breeding’s Nitrogen Fixation Technology (NFT) is adopted widely, it could have long-lasting implications for the agricultural sector—reducing its impact on the planet while boosting yields. According to the World Economic Forum, the world’s population is expected to hit 9.7 billion by 2050, and agriculture needs to become more productive and sustainable to meet the growing population.
A competitive, low-emissions advantage
“Farmers today need to use biological fertilizers to allow them to reduce their ecological footprints and compete in a better way for export, ”Assaf Dotan CEO of Grace Breeding, said in a statement. “The NFT product is giving farmers the competitive advantage by allowing them to reduce their ecological footprint both in air pollution and in water and soil contamination. Grace Breeding continues to improve its products while examining the existing products in the target markets around the world.”
Synthetic fertilizer relies heavily on urea—a synthetic nitrogen fixer made by reacting natural gas, atmospheric nitrogen, and water to produce ammonia and carbon dioxide. More than 70 percent of fertilizer usage worldwide is reliant on urea. But it’s a leading producer of greenhouse gas emissions; nitrogen fertilizers produce about 2.4 percent of global emissions, a number slightly higher than previous FAO estimates of about 2.1 percent.
Photo by Paz Arando on Unsplash
Grace Breeding’s NFT is entirely plant-based, which the company says has been found to improve the absorption of nutrients from the soil and increase the efficiency of nitrogenous feeding. “By switching from urea to NFT, growing costs and environmental damage caused by the use of synthetic fertilizers are reduced,” the company says.
In a recent experiment where it was tested against a full dose of commercial fertilizer, the NFT formula reduced the weight of the transported fertilizer 25 times, from 1,100 lb and 550 lb per hectare when using urea to grow corn and wheat respectively, to 44 lb when using the NFT formula on both cultivations. It also reduced the needed dosage to just once versus the three to four applications of conventional.
Cleaning up fertilizer
Research published in 2019 by the University of Sheffield found it could reduce CO2 emissions from fertilizer by producing “Blue Urea”, using an alternative method to produce hydrogen that uses renewable energy and does not require fossil fuels as a feedstock for combustion. This also means finding another CO2 source that would normally be produced when creating hydrogen. To replace the CO2, the researchers say it can be taken from captured emissions. The researchers also further reduced energy and costs by eliminating the need for drying and pelletization.
“The world is fast approaching the limit of its ability to feed itself so maximising the efficiency of food production is imperative,” the researchers noted.
Photo by Tim Mossholder from Pexels.
Between 2005 and 2015, a study including more than 21 million smallholder farmers in China, found that the farmers could increase crop yields while reducing their environmental impact. Over the ten-year period, yields of maize, rice and wheat increased by around 11 percent. This also saw nitrogen fertilizer decrease more than 16 percent.
“By producing more crops and needing less fertilizer, this experiment provided an economic return of US$12.2 billion,” reported Our World In Data. “This wasn’t achieved through major technological innovations or policy changes: it involved educating and training farmers on good management practices.”
Australian fertiliser company Incitec Pivot has confirmed that it is expecting delivery of phosphate rock exported by Morocco from occupied Western Sahara, reports Kerry Smith.
Cuba’s world-leading disaster management system sprang into action when Hurricane Ian struck the country’s western province of Pinar del Río, on September 27, report Vijay Prashad and Manolo De Los Santos.
This year’s midterm elections will decide the direction of a massive legislative package meant to tackle the nation’s agricultural problems. Republican Senate and House members are already vowing they won’t pack it with climate “buzzwords.”
Roughly every five years, lawmakers pass The Farm Bill, a spending bill that addresses the agriculture industry, food systems, nutrition programs, and more. This legislation is up for reauthorization next year. The political fighting comes on the heels of both the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law including billions of dollars for climate provisions.
John Boozman, a Republican Senator from Arkansas who is a high-ranking member of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry, is among a growing number of Republicans who have said they will not allow additional climate provisions into the upcoming Farm Bill. If Republicans win back the House this November, which is still a possible outcome despite tightening Democratic races across the country, GOP members will be in control of drafting next year’s Farm Bill.
“In their zeal to pass their reckless tax-and-spend agenda, they (Democrats) have undermined one of the last successful bipartisan processes in the Senate,” said Boozman in a Senate floor hearing this past August. Boozman said the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act without bipartisan support threatens the future of the Farm Bill, a generally bipartisan omnibus bill. The next bill needs to be authorized before September 2023.
Over a dozen members of the House Agriculture Committee, which steers the Farm Bill draft process, are up for reelection this November. For example, Abigail Spanberger, a Virginia Congresswoman whose district is near the nation’s capital, and a committee member and subcommittee chair, currently faces a contested election in her state, with inflation’s impact on farming communities a key point in the race. Glenn Thompson, a Congressman who represents a western Pennsylvania district, is slated to be the Chair of the House Agriculture Committee if Republicans win the House. After the passage of the historic climate bill this August, the Pennsylvania Republican said the Inflation Reduction Act “only complicates the pathway to a Farm Bill and creates even greater uncertainty for farmers, ranchers, and rural communities.”
Thompson has expressed interest in conservation efforts in the past, but in a September hearing, he said he won’t allow unnecessary climate items into next year’s bill.
“I will not sit idly by as we let decades of real bipartisan progress be turned on its head to satisfy people that at their core think agriculture is a blight on the landscape,” Thompson said in the hearing. “I have been leaning into the climate discussion, but I will not have us suddenly incorporate buzzwords like regenerative agriculture into the Farm Bill or overemphasize climate.”
Ahead of the November elections, House Republicans have already released insight into their priorities for this upcoming legislation. The Republican Study Committee, whose members make up 80 percent of all Republican members of Congress, released its draft budget in July. This draft document outlines a plan that completely defunds federal programs that support conservation efforts, as well as slashes federal food stamp and crop insurance programs. The draft document heralds the preliminary budget as “ undeniably pro-farmer.”
As Farm Bill debates continue, a group of over 150 progressive, agriculture, and environmental groups, from the nation’s largest federation of labor unions to the Sierra Club environmental group, have urged President Joe Biden to add climate reforms in the upcoming legislative package. In a letter to Biden, organizations urged the President to pass a Farm Bill that would help mend economic and racial divides in the industry, increase access to nutrition, support fair labor conditions in farming communities labor conditions, as well as tackle the climate crisis with a focus on agriculture.
Sarah Carden, policy advocate for Farm Action, a progressive agriculture advocacy nonprofit that signed the letter, said that no farmer will deny the industry has been plagued by increased extreme weather events and the Farm Bill needs to address climate change as much as it does other problems in the industry. She said the organization has urged federal agencies to push more funding into programs that help conservation efforts, promote soil health, and mandate the use of climate-smart solutions, instead of contributing to a band-aid funding cycle.
“Farmers who are receiving federal support in the wake of increased extreme weather events and disasters should be practicing practices that contribute to resiliency,” Carden told Grist.
Carden said that the United States Department of Agriculture, or USDA, has created more climate-focused solutions in recent years, such as the recently announced Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities which directs $3 billion to small growers into the supply chain, but it’s important that sustainable solutions are written into the Farm Bill this upcoming cycle as administration changes could upend individual agency efforts.
Since its creation in the 1930s, the Farm Bill has provided direct, federal funding to farmers to address the evolving agricultural industry, from land management to economic development. What was created as a way to infuse cash into an industry decimated by the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, by 1973 the farm bill turned into a massive set of legislation that addresses everything from soil erosion to federal food stamp programs.
Farmers and growers need to address the changing climate, said Margaret Krome, the policy program director for Wisconsin and Midwest agriculture nonprofit research group Michael Fields Agricultural Institute. Krome said the industry is running out of time to address ongoing problems. “We have got climate change at our doorstep,” she said.
Krome, who works with state and federal officials on legislation about agriculture, said the Farm Bill has always been a way to have farmers focus on their current needs. As discussions and draft legislation begin, she said three issues are likely to be at the top of the debates; climate change, the future of farming and addressing historic racial injustices in the industry, and the intersection of nutrition and agriculture.
With increasing polarization in politics and the upcoming midterm elections, she said it is important for those working on the bill to remember that farming touches everyone in the country and should, hopefully, remain bipartisan. Despite political differences at the state level across the country, a nonpartisan coalition of state agriculture department officials recently issued a letter declaring their desire for the Farm Bill to include increased disaster relief, nutrition programs, and subsidies for regional food production.
As farming adapts to warming crops and increased droughts, federal agencies are increasing funding and focusing on addressing the industry’s role in spurring a warming world. According to the USDA, the nation’s agriculture sector accounted for 11 percent of the country’s carbon emissions in 2020.
Congressman David Scott of Georgia, center, speaks at a press conference in 2009. Scott is currently seeking re-election and is the Chair of the House Committee on Agriculture.
Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images
The Farm Bill already includes language outlining two top USDA environmentally focused programs, the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, or EQIP, and the Conservation Stewardship Program. Both of these programs are normally funded through the Farm Bill, but the Inflation Reduction Act added billions of funding to them, with $8.45 billion for EQIP and $3.25 billion for the conservation program. The infusion was praised by environmental groups and Democrats who hope the increased funding will help farmers implement climate-smart solutions like cover crops to help to increase crop resiliency or create wildlife habitats on farmland.
Key agricultural leaders on Capitol Hill also predict that, alongside the addition of climate provisions, fights over Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, will stall next year’s Farm Bill. In both 2014 and 2018, efforts from House GOP members to cut SNAP funding slowed the bill’s passage. Earlier this year, Georgia Democratic Congressman David Scott, who is currently seeking re-election and is the Chair of the House Committee on Agriculture and represents a district just outside of Atlanta, warned that fights over SNAP could derail Farm Bill conservations. Given the Biden administration’s recent announcement of plans to end hunger by 2030, debates over nutrition funding are likely to flare up.
The fight will boil down to the program’s funding as from 2024 to 2028, SNAP is estimated to cost roughly $531 billion, an increase caused by droves of new users coming to the program due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In comparison, all nutritional programs, not just SNAP, were estimated to cost $326 billion in the 2018 Farm Bill.
Recently passed landmark climate legislation may also interfere with what makes it into the Farm Bill, as Conservative House and Senate members have said funding from the Inflation Reduction Act could decrease the budget for climate proposals inside the Farm Bill.
Why is much modern food of inferior quality? Why is health suffering and smallholder farmers who feed most of the world being forced out of agriculture? 
