The Environmental Protection Agency denied a petition Wednesday that asked the federal agency to more closely regulate a group of chemicals used in pesticide-coated seeds, which are linked to killing pollinators such as hummingbirds and bumblebees.
“We gave EPA a golden chance and a blueprint to fix a problem that has caused significant harm to people, bees, birds, and the environment — and it stubbornly refused,” said Amy van Saun, senior attorney with the Center for Food Safety, in a statement. “It’s extremely disappointing and we’ll be exploring all possible next steps to protect communities and the environment from the hazard of pesticide-coated seeds, including a lawsuit challenging this decision.”
The seeds in question are coated in a class of chemicals known as neonicotinoids, or “neonics,” and have been cited in the mass die-off of various pollinators, such as bees and birds. The seeds are covered in chemicals that harm pollinators’ nervous systems, causing paralysis and death. The chemicals, banned in the European Union, aren’t regulated by the EPA’s pesticide enforcement rulings, which prompted environmental and ecological groups to take legal action. In the agriculture industry, seeds are treated with pesticides before they are put in the ground to protect plants from pests and diseases.
In its responsive letter, the EPA said it does not agree with the request of the petitioners to “categorically exclude seed treated with systemic pesticides” from the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act. This EPA legislation limits the use of pesticides that “generally pose unreasonable risks to people, including agricultural workers, or the environment.”
Mead, Nebraska, a rural village outside of Omaha, has been embroiled in a battle with a neighboring ethanol plant linked to these pesticide-coated seeds. The now-closed plant produced ethanol out of coated seeds and created a byproduct ripe with neonicotinoids. Village residents reported the loss of bee colonies and birds when the plant was still in operation. More troubling, these chemicals have been detected at least 40 feet beneath groundwater wells downstream of the shuttered site. Efforts are also underway to clean up a sludge of byproduct, called “wet cake,” which contains traces of toxic chemicals roughly 85 times higher than the legal limit. Last year, the state of Nebraska sued AltEn, the Kansas company that owns the plant.
Pollinators like the bumblebee, pictured here, have been killed off by the class of chemicals known as neonicotinoids.
Paula French / EyeEm/ Getty Images
Jody Weible, a Mead resident whose home is less than a mile from the shuttered plant, told Grist the EPA was “dead wrong,” in its decision to not increase regulations for these chemicals. Weible said cleanup efforts fronted by herself and others have been slowly progressing since the plant closed last year, but being cast off by government agencies, state or federal, has been a familiar part of her journey as an affected resident.
Weible, who has lived in her home for almost four decades, said while the ethanol plant was active, it was difficult to just be outside. She recounted that children would experience nosebleeds, family members had severely irritated eyes, and opening windows was a risk. She collected the byproduct in a jar over three years and said, to this day, the “sweet, dead, acidic” smell will still “drop you to your knees.”
She said since the plant closed, researchers have visited her home and found high levels of neonicotinoids in the house’s dust. Since the plant closed, noticeable changes have occurred, but clean-up efforts continue. “We now have mosquitoes back,” Weible said. “We had almost no birds, no butterflies. Everything’s coming back.”
The practice of burning pesticide-coated seeds was lucrative for ethanol plants and other big agricultural industry players. The AltEn plant opened in 2015 and closed in 2021. At that time, it produced approximately 24 million gallons of ethanol annually, billing itself as a place for large pesticide companies, like Bayer and Syngenta, to recycle their leftover seeds for free. Ethanol is a powerful industry in Nebraska and other Corn Belt states. In the wake of these findings, Nebraska banned the practice but is the only state to do so in the country, where there are over 200 other ethanol refineries.
The EPA has been monitoring the Nebraska plant for continued pollution, but neighboring residents say efforts haven’t been fruitful. Last year the agency conducted air monitoring around the facility and said they have not detected pollutants considered an “immediate health threat.”
In 2020, the EPA released interim proposals to regulate this class of chemicals. The agency suggested growers use more protective gear when handling the chemicals, limiting the times that the chemicals can be sprayed on blooming plants that attract pollinators and adding packaging language that advises homeowners not to use neonicotinoids. In the decision letter released this week, the agency said it intends to continue seeking comments and information about how these chemicals and the seeds they are coated with may be in violation of public health and industry use.
New research finds between 90 to 99 percent of all tropical deforestation is related to agriculture, either directly or indirectly.
The new research, published in the journal Science found only half to two-thirds of deforested land for agricultural purposes actually winds up seeing active agriculture. Much of the land lies razed and unused.
“A big piece of the puzzle is just how much deforestation is ‘for nothing,’” said Prof. Patrick Meyfroidt from UCLouvain and F.R.S.-FNRS in Belgium.
“While agriculture is the ultimate driver, forests and other ecosystems are often cleared for land speculation that never materialised, projects that were abandoned or ill-conceived, land that proved unsuitable for cultivation, as well as due to fires that spread into forests neighboring cleared areas”.
Photo by Johny Goerend on Unsplash
Deforestation has long been a result of agriculture, but the new study is the first to pinpoint the loss of hectares to more specific numbers, narrowing loss down to 6.4 to 8.8 million hectares per year from previous estimates of 4.3 to 9.6 million hectares between 2011 to 2015.
For more than a decade, estimates suggested 80 percent of deforestation is related to agriculture, but the new findings push that number up significantly.
“Our review makes clear that between 90 and 99 percent of all deforestation in the tropics is driven directly or indirectly by agriculture,” Florence Pendrill, lead author of the study at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, said in a statement.
“But what surprised us was that a comparatively smaller share of the deforestation—between 45 and 65 percent—results in the expansion of actual agricultural production on the deforested land. This finding is of profound importance for designing effective measures to reduce deforestation and promote sustainable rural development,” Pendrill said.
Palm Plantation | Courtesy Greenpeace
The research saw a collaboration between the world’s leading deforestation experts and looked not only at the connection between agriculture and deforestation, but how it impacts conservation efforts.
Three commodities are driving tropical deforestation: land for pasture, soy—grown primarily for livestock feed—, and palm oil. The researchers also point to sector-specific initiatives that aren’t effectively dealing with indirect impacts.
Tangible solutions
“Sector-specific initiatives to combat deforestation can be invaluable, and new measures to prohibit imports of commodities linked to deforestation in consumer markets, such as those under negotiation in the EU, UK and USA represent a major step forward from largely voluntary efforts to combat deforestation to date,” said Dr. Toby Gardner of the Stockholm Environment Institute and Director of the supply chain transparency initiative, Trase.
“But as our study shows, strengthening forest and land-use governance in producer countries has to be the ultimate goal of any policy response. Supply chain and demand-side measures must be designed in a way that also tackles the underlying and indirect ways in which agriculture is linked to deforestation. They need to drive improvements in sustainable rural development, otherwise we can expect to see deforestation rates remaining stubbornly high in many places,” Dr. Gardner added.
Courtesy Flash Dantz via Pexels
The researchers say the new data is key for policymakers across consumer markets, the private sector, and rural development policies in the producing countries. They say supply chain interventions are critical and must go beyond specific commodities to drive “genuine partnerships” between the producers, consumer markets, and governments.
Three gaps need addressing to reduce deforestation, the researchers say.
“The first is that without a globally and temporally consistent data product on deforestation we cannot be confident about overall trends in conversion. The second is that except for oil palm and soy, we lack data on the coverage and expansion of specific commodities to know which are more important, with our understanding of global pasture and grazing lands being especially dire. The third is that we know comparatively very little indeed about tropical dry forests, and forests in Africa”, said Professor Martin Persson of Chalmers University of Technology.
“What is most worrying, given the urgency of the crisis”, Prof. Persson said, “is that each of these evidence gaps pose significant barriers to our ability to drive down deforestation in the most effective way – by knowing where the problems are concentrated, and understanding the success of efforts to date.”
Hunger has doubled in the world’s 10 worst climate hotspots, worsened by profiteering on cereal markets by huge agriculture corporations. Peter Boyle reports.
As a young boy in the 1970s, Vishwanath Thange knew hunger. He usually lived on one meal a day, not enough when you’re working construction. But Thange had to take the work — or starve. He was born in Hiware Bazar, a village tucked deep inside the western Indian state of Maharashtra. Back then, the hamlet was a crime-ridden backwater, desperately poor and largely abandoned by government agencies. Thange’s family owned seven acres, but chronic drought prevented them from growing food to eat or sell. So Thange left, when he was 15, to look for work in nearby cities. About 20 years ago, he returned to Hiware Bazar, and today he is one of the 89 farmers there who have assets worth more than a million Indian rupees — a fortune in a country where 90 percent of the population makes less than 300,000 rupees a year. In the past 25 years, every farmer in Hiware Bazar has prospered, says Thange. “Today,” he says, “not a single person goes to bed hungry.”
Thange recently earned around 2 million rupees from his farm, the equivalent of a bit more than $25,000. The average agricultural household in India, meanwhile, earns the equivalent of $800 as farm income annually. Thange’s income has paid for a good education for his two sons — a significant feat in rural India, where virtually no one can afford education. It also meant a sturdy, comfortable home for his family, and an increase in his land holdings, from seven acres to 25 acres. The average size of a farm in India is just 2.6 acres.
Although Thange’s story is not an exception in Hiware Bazar, it is exceptional for India. Sixty-five percent of the country’s population resides in villages, where farming is the principal occupation. Farming, however, has been unprofitable in recent decades due to drought, a lack of direct integration with markets, high input costs, and low market prices.
Chirodeep Chaudhuri
Vishwanath Thange holds a flower while standing in an irrigated field in Hiware Bazar. Chirodeep Chaudhuri
Chirodeep Chaudhuri
A motorcycle and car drive by the sign for Hiware Bazar, left. Right, painted rocks sit in a village field. Chirodeep Chaudhuri
Chirodeep Chaudhuri
The failure of the agriculture sector is blamed for the epidemic of farmer suicides in the country, which claimed the lives of more than 300,000 people between 1995 and 2014. According to the latest government figures, more than one agricultural worker dies by suicide every hour in the country. Maharashtra, the state where Hiware Bazar is located, reports the highest number of such suicides in the country. Last year, Maharashtra recorded more than 4000farmer suicides, or over 11 each day.
Climate change has exacerbated India’s agrarian crisis. Last year, the country lost more than 12 million acres of cropland to extreme weather. As droughts worsen, the resurrection of Hiware Bazar holds lessons for villages across the country.
Popularly known as the “village of millionaires,” Hiware Bazar’s model is now being replicated in thousands of villages across India. Through effective watershed management, the rebuilding of natural resources, and a shift to more sustainable, less water-intensive crops — all of which hinged on the participation of residents — the village turned itself into a national “model of development.” The agricultural success has driven progress across the rest of the community, including in healthcare and education.
But Hiware Bazar’s salvation took years of hard work. No one knows this better than Popatrao Pawar, the sarpanch, or head of the village, who spearheaded the village’s transformation. “When we started, it seemed impossible,” he says. “For us, it’s paradise regained.”
Popatrao Pawar stands near a gate being constructed in Hiware Bazar. “The gate will survive even beyond us … as a commemoration of the work that we have all managed to do here,” he said. Chirodeep Chaudhuri
Hiware Bazar lies in the drought-prone Ahmednagar district of Maharashtra, and according to the most recent government data, receives less than half of the national average of rainfall each year. Agriculture there was largely rain-fed, but villagers had traditionally produced enough to feed themselves. Every home had cattle or goats, and dairy production was the primary source of income. But in the decade starting in 1972, the village faced three severe droughts, rendering the land barren, or banjar in local parlance. Wells went dry, fodder to feed livestock disappeared, and villagers turned to the forests on surrounding hills, stripping away the trees for firewood to produce liquor, both for sale and to ease the pain as their livelihoods collapsed.
By the 1980s, Hiware Bazar had lost most of its natural assets. Only a fraction of the land could be cultivated, the soil was exhausted, and there was no electricity. At first, people left the village, thinking it would be temporary. Eventually, they just stayed away. Those who remained worked on farms or at construction sites in nearby villages for low wages.
The sun beats down on a dry patch of land in Hiware Bazar. Chirodeep Chaudhuri
“When contractors came looking for workers in Hiware Bazar, villagers would fight for the jobs, beat each other up,” says Arjun Pawar, who was the head of the village between 1972 and 1977.
According to Arjun, alcohol production and sale became the primary source of income. Locals mixed black jaggery, a coarse sugar made from sugarcane juice, with ammonium chloride powder and rotten fruit, like orange and sweet lime, to produce a potent brand of desi daru, Hindi for “country liquor.” An increase in crime followed. Villagers would also assault government officers, such as the forestry officials who prohibited cattle grazing on what remained of the forested hills surrounding Hiware Bazar.
“People would tie up the forest officials to trees, and soon our village became a ‘punishment posting,’ where government policemen, teachers, and health officials were posted only if they had to be punished,” says Arjun.
Men got drunk in the local school’s empty classrooms, recollects Deepak Thange, who was a student in the 1980s. At the time, every child in his village, including him, dreamed of growing up and building a future far from the village.
“There was no hope for Hiware Bazar,” he says. “There was no hope for any of us.”
When Habib Sayyed, a 48-year-old farmer, was a child, he would spend most Saturdays during the monsoons gathering cow dung. He and other children in the village would use the dung to patch the school’s mud floor. Before lessons resumed on Monday, the dung would dry, holding the floor together until the following weekend, when it would have again turned to muck from rain seeping in from the ceiling.
The school was a small, dilapidated structure with a tin ceiling and two rooms that ran only through fourth grade. Today, a new school, Yashwant Vidyalaya, sits at the village entrance, a prominent symbol of Hiware Bazar’s progress. It was revamped in the early ‘90s after Popatrao Pawar, the village head, convinced 18 families to donate parts of their land for its construction. The new school was the first glimmer of hope in the village, says Subhash Thange, who as a young man donated his labor to help rebuild the village. “It promised a better future for the children and built faith in the new administration.”
Habib Sayyed sits on the steps of Yashwant Vidyalaya, a new school he says symbolizes the progress Hiware Bazar has made in recent years. Chirodeep Chaudhuri
And the school has delivered. The literacy rate in Hiware Bazar is 95 percent, compared to 30 percent in 1990. “Our school runs classes up to the 10th grade, and also hosts students from neighboring villages,” Sayyed says. “During the pandemic, even as schools were shut across the country, ours continued after putting a COVID-19 prevention system in place.”
Pawar was initially skeptical about running for village sarpanch. As a boy, he had moved away after fourth grade to complete his schooling; in 1987, he earned a postgraduate degree in commerce. He was not only the most educated person in Hiware Bazar, but he also had a promising career as a professional cricket player if he chose to pursue it. His achievements had earned him the respect and admiration of other villagers.
“He had played cricket with some of the top players in the country at the time, and yet he was humble, always kind and soft-spoken,” says Sakharam Padir, a teacher and one of the first to volunteer with Hiware Bazar’s new village council. Pawar’s success story, he says, gave people hope.
In 1989, some residents asked Pawar to run for office. His family, however, advised him to abandon the village and use his education to secure a white-collar job. As he considered what to do, Pawar’s mother left the village in protest, living at her father’s place for eight days. “She was adamant that I should worry about my own future, as the village did not have one,” says Pawar.
But residents kept pleading with him to help, and Pawar says their persistence, as well as a genuine concern for the place where he grew up, eventually persuaded him to stay. In late 1989, he was unanimously elected to a five-year term as sarpanch.
One of the first things Pawar did was invite villagers to share their concerns. The conversations left him wondering how he would raise the money necessary to begin solving the many problems. The village had all but collapsed; it lacked basic amenities like water, roads, sturdy homes, medical facilities, and toilets.
“It took us four days to prepare this list and it left me overwhelmed,” says Pawar. “All I knew then was that if we were going to emerge from this situation, the entire village would have to work together.”
Together with the new village council, Pawar embraced the idea of shramdaan, or “labor donation,” as a way to get villagers invested in building a better future. He went door to door, trying to convince people to contribute. If most of the villagers were inspired by Pawar and eager to work with him, there were some who resisted. After the village council built fences around its tamarind orchards, for instance, some residents unleashed their goats inside the fences to chew up the leaves and tender branches.
A motorcyclist drives by a community mural in Hiware Bazar. The broad asphalt roads of the village are a rarity in rural Indian villages. Chirodeep Chaudhuri
The council prepared a five-year development plan with education as the priority. Using donated land and labor, the village rebuilt the school. The council then started asking state agencies — like forestry, agriculture and animal husbandry — for help, using the school as evidence that Hiware Bazar was serious about changing its fortunes. The officials, still wary of the clashes they’d had with villagers over the years, were not easily convinced.
“I pleaded with them,” says Pawar.
His persistence eventually paid off. In 1992, the forest department added Hiware Bazar to the Joint Forest Management program. Begun in India in 1988, the national program helped forest communities develop and manage degraded forestland in ways that helped them meet their subsistence needs. Residents replanted 170 acres in the hills around the village, sowing tamarind, mango, arjun, and Indian gooseberry trees, all of which have economic and environmental as well as social and cultural value. The bark and fruit of the arjun tree, for instance, are widely used in ayurveda, the alternative medicine practice with deep roots in India. They started rituals, like gifting plants to newlyweds and organizing tree-planting campaigns for kids. They built water holes for the wildlife and replaced firewood with biogas generated from cattle dung.
Next, the villagers restored the depleted watershed. In 1994, Hiware Bazar joined the state government’s Ideal Village program. The idea was to build resiliency and sustainability by providing safe drinking water, creating jobs, and strengthening education and health care.
Watershed development was central to the program. Years of cattle grazing and clear-cutting in the hills had eroded the soil and depleted the groundwater. Now, with reforestation and a ban on cattle grazing, the soil began to improve. The tree cover slowed the rainwater runoff, holding the soil in place and allowing the water to percolate into the soil.
Villagers built small dams along the natural drainage lines on the hills to trap rainwater, increasing the groundwater and holding the excess as surface water. The same technique was used to trap rainwater within the farmers’ fields. “With the watershed infrastructure, the water table rose almost immediately and the area under irrigation increased,” says Pawar.
Farmers in Hiware Bazar had traditionally grown sorghum and pearl millet, and would often plant water-intensive crops like sugarcane and banana. They extracted groundwater for irrigation through deep wells, depleting the aquifers. Now, the village council started planning crops according to water availability, while also promoting dryland crops, like pulses, and less water-intensive crops, like vegetables. They abandoned wasteful flood irrigation in favor of micro-irrigation, which efficiently delivers water to crops through drip pipes and sprinklers.
Drip pipes carry water across a large field in Bhalwani village, near Hiware Bazar Chirodeep Chaudhuri
Before long, farming was working again in Hiware Bazar. By the mid-aughts, the number of trees had increased from 30,000 to 900,000. The amount of irrigated land went from 154 acres in 1994 to 642 acres in 2006. The village council helped farmers get bank loans for tractors, and secured some genetically modified seeds to boost yield, use less water, and resist pests. Farming evolved from subsistence to commercial, with villagers growing and selling wheat, oilseeds, pulses, vegetables, fruits, flowers, and fodder. Incomes rose sharply, and in 1998 the government declared Hiware Bazar to be an “ideal village.”
In the quarter century since this work began, Hiware Bazar has built on its water harvesting and watershed management initiatives. It has introduced “water budgeting,” which considers the total available water in the village from rainfall and conservation efforts, and then makes allocations for drinking, domestic use, and irrigation, while banking 30 percent each year for future use. Crops are planned according to the water budget, and villagers have continued to donate their labor to maintain the infrastructure.
A direct benefit of the village’s agricultural revolution is dairy farming, which is once again integral to Hiware Bazar’s economy. The increased income enabled many farmers to buy more cattle. In 2003, villagers constructed a veterinary clinic to ensure animal health and provide services like artificial insemination. The efforts, in turn, have increased the village’s milk production from 39 gallons a day in 1990 to more than 1,300 gallons today.
A man drives cattle down a road in Hiware Bazar Chirodeep Chaudhuri
With farming revitalized, the wealth spread throughout the community. Every home is made of concrete, as opposed to just two in 1990. The village has 87 tractors, compared to none in 1990; 368 motorcycles, compared to 10 in 1990; and 28 cars, compared to none in 1990. To ensure that the village’s development benefited its poorest citizens, most of whom did not own farmland, the village council leveraged government programs to allot land to these families, and served as guarantors for their agricultural loans.
“I think what worked was that whatever plans and schemes were implemented in Hiware Bazar, villagers did not think of them as government schemes or village council schemes,” says Sakharam Padir. “They thought them to be programs for their own development, for their own family’s welfare.”
Over the past two decades, Hiware Bazar has helped thousands of villages in India replicate its development model. According to a 2019 report bythe national government’s policy think tank, India is suffering from the worst water crisis in its history, with 600 million people facing significant water stress and some 200,000 dying every year due to inadequate access to safe water. Agriculture accounts for 90 percent of water usage in India, and most of the irrigated land depends on groundwater sources, which are rapidly being depleted. Hiware Bazar’s development model, with watershed management and water conservation at its core, holds substantial relevance for Indian agriculture.
Within three years of the implementation of Hiware Bazar’s model in Bhalwani, another drought-prone village in Maharashtra, the average income of the village’s farmers rose from 100,000 rupees in 2018 to 500,000 in 2021. In 2018, the village lost two farmers to suicide, but none in the years since.
A farmer in Bhalwani, an adjoining village to Hiware Bazar, covers harvested onions in long lengths of cloth to protect them from the elements. Chirodeep Chaudhuri
Ajay Dandekar, a professor with the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Shiv Nadar University, calls Popatrao Pawar’s contribution to Indian agriculture “immense.” But he says India’s agrarian crisis is complex, and solving it will require fundamental changes in how agricultural commodities are priced as well as in cropping patterns, which are not in line with the rainfall patterns in the country.
“Many things can be learnt from Hiware Bazar,” says Dandekar, who in a 2017 study investigated the reasons behind farmer suicides in two of India’s hardest-hit districts. “But more importantly, along with it, the government must create macroeconomic structures within the agrarian economy that will regulate the prices and benefit farmers.”
In 2020, Pawar was awarded the Padma Shri, one of the highest civilian honors in India, for his work in Hiware Bazar. Today, he is the executive director of the Maharashtra government’s Model Village Program, working to transform a thousand of the state’s most depressed villages into self-sufficient communities. Meanwhile, activists, bureaucrats, and policymakers from across the country — as well as from countries like Germany, South Africa, Bangladesh, and others — have visited Hiware Bazar to study its success.
“In Hiware Bazar, we’ve seen every type of scarcity,” says Pawar. “We know the pain that walks in with scarcity, but we have also tasted the fruits of unity and cooperation. And now, we’re sharing our lessons with the world.”
The corn on Zack Smith’s 1,200 acres is not his future. Smith, a fifth-generation farmer working the land near Buffalo Center, Iowa, a town of almost 900 near the Minnesota border, knows the climate is changing and, in the future, it will be too hot and dry for a crop like corn.
Researchers predict that by 2053, a large swath of the Midwest will experience at least one day with temperatures of 125 degrees Fahrenheit or hotter. According to the First Street Foundation, a nonprofit climate change research group, Smith’s farm could one day be part of an “Extreme Heat Belt,” a region that would include Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin.
Roughly the same region claims the name Corn Belt due to its output of corn, estimated at 10 billion bushels each year. These impending high temperatures will change the region’s economic and agricultural future, with growers already seeing drops in corn production this year. Changes to corn’s genetic makeup have increased its resilience to drought in recent years, but studies show that increasing heat is attacking soil conditions and, in turn, corn yield.
The future of Corn Belt and Midwest agriculture will get hotter and hotter, making each year more fragile and leaving farmers and growers adapting to extreme weather. Some states are even planting trees to protect livestock from the impending heat, which has been killing more and more animals each year. Farmers, growers, and scientists are now testing new grains, crops, and changes to land management to prepare for the impending wave of dangerous and destructive heat expected to accumulate in the middle of the country.
As the corn industry braces for these changes, Smith is putting his focus on the Stock Cropper, a technology he’s developing to shift away from corn production.
Simply, Stock Cropper is an animal pen that moves on its own. The autonomous, solar-powered, mobile barn moves animals through a pasture, allowing them to eat and fertilize along the way. The process of animals slowly moving forward along a strip of land helps the land retain nutrients, without the need to mow or use heavy machinery. Animals such as chickens, goats, lambs, or hogs are placed inside the roughly 24-foot-long pen that ranges from 10 to 30 feet wide.
“It’s putting animals back out on the land, but using technology to our benefit,” Smith said.
Smith grew up on a hog farm in Iowa but after massive industry-wide consolidation a few decades ago, his family started farming only corn and soybean. Since the early 1990s, Iowa’s pig population has increased by over 50 percent, but individual farms raising hogs dropped 80 percent. Livestock concentration has decimated individual farms and small communities across the Midwest, with farmers forced to either go big or get out.
After the hog bubble burst, Smith’s family found their land to be their most valuable asset and started farming more crops, just like other Iowan farmers. Iowa now produces the most corn of any state, and the United States is the global leader in corn production. Corn is used in myriad ways, from food sweetener to alcohol distillation. The nation’s massive corn export fuels both livestock and ethanol, which combined, account for 63 percent of the country’s agricultural exports.
Smith sees the future of corn production as fraught with drying soils and predicts a looming price drop for corn commodities. Current corn prices are higher than they have been in recent years with experts expecting this to last into the next few years, but growers are concerned that this year’s heatwave and drought have already damaged the corn yield, with an estimated one billion bushels less harvested in Iowa and Nebraska.
Smith said he also sees the nation’s shift away from a dependence on fossil fuels and ethanol as a losing battle for large corn producers in Iowa and he’s getting ready for life after ethanol. Right now, roughly half of the state’s corn production is used for ethanol.
“If that goes away, our model is going to look substantially different out here,” Smith said.
While the Stock Cropper technology is a small portion of Smith’s current operation, he said he wants to grow the technology to sell to other farmers. As corn becomes harder to raise, Smith imagines that a combination of selling the technology and the high-quality protein, those aforementioned hogs, and goats, in place of corn yields, will become his primary source of income.
Smith said he still wants to farm corn sustainably, both for the land and to combat future harsh conditions. Currently, Smith uses sustainable practices such as strip tillage, the process of cultivating the land with minimal disruption to the soil, and cover crops, planting vegetation that isn’t meant to be harvested to protect the soil from erosion and to improve conditions.
“Environmental and economic efficiencies are paramount on the farm and if you’re being environmentally efficient, you’re being economically efficient,” Smith said.
Corn, grains, and soybeans take up a large portion of the nation’s agricultural acreage and are annual crops. Each year, money is sunk into planting, growing, and harvesting these crops, only to do it all over the next year. To combat this cycle, a new grain is growing in portions of the Corn Belt.
Tim Crews director of ecological intensification at The Land Institute, harvests Kernza from an intercropping test plot where weed suppression is being studied.
The Land Institute
Kernza is domesticated wheatgrass that grows perennially and can be harvested for 10 to 20 years after being planted. It is often used as a substitute for grains in bread and beer production. This perennial plant is cropping up across the pockets of the Corn Belt and Midwest, from Minnesota to Colorado.
Tim Crews, chief scientist at the Land Institute, a nonprofit agricultural research group in Salina, Kansas, said there are no silver bullets to make current crop systems adapt to impending, destructive heat. Crews is part of a larger effort to shift away from annual crops and plant more perennials like Kernza through the Perennial Agriculture Project, to make future crops more resilient to heat.
Kernza, and other perennials like legumes and oilseeds, a cousin to sunflowers, are more drought and heat-resilient because of their root structures. These crops have large root systems and can both store and pull water from deeper in the ground, as opposed to corn, which has a shorter root system. Crews said that hundreds of years of planting crops with small root systems have made soil that can’t retain a lot of water, causing agricultural runoff. This runoff has polluted rivers and lakes across the region, but in Minnesota, Kernza is already being planted to prevent future Mississippi River pollution. Crews said the Land Institute’s work hopes to fix years worth of disruptive practices to prepare for an intense future.
“We became annual agriculturalists that created an ecosystem that does not exist hardly anywhere else on the planet and one that is so radically disrupted on an annual basis,” Crews said.
Perennials are also better for the environment because they don’t need heavy, gas-powered equipment to operate every year, and also require far less yearly fertilizer and nitrogen. “It takes a heck of a lot of human work or fossil fuels to knock those ecosystems back to square one every single year,” Crews said.
But, Kernza and perennials aren’t without their challenges. These crops are in the early stages of domestication in the region and need years to develop and potentially replace crops like corn. Additionally, Kernza roots may trap more water than corn and soybeans, but they need more water throughout the year as their growing period is longer than an annual crop. Crews said long-lasting droughts, such as ones lasting nine months or more, will complicate these crops, but perennials can thrive in heavy and recurrent rainfall events.
“If you have a deluge every two months, you’re good to go, and the annual systems are not going to work,” Crews said.
The Land Institute is working on developing new perennial grains that are bred with commonly used annual grains to make the transition from annual to perennial easier across the board. The Kansas research organization has been testing perennial breeds of wheatgrass, rice, sorghum, legumes, and more. These perennial crops will take decades to become planted in fields across the region but will allow the Corn Belt to adapt to a warmer climate and perhaps hang up its corn-focused moniker.
“There are so many other potential new crop species out there that could be far more drought intensive or heat tolerant than even any of the ones we’re working on right now,” Crews said.
In recent years, governments have been demonstrating their subservience to their billionaire masters in Big Finance, the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations, BlackRock and the entire gamut of forces in the military-financial-industrial complex behind the ‘Great Reset’, ‘New Normal’ or whichever other benign-sounding term is used to disguise the crisis and current restructuring of capitalism and the brutal impacts on ordinary people.
In late 2019 and early 2020 (due to collapsing financial markets immediately prior to COVID) and during COVID (via COVID-relief packages), trillions of dollars were handed over to elite interests while lockdowns and restrictions were imposed on ordinary people and small businesses. The winners were the likes of Amazon, Big Pharma and the tech giants. The losers were small enterprises and the bulk of the population, deprived of their right to work and the entire panoply of civil rights their ancestors struggled for.
In August 2020, a report by the International Labour Organization stated that COVID policies had severely disrupted economies across the world with estimated losses of working hours equivalent to nearly 400 million full-time jobs in the second quarter of 2020.
The restrictions and closure of the global economy impacted the most vulnerable – the 1.6 billion informal (low-income) economy workers, representing half the global workforce.
In India, lockdown pushed around 230 million into poverty. A May 2021 report by Azim Premji University highlights how – to survive lockdown – the poorest 25% of households borrowed 3.8 times their median income, as against 1.4 times for the top 25%.
The Modi government has handled the pandemic by prioritising the profits of big business and protecting the fortunes of billionaires over protecting the lives and livelihoods of workers.
But this approach was not limited to India. Between April and July 2020, the total wealth held by billionaires around the world grew from by 25% to $10+ trillion.
Due to financial COVID ‘relief packages’, governments are now under the thumb of global creditors and the post-COVID era is seeing massive austerity measures due to strings-attached loans, especially in Africa and the Global South. This was the inevitable consequence of closing down the world economy. Something that was known beforehand and devised to benefit hegemonic interests and their geopolitical goals.
What we are witnessing is an economic reset – which policies carried out under the guise of preventing COVID helped set in motion. This reset includes energy and food ‘transitions’ and is tied to a ‘green’ environmental, social and governance (ESG) agenda and emerging green bond financial markets that will be highly profitable for banks and investors. Moreover, current sanctions placed on Russia are helping to disrupt food and energy markets thereby accelerating the planned changes.
As part of the ‘food transition’, we hear much talk of ‘precision’ agriculture driven by AI and cloud technology. Farmerless farms and driverless machines are to become the norm. This transition involves commodity crops – patented, genetically engineered seeds doused with chemicals – cultivated for ‘biomatter’, manipulated by biotech companies and constituted in giant vats into something resembling food.
This is part of the brave new world being promoted by the self-labelled ‘visionaries’ associated with the World Economic Forum – an Orwellian future where capitalist ‘liberal democracy’ has run its course.
To sell this to people, ‘smart’ is key to the sales pitch – smart cities, smart interconnectivity, smart agriculture and so on. A ‘smart’ digital world encompassing almost everything, not least ‘precision’ surveillance of the population – its behaviour, its dissent or conformity, its digital money and its purchasing.
Integral to this is the financialisation of nature and an ESG agenda linked to the ‘green profiling’ of nations, companies and individuals and their carbon footprint. A green imperialism (no doubt forced through on the back of debt-related conditionalities) to ensure countries (and people) comply with sustainability/net-zero goals that are used to facilitate highly profitable technologies and fresh business models.
For instance, how could countries demonstrate their ESG ‘green’ credentials while maintaining their international credit ratings? Perhaps by allowing herbicide-resistant GMO commodity crop monocultures that the strategically influential GM industry and its lobbyists misleadingly portray as ‘climate friendly’.
Or maybe by displacing indigenous peoples and using their lands and forests under the guise of ‘carbon sinks’ for global corporations to ‘offset’ their pollution and claim ‘net-zero’ status.
With this in mind, let us turn to the current farmer protest in the Netherlands, where there is a plan to remove farmers from the land, using concerns over the environment as justification.
On one hand, there is the official government narrative that this ‘transition’ is needed to reduce animal-based agriculture and the meat industry’s dangerous emissions. This is where the ‘food transition’ comes in: ‘precision’ agriculture, fewer farmers and fake-meat made in a lab – sold as climate-friendly which is anything but, given that it will rely on intensive commodity cropping and long-line supply chains for biomatter.
On the other hand, however, the Dutch government’s official narrative of reducing nitrogen and ammonia emissions by transforming farming can easily be used as cover for a standard ‘land grab’ to line the pockets of property developers and investors as part of the vision for a mega ‘tristate’ city – mentioned in the 2017 article “Dutch investors launch new marketing programme for NL: Tristate City“.
Dutch campaigner Willem Engel is reported on the Rio Times website as saying that, under the guise of climate protection, the way to get there seems to be through forced expropriation. He claims that the Dutch government is not seeking to eliminate about a third of its farms for environmental reasons. Instead, it is about the construction of Tristate City, a megalopolis with a population of around 45 million extending to areas of Germany and Belgium.
Engel says that the so-called ‘nitrogen crisis’ is fictional, a purely political issue to reshape the country’s landscape. He argues that the largest nitrogen emissions are not caused by agriculture but by industry.
This is not to imply that the Netherlands is to become a country totally buried under concrete. But much farmland is strategically important to industry and housing. The tristate concept is based on a giant unified ‘green’ urban region ‘smart’ enough to compete with the massive metropolises we see in Asia, not least in China.
Of course, the food transition and the tristate concept are not mutually exclusive and can both be regarded as integral to the overall ‘sustainability’ agenda. Either way, the type of corporate environmentalism, economic reset and corporate-led ‘food transition’ currently being promoted globally has little to do with protecting the environment. It is a financially lucrative agenda that has co-opted the terms and concerns of genuine environmentalists.
That much has been made clear by investigative journalist Corey Morningstar who has described the nature of and links between the corporate-billionaire interests driving this process in her revealing multi-part article ‘The Manufacture of Greta Thunberg’.
In finishing, let’s turn to the official tristate city website where it states:
Dit model heeft geen enkele relatie met het stikstofbeleid van de Nederlandse overheid!
Translation:
This model has no relation to the nitrogen policy of the Dutch government!
This story is part of the Grist seriesParched, an in-depth look at how climate change-fueled drought is reshaping communities, economies, and ecosystems.
Peter Hanlon, a 68-year-old farmer from Boston, has been growing cranberries in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, for decades. Cranberries are in Hanlon’s blood — his grandfather farmed them on the cape before him. But six weeks ago, Hanlon sold his farm in the town of Sandwich. None of his kids wanted to carry on the tradition, and Hanlon doesn’t blame them: Profit margins are incredibly tight, and increasingly erratic weather patterns in recent years have made cranberries more difficult to grow.
“The last two storms, in ‘15 and ‘17, scared me,” Hanlon said. He recalls seeing an 11-foot surge of ocean water coming into his farm through the woods and inundating his vines, dooming many of them to die from salt exposure.
Cranberry farmers in Massachusetts have had to contend with wildly fluctuating environmental conditions over the past several years. The 2015 and 2017 storms Hanlon referred to killed some coastal Massachusetts cranberry bogs when they flooded them with sea water, extreme temperatures and drought parched vines in 2020, and a deluge of rainfall pickled the state’s cranberry crop last year, leading to a nationwide shortage. Massachusetts is the second-largest producer of cranberries in the nation behind Wisconsin, which also had a bad growing season last year.
This year, another massive drought, fueled by climate change, has farmers like Hanlon weighing their options and making tough decisions.
A cranberry field in Massachusetts. Sanghwan Kim / Getty Images
Massachusetts and much of the rest of the Northeastern United States has been in a state of moderate to extreme drought for the better part of the summer. Dry conditions descended on the region in late spring and didn’t let up for months. Massachusetts dealt with some of the worst drought in the Northeast: As of the end of last month, 10 of its 14 counties were experiencing extreme drought, and the remaining four were experiencing severe drought. “The boom or bust scenario that climate change presents when it comes to precipitation events — the boom being the large precipitation event, the bust being long dry spells — that’s not a good thing,” Zachary Zobel, a scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Massachusetts, told Grist.
The Massachusetts drought has begun to ease in recent weeks, especially after this past week, when a round of soaking storms rolled into the Northeast. But it may take another round or two of wet weather to make up for the months of drought that desiccated farm fields, depleted reservoirs, and sparked wildfires in the Northeast. And this year’s drought is more evidence that farming conditions are getting less predictable.
“Farmers wake up every day and they have to face whatever the weather is going to present to them — that’s farming,” Brian Wick, executive director of the Cape Cod Cranberry Growers’ Association, told Grist. “But it’s quite clear in talking to many growers over the past several years that this change in climate is very real and it’s really starting to impact how they farm.”
Cranberries are a finicky crop. Too much water, like the state saw last year, can cause fungus to grow on cranberry vines and affect the color and quality of the fruit. But add too little water, and the vines shrivel up and die, or the berries don’t grow to full maturity.
Farmers also need access to ample fresh water in order to protect and harvest their cranberries. Cranberries grow on vines in dry fields much like grapes or any other crop during most of the growing season. But twice a year, farmers flood those dry fields with water and turn them into bogs: In the spring, when a late frost might threaten to kill their budding cranberry vines, the flooding protects the tender shoots and flowers from freezing over. In the fall, farmers turn on their irrigation systems again to harvest their berries. They use machines to shake the plants to release the berries into the bog, where they’re corralled into containers and shipped to destinations across the country.
Cranberry harvest. Abstract Aerial Art / Getty Images
So far, it looks like most cranberry farmers are going to pull through this year, thanks to the recent storms and to irrigation pumps, which farmers switched on throughout the season to pull water from local sources and make up for lost rainfall. But it was a more expensive growing season for that reason — pumps run on gasoline or propane, and fuel costs were astronomical this summer. And the drought isn’t over yet. Wick won’t breathe easy until the berries are off the vines and loaded into trucks. “We’ll see what we get for rainfall over the next few weeks,” he said. “We still have about a month before harvest to get some periodic rains.”
In general, climate change isn’t stopping the state’s cranberry farmers from growing their crop — yet. “Cranberries in Massachusetts will continue to thrive,” Wick said, “but it’s going to be more challenging and difficult, and they’re going to have to adapt. You’re not going to have that nice, consistent growing season, it just seems to be one extreme or another.”
Peter Hanlon, the cranberry farmer who sold his farm, said he’s glad he’s not trying to beat the weather odds this year or in the future. “My son tells me the weather is going to get worse,” he said. But the weather has already been so bad, Hanlon says, it’s hard to imagine an even more erratic season. “I reserve judgment on that,” he said.
Millions of African people have demanded that the UK and others cease funding an agricultural initiative on the continent. They say that the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) locks farmers into dependence on corporations and environmentally destructive practices. Instead, farmers, along with faith leaders and other civil society organisations (CSOs), have urged funders to redirect financing to initiatives that are ecologically sound and offer self-sufficiency for people.
Like its earlier namesake, AGRA’s ‘revolution’ reduces farmers’ autonomy, making them reliant on artificial inputs such as fertilizers and pesticides supplied by corporations, the civil society alliance says. Moreover, these agrochemicals ravage the natural world – from waterways to insects – and play a central role in the world’s environmental crises.
The Southern African Faith Communities’ Environment Institute’s climate justice coordinator Gabriel Manyangadze explained in a press conference on 1 September:
We are calling upon all the funders to please stop funding AGRA. Redirect your funding towards systems that enable people to have their dignity, for all creation to have an equal chance to live, where there are no chemicals in our water, in our ground, and in our food.
As Timothy A. Wise wrote in Mongabay, however, donor-funded research shows that AGRA is failing to achieve its aims in terms of income and food security. Wise is a senior research fellow at Tufts University’s Global Development and Environment Institute. His own research in 2020 found that the number of severely undernourished people had increased by 31% since AGRA’s founding. This increase was in the thirteen countries the ‘revolution’ focuses on.
Speaking at the press conference, Leonida Odongo from the social justice-focused organisation Haki Nawiri Afrika insisted that African people have the “expertise” to solve the continent’s agricultural issues, not AGRA. They are “best-placed” to provide the necessary “Afro-centric” solutions, she said.
These solutions should involve sustainable agroecological practices, AFSA says. It asserts that ecologically-friendly bio-fertilizers and bio-pesticides can be made from local, low-cost materials, for example, to replace their chemical counterparts.
The Canary contacted the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office for comment on the UK’s funding of AGRA. It did not respond by the time of publication.
Seed privatisation
Odongo also pointed out that AGRA focuses on seeds, alongside chemical inputs. From the earlier Green Revolution onwards, corporations have secured a monopoly on seed production. Championed by industrialised nations, they have patented varieties of existing seeds, such as genetically modified organism (GMO) varieties. Four agri-giants currently control over 50% of seeds globally, according to DW.
Linked to this seed privatisation, Odongo says that African countries are increasingly introducing legislation containing “punitive clauses” that outlaw “age-old traditions” of farmers saving and exchanging seeds. In other words, farmers’ use of indigenous seeds is being restricted by law, forcing them into dependence on corporations’ hybrid varieties instead.
Its chemical fertilizer and hybrid seed heavy agenda has snatched the power out of the hands of the small scale farmers whilst simultaneously degrading their soils.
He further suggested that the initiative hasn’t helped women, who he described as “the anchors of the agricultural sector in Africa”. The donor-funded research, carried out by consultancy firm Mathematica, found that most of those who did benefit from it were male and wealthier to start with. Phiri also pointed out that the chemical fertilizer industry and patent holders of hybrid seeds are key beneficiaries of AGRA. He concluded by saying:
when a solution marketed as having the interest of local communities at its core actually benefits those same local communities the least, you know you are dealing with a false solution – a pretentious money grab!
Working together
Despite this opposition to AGRA among civil society, institutions and policymakers appear to have largely embraced it.
One such institution is the African Development Bank (ADB). In the press conference, Oakland Institute executive director Anuradha Mittal accused the financial institution of currently using:
the food price crisis to expand the use of industrial inputs to the benefit of agrochemical and agribusiness firms
Dr Akinwumi A Adesina is the current head of the ADB. He used to work for AGRA funder the Rockefeller Foundation. He also worked for AGRA itself from 2008-2011, before becoming Nigeria’s agriculture minister.
In this atmosphere, civil society is struggling to be heard. AFSA’s Kirubel Tadele said that donors have answered AFSA’s call for defunding with silence. Meanwhile, Nnimmo Bassey, director of Nigeria’s Health of Mother Earth Foundation, told The Canary:
AGRA has studiously avoided responding to the calls from CSOs. They continue to push in with the failed system simply because they have deep pockets behind the endeavour. Efforts at direct communication with AGRA has proven to be like talking to persons who play deaf but have no knowledge of sign language.
‘Climate-stupid agriculture’
At its recent annual event, AGRA attempted to rebrand its initiative. The Seattle Times reported that it will drop any mention of a ‘green revolution’. From now on, only its acronym will remain. During the summit, AGRA president Agnes Kalibata, a former agriculture minister in Rwanda, insisted that the organisation has had some “huge successes”.
Its critics appear to disagree. The Oakland Institute’s Mittal said:
the new AGRA strategy unveiled at the forum shows that the institution is still centered on technological fixes and the promotion of agricultural inputs.
She added that AGRA’s promoters and supporters “continue to cater to the interests of agrochemical corporations”, while ignoring the civil society call for change “towards truly sustainable food production on the continent”.
In the age of climate breakdown, industrial giants are increasingly churning out what they call ‘climate-smart’ products, such as seeds that are resilient to drought. But continuing with the industrial model, which allows these giants to keep their stranglehold on the food system, isn’t climate-smart, it’s “climate-stupid agriculture”, Odongo said. And millions of African people want absolutely no part of it.
As Pakistan struggles to respond to catastrophic floods, calls are growing to demand the suspension of the country’s external debt repayments, reports Susan Price.
Bunge and Cargill, behind more than 30% of soy exports to EU and UK, accused of exposing suppliers to link with indigenous rights violations
Two of the world’s biggest grain traders are sourcing soy from a Brazilian farm linked to abuses of indigenous rights and land, a report from the environmental group Earthsight claims
Earthsight named the companies as Bunge and Cargill and said they sourced soy produced on a farm located on ancestral land of the Kaiowá indigenous group.
This story is part of the Grist seriesParched, an in-depth look at how climate change-fueled drought is reshaping communities, economies, and ecosystems.
The California water wars of the early twentieth century are summed up in a famous line from the 1974 film Chinatown: “Either you bring the water to L.A., or you bring L.A. to the water.” Nearly a hundred years have elapsed since the events the film dramatizes, but much of the West still approaches water the same way. If you don’t have enough of it, go find more.
As politicians across the West confront the consequences of the climate-fueled Millennium Drought, many of them are heeding the words of Chinatown and trying to bring in outside water through massive capital projects. There are at least half a dozen major water pipeline projects under consideration throughout the region, ranging from ambitious to outlandish. Arizona lawmakers want to build a pipeline from the Mississippi River more than a thousand miles away, a Colorado rancher wants to pipe water 300 miles across the Rockies, and Utah wants to pump even more water out of the already-depleted Lake Powell.
Proponents of these projects argue that they could stabilize western cities for decades to come, connecting populations with unclaimed water rights. Their detractors counter that, in an era of permanent aridification driven by climate change, the only sustainable solution is not to bring in more water, but to consume less of it. Either way, most of these projects stand little chance of becoming reality — they’re ideas from a bygone era, one that has more in common with the world of Chinatown than the parched west of the present.
The Central Arizona Project canal runs through rural desert near Phoenix. The canal diverts Colorado River water down a system of aqueducts, tunnels, pumping plants, and pipelines to the state of Arizona.
AP Photo / Ross D. Franklin
As western states grew over the twentieth century, the federal government helped them build several massive water diversion projects that would hydrate their growing urban populations: The Central Arizona Project aqueduct brought water from the Colorado River to Phoenix, for instance, and the Big Thompson system piped water across the Colorado Rockies to Denver. Each state along the Colorado River basin had the rights to a certain quantity of river water, divided among major users like farms and cities, and the projects were designed to help the states realize those abstract rights.
“States have [historically] been very successful in getting the federal government to pay for wasteful, unsustainable, large water projects,” said Denise Fort, a professor emerita at the University of New Mexico who has studied water infrastructure.
It’s easy to understand why politicians want to throw their weight behind similar present-day projects, Fort told Grist, but projects of this size just aren’t practical anymore. For one, there’s no longer enough unclaimed water to make most pipeline projects cost-effective. Additionally, building large infrastructure projects in general has become more difficult, in part thanks to reforms like the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires that detailed environmental impact statements be produced and evaluated for large new infrastructure projects.
These realities haven’t stopped the West’s would-be water barons from dreaming. The hypothetical Mississippi River pipeline, which gained new life last year amid devastating drought conditions, is a case in point. The basic idea is to take water from the Mississippi River, pump it a thousand miles west, and dump it into the overtaxed Colorado River, which provides water for millions of Arizona residents but has reached historically low levels as its reservoirs dry up. The Arizona state legislature allocated seed money toward a study of a thousand-mile pipeline that would do exactly this last year, and the state’s top water official says he’s spoken to officials in Kansas about participating in the project. Meanwhile, a rookie Democrat running for governor in California’s recall election last year proposed declaring a state of emergency in order to build a similar project.
Bathtub rings, seen here on June 8, 2022, show how low Lake Powell levels have dropped.
AP Photo / Brittany Peterson
The most obvious problem with this proposal is its mind-boggling cost. A federal report from a decade ago pegged an optimistic cost estimate for a similar pipeline at $14 billion and said the project would take 30 years to build; a Colorado rancher who championed the idea around the same time, meanwhile, estimated its costs at $23 billion. The actual costs to build such a pipeline today would likely be orders of magnitude higher, thanks to inflation and inevitable construction snags. Even at its cheapest, the project would cost about twice as much per acre-foot of water delivered than other solutions like water conservation and reuse.
Even if the sticker price weren’t so prohibitive, there are other obstacles. The project would have to secure dozens of state and federal permits and clear an enormous federal environmental review; moving the water would also require the construction of several hundred megawatts of power generation. Plus, the federal report found the water would be of much lower quality than other western water sources.
Even if the government could clear these hurdles, the odds that Midwestern states would just let their water go are slim. A multi-state compact already prohibits any sale of water from the Great Lakes unless all bordering states agree to it, and it’s almost certain that Mississippi River states would pass laws restricting water diversions, or file lawsuits against western states, if the project went forward.
“If this gets any traction at all, people in the flyover states of the Missouri River basin probably will scream,” one water official told the New York Times when the project first received attention. A man from Minnesota wrote to the Palm Springs Desert Sunearlier this month and expressed similar sentiments, warning, “If California comes for Midwest water, we have plenty of dynamite.”
Even smaller projects stand to be derailed by similar hiccups. Take for instance the so-called Water Horse pipeline, a pet project of a Colorado investor and entrepreneur named Aaron Million. Almost two decades ago, when Million was working on a master’s thesis, he happened upon a map that showed the Green River making a brief detour into Colorado on its way through Utah. It dawned on Million that Colorado had unclaimed rights to water from the Green, since the river was part of the Colorado River system, and he devised a plan to build a pipeline that would pump water around the Rockies to the city of Fort Collins, where he lives. He frames the pipeline as a complement to water-saving policies.
Entrepreneur Aaron Million, seen here in 2011, uses a map to illustrate how his proposed pipeline would run from Wyoming’s Flaming Gorge Reservoir to serve Colorado cities. Million has been pushing a $3 billion proposal to pump 250,000 acre-feet from the reservoir and Wyoming’s Green River to Colorado.
AP Photo / Ed Andrieski
“The state should do everything possible to push conservation, but that’s not going to cure the issue,” he told Grist. “Infrastructure is one of the few ways we’ll turn things around to assure that there’s some supply.”
In the 20 years since he first had the idea, Million has suffered a string of regulatory and legal defeats at the hands of state and federal agencies, becoming a kind of bogeyman for conservationists in the process. At one point, activists who opposed the project erected three large billboards warning about the high cost and potential consequences, such as the possibility that drawing down the Green River could harm the river’s fish populations. Nevertheless, Million hasn’t given up, and he’s currently working to secure permitting for the fourth iteration of the project.
This latest version would curve up through the Wyoming flatlands and back down to Fort Collins, a distance of around 340 miles. It would carry about 50,000 acre-feet of water per year, much less than the original pipeline plan but still twice Fort Collins’ current annual usage. Million told Grist that he’s secured partial funding for the project from multiple banks and the infrastructure company MasTec, but it remains unclear how much he would have to charge to make the project profitable. In any case, Utah rejected a permit for the project in 2020, saying it would jeopardize the state’s own water rights. Million sued, and he says he expects a ruling this year.
The list of projects that run on similarly magical thinking goes on: Utah wants to build a pipeline of its own from Lake Powell to the fast-growing city of St. George, but Lake Powell has almost no water left. Another businessman in New Mexico has pushed plans to pump river water 150 miles to the city of Santa Fe, but that water would have to be pumped uphill. California wants to build a $16 billion pipeline to draw water out of the Sacramento River Delta and down to the southern part of the state, but critics say the project would deprive Delta farmers of water and destroy local ecosystems.
Fort, the University of New Mexico professor, worries that the bigwigs who throw their energy behind large capital projects may be neglecting other, more practical options.
“The other alternatives have political costs, and they have costs that are maybe more likely to be borne locally,” including by farmers and other large water users, she said. “It’s much easier to [propose] a shining pipeline from the Mississippi River that will never be built than it is to grapple with this really unpleasant truth.”
Conservation alternatives are less palatable than big infrastructure projects, but they’re also more achievable. Arizona, for instance, has invested millions of dollars in wastewater recycling while other communities have paid to fix leaky pipes, making their water delivery systems more efficient. The elephant in the room, according to Fort, is agriculture, which accounts for more than 80 percent of water withdrawals from the Colorado River. If a portion of the farmers in the region were to change crops or fallow their fields, the freed-up water could sustain growing cities.
“There are no easy fixes to a West that has grown and has allocated all of its water — there’s no silver bullet,” she said. A water pipeline like Million’s would help, if he could wave a magic wand and build it, but Fort believes the present scramble over the Colorado River will likely make such projects impossible to realize.
Pipes extend into Lake Mead well above the high water mark near Boulder City, Nevada.
AP Photo / Julie Jacobson
Million himself, though, is confident that his pipeline will get built, and that it will ensure Fort Collins’ future.
“We’re not looking for the last dollar out of this project,” he told me. “We’re doing everything we can to minimize impacts, maximize benefits, and this project has a lot of benevolence associated with it.” In his vision of the West’s future, urban growth will necessitate more big infrastructure projects like his.
Still, he admits the road hasn’t always been easy, and that victory is far from guaranteed. “I’ve cowboyed enough in my life to know that you just got to stick to the trail,” he said. “We’ve had a few blizzards along the way, and some gun battles, but it is what it is.”
Prior to the Industrial Revolution, most humans were engaged in agriculture. Our relationship with nature was immediate. Within just a few generations, however, for many people across the world, their link with the land has been severed.
Food now arrives pre-packaged (often precooked), preserved with chemicals and contains harmful pesticides, micro-plastics, hormones and/or various other contaminants. We are also being served a narrower menu of high-calorie food with lower nutrient content.
It is clear that there is something fundamentally wrong with how modern food is produced.
Although, there are various stages between farm and fork, not least modern food processing practices, which is a story in itself, a key part of the problem lies with agriculture.
Today, many farmers are trapped on chemical and biotech treadmills. They have been encouraged and coerced into using a range of costly off-farm inputs, from synthetic fertilisers and corporate-manufactured seeds to a wide array of weedicides and pesticides.
With the industrialisation of agriculture, many poor, smallholder farmers have been deskilled and placed into vulnerable positions. Traditional knowledge has been undermined, overwhelmed or has survived only in fragments.
Writing in the Journal of South Asian Studies in 2017, Marika Vicziany and Jagjit Plahein state that farmers have for millennia taken measures to manage drought, grow cereals with long stalks that can be used as fodder, engage in cropping practices that promote biodiversity, ethno-engineer soil and water conservation and make use of collective sharing systems.
Farmers knew their micro-environment, so they could plant crops that mature at different times, thereby facilitating more rapid crop rotation without exhausting the soil.
Experimentation and innovation were key. Two terms modern agritech/agribusiness corporations lay claim to, but something farmers have been doing for generations.
Many farmers also used ‘insect equilibrium’ and their knowledge of which insects kill crop-predator pests. Food and policy analyst Devinder Sharma says he has met women in India who can identify 110 non-vegetarian and 60 vegetarian insects.
Complex, highly beneficial traditional knowledge systems and on-farm ecological practices are being eroded as farmers lose control over their productive means and become dependent on proprietary products, including commodified corporate knowledge.
Farmers in places like the Netherlands are now being blamed for harming the environment due to carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide emissions. Although Dutch farmers are taking flak, what we are also seeing is an attack on large feed and meat producers. There are not many small farms left in the Netherlands and most animal farms are concentrated feeding operations.
The Netherlands’ farming sector is highly livestock intensive and there seems to be a policy to reduce the size of the meat industry in that country. Farmers have been told to get out of farming or shift to growing crops.
Instead of the authorities facilitating a gradual shift towards organic, agroecological agriculture and attract a new generation to the sector, farmers are in danger of being displaced.
But Dutch farmers are not the only ones in the firing line. Farmers in other European nations are also protesting because various policies make it increasingly difficult for them to make a living.
There seems to be a concerted effort to make farming financially non-viable for many farmers and remove them from their land. The farmer protests in Europe follow in the wake of massive resistance by Indian farmers against corporate-backed legislation that would have seen an accelerated drive to push many already financially distressed farmers out of farming.
Farmer Bill
The biggest owner of private farmland in the US – Bill Gates – has a vision for farming: a chemical-dependent, corporate-dependent, one-world agriculture (Ag One initiative) to facilitate the global supply chains of conglomerates. This initiative is side-lining indigenous knowledge and practices in favour of corporate knowledge and a further colonisation of global agriculture.
Gates’s corporatisation of smallholder agriculture is packaged in philanthropic terms – ‘helping’ farmers in places like Africa and India. It has not worked out well so far if we turn to the Gates-backed Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), established in 2006.
The first major evaluation of AGRA’s efforts to expand high-input agriculture in Africa found that – after 15 years – it had failed. With concerns being voiced over the use of hazardous pesticides, less than impressive yields, the privatisation of seeds, corporate dependency and farmer indebtedness, among other things, we can expect more of the same under the Ag One initiative.
But the ultimate high-tech vision for farming is farmerless farms largely overseen by driverless vehicles and AI-driven sensors and drones linked to cloud-based infrastructure. The likes of Microsoft will harvest field data on seeds, soil quality, historical crop yields, water management, weather patterns, land ownership, agronomic practices and the like.
Tech giants will control multi-billion-dollar data management markets that facilitate the needs of institutional land investors, agribusiness and monopolistic e-commerce platforms. Under the guise of ‘data-driven agriculture’, private corporations will be better placed to exploit farmers’ situations for their own ends.
With lab-based synthetic meat being promoted and attracting huge interest from investors, Gates and the agritech sector also envisage a largely ‘climate-friendly’ animal-free agriculture, which they claim will result in freeing up vast tracts of farmland (we can only speculate for what).
It remains to be seen just how energy-efficient, environment-friendly and health-friendly synthetic meat labs are once scaled up to industrial levels.
At the same time, industrial agriculture will use new technologies – minus farmers – and will still rely on and boost the use of fossil-fuel-dependent agrochemicals (with all the associated health and environmental problems) and remain focused on long-line supply chains, unnecessarily shipping food around the world.
A high-energy system reliant on the oil and gas that has fuelled the colonisation of the food system (‘globalisation’) by agribusiness conglomerates. Moreover, the new human-less on-farm technologies will be energy-intensive to run and will rely on environment-destroying extraction for finite resources like lithium, cobalt and other rare-earth elements to produce.
Low-energy agroecological approaches based on the principles and practices of localisation, local markets, authentic regenerative agriculture and proper soil management (which ensures effective and ecologically sound nitrogen and carbon storage) are key to ensuring genuine long-term sustainability in food production.
Many who belong to the agribusiness lobby have been drawing attention to Sri Lanka in an attempt to show organic farming can only lead to disaster. A transition to organics has to be gradual, not least because regenerating soil cannot occur overnight. Regardless, the article ‘Sri Lanka Faces Food Crisis – No, It’s Not Due to Organic Farming’ that recently appeared on The Quint website reveals why that country really headed into crisis.
Great refusal
The neoliberal programme that took root in the 1980s has now reached a debt-bloated, inflationary impasse. In response, capitalism has embarked on a ‘great reset’ with transformative technology very much to the fore in the guise of a ‘4th Industrial Revolution’, promising a brave new tomorrow for all.
However, there are deep-seated concerns about how this technology could be used to monitor and control entire populations, especially as we are witnessing a brutal economic restructuring and increasing clampdowns on personal liberties. If neoliberalism promoted individualism, the ‘new normal’ demands strict compliance – individual freedom is said to pose a threat to ‘national security’, ‘public health’ or ‘safety’.
There is also concern about economic collapse, war and the exposure of a food system to energy price shocks, supply chain breakdowns and commodity market speculation.
In Mali in 2015, Nyeleni – the international movement for food sovereignty – released The Declaration of the International Forum for Agroecology.
“Essential natural resources have been commodified, and rising production costs are driving us off the land. Farmers’ seeds are being stolen and sold back to us at exorbitant prices, bred as varieties that depend on costly, contaminating agrochemicals.”
It added:
“Agroecology is political; it requires us to challenge and transform structures of power in society. We need to put the control of seeds, biodiversity, land and territories, waters, knowledge, culture and the commons in the hands of the peoples who feed the world.”
The Declaration made it clear that the prevailing capitalist food system had to be challenged and overcome.
In analysing the potential for challenging the capitalist order, Herbert Marcuse stated the following in his famous 1964 book ‘One-Dimensional Man’:
“A comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilization, a token of technical progress.”
Today, we might say – an uncomfortable, unsmooth, unreasonable, undemocratic unfreedom prevails, a token of an emerging techno-dystopia.
Marcuse felt post-war mass culture had made people repressed and uncritical. They were a reflection of a one-dimensional system based on the consumption of commodities and the effects of modern culture and technology that served to dampen dissent.
The controlling nature of technology pervades all aspects of life today. But whether it involves farmers protests in Europe and India, the advancement of a political agroecology, truckers taking to the streets in Canada or ordinary people protesting against a rapidly advancing authoritarianism in Western societies, many people across the world know something is seriously amiss.
To borrow from Marcuse, we are seeing a ‘great refusal’ – people saying ‘no’ to multiple forms of repression and domination – tentacles of an economic system in crisis.
Vicious heat waves are sweeping parts of the globe this week, along with the dangers that come with blazing-hot temperatures: wildfires, dehydration, and even death. The hot weather could also push prices up for food, making inflation even worse.
Western Europe is facing sweltering temperatures again this week, with the thermostat hovering around 110 degrees in Seville in southern Spain. More than 20 wildfires are burning in Spain and Portugal, and persistent drought has left rivers and reservoirs running so low that they’re exposing ancient artifacts.
In Italy, the hot and dry conditions are expected to destroy a third of the seasonal harvest of rice, corn, and animal fodder — at a minimum. Locusts have descended on the island of Sardinia in the worst invasion in three decades, hurting the production of hay and alfalfa. The European Commission recently downgraded its soft-wheat harvest estimates from 130 million tons to 125 million tons — more bad news amid a food shortage precipitated by Russia’s blockade on exports from Ukraine. (Russia and Ukraine are among the world’s biggest exporters of grain.)
Across the world in China, a record-breaking heat wave is causing major problems. Roofs are melting, residents are relocating to public cooling zones in underground air-raid shelters, and health workers are strapping frozen food to their too-hot hazmat suits. The Central Meteorological Observatory in Tokyo has warned that the heat could further hurt the production of corn and soy, worsening inflation. These crops are used to feed pigs, and early-season failures have already sent the price of pork, China’s staple meat, soaring.
When major crops wither, it can have knock-on effects across the ocean and show up on your grocery bill. Inflation has been climbing in the United States at the highest rate in 40 years, up 9.1 percent over the past 12 months, much of it the result of spiking food and energy prices. The surge has been egged on by the pandemic-beleaguered supply chain and by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But climate change is becoming a driver of inflation, too. Experts are warning that heat, flooding, drought, wildfires, and other disasters have been wreaking economic havoc, with worse to come.
“If we wish to control inflation, we must address climate change now,” David A. Super, a professor of law and economics at Georgetown, recently argued in The Hill. Beyond crops, the changing climate has driven up the price of lumber as well as insurance premiums.
“Heatflation” might already have something to do with escalating food costs around the world. A heat wave in India this spring devastated wheat plants, leading it to ban exports. In the United States last year, searing heat and drought in the Great Plains scorched the wheat crop and also enabled wheat-munching grasshopper populations to flourish. The grain’s price nearly doubled to $10.17 a bushel, its highest level since 2008. Extreme temperatures endanger livestock, too: The heat wave that struck much of the country last month caused thousands of cattle to die of heat stress in Kansas.
“We all know our grocery bills are going up,” Bob Keefe, the author of the book Climatenomics, told me last month. “Part of the reason is that when you lose crops to storms or drought or flooding, prices are going to go up.”
In a report last year, researchers at the European Central Bank examined the evidence that abnormal temperatures can drive inflation. Looking at seasonal temperatures and price indicators in 48 countries, they found that hot summers had “by far the largest and longest-lasting impact” on food prices. The effect lasted almost a year and was especially noticeable in developing countries. “We find that higher temperatures over recent decades have played a non-negligible role in driving price developments,” the authors concluded.
While climate action and economic concerns are often pitted against one another, the evidence is piling up that in many cases, they are one and the same.
The NSW Government’s $48 million program to improve the uptake of AgTech is open for applications from companies tech companies focused on agriculture that want to become panel suppliers. Beginning in 2023, a grants program for farmers in one of five target regions in rural and regional NSW will commence, aiming to improve connectivity and…
On August 2, 2014, the residents of Toledo, Ohio, a port city on the shores of Lake Erie, woke up without clean water. Testing had detected elevated levels of microcystin — a potent liver toxin and possible human carcinogen — in the city’s drinking water supply, and for three days, residents were told not to drink, bathe in, or even touch their tap water. The toxins were traced to a harmful algal bloom, or HAB, a potent green sludge made up of microscopic algae and bacteria that had sprouted in the shallow waters of the lake.
Alicia Smith remembers that day. Nearly half a million people lost access to drinking water, and 110 got sick, experiencing headaches, chest tightness, muscle weakness, and nausea. Smith is the director of the Junction Coalition, a community organization in Toledo that works on promoting environmental justice and economic empowerment for the city’s low-income residents, many of them communities of color. Every August since then, she said, her neighbors worry about whether they’ll lose access to water again as fresh blooms occur.
Beyond the health risks, Toledo residents are paying the price for this ever-present — and growing — threat. According to a report released in May by the nonprofit Alliance for the Great Lakes, the city of Toledo spends, on average, $18.76 per person annually on HAB-related monitoring and treatment, which adds up to nearly $100 for a family of five per year. That cost, generated from data from the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency, is passed on to ratepayers, making water bills even less affordable for many residents, Smith said.
Aretha Howard carries a case of bottled water to her car in Toledo, Ohio during the water crisis in August 2014.
Paul Sancya/Associated Press
“We as the consumer have the burden of paying for a lack of regulation, mandates, and policies on water contamination,” she told Grist.
The report is one of the first to examine the cost of harmful algal blooms, a yearly problem that’s gotten worse in the last few decades. In the 1960s, before the Clean Water Act set limits on the discharge of pollutants from so-called “point” sources, like wastewater treatment plants, into the Great Lakes, the main cause of algal blooms was untreated sewage — a toxic stew for beach-goers, but a nitrogen-rich snack for algae. Now, though, the main food source for HABs is agricultural runoff — both excess fertilizer and animal waste, which contain phosphorus and nitrogen that flow from “nonpoint” sources like farm fields and are therefore not regulated by the federal Environmental Protection Agency.
This runoff, combined with discharges from combined sewer overflows and warming waters in the shallower parts of the Great Lakes, creates a perfect environment for HABs. Since 2012, the city of Toledo’s public drinking water system has regularly tested the waters of Lake Erie for microcystin. It also monitors the levels of cyanobacteria, which produce microcystin and are a key component of algal blooms, on an hourly basis. But even if an algal bloom isn’t toxic, treating the water and disposing of the waste that’s created still adds an additional cost. These burdens are then passed down to ratepayers, in a region where the rising cost of water has already left thousands of families in debt or facing shutoffs.
“The agribusiness system has relied on the ability to externalize these costs to downstream communities,” said Tom Zimnicki, the Agricultural & Restoration Policy Director for the Alliance for the Great Lakes. “And that clearly is not an equitable system.”
These costs are likely to grow, Zimnicki added, as climate change supercharges the spread of HABs. Severe storms in the Midwest are becoming more frequent and intense; the amount of precipitation falling in the heaviest storms has increased by 35 percent since 1951, according to the University of Michigan. All that precipitation washes more soil — and with it, fertilizer — from agricultural areas into the region’s waterways. In 2020, more than 9,000 metric tons of phosphorus flowed into Lake Erie. And as the climate changes, average temperatures around the Great Lakes are also getting warmer, creating optimal conditions for HABs to develop. Average summer temperatures in Lake Erie’s waters have increased by 1 degree Fahrenheit since 1980.
Water drawn from Lake Erie, where the city of Toledo sources its drinking water, contained a thick soup of algae and cyanobacteria during the water crisis in 2014.
Haraz N. Ghanbari/Associated Press
The issue is also not limited to the Great Lakes Region. In June, the U.S. Government Accountability Office released a report urging federal agencies to do more to address algal blooms, which are occurring in all 50 states in all types of water — fresh, saline, and brackish. The report indicated that different kinds of algal blooms, from “red tides” in Florida to cyanobacteria in Oregon, are burdening communities that rely on waterways for economic activities like tourism and fishing, as well as threatening their health and drinking supplies.
Zimnicki noted that the data for the Alliance for the Great Lakes report was collected in 2020, a relatively mild year for HABs, so the true costs for water treatment and waste disposal are likely higher than what is noted in the report. The organization is advocating for states and municipalities to collect this data more regularly, he said, to be able to compare costs from year to year and see whether they change over time.
This year, thanks to fairly average rainfall in the spring and early summer, scientists don’t expect to see a particularly large algal bloom in western Lake Erie, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s annual forecast for HABs. Conditions will likely be similar to 2018, when most of the lake remained clear but areas around Toledo and nearby Sandusky, Ohio, experienced persistent blooms throughout the summer. A medium-density bloom had already formed in the area as of July 10, according to NOAA, but forecasts can’t predict how toxic blooms will be, and covering a smaller area could actually make them more concentrated.
Researchers on a call announcing the forecast also warned that the long-term trends are still worrying; the volume of water flowing into Lake Erie from the Maumee River has been above average for 12 of the last 14 years, while the amount of phosphorus entering the lake remains high, despite efforts to reduce it. An agreement signed between the United States and Canada in 2016 aimed to cut the springtime discharge of phosphorus into Lake Erie’s tributaries to 6,000 metric tons per year – but every year since has exceeded that amount.
Satellite photos of Lake Erie can detect particularly strong algal blooms, such as this one in 2011.
European Space Agency
Meeting that goal will require reducing fertilizer application as well as increasing the amount of water retained by the land and decreasing soil erosion, Santina Wortman, a physical scientist for the EPA’s Great Lakes office, told reporters on the call in early July. Federal funding for the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative as well as state programs like H2Ohio, which incentivizes farmers to create “nutrient management plans” that use less fertilizer, are steps in the right direction, but these solutions will have to be applied on a large scale in order to be effective, she said.
Silvia Secchi, a natural resource economist at the University of Iowa, however, says the problem runs deeper. The programs implemented so far are mainly voluntary measures, and don’t address the nutrient runoff produced by industrial agricultural operations like large animal feedlots, which generate tons of manure that gets spread on nearby fields as fertilizer. These businesses, Secchi said, have no incentive to change as demand for their products — like cheap pork and beef — keeps rising. The situation was like trying to empty an “ever-growing bucket with a little spoon,” Secchi said.
Smith also wants to see legally binding limits on nutrient pollution, as well as greater investment in green infrastructure to reduce runoff into the Great Lakes. But she emphasized that solutions have to place low-income residents and community members, who face the greatest burden from the cost of dealing with HABs, at the forefront. Aside from laws preventing utilities from shutting off water if customers are unable to pay, she said funding will be needed to distribute water filters, educate people about the harmful effects of HABs, and make water affordable for all residents.
“As the Great Lakes, we live right in the midst of the freshwater,” Smith said. “If you know that water is important, if you know that water is life, then you will preserve just that.”
Georgia state Sen. Kim Jackson has pretty much given up on the idea that Black Georgians might some day receive reparations for past injustices.
“In Georgia, the concept of reparations is a politically dead issue. It will not move,” saidJackson, a Black woman who comes from a farming family and sits on the Senate Agriculture and Consumer Affairs Committee.
But leap across the country to California, aleaderin this regard. The state launched a Reparations Task Force last year, and is compensating survivors of state-sponsored sterilization. While California is looking comprehensively, advocates in Republican-controlled states like Georgia are hoping for a narrower victory focused on farmers.
While Jackson supports reparations on a philosophical level, she’s aware of the political realities in her state. “So we have to take the steps that we can take, which is bringing farmers to parity,” she said.
Reparations are an old argument, fought mostly on the national stage. In recent years, however, state and local governments have gotten around the sticky point of who would get money by focusing on descendants of specific latter-day policies, rather than the much broader set of injustices Black Americans have faced since before the nation’s founding.
Some argue that a $4 billionprovision to cancel the debts of farmers of colorin the American Rescue Plan Act Congress passed last year is simply reparations by another name. It’sstalled in the courtsover a basic argument over whether and how to compensate people for past injustices.
Loans are essential to farming, a capital-intensive environment that requires expensive equipment and healthy access to credit. In the agriculture community, crushing debt is a contemporary legacy — like discriminatory lending for housing, forced sterilization, and gentrification caused by freeway construction — for which many advocates say Black farmers should be compensated.
“If we want to have future generations of Black farmers, then forgiving this debt helps to open up a pathway for new generations of farmers to pick up where their parents or grandparents left off because they won’t be inheriting massive amounts of debt,” Jackson said.
Modern legislation addressing the idea of reparations has been stalled in Congress for decades.H.R. 40is named after the post-emancipation promise of 40 acres and a mule for the formerly enslaved made by Gen. Tecumseh Sherman as he was marching through Georgia. The program was immediately revoked by President Andrew Johnson, who succeeded Abraham Lincoln after he was assassinated. The bill, first introduced in 1989 by the late U.S. Rep John Conyers of Michigan, would commission a study on the effects of slavery and racial discrimination and develop reparations proposals for African Americans. For the first time last year, it was approved by the House Judiciary Committee, but it has yet to reach the floor for a vote.
Jackson knows that the chances of adopting any kind of compensation to Black farmers using state funds are slim as long as Georgia is ruled by a Republican state legislature and governor. Republicans in Georgia and nationally have expressed fierce opposition to policies that seek to correct the consequences of past discrimination. U.S. Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has said he opposes reparations for slavery since “none of us currently living are responsible.”
But not so in California, which is controlled by Democrats and where non-Hispanic white residents make up a minority of the state population. An interim report by the state’s Reparations Task Force calls for implementing a “comprehensive reparations scheme,” including policies to “compensate for the harms caused by the legacy of anti-Black discrimination.”
Preliminary recommendationsinclude compensating individuals forcibly removed from their homes for park or highway construction, families who were denied inheritances because of anti-miscegenation laws or precedents; and those whose mental and physical health has been permanently damaged by health care system policies and treatment.
In December, the statedescribed how it will divide$4.5 million among survivors of state-sponsored sterilization programs involving eugenics and forced-sterilization of women in state penal institutions, tying the funds to specific individuals who were hurt by the state.
Evanston, Illinois, is another standout. It received considerable national attention last year when it agreed to payreparations to people affected by discrimination in lending, zoning laws and practicesbetween 1916 and 1969. Residents or descendants of those who were discriminated against are eligible for up to $25,000 in grants to purchase a home, upgrade their home or assist with their mortgage. The effort is funded by city tax from the sale of recreational cannabis.
“There is precedent,” Robin Rue Simmons said in a panel last month moderated by the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank focused on public policy. Simmons isfounder and executive director of FirstRepair, a not-for-profit that advocates for local reparations nationally, and a former fifth ward alderman for the city of Evanston. “Most examples of radical policy change start with the local initiative and there is no difference here with what we’re seeing with the local reparations movement.”
Nashville is considering how reparations can help to ameliorate harm from construction on parts of Interstate Highway I-40 that in the late 1960swiped out a once thriving Black communitythat included four historically Black colleges and universities and successful small businesses.
Similar efforts are being studied in Asheville, North Carolina; Greenbelt, Maryland, a suburb of the nation’s capital; and Detroit.
A number of states are taking a closer look at racial equity in agriculture specifically, and attempting to reform existing systems.
Since the 2020 uprisings for racial justice, at least five states have introduced bills to stem Black land loss, but proposals in all but Illinois have died in committee. In Vermont, a proposal that included creating a Land Access and Opportunity Board was approved in a separate bill.
A bill in Georgia would have created an office within the Georgia Department of Agriculture to encourage the growth of Black farmers and bring “oversight and accountability.”
“I’m not trying to go back and undo all the unfairness you have already done. We know that. I’m trying to take the system that has been broken for so long and make it better because it’s the right thing to do. It doesn’t separate the fact that you took from us. What it says to me is it’s about time we were all included in improving the quality of life for all Georgians.”
Lloyd Arthur can run his hand through the soil at his cotton farm and know what kind of year he’s going to have. His dry, cracked field is making him think this could be a repeat of one of the state’s worst years.
“We can’t outfox what Mother Nature sends us,” said Arthur, whose farm is about 30 miles outside of Lubbock. “2022 has been one for the record books. We’ve always compared years to 2011, as far as droughts and whatnot, but 2022 is worse. We don’t have any underground moisture.”
According to the United States Drought Monitor, more than 80 percent of Texas has been facing drought conditions most of the year, and some areas for much longer. Prolonged drought can lead to crop loss, heat stress, and limited feed availability for livestock, as well as increased risk of wildfires.
An irrigation system on a farm field near the High Plains town of Ralls, about 30 miles east of Lubbock, on June 22, 2022.
Trace Thomas for The Texas Tribune
The drought has been affecting West Texas since last August. There has been some rainfall in recent weeks, but not enough. After receiving about three inches of rain in May, Ralls saw less than an inch in May, a big difference from the two inches of rain the area receives on average in June.
“Planting time came and we got a few rains, but they were short-lived rain events,” Arthur said. “It kind of gave us a little false hope. We were so dry, with no moisture underneath, that a lot of the rain did run off.”
Arthur said there is still a chance for a decent crop this year — there are areas of his farm where crops are standing, including a little area on his dryland patch. He uses an app to monitor where he should focus his irrigation, but he is still wary of investing in a crop that may not make it past the summer.
“At this point, we’re at triple digits, 20-miles-per-hour winds with humidity — there’s no way this crop can sustain this much longer,” Arthur said. “All of my irrigated [crop], in the heat the last few days that we’ve had, is stressed. We do have some places that look good, but only Mother Nature and time will tell what’s going to happen with that.”
New data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shows there is a reason for Texans to be concerned about the weather this year: May of this year tied for the warmest May on record in the state, along with May 2018.
The early heat was followed by more drought, which has led officials to say this year could be as bad as, if not worse than, the historic 2011 drought — the driest year on record for Texas that caused billions of dollars in losses. According to Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service, the total cost of crop and livestock losses was estimated at $7.62 billion. This was due to low crop yields, increased use of water irrigation systems, and loss of pastures.
“It’s a valid fear right now,” said Victor Murphy, climate service program manager for NOAA. “I’ve been holding off saying that for a while, because parts of the state had good rainfall in May. But seeing June be as dry as it’s been, we’re actually running ahead of 2011 right now.”
The drought is widespread in West Texas. According to Murphy, Midland had its driest period on record from September 2021 to May 31, when it received only 8 percent of its normal rainfall. The second-driest was in 2011.
In the same time period, Lubbock has experienced its seventh-driest time on record overall, but the driest since 2011. Lubbock also had six days reach 100 degrees Fahrenheit or higher from March through May — tying for the third-highest number of 100-degree F days in those months in Lubbock’s records, going back to 1914.
Murphy said when dry conditions combine with heat, it creates a feedback cycle that can be hard to get out of. The cycle can evaporate precipitation before it can reach the soil, causing a critical impact on agriculture. Murphy said dryland crops would not be able to survive and would need irrigation.
“If you go long enough without any rainfall, the ground becomes bone dry,” Murphy said. “So whatever heat comes down, it just radiates back up. I think the state of Texas as a whole right now is very susceptible to that, and that’s what happened in 2011 too.”
The feedback cycle is part of why the soil at Arthur’s farm in Ralls couldn’t retain the rainfall. There was enough rain to get this year’s cotton crop started, including some of his dryland crop which is not irrigated and dependent on rainfall. However, he’s not sure if it can make it through a dry summer, with high temperatures causing water loss, even with irrigation.
“We lose a lot of valuable irrigation water to evaporation here in a normal year,” Arthur explained. “With this dry heat and low humidity, we’ll lose even more than that. So that’s where I’m going to be cautious and go by a field-by-field basis.”
A farm irrigation system on a High Plains farm near Ralls, a small town in Crosby County about 30 miles east of Lubbock.
Trace Thomas for The Texas Tribune
The harsh weather conditions could cause major hiccups for the region’s highest cash crop. According to Plains Cotton Growers, the Texas High Plains area produces about 66 percent of the state’s cotton and cottonseed, and about 30 percent for the U.S.
Arthur said he and many other producers in the region depended on crop insurance after the 2011 drought. Crop insurance covers crop losses caused by natural events, including drought and destructive weather. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, more than $1.65 billion covered the losses in 2011, with much of that being distributed in West Texas.
Even with the insurance, it took a long time to recover from 2011. Arthur is worried it could be the same way this year, especially as inputs like fertilizer, water pumping and seed are higher from inflation.
“We had to rely on crop insurance, but 2012 and 2013 were not much better, we didn’t really start having a normal rainfall until the 2014 crop,” Arthur explained. “But now, we started off the year with no moisture, and our expenses are way larger. Some of our inputs have doubled and even tripled, so there’s going to be a larger expense for irrigation with those fuel costs and because we’re facing inflation. So people will be evaluating the cost.”
In the Panhandle, producers are already weighing their options when it comes to replanting lost acres. According to NOAA, the Amarillo area was on track to have its third-driest year on record until it had rainfall in early June. However, the rainfall was too intense for budding crops.
“Many of the recent rainfall events brought hail, so we have tens of thousands of acres that have been hailed out. It’s almost a Catch-22,” said Jourdan Bell, an agronomist for Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Center at Amarillo. “Then unfortunately, depending on where producers were, many of these areas received a sprinkle of rain and heavy winds, so we’ve had a lot of wind injury and fields that are blown out.”
Bell said many areas of the Panhandle were receiving two inches of rain in 30 minutes, but because of how dry the land already was, they experienced water runoff. On top of that, she said, only the topsoil retained moisture, so the soil below is still dry.
“If we don’t have the soil moisture, and we don’t have the rainfall, we’re not going to make it through the season,” Bell said. “Even with irrigation, just because we apply an inch doesn’t mean that is automatically available for the crop. We have to meet the plant demands plus the environment’s demands.”
State climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon said the longer the drought goes on, the more water resources will be affected.
”As we enter the heat of the summer, there will be greater water demand, both in agriculture and urban use,” he explained. “That can cause greater groundwater depletion and create issues as wells start running dry.”
A runner in Hodges Park in Lubbock, which saw six days reach 100 degrees or higher from March through May in 2022.
Trace Thomas for The Texas Tribune
Data from the Texas Water Development Board shows that the state’s reservoirs are about 77 percent full. However, most of the fuller reservoirs are closer to Central and far East Texas. Aside from Lake Alan Henry in Lubbock County, reservoir levels in West Texas range from one percent to 32 percent full.
“It takes a prolonged period of wet weather to start producing significant runoff to begin replenishing reservoirs, or alternatively a flood can do it,” Nielsen-Gammon said. “It’s actually a saying here in Texas, that droughts end with floods.”
The Texas Tribune is a nonpartisan, nonprofit media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them – about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.
The first time Chris Smith tried to grow taro on his experimental farm in western North Carolina, the plants were too eager. He’d started them in a heated greenhouse one February day a few years ago, thinking the tropical crop would need plenty of time to establish. Within a month, the taro had sprung up a foot and a half. Their heart-shaped leaves crowded the small greenhouse, but it was too early to transplant them into the still-cold ground. “That was a fail,” said Smith, the founder of the nonprofit Utopian Seed Project.
In the tropics, the starchy, lavender-hued root vegetable is grown year-round. But even North Carolina’s relatively mild winters aren’t taro-friendly. Smith and his team have kept tinkering with taro, as part of their wider effort to diversify farming — work that would not only make the food system more resilient to climate change, they thought, but also more delicious. Now, they start the seedlings in mid-April, or directly sow offshoots of the mother plant into the ground, deep enough to withstand any late frosts.
A taro seedling before planting. Courtesy of the Utopian Seed Project
As temperatures rise and rainfall grows erratic, planting different crops is one way farmers can adapt to climate change. Rising heat in Michigan, for instance, has prompted a boom in vineyards and widened the range of grape varieties that can be grown there, leading some to speculate that the Midwestern state could be the next wine hub. In Kansas, as rainfall declines, cotton is flourishing in fields once dedicated to wheat and corn. And in the Southeastern U.S., tropical crops like taro look particularly attractive. But that does little good for farmers if their customers don’t know how to eat it. In his mission to introduce taro to the Southeast, Smith is working with farmers, customers, and chefs alike — making an effort to cultivate taro and create a market for it.
In many countries, taro is a staple, and it’s among the world’s oldest cultivated plants. First grown in southeast Asia, taro made its way across the Pacific around 1,500 years ago in the canoes of Polynesian voyagers who traveled the open ocean before making new lives in Tahiti and Hawaii. (While climate change may give the crop a leg-up in the southern U.S., rising temperatures and severe storms are threatening taro in Hawaii, where it’s part of the native Hawaiian creation story.) Root to leaf, the entire plant is edible, though it needs to be cooked first, since taro contains high amounts of oxalic acid, which is usually linked to kidney stones. It can withstand stretches of days without rain because its hairy corms, or potato-like roots, store water. And its broad, sturdy leaves can stand up to heavy rain.
Taro plant leaves face the sun. Courtesy of the Utopian Seed Project
The quest to grow taro in the South reflects a broader theme in efforts to protect agriculture from the hazards of climate change: diversification. “If I put all my eggs in one basket, say all I grow is watermelon, and I get hit with a pretty nasty disease, I lose everything that year,” said David Suchoff, an alternative crops specialist at North Carolina State University who studies plants like hemp and sesame. Or, one year may be dry, another too wet. “We need to be able to weather that better,” Suchoff said. Some plants endure heat or dry spells better than most, while others may be immune to emerging fungi and bacteria. Diversity — meaning both different kinds of crops and different varieties among a particular crop — offers natural protection from pests, disease, and extreme weather.
The global food system is anything but diversified: It’s propped up by three crops — rice, wheat, and corn — that supply half the world’s calories. One NASA study found that in the next ten years, climate change could cut into the yields of wheat and corn by as much as 17 and 24 percent, respectively. Experts say diversifying the food system will help it recover faster when inevitable disruptions come.
Taro roots are sorted into labeled trays. Courtesy of the Utopian Seed Project
That led Smith and his Utopian Seed Project to experiment with tropical crops: bambara, achira, cassava, taro. Most of those plants grow in the tropics year-round, but in North Carolina, the farmers had to figure out how to save the plant material over the winter until it could be re-planted the following spring. It’s the same puzzle farmers solved for now-ubiquitous tomatoes and sweet potatoes, which also originated in the tropics. Taro soon distinguished itself as a high-performer. Taro was easy to grow. It could also be grown organically, and without extra heating or lighting.
Just as important, taro is tasty. Even more versatile than a potato, taro can be steamed, fried, boiled, and braised into sweet and savory dishes alike. Asian-American and Black chefs in Asheville were eager for a local supply. “It’s not like everything we’re doing is about preparing for catastrophe,” said Smith, who pointed to a broad nutritional base and wide representation of cuisines as benefits of a diversified food system.
This summer, with the help of a U.S. Department of Agriculture grant, the Utopian Seed Project scaled up their research trials. Partnering with two farms in the Southeast, they’ll study several varieties, including Korean, Filipino, and Hawaiian taro. The farmers will track costs, yields, and sales, providing a mountain of economic data. At the nonprofit’s farm, different plots will undergo various treatments to compare planting time, planting methods, watering methods, and harvesting techniques.
Three varieties of taro plants
Courtesy of Yanna Fishman
One of their partners is Michael Carter Jr., who runs Carter Farms in the Piedmont region of Virginia, which has been in his family since 1910. Carter had spent several years living in West Africa, where he couldn’t get enough of kontomire, a spicy stew with taro leaves and ground melon seeds, called egusi. When he returned to the U.S., he started experimenting with taro and found it easy to grow. After his first harvests, he dropped some greens off to a couple of stores catering to African immigrants in northern Virginia, and they were snatched up within minutes. “I can’t grow nearly enough to meet the demand,” Carter said.
Carter felt happy to provide beloved, but hard-to-find produce for people. He knew what it was like to crave certain veggies when far from home; when he lived in West Africa, much as he loved the kontomire, he still hankered for broccoli every now and then. And the taro could benefit people who hadn’t grown up eating it, too. Carter, who focuses on traditional African crops, believes diversifying food production can help African Americans connect with what he calls “culturally appropriate foods.” Although some consider collards as synonymous with African American cooking, they had their start in the eastern Mediterranean, and were brought to North America by Europeans in the 1600s. “You won’t buy collards in West Africa, but you will find taro leaves,” Carter said. “This is the right path back home.”
Before food producers adopt something new, they need to know there’s a market for it. Chefs and stores, on the other hand, want to know they can get a steady supply before they take on a new ingredient or product. Suchoff said a system-based approach is key. “The challenge is, if there’s no market for a crop, it doesn’t matter how drought-tolerant it is or how heat-tolerant it is,” he said. “If the farmer can’t sell it, it’s not really of much use.”
A San Francisco pastry chef slices taro to make a paste. Taro root can be prepared as part of both savory and sweet dishes. Liz Hafalia / The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images
In his taro crusade, Smith works both sides of the equation, offering farmers information from field tests and giving chefs samples from the harvest. To drum up diners’ enthusiasm, the Utopian Seed Project recently held a tasting event with chefs in the area. Cleophus Hethington, previously the head chef of the Asheville restaurant Benne on Eagle, used taro greens to make epis, a Haitian base for stews and sauces. He blended the root into rice-like flecks before stewing it in coconut milk to make creamy, taro-based grits.
Hethington, who was recently nominated for a national James Beard Emerging Chef award, had been cooking food of the African diaspora on a busy block in a historically Black neighborhood, now the heart of the city’s tourist industry. It had been difficult, at times, to cook the food that he did when people in Asheville often weren’t familiar with it. “Once they get the exposure and experience, they see the connectivity and that’s the fun part of it,” Hethington said. “But I can’t say it comes without struggle.”
To Smith, these challenges speak to the nature of change in the food system: “It’s a slow process, to really integrate this food in a way that makes sense and could have lasting change.” One of the chefs he’d worked with asked when they could get a case of taro every week. Smith said it’d take a couple of years.
The chief scientist of the Food Agility Cooperative Research Centre and former University of New England Distinguished Professor has made history as the first Australian to receive a prestigious AgTech award from the International Society of Precision Agriculture. Applied Physics Professor David Lamb was awarded the Pierre C. Robert Precision Agriculture Award at the 15th…
Last June, Aaron Flansburg felt the temperature spike and knew what that meant for his canola crop. A fifth-generation grower in Washington state, Flansburg times his canola planting to bloom in the cool weeks of early summer. But last year, his fields were hit with 108-degree Fahrenheit heat just as flowers opened. “That is virtually unheard of for our area to have a temperature like that in June,” he says.
Yellow blooms sweltered, reproduction stalled, and many seeds that would have been pressed for canola oil never formed. Flansburg yielded about 600 to 800 pounds per acre. The previous year, under ideal weather conditions, he had reached as high as 2,700.
Many factors likely contributed to this poor harvest — heat and drought persisted throughout the growing season. But one point is becoming alarmingly clear to scientists: heat is a pollen killer. Even with adequate water, heat can damage pollen and prevent fertilization in canola and many other crops, including corn, peanuts, and rice.
For this reason, many growers aim for crops to bloom before the temperature rises. But as climate change increases the number of days over 90 degrees Fahrenheit in regions across the globe, and multi-day stretches of extreme heat become more common, getting that timing right could become challenging, if not impossible.
Faced with a warmer future, researchers are searching for ways to help pollen beat the heat. They’re uncovering genes that could lead to more heat-tolerant varieties and breeding cultivars that can survive winter and flower before heat strikes. They’re probing pollen’s precise limits and even harvesting pollen at large scales to spray directly onto crops when weather improves.
At stake is much of our diet. Every seed, grain, and fruit that we eat is a direct product of pollination, explains biochemist Gloria Muday of North Carolina’s Wake Forest University. “The critical parameter is the maximum temperature during reproduction,” she says.
The creation of seeds begins when a pollen grain leaves the anther of a plant’s male reproductive organ, the stamen, lands on the sticky stigma of a female reproductive organ, the pistil, and sets about growing a tube. This tube is formed by a single cell that grows through the stigma and down a stalk called the style until it ultimately reaches the ovary, where it delivers the pollen grain’s genetic material. Pollen tube growth is one of the fastest examples of cellular growth in all of the plant world, says Mark Westgate, an emeritus professor of agronomy at Iowa State University. “It grows up to one centimeter an hour, which is incredibly fast,” he says.
Growing at such a clip requires energy. But at temperatures starting around 90 degrees F for many crops, the proteins that power a pollen grain’s metabolism start to break down, Westgate says.
In fact, heat hinders not only tube growth but other stages of pollen development as well. The result: a pollen grain may never form, or may burst, fail to produce a tube, or produce a tube that explodes.
Not all cultivars are equally susceptible to heat. Indeed, researchers are still working out the molecular mechanisms that allow pollen from some crop cultivars to survive while pollen from others dies off.
For example, fertilization is notoriously heat-sensitive in many cultivars of tomato — a crop that in 2021 covered 274,000 acres of open fields in the United States alone. If the weather gets too hot, says Randall Patterson, president of the North Carolina Tomato Growers Association, “the pollen will burn up.” Patterson times his tomato plantings to flower during the longest stretch of nights below 70 degrees F and days below 90. Typically, he has a three-to-five-week window in which the weather cooperates for each of his two annual growing seasons. “If it does get hotter, and if we do have more nights over 70 degrees F, ” he says, “that’s going to close our window.”
Muday studies pollen from a mutant tomato plant that may carry clues for keeping that window open. In 2018, her team reported that antioxidants known as flavonols play an important role in suppressing molecules, called ROS, that would otherwise increase to destructive levels at high temperatures.
With funding from the National Science Foundation, Muday is now part of a multi-university team aiming to uncover the molecular mechanisms and underlying genes that could help tomato pollen weather a heat spell. The hope is that breeders could then incorporate these genes into new, more resilient tomatoes.
Insights from her initial study have already helped Muday develop a tomato that produces especially high levels of flavonols. “They appear to be extra good at dealing with high temperature stress,” she says. Ultimately, Muday expects they’ll find that the path from heat to pollen death involves many players beyond flavonols and ROS, and so potentially many targets for fixes.
Meanwhile, breeders of tomatoes and other crops are already working to develop cultivars that can better handle heat. “If farmers in the Pacific Northwest or in the Mountain States or in the High Plains are going to grow peas, and the climate is going to be warmer, then we have to have peas with more heat tolerance,” says pulse crop breeder and plant geneticist Rebecca McGee of the USDA Agricultural Research Service in Pullman, Washington.
Pulse crops — so named for the Latin “puls” meaning thick soup — include dried beans, peas, lentils, and chickpeas. These plants don’t require a lot of moisture. But if temperatures get too hot, the pollen aborts, says Todd Scholz, vice president of research for the USA Dry Pea and Lentil Council. The same heat wave that pummeled Flansburg’s crop last year decimated pulse plants. Lentil and dry pea harvests fell to about half of the average production, while chickpeas fell by more than 60 percent.
McGee is breeding some of her peas and lentils to be more resilient to high temperatures. But with other projects, she’s taking a different and somewhat counterintuitive approach: breeding crops that can withstand cold.
In the northern United States, growers typically plant pulse crops in the spring. McGee is breeding peas, lentils, and chickpeas that are instead sown in autumn. The idea is that these cultivars will survive the winter and then get a jump-start on flowering early in the summer — giving them a fighting chance to pollinate successfully before a heat wave.
A blue orchard bee visits a blueberry flower.
Jenna Walters via Yale Environment 360
Last year, McGee released to seed producers a limited amount of the first three autumn-sown, food-quality pea cultivars for her region. She says they flower about two weeks earlier than most spring-sown peas — and with double the yield. Of course, these crops aren’t guaranteed to flower before high heat arrives, McGee says, “but you don’t have to worry as much.”
At Michigan State University, Jenna Walters is studying how temperature affects pollen — and pollinators — in a fruit crop. On Memorial Day weekend of 2018, the temperature in southwestern Michigan lingered at 95 degrees F while bees buzzed between clusters of delicate white blossoms on blueberry bushes. Come harvest, many fruits were smaller than usual or had failed to form altogether. In a state that averages around 100 million pounds of blueberries a year, growers harvested just 66 million.
Walters — a PhD candidate earning a dual degree in entomology and ecology, evolution, and behavior — is investigating what exactly went wrong. She began by pinpointing a blueberry pollen grain’s heat limit — exposing pollen in petri dishes to a range of temperatures and monitoring the pollen for 24 hours. Her results, not yet published, suggest that at temperatures above 95 degrees F, pollen tubes fail to grow.
Walters also simulated an acute heat wave by exposing pollen grains to 99.5-degree heat for four hours and then lowering the temperature to 77 degrees F for another 20 hours. “There is basically no return,” Walters says. “[Heat] exposure for just four hours is enough to lead to permanent damage.”
She is now confirming these results in actual blueberry bushes in growth chambers set to different temperatures. If the findings hold, she says, 95 degrees F could trigger growers to periodically flip on their misting systems to cool fields. But growers would have to consider tradeoffs. “A lot of pathogens are spread via high humidity or water, especially during that flower-opening period,” she says. And when misting machines are on, most pollinators aren’t likely to visit.
It’s possible that overheated blueberry bushes might also lead to fewer blueberry pollinators over time, Walters says. She and her colleagues are comparing the nutritional content of heat-stressed and unstressed pollen, searching for differences in proteins, carbohydrates, and other factors that could be critical to a bee’s health.
This year, she will fill eight 6-by-12-foot mesh-walled cages with more than two dozen potted blueberry bushes each, as well as a few female blue orchard bees — one of the many bee species that pollinates blueberry flowers. For four hours a day, over the course of four or five weeks, she’ll sit inside her cages and watch the bees lay eggs and forage for pollen on bushes that, in half of the cages, had been exposed to heat stress early in their bloom.
The concern, says Walters, is that if heat is destroying pollen, nutritional stress will cause females to make more male eggs, which require less pollen to produce. But male blue orchard bees are less useful to a blueberry grower, since only the females pollinate and lay eggs to start the next generation. To compensate for pollen loss, Walters says, growers might consider planting strips of wildflowers that are more heat tolerant and could provide pollinators with additional nutrients.
And then there are the technofixes. Mark Westgate, of Iowa State, is the chief science officer at PowerPollen, an Iowa-based ag tech company focused on improving pollination for producers of hybrid corn seed — a crop in which pollen fails at temperatures above 104 degrees F.
Using a tassel-shaking collection device attached to a tractor, the company gathers large quantities of ripe pollen in fields, then stores those living pollen grains in a controlled environment. PowerPollen returns to apply that pollen when weather conditions favor fertilization — typically no later than five days after collection. The window sounds small, but it could enable farmers to dodge an especially hot day. The company is working on extending this time frame and on applying its technology to other crops.
For some, a simpler solution may be switching crops altogether. “There are pulses that grow in tropical climates, so it may be that you pick a different cultivar,” says Scholz, of the Dry Pea and Lentil Council. But some pulses that stand up to heat, he notes, such as fava beans and black-eyed peas, require more moisture than dryland farmers of the Pacific Northwest can supply.
Flansburg, in Washington, doesn’t want to switch. He remains hopeful that breeding efforts will help him continue to grow the canola and other crops his family has cultivated for generations. Still, he worries about the future. “There’s an overall picture of a changing climate that we’re going to have to address and deal with if we’re going to be able to continue to feed people,” he says. “There’s just a limit to how much heat a plant can take.”
New research connects rural agricultural emissions including ammonia, nitrous oxide, and nitrogen oxides to urban pollution issues.
The new research, published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, looked at fertilized soils over a three-year period and compared that to regional air quality, climate, and health.
Agriculture emissions
According to the researchers out of Rice University, ammonia is taking quite the toll, creating $72 billion worth of damages, followed by nitrous oxide at $13 billion and nitrogen oxides at $12 billion. The damages from air pollution were measured by increased mortality and morbidity rates as well as value of statistical life, and the monetized damages looked at damages and threats to property and crops, ecosystem services such as carbon sequestration and pollination, as well as human health.
Photo by Egor Myznik at Unsplash.
The researchers concluded that both ammonia and nitrogen oxide were most damaging in all regions across the three-year snapshot. Regions most affected include the Midwest as well as California and Florida—key crop-growing regions. Following the spring fertilizing periods, pollution levels in nearby population centers ticked up.
“We always talk about how carbon dioxide and methane contribute to greenhouse gases, but nitrous oxide is about 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide for its global warming potential,” Rice University’s George R. Brown School of Engineering graduate student and study co-author Lina Luo said.
Further, Luo says some farming strategies aimed at reducing emissions can increase air pollutants. “We need to see if [strategies] can reduce all three nitrogen species—or make some tradeoffs—and still not decrease crop yield,” she said.
Overlooked emissions
Daniel Cohan, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rice, led the research. He says there’s been neglect when it comes to air quality management in controlling agricultural emissions even despite efforts by the EPA to tighten standards. The recent focus of the Biden administration has been on transportation and industrial emissions, Cohan said, noting agriculture emissions need more attention and resources, particularly as climate change exacerbates nitrogen pollutants.
“Our group had been studying nitrogen oxide emissions for a number of years and began to realize that we can’t just focus on that,” Cohan said. “We needed to consider the range of emissions that come from soils, and we became curious about the relative impacts of different air pollutants and greenhouse gases that emanate from agricultural soils.
Photo by Paz Arando on Unsplash
“A big part of our motivation was realizing that choices in farming practices might cause some emissions to go up and other emissions to go down,” he said.
Cohan says ammonia and nitrogen oxide have the greatest impact both on air-polluting particulates and ozone.
“Those of us who study these pollutants for a living know how potent ammonia is, but the message hasn’t gotten through to most regulators and policymakers,” Cohan said. “In fact, ammonia is one of the most potent sources of particulate matter because of how it binds with other pollutants to have a multiplying effect.
“That’s an important message: We need to take more steps to control ammonia,” he said.
Cohan says steps are being taken, including recycling nitrogen back into the crops by methods including biochar and other soil amendments.
The findings follow another study that identified an overlooked area of agriculture-related emissions: transport. That study concluded that nearly 20 percent of the food system’s emissions come from transportation, leading the researchers to urge consumers to shop and eat locally as much as possible.
The war in Ukraine has made an already critical food crisis worse. Fingers point to grain supply shortages, but the problem is far deeper and linked to the economic system that turns food into a profitable commodity, writes William Briggs.
The COVID-19 pandemic has made it painfully clear that our concentrated global food system is prone to breakdown and riddled with exploitation.
Look no further than to the fruit and vegetable farmers in Europe and the United States who destroyed perfectly good produce because corporate food processors lacked the resiliency to adapt to changing consumption demands. The 2.5 million farmworkers in the U.S., at the same time, risked their lives for poverty-level wages without personal protective equipment.
Such concentration takes freedom from farmers, taking from them the ability to negotiate the prices of what they sell and the inputs, such as feed and seed, that they purchase. Meanwhile, workers lack critical safety protections, for instance, safeguards against chemical or pesticide exposure, as they labor for subsistence-level wages.
This is the food and farm system that the World Trade Organization (WTO) played a central role in creating. The WTO, which emerged out of the Uruguay Round of negotiations of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in 1994, has become synonymous with promoting “free trade,” namely, in calling on states to privatize public enterprises, end price and wage supports, and lift import tariffs not only in agriculture but also in the pharmaceutical, automobile and textile industries.
Food, farm and peasant movements, specifically those in the international coalition, La Via Campesina (LVC), plan to protest the meeting to denounce such free trade policies and demand change.
This is not the first time that LVC members have challenged the WTO. Perhaps the most recognized is Lee Kyung Hae, a Korean farmer who died by suicide at the organization’s meeting in Cancún, Mexico, in 2003, to call attention to how WTO prescriptions drove farmers into poverty.
Such conditions of economic depression persist globally: About 30 Indian farmers take their own lives every day over their inability to pay loans and purchase inputs. Desperation among U.S. farmers, similarly, has led them to have one of the highest suicide rates among all professions
The WTO’s role in creating these dynamics is showcased in the Agreement on Agriculture (AoA), which entered into force in 1995. The AoA put agriculture into an economic bind, categorizing farm system policies globally into three boxes — amber, blue and green.
Amber box policies, specifically, are prohibited under the AoA for being “market distorting.” Such initiatives include the government purchase of commodities to guarantee a certain income. Import tariffs also fall into this box. Blue box policies, which are permitted by the agreement, also affect incomes. In the U.S., direct payments to farmers from the government are one example. Blue box policies are allowed because they are limited in terms of amount. The last kind of policies — those in the green box — are also allowed. These include funds dedicated to research and development or environmental conservation.
As a treaty, the AoA has enforcement mechanisms: Through the WTO’s dispute settlement mechanism (DSM), states that feel another country has unfairly restrained trade may file a grievance and seek retribution.
One well-known case is the U.S.’s successful effort to have Mexico remove its tariffs on high-fructose corn syrup, resulting in a rise of obesity south of the border. Similarly, Canadian dairy farmers were harmed as its government was forced by the WTO — under the pressure of powerful corporate dairy interests from the U.S. — to remove export supports and allow foreign firms access to domestic markets. Another example is when Brazil claimed that its cotton industry was adversely affected by U.S. subsidies. Years of negotiations resulted in a victory for the Latin American country, with the U.S. agreeing to pay $300 million to Brazilian producers.
The WTO’s free trade promotion, while increasing imports and exports, has not helped small-scale producers. According to Public Citizen, since the mid-1990s when the WTO, as well as the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect, over 231,000 family farms went under as they could not compete with increases in price volatility and deregulation. From 1995 to 2017, this was approximately 11 percent of all farms in the U.S.
Still, wealthy countries disproportionately benefit under these global rules. The U.S., for instance, can rescue its farmers with ease in the aftermath of disasters such as the COVID-19 pandemic; stimulus payments accounted for 40 percent of farmers’ total income in 2020. Countries with limited resources don’t have the means to pay farmers when crisis hits, or to pay fines in case of violating WTO dictates.
Additionally, in the name of free trade, agribusiness companies often export or dump food into foreign markets at prices that undercut domestic producers. This drives environmentally destructive overproduction in wealthy countries like the U.S., while forcing farmers out of business abroad.
Despite these deeply entrenched problems, this WTO meeting could be different, as protesters’ demands for significant food and farm system reform are taking on increased urgency.
Part of the reason why movements have seized upon this opportunity to call for change is that the WTO has been weakened in recent years; the DSM has lacked personnel since former President Donald Trump, as part of his China trade war, hampered the WTO by not appointing judges to hear grievances.
There’s also the fact that negotiations, particularly concerning further liberalizing agriculture, have been stalled since 2001 as economically developing countries such as Brazil and South Africa have failed to find common ground with the U.S. and Europe.
In this context, potential alternatives to the WTO vision of agriculture, as well as its DSM enforcement mechanism, include the demand for parity — the New Deal-era set of policies that sought to place farmers’ incomes on par with what workers in urban areas receive. In clear defiance to the WTO and its boxes, organizations such as the National Family Farm Coalition see parity policies as a means to curtail corporate consolidation and protect the environment. Central to this demand is for governments to provide a space for farmers, workers and processors to negotiate food production and distribution in long-term, sustainable ways.
Additionally, LVC promotes agroecology — a labor-intensive, chemical-free way of growing food that works with nature instead of trying to dominate it. To make this form of farming practicable, governments around the world will have to enact land redistribution policies, as well as significant income supports to keep new farmers in the profession.
With the WTO weakened, now is a propitious time to denounce free trade and demand food and farm system change. More than 15 years ago, Lee Kyung Hae gave his life in this struggle. Inspired by his sacrifice, farmers and activists will convene in Geneva, keeping hope alive for building a more just, equitable and sustainable way of practicing agriculture.
Sbongile Tabhethe works in the food garden at eKhenana land occupation in Cato Manor, Durban, 9 June 2020. Credit: New Frame / Mlungisi Mbele
In March 2022, United Nations (UN) Secretary-General António Guterres warned of a ‘hurricane of hunger’ due to the war in Ukraine. Forty-five developing countries, most of them on the African continent, he said, ‘import at least a third of their wheat from Ukraine or Russia, with 18 of those import[ing] at least 50 percent’. Russia and Ukraine export 33% of global barley stocks, 29% of wheat, 17% of corn, and nearly 80% of the world’s supply of sunflower oil. Farmers outside of Russia and Ukraine, trying to make up for the lack of exports, are now struggling with higher fuel prices also caused by the war. Fuel prices impact both the cost of chemical fertilisers and farmers’ ability to grow their own crops. Maximo Torero Cullen, chief economist at the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, said that ‘one of every five calories people eat have crossed at least one international border, up more than 50 percent from 40 years ago’. This turbulence in the global food trade will certainly create a problem for nutrition and food intake, particularly amongst the poorest people on the planet.
Poorer countries do not have many tools to stem the tide of hunger, largely due to World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules that privilege subsidy regimes for richer countries but punish poorer ones if they use state action on behalf of their own farmers and the hungry. A recent report by no less than the WTO, International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development provided evidence of these subsidy advantages from which wealthier countries benefit. At the 12th WTO ministerial conference in mid-June, the G-33 countries will seek to expand the use of the ‘peace clause’ (established in 2013) to allow poorer countries to protect their farmers’ livelihoods through the state procurement of food and enhanced public food distribution systems.
Two young girls return to their homes after drawing water from a stream that the farm dwelling community shares with wild animals, 29 July 2020.
Credit: New Frame / Magnificent Mndebele
Those who grow our food are hungry, yet, stunningly, there is little conversation about the poverty and hunger of farmers, peasants, and agricultural workers themselves. More than 3.4 billion people – nearly half the world’s population – live in rural areas; amongst them are 80% of the world’s poor. For most of the rural poor, agriculture is the principal source of income, providing billions of jobs. Rural poverty is reproduced not because people do not work hard, but because of the dispossession of rural workers from land ownership and the withdrawal of state support from small farmers and peasants.
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research (South Africa) has been paying very close attention to the plight of farmworkers in the region as part of our overall project to monitor the ‘hurricane of hunger’. Our most recent dossier, This Land Is the Land of Our Ancestors, is a fine-grained study of farmworkers from their own perspective. Researcher Yvonne Phyllis travelled from KwaZulu-Natal to the Western and Northern Cape provinces interviewing farmworkers and their organisations to learn about the failures of land reform in South Africa and its impact on their lives. This is one of the few dossiers that begins in the first person, reflecting the intimate nature of politics surrounding the land issue in South Africa. ‘What does the land mean to you?’, I asked Yvonne while we were together in Johannesburg recently. She answered:
I grew up on a farm in Bedford, in the Eastern Cape province. My upbringing gifted me some of the best lessons of my life. One lesson was from the community of farmworkers and farm dwellers; they taught me the value of being in community with other people. They also taught me what it means to nurture and cultivate land and how to make my own meaning of what land is to me. Those lessons have informed my personal beliefs about the nature of land. All people deserve to live from the land. Land is not only important because we can produce from it; it forms part of people’s histories, humanity, and cultural heritage.
Six generations of the Phyllis family have lived in this house and worked on this farm. Credit: New Frame / Andy Mkosi
The process of colonialism by Dutch (Boer) and British settlers dispossessed African farmers and converted them into either landless workers, unpaid labour tenants, or the rural unemployed. This process was hardened by the Native Land Act (no. 27 of 1913), whose legacy continues to be felt today. Seventeen-year-old composer Reuben Caluza (1895–1969) responded to the law with his ‘Umteto we Land Act’ (‘The Land Act’), which became one of the first anthems of the liberation movement in the country:
The right which our compatriots fought for
Our cry for the nation
is to have our country
We cry for the homeless
sons of our fathers
Who do not have a place
in this place of our ancestors
The Freedom Charter (1955) of the African National Congress (ANC) and its allies promised those who struggled against apartheid, which formally ended in 1994, that ‘The land shall be shared among those who work it’. This promise was alluded to again in the 1996 South African Constitution, chapter 2, section 25.5, but it excludes explicit mention of farmworkers.
This is the site of the ancestral graveyard of the Phyllis family on which Yvonne’s father Jacob and their family worked, 6 June 2021. Credit: New Frame / Andy Mkosi
In fact, right from the 1993 Interim Constitution, the new post-apartheid system defended the rights of farm owners through a ‘property clause’ in chapter 2, section 28. Differences within the ANC led to the abandonment of the more progressive Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) in favour of the neoliberal Growth, Employment, and Redistribution (GEAR) strategy – a self-imposed structural adjustment programme. What this meant was that there were simply insufficient political will and state funds allocated for the land restitution, land tenure reform, and land redistribution programmes. As our dossier notes, to this day the promises of the Freedom Charter ‘have yet to be fulfilled’.
Rather than expropriate land from the primarily white land-owning class to compensate for historical injustices, the state provides for compensation to landowners and operates on the principle of ‘willing buyer, willing seller’. Bureaucratic red tape and a lack of funds have sabotaged any genuine land reform project. In his 2014 Ruth First Lecture, Irvin Jim, general secretary of the largest trade union in the country, the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA), noted that the centenary of the 1913 Land Act was not commemorated by the government but only by the militant strike by farmworkers in 2012 and 2013. ‘The strike is still fresh in our memories’, Jim said. ‘It continues to highlight the colonial historical fact that the land, and the produce that comes from it, are not being equitably shared among those who work the land’. Due to the neoliberal orientation of the land question, some of the programmes set up for restitution and redistribution have ended up benefitting large landholders over subsistence farmers and lifelong farmworkers.
Former labourers Freeda Mkhabela, Lucia Foster, and Gugu Ngubane (from left to right) are among the activists struggling against landlessness as well as poor pay and working conditions and for better treatment of farmworkers, 26 May 2021. Credit: New Frame / Mlungisi Mbele
A genuine agrarian reform project in South Africa would not only meet the cries for justice from the land but would also provide a pathway to deal with the hunger crisis in the countryside. Our dossier ends with a six-point list of demands developed from our conversations with farmworkers and their organisations:
The government of South Africa must consult farmworkers and farm dwellers to incorporate their contributions into the development of a land reform programme which addresses their land needs.
Labour tenants’ claims to land ownership should be given priority in order to avoid land reform that solely enriches Black elites.
The Department of Agriculture, Land Reform, and Rural Development should facilitate the process of white farm owners apportioning some of their farmland to lifetime employees and descendants of families who have worked on farms for several generations.
The government must purchase farms for farmworkers and assist them with capital for start-up costs, farming equipment, and agricultural skills.
Land reform in South Africa must take into account the social factors that contribute to food insecurity and acknowledge the opportunities to rectify it through land redistribution.
The process of land reform must address the marginalisation of women workers in the agricultural industry and the lack of land ownership by women farmers to ensure gender parity in both spheres.
Loo ngumhlaba wookhokho bethu! This is the land of our ancestors! That’s the slogan that gives our dossier its title. It is about time that those who work the land get to own the land.
Honduran President Xiomara Castro signed a decree on April 25 that repealed the law creating the country’s nefarious Economic Development and Employment Zones (ZEDEs), reports Ben Radford.
In at least two regions of the African continent food deficits are a major concern for political officials and humanitarian organizations.
The Russian special military operations in neighboring Ukraine have brought to the surface a number of persistent economic problems which have plagued the world since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic that emerged during the early months of 2020.
President Macky Sall of the West African state of Senegal, the current elected chairman of the 55 member-states African Union (AU) along with AU Commission Chairman Moussa Faki Mahamat, visited the Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss measures which could alleviate the escalating problems related to the lack of food and agricultural inputs.
Standing on the grassy plateau where water is piped onto his property, Josh Davy wished his feet were wet and his irrigation ditch full.
Three years ago, when he sank everything he had into 66 acres of irrigated pasture in Shasta County, Davy thought he’d drought-proofed his cattle operation.
He’d been banking on the Sacramento Valley’s water supply, which was guaranteed even during the deepest of droughts almost 60 years ago, when irrigation districts up and down the valley cut a deal with the federal government. Buying this land was his insurance against droughts expected to intensify with climate change.
But this spring, for the first time ever, no water is flowing through his pipes and canals or those of his neighbors: The district won’t be delivering any water to Davy or any of its roughly 800other customers.
Without rain for rangeland grass where his cows forage in the winter, or water to irrigate his pasture, he will probably have to sell at least half the cows he’s raised for breeding and sell all of his calves a season early. Davy expects to lose money this year — more than $120,000, he guesses, and if it happens again next year, he won’t be able to pay his bills.
“I would never have bought (this land) if I had known it wasn’t going to get water. Not when you pay the price you pay for it,” he said. “If this is a one-time fluke, I’ll suck it up and be fine. But I don’t have another year in me.”
Since 1964, the water supply of the Western Sacramento Valley has been virtually guaranteed, even during critically dry years, the result of an arcane water rights system and legal agreements underlying operations of the Central Valley Project, the federal government’s massive water management system.
But as California weathers a third year of drought, conditions have grown so dry and reservoirs so low that the valley’s landowners and irrigation districts are being forced to give up more water than ever before. Now, this region, which has relied on the largest portion of federally-managed water flowing from Lake Shasta, is wrestling with what to do as its deal with the federal government no longer protects them.
An irrigation canal on Davy’s pasture in Shasta County is bone-dry on April 27, 2022. Miguel Gutierrez Jr. / CalMatters
All relying on the lake’s supplies will make sacrifices: Many are struggling to keep their cattle and crops. Refuges for wildlife also will have to cope with less water from Lake Shasta, endangering migratory birds. And the eggs of endangered salmon that depend on cold water released from Shasta Dam are expected to die by the millions.
For decades, water wars have pitted growers and ranchers against nature, north against south. But in this new California, where everyone is suffering, no one is guaranteed anything.
“In the end, when one person wins, everybody loses,” Davy said. “And we don’t actually solve the problem.”
This parched valley was once a land of floods, regularly inundated when the Sacramento River overflowed to turn grasslands and riverbank forests into a vast, seasonal lake.
The river was corralled by levees, the region replumbed with drainage ditches and irrigation canals. Grasslands and swamps lush with tules turned to ranches and wheat fields, then to orchards, irrigated pasture and rice.
The federal government took over in the 1930s, when it began building the Central Valley Project.’s Shasta Dam, which displaced the Winnemem Wintu people. A 20-year negotiation between water rights holders and the United States’ Bureau of Reclamation culminated in a deal in 1964.
Today, under the agreements, which were renewed in 2005, nearly 150 landowners and irrigation districts that supply almost half a million acres of agriculture in the western Sacramento Valley are entitled to receive about three times more water than Los Angeles and San Francisco use in a year.
It’s a controversial amount in the parched state. Before this year, the Sacramento River Settlement Contractors, as they’re called, received the largest portion of the federally-managed supply of water that flows from Shasta Lake. It’s more than cities receive, more than wildlife refuges, more even than other powerful agricultural suppliers like the Westlands Water District farther south.
Their contract bars the irrigation districts’ supply from being cut by more than a quarter in critically dry years. During the last drought in 2014, federal efforts to cut it to 40 percent of the contracted amount were met with resistance, and deliveries ultimately increased to the full 75 percent allocation for the dry year.
But this year, facing exceptionally dry conditions, the irrigation districts negotiated with state and federal agencies, and agreed in March to reduce their water deliveries to 18 percent. Other agricultural suppliers with less senior rights are set to get nothing.
Low water levels at Shasta Lake on April 25, 2022.
Miguel Gutierrez Jr. / CalMatters
Growers understand that they have to sacrifice some water this year, said Thaddeus Bettner, general manager for Glenn-Colusa Irrigation District, the largest of the Sacramento River Settlement Contractors and one of the largest irrigation districts in the state. But he wondered why irrigation districts in the Western Sacramento Valley draw so much of the blame.
“I understand we’re bigger than everybody so we catch the focus,” Bettner said. “We’re just trying to survive this year. Frankly, it’s just complete devastation up here. And it’s unfortunate that the view seems to be that we should get hurt even more to save fish.”
Cutting deliveries to growers means that more water can flow through the rivers, which slightly raises the chances for more endangered winter-run Chinook salmon to survive this year.
“They had the water rights to take 75 percent of their allocation instead of 18 percent, and we were anticipating another total bust,” said Howard Brown, senior policy advisor with NOAA Fisheries’ West Coast Region. “One hundred percent temperature dependent mortality (of salmon eggs) would not have been something out of reason to imagine.”
Yet more than half of the eggs of endangered winter-run Chinook salmon are expected to still die this year, according to the National Marine Fisheries Service.
State and federal biologists are racing to move some of the adult salmon to a cooler tributary of the Sacramento River and a hatchery.
“We’re spreading the risk around, and putting our eggs in different baskets,” Brown said. “The animal that’s on the flag of California is extinct. How many can we afford to lose before we lose our identity as people and as citizens of California?”
In any other year, Davy would run his cattle on rain-fed rangeland he leases in Tehama County until late spring before moving the herd to his home pasture, kept green and lush with spring and summer irrigation.
Davy, who grew up roping and running cattle, supports his career as a full-time rancher with his other full-time job as a farm advisor with the University of California Cooperative Extension, specializing in livestock, rangelands, and natural resources.
Three years ago, he sold his home in Cottonwood, on the Shasta-Tehama county line, for a fixer-upper nearby with holes in the floor, a shoddy electrical system and windows that wouldn’t close. This fixer-upper had two inarguable selling points: a view of Mount Shasta and water from the Anderson-Cottonwood Irrigation District, a settlement contractor.
This year, without rain, the grass where his cows forage through the winter crunches underfoot.
“This grass should be up to my waist right now,” Davy said, readying a chute he would soon use to transport his cattle. He unloaded hay from his pickup to feed the cows and calves until he could move them — unheard of, he said, in April.
Cattle feed on hay in Tehama County.
Miguel Gutierrez Jr. / CalMatters
Forty miles away, his pasture, green from the April rains, is faring a little better — but the green can’t last without irrigation. Thinking about it too hard makes Davy feel sick.
“I try to stick to what I can get done today, and then assume next year I’ll be okay. I think that’s the mantra for agriculture,” he said: “Next year will be better.”
About 75 miles south of Davy’s ranch, rangeland and irrigated pastures open up to orchards and thousands of acres of empty rice fields.
“Nothing like I thought I’d ever see,” said Mathew Garcia, gazing at one of his dry rice fields in Glenn, about an hour and a half north of Sacramento.
In any other year, he would have been preparing to seed and flood the crumbled clay. This year, he had to abandon even the one field he’d planned to irrigate from a well. The ground was too thirsty to hold the water.
Garcia’s water comes from two different irrigation districts with settlement contracts. This year, the roughly 420 acres he farms will see water deliveries either eliminated or too diminished to plant rice. He’ll funnel the water instead to his tenant’s irrigated pasture where cattle graze.
“Without the water, we have dirt. It’s basically worthless,” Garcia said. “It’s very depressing.”
Garcia places some of the blame on the weather. But he also blames federal regulators, who allow water to flow from the reservoirs year-round for fish, wildlife, and water quality.
“Everybody says well, you shouldn’t farm in the desert. Does this look like a desert to you? No. It looks like fertile, beautiful farmland with the most amazing irrigation system that’s ever been put in. And they’re just taking the water from it. They’re creating a desert.”
In the depths of California’s last historic drought from 2012 through 2016, Garcia could still plant his fields. Even with last year’s reduced water deliveries, he planted — filling the gaps in water supply by pumping from his groundwater wells.
Garcia will survive this year: He credits his wife’s foresight to purchase crop insurance years ago. Without it, he said, he’d be done — he’d have to sell land, maybe find another job.
Mathew Garcia, standing in one of his fallowed rice fields in Glenn, says he can’t plant anything this year because of reduced water deliveries.
Miguel Gutierrez Jr. / CalMatters
“If this drought sustains, I don’t know how long insurance is going to last. And then at what point do you throw in the towel?” said Garcia. “There’s a teetering point somewhere. Everybody’s is different. I don’t know where mine is yet.”
Local water suppliers anticipate about 370,000 acres of cropland will go fallow in the western Sacramento Valley, the result of diminished deliveries to the settlement contractors. Most lie in Colusa and Glenn counties, where agriculture is the epicenter of the economy. Money and jobs radiate from the fields to the crop dusters and chemical suppliers, rice driers, and warehouses.
And, like the water, jobs for farm workers have dried up.
For nine years, SergioCortez has been traveling from Jalisco, Mexico to work in Sacramento Valley fields. This is the driest he’s ever seen it, and he knows that next year could be worse.
“Aquí el agua es todo, pues,” he said. “Al no haber agua, pues no hay trabajo.” Water is everything, he said. If there’s no water, there’s no work.
The parking lot at the migrant farmworker housing in Colusa County where Cortez and his family live for part of the year was full of cars and pickups that would normally be parked at the fields. Cortez hadn’t worked in two days.
For Adolfo Morales Martinez, 74, it had been a month since he worked. And, at the end of April, his unemployment benefits were about to end.
“Desesperados. Estamos desesperados,” he said. “Pues en el campo gana uno poquito, no? Y sin nada? No mas.” We’re desperate, he said. In the fields, he can earn a little. But now, nothing.
Normally Morales Martinez drives a tractor, readying rice fields for planting. Now it’s like a desert, his wife, Alma Galavez, said.
“Eso está desértico, vea. Todo. Nada, Nada. Está feo y triste,” she said. There’s nothing. It’s ugly and sad.
Environmental advocates and California tribes have been fighting the growers’ and irrigation districts’ claim to California’s finite water supply for years, citing inadequate water to maintain water quality and temperatures for endangered fish and the Delta.
“People who have built their farms in the desert, or in areas where their water has to be exported to them, need to think about changing. Because that’s what’s killing the state,” said Caleen Sisk, chief and spiritual leader of the Winnemem Wintu, whose lands were flooded with the damming of Lake Shasta.
To Sisk, the salmon that once spawned in the tributaries above the Central Valley signal the region’s health. “If there are no salmon, there will be no people soon.”
Federal scientists estimate that last year about three-quarters of endangered winter-run Chinook salmon eggs died because the water downstream of a depleted Lake Shasta was too warm. Only about three percent of the salmon ultimately survived to migrate downriver.
“It’s been clear for decades that there was a need to reduce diversions,” said Doug Obegi, senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council. “The consequences are just becoming more and more extreme.”
In 2020, California sued the Trump administration over what it said were flawed federal assessments for how the Central Valley Project’s operations harm endangered species.
The judge sent the federal plans back for more work and approved what he called a “reasonable interim approach“ that called for prioritizing fish and public safety over irrigation districts. He called the contracts an “800 pound gorilla” that “make it exceedingly and increasingly difficult” for the federal government to be “sufficiently protective of winter-run (salmon).”
U.S. Bureau of Reclamation spokesperson Gary Pitzer said the agency worked with the districts to reach an agreement on how much water to deliver because “it’s the right thing to do, particularly during drought — one of the worst on record.”
Environmental advocacy groups applauded the reduced allocations to the Sacramento Valley irrigation districts. But they also raised concerns that other irrigation districts with similar contracts elsewhere in the state would still see their full dry year allocations, and cautioned that the temperatures will still kill salmon by the scores this year.
Curtis McCasland, manager of the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge Complex, expects less than half a typical year’s water supply to be delivered to the refuges this year — cobbled together from purchased water supplies, federal deliveries and, he hopes, storm flows this winter.
North of Sacramento, the five refuges in the complex are painstakingly tended wilderness in a sea of agriculture. More than a century ago, wetlands fanned out for miles to either side of the flood-prone Sacramento River. Now, more than 90 percent of the state’s wetlands are gone, drained for fields, homes, and businesses. Those remaining in these refuges now depend on water flowing from Shasta Dam and shunted through irrigation canals.
At the end of April, the Colusa National Wildlife Refuge offered an oasis among the barren rice fields, which normally provide about two-thirds of the migrating bird’s calories. Dark green bulrushes rose from shallow ponds where shorebirds jackhammered their bills in and out of the muck.
McCasland knows all this lush green can’t last. As he steered an SUV past black-necked stilts picking their way through the water and ducklings paddling ferociously, he braced for another dry year.
“Instead of being those postage stamps in a sea of rice, we’re going to be postage stamps in a sea of fallow fields,” McCasland said.
An American bittern feeds at the Colusa National Wildlife Refuge on April 28, 2022.
Miguel Gutierrez Jr. / CalMatters
In a typical year, the refuge wetlands that depend on federal water get much less water than the settlement contractors are entitled to — about four percent of the total, McCasland estimates. And he worries that this year, whatever water they do receive won’t be enough to keep all these birds fed and healthy.
More than a million birds descend on the refuges every winter to rest and find food. More stop in the surrounding rice fields, which are largely dry this year.
“In years where Shasta is at a normal or average level, it should be no problem to get us the water,” he said. “In years like this, certainly it’s going to be terribly difficult.”
The drought may already have taken a toll. Last November, only 745,000 birds landed in the refuge, a decrease of more than 700,000 from November of 2019, although some may have remained farther north because of unseasonably balmy weather there.
The refuges are like a farm, where McCasland and his colleagues carefully cultivate tule, shrubs, and grasses with pulses of summertime irrigations. With less water this summer, these wintertime food sources for birds will dry and shrivel. And with less water during the peak of fall and winter migrations, hungry birds will be packed together in the few remaining marshes — raising the risk of outbreaks from diseases like avian botulism or cholera.
“There’s not a lot of places for these birds to go,” he said. “The Sacramento Valley has always been the bankable piece….They do have wings, they may be able to move through.” But, he added, “the question is, what happens next?”
CalMatters Photo Editor Miguel Gutierrez contributed to this story.
This article was originally published by CalMatters, and is reprinted with permission. CalMatters.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics.
This summer is not going to be easy for Matt Watkins. The 39-year-old farmer runs a citrus operation in Tulare County, on the southeast side of California’s Central Valley, and he irrigates his trees using water from a federal canal system. Earlier this year, the federal government informed farmers in his area that it would be delivering only 15 percent of a typical year’s water allotment, thanks to a severe regional drought that has sapped the reservoirs and rivers that are supposed to replenish the canals.
Watkins’s trees need regular watering over the course of the year in order to produce California’s famous oranges, but this summer the water from the federal canal will only last him a month. He and other nearby farmers are pumping unreliable groundwater to make up the difference, hoping their already struggling wells don’t go dry, or are purchasing water for exorbitant rates on an informal local market. Others will rip up their trees and leave their fields fallow.
“We’re year to year right now,” Watkins told Grist. “If it doesn’t rain next year, there could be a pretty big catastrophe for farming. It’s getting down to the point where there’s not much flexibility. There’s probably some small family farmers that may not survive completely.”
About 100 miles away, on the northwest side of the Central Valley, the situation could not be more different. Even during an unprecedented drought, the almond and pistachio farmers around the city of Los Banos will get around 75 percent of a normal year’s water, far more than almost any other group of growers in California. These farmers grow many of the same crops as the farmers on the southeast side, and the water they use comes from the same canal system. Yet while Watkins has almost no water, these farmers have plenty.
The startling contrast is the result of an obscure and contentious legal agreement known as the exchange contract, which dates back to the early twentieth century. This contract never mattered much during wet years, but during droughts it allows a small group of Central Valley farmers to claim enormous amounts of water while their neighbors make deep cuts. As the overall water shortage only deepens, the arcane legal precedent has pitted two groups of farmers against each other, opening up a rift in an industry that more often finds itself united in opposition to outside parties like environmentalists.
The aridification of the American West is straining the region’s antiquated water management system, draining reservoirs that have been full for decades and forcing the government to make new and painful decisions that privilege some groups at the expense of many others. Bigger water cuts could prove devastating for the Central Valley’s economy: A study of last year’s drought produced by the University of California, Merced, found that the water shortage caused $1.7 billion in economic losses and also resulted in the loss of more than 8,000 jobs, many of them among vulnerable migrant laborer populations. The effects aren’t limited to California. The Central Valley provides an enormous share of the nation’s fruits, vegetables, and nuts, and many of the crops are grown almost nowhere else in the country. If production continues to fall, there will be price impacts at grocery stores nationwide.
The exchange contract isn’t the source of these problems, but it does ensure that while most farmers struggle to make do with dramatically less water, a few will remain artificially insulated from the effects of climate change, which has enhanced the West’s ongoing megadrought — all thanks to water rights acquired generations earlier.
“We have a water rights system that is based on this principle of ‘first in time, first in right,’ where landowners were able to go out and post a sign on a tree and start diverting water. And just by the act of taking the water, it became theirs,” said Doug Obegi, director of California river restoration projects at the Natural Resources Defense Council.* “But that was only made available by the fact that the settlers had wiped the Native people off of the land. We have now a system that, a hundred-plus years later, is still maintaining that privilege, and leading to this inequity where you have some water districts getting very little water and others getting a lot.”
Officially, water rights in the U.S. operate on a principle of seniority. If you used a body of water first, you usually have a stronger legal claim to it than someone who started using it after you. This very simple principle can lead to some very complicated outcomes.
In the late nineteenth century, a California settler named Henry Miller built a cattle empire on the western side of the Central Valley, amassing over a million acres of land alongside the San Joaquin River. Miller and his partners claimed this land and used water from the San Joaquin to irrigate it, thus acquiring formal rights to the river water.
A few decades later, in the 1930s, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation began building a series of dams and reservoirs in the mountains around the Central Valley. As in other parts of the West, the purpose of the dam system was to enable large-scale farming by creating massive water storage facilities. One of Reclamation’s goals was to redirect the San Joaquin River from the northern side of the valley to the drier southern side, diverting the flow of the river away from Miller’s cattle empire so it could irrigate more than a million acres of new farmland.
The Friant-Kern Canal is an irrigation canal and part of the Central Valley Project aqueduct.
Citizens of the Planet / Education Images / Universal Images Group via Getty Images
In order to redirect the river, Reclamation had to compensate the farmers who used Miller’s land, since they had formal rights to the water from San Joaquin River. The two parties worked out a unique deal: If the farmers surrendered their rights to the San Joaquin River, the government would provide them with an equal amount of water from anothernearby river, the Sacramento.
If the Sacramento ever failed to provide the farmers with enough water, however, they could claim water from the San Joaquin, which was now flowing into the southern part of the valley. If the farmers on Miller’s land made such a claim, Reclamation would have to take the water away from the farmers in the southern part of the valley, move it through the canal system, and deliver it to the farmers on Miller’s land.
In other words, the farmers on Miller’s land had the rights to water from two different rivers, and they could cut ahead of other users in the event of a water shortage. These irrigators became known as the “exchange contractors,” and today they produce tens of thousands of acres’ worth of tomatoes, lettuce, pistachios, and almonds, making up a massive share of the Central Valley’s agricultural output. Their typical year’s water allocation is 875,000 acre-feet, equivalent to about half of Los Angeles County’s water supply.
For almost a century, the exchange agreement was just a hypothetical. That ended in 2014, during the start of California’s last major drought, when water levels dropped so low that Reclamation couldn’t provide any water to the exchange contractors. Pursuant to their original agreement with the federal government, the exchange contractors claimed their rights to water from San Joaquin, effectively seizing the water from farmers in the eastern part of the valley known as the Friant division, which is where Watkins has his citrus farm. The exchange contractors got a giant allocation of water, and the Friant farmers took a sizable cut, forcing them to pump groundwater or leave their crops unplanted. The same thing happened the next year.
In response to Reclamation’s decision, a group of water users led by the city of Fresno and several Friant irrigation districts filed a lawsuit against the federal government and the exchange contractors. The Friant districts alleged that, in fulfilling its contractual obligation to the exchange contractors, the federal government breached its contractual obligation to the Friant districts, failing to provide them with an adequate amount of water. After more than seven years, that lawsuit is still ongoing, though a decision is expected soon.
Meanwhile, California has entered the second year of another massive drought, and Reclamation has once again found itself between a rock and a hard place. While there is more water in the reservoir that flows to the Friant districts than there was last year, Reclamation is holding back that water so it can save it for the exchange contractors — for the third time in a decade.
This has created an almost surreal split-screen effect in the Central Valley. On the west side of the valley, in the irrigation districts that benefit from the exchange contract, farmers are proceeding more or less as they always have. On the east side of the valley, meanwhile, the situation is dire.
Vehicles drive past farmland and a freight train though Tulare County in the Central Valley near Pixley, California, in 2021.
PATRICK T. FALLON / AFP via Getty Images
“The tension is palpable,” said Tricia Stever Blattler, the executive director of the Tulare County Farm Bureau, whose farmers rely on water from the Reclamation system. “A lot of farmers are fearing they will have to fallow ground and push trees and vines out. There’s speculation about selling land.”
Aaron Fukuda, the general manager of the Tulare Irrigation District, echoed that sentiment.
“The situation has become significantly worse as surface water deliveries are again curtailed this year, forcing growers to turn to groundwater,” he told Grist. In a typical dry year, many farmers can pump subterranean water from wells in order to make up for lost reservoir water, but that isn’t an option for many farmers in the area.
“Our groundwater levels have yet to recover from the last drought, so many [areas] are implementing groundwater cutbacks, which ultimately reduces the ability of growers to meet their crop demands,” he added. A state law passed during the last drought led to further restrictions on pumping, which leaves farmers in the valley with fewer options than ever.
The Natural Resources Defense Council’s Obegi says that the Bureau of Reclamation could soon push to renegotiate the exchange contract if it wanted to, potentially capping the water deliveries that go to the contractors and curbing degradation of the San Joaquin River in the process. The revision would be painful for the exchange contractors, but it would lead to a more equitable distribution of water in the valley during drought years. It would also help restore fish populations in the San Joaquin River, pursuant to a 2006 settlement in a lawsuit brought by environmental groups including the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Ernest Conant, the regional director for Reclamation’s mid-Pacific division, said the exchange contract is a reflection of Western water law, and that the authority is bound by law to honor the contract, even if it means diverting water from other parties.
“People may think this is just not fair,” he told Grist. “Why are the exchange contractors getting 75 percent and everybody else getting zero? The basic answer is, ‘first in time, first in right,’ and that’s the basic premise of water law throughout the West.”
Conant declined to comment on the specific details of how Reclamation interprets the exchange contract, citing the ongoing litigation. He did, however, say that the bureau might someday renegotiate the agreement.
Chris White, the executive director of the exchange contractors’ water authority, says the contractors are trying to minimize their impact on Friant farmers like Watkins, in part by using more groundwater and fallowing some land to ensure they don’t take more water from Friant than they need to. He blamed the diminished reliability of Reclamation’s water supply in part on regulation.
“When we first signed this contract, years and years ago, there was always a thought that Reclamation would be able to supply our water,” he said.
Fundamentally, the exchange contractors have no incentive to give up their water, and Reclamation has not made any attempts to get them to do so. Unless the Bureau pushes to renegotiate the contract, the two groups of farmers will likely remain at loggerheads.
That the two groups have been unable to come to a resolution is unusual, given that past water conflicts have generally pitted a united agricultural industry against non-agricultural water users. In other parts of California, the drought has caused tensions to erupt between farmers and Indigenous tribes, as Reclamation has held back water from farmers to preserve salmon populations. Along the Colorado River, meanwhile, recent cuts to Arizona’s water allocation have hit farmers first and worst while leaving municipal water intact. In the Central Valley, though, the shortage has redirected water from one group of farmers to another.
“It’s a tough situation,” said Alexandra Biering, the government affairs manager for the Friant Water Authority. “So many of the exchange contractors are our friends and good members of the agricultural community, which collectively always feels under attack. But this is really untenable.”
*Editor’s note: The Natural Resources Defense Council is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.
