Food and Farm Labor | Civil Eats

A New Book Dives Deep Into the Climate and Health Impacts of Gas Stoves

Lisa Held — Wed, 14 Aug 2024 09:00:09 +0000

Each year, 100,000 Americans die from coal and car pollution. And each year, 20 percent of deaths worldwide are attributable to fossil fuel use. Rob Jackson, Stanford climate scientist and chair of the Global Carbon Project, keeps a long list of statistics like these—on the devastating health impacts of fossil fuels—ready to share.

“That’s 10 million senseless deaths [due to fossil fuels] when we have cleaner fuels available,” Jackson explained to Civil Eats as he prepped for the launch of his new book, Into the Clear Blue Sky: The Path to Restoring Our Atmosphere. “One reason I push the intersection between health and climate is because it reaches people who won’t otherwise pay attention to climate.”

That intersection hits home in about 40 percent of U.S. kitchens, where Americans still cook over flames powered by natural gas. The week of Jackson’s book launch, many of those cooks were probably drenched in sweat, too: July 22 was the hottest day ever recorded on Earth.

In the book, Jackson tells stories of measuring both the staggering greenhouse gas emissions gas stoves produce and the dangerous levels of air pollutants home cooks breathe in as they sauté and roast (even long after the burners are off).

Last year, some of those measurements, published in research studies, contributed to public awareness that quickly spiraled into what multiple media outlets branded “gas stove culture wars.” (Just last week, Senator JD Vance told his supporters Vice President Kamala Harris “wants to take away your gas stoves,” which is entirely false.) But Into the Clear Blue Sky is a solutions book written by a scientist, and Jackson approaches the phaseout of gas-powered home appliances with the same steady, measured urgency he applies to exploring decarbonizing steel and electrifying vehicles—two other important solutions in his book. Also, early on, he establishes a throughline: that the impacts of the climate crisis are unequally felt, and solutions need to be accessible and applicable to all.

Jackson spoke to Civil Eats about his groundbreaking research, the pushback against policies that could speed electrification, and how writing about climate solutions—gas stove phaseouts and otherwise—has left him angry and afraid, but also hopeful.

You set out to write about climate solutions, and you allotted two chapters to the food system—one on gas stoves, one on beef. Considering all the ways that climate change intersects with the food system, why those two?

For a couple of reasons. In the book, I highlight the opportunities for reducing methane concentrations in the atmosphere as probably our best short-term goal for climate action. And the two largest sources of methane in the world are food: primarily cows and rice paddies, and gas appliances in our homes and buildings.

We did the first studies looking at emissions from water heaters and have spent the last five years studying gas stoves—initially, purely for their greenhouse gas emissions, to see how much methane leaks into the air. We found that the leaks from gas stoves alone in the U.S. were responsible for pollution equivalent to half a million U.S. cars.

But as we were going into hundreds of homes measuring methane, we started measuring indoor air pollutants like NOx [nitrogen oxide] gasses, which triggers asthma, and benzene, which is carcinogenic. That opened a whole new field of study for me, because I realized every time I turned on a burner on a gas stove or started the oven, pollution levels shot up above health benchmarks, even when I had the ventilation hood on in my house.

You wrote that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) doesn’t include methane leakage from gas appliances in their greenhouse gas emissions estimates. Is that still true, or has your research changed things?

It’s still mostly true. They do now include some emissions from gas stoves, but they don’t include the full set of emissions, including leakage. I began measuring methane from appliances in homes and buildings because it was the least-studied part of the gas supply chain, and I wanted to fill a fill a research gap there. Our research has drawn a lot of attention to the issue of gas appliances in our homes.

The largest source of emissions indoors is the furnace, because it burns so much more gas. But the furnace and the water heater are required to vent directly outdoors through a chimney or a pipe. I focus a lot on gas stoves because there’s no vent. Or there’s a hood that most people don’t use—and that surveys show often isn’t effective.

The levels of air pollutants you’ve measured in people’s homes are unbelievably high. In the book, you talk about how the industry knew about the health concerns more than 100 years ago, to the extent that their own experts said gas shouldn’t be used in homes without requiring hoods that vented to the outside, which didn’t happen. How much of this evidence on indoor air pollutants and the health implications is just emerging now and how much is new?

It’s a fascinating question. For example, there’s 50 years of measurements on NOx pollution indoors. There were meta-analyses done in the 1990s showing that stoves increased indoor NOx levels and that the likelihood of asthma and wheezing and different health outcomes increased if you lived in a home with a gas stove. So, that knowledge was well known 30 years before I ever thought about measuring gas stoves.

I think our instruments are better now, and we have a finer-scale resolution. And until we did it, no one had measured benzene emissions indoors from gas stoves. So, we’re still learning about the full set of pollutants that are generated indoors.

And I think we’re learning more now about not just the emission rates but the concentrations that people actually breathe. That’s the tricky part, because what you need to know for predicting health outcomes is how high the levels are—not just in the kitchen but in the bedrooms down the hall where people spend their time and sleep.

That was the biggest surprise of our studies for me—the fact that concentrations of pollutants rose so quickly in bedrooms down the hall and stayed above health benchmarks for hours after the stove was off. When you think about cooking meal after meal, day after day, month after month and these concentrations just recurring all the time in our homes . . . sometimes I think we would never willingly stand over the tailpipe of a car breathing in the exhaust, but we willingly stand over a gas stove and breathe the same pollutants.

Have you done any of this research in restaurants?

We are doing that right now, literally. I have a part of my lab up in Pittsburgh doing measurements. We’ve done some in the Bay Area. We’re doing some in the Midwest, and we’re going to go to Washington, D.C. this summer and do some more.

Generally, [commercial] kitchens have industrial hoods, which are much better. However, they also have many more burners. And they have pilot lights, which are the most inefficient way that we burn. So, I worry about exposures where the concentration is building up at night after the restaurant closes and the hoods are off and these pilot lights are burning. I worry more about small kitchens . . . somewhere where maybe the ventilation is not so good.

We’re really trying to understand the risks in kitchens and, frankly, to do it more positively. We’re trying to work with chefs to promote the benefits of electrification. There’s an increasing number of chefs willing to speak out and say, “Yes, I can cook with electricity and there’s no reason not to switch now.”

In terms of electrification, you talk a lot in the book about how climate solutions need to be accessible to everyone. Switching to induction from gas can be really costly. How do you see the transition becoming possible for people at all income levels?

I do think the cost will come down over time. But I think of climate solutions [as having] two flavors: One is to use less of whatever it is that emits fossil fuels. The other is to decarbonize whatever infrastructure is left. And we can’t really cook less, so that’s not a realistic solution set for our homes.

So, I think we need to favor reach codes that require future construction to be all electric.

Governor [Kathy] Hochul and the Assembly and Senate in New York passed the country’s first state-level bill requiring new homes and buildings be all-electric by 2026. Those bills make sense to me, because every time we plumb a new house or new building with gas infrastructure or fossil fuel infrastructure, we lock in greenhouse gases for decades to come.

I don’t suggest that we need to go into every home and rip people’s stoves off the walls. We need an orderly transition, and the place to do that is when our stoves reach the end of their lifetime, to switch them out. Since I am fortunate and relatively wealthy, I chose to replace my gas stove with an induction stove before the end of its lifetime because I could. But the hundreds of homeowners we sample in Bakersfield and lower-income neighborhoods, they don’t have that option, and even if they can afford it, they rent. So, I worry the most about people in lower-income communities.

There’s also been a lot of pushback. Are you optimistic about these electrification laws moving forward?

The industry is powerful. The reach codes that Berkeley passed have been overturned. There were 100 cities and counties in California that had passed similar reach codes, and most of those are now moot. States like New York have taken a different approach, and I’m optimistic that states that want to act will find a way to incentivize the transition to electric appliances. But there have now been a couple of dozen states that have passed preemption laws to make such codes illegal. Though there’s tremendous pushback, I think induction stoves will win eventually, because they’re a better product. They’re more efficient. A child can’t burn their hand. But [with climate], winning slowly is the same as losing, as Bill McKibben likes to say.

On that note, my editor suggested I ask you about what gives you hope, and I felt myself having an emotional reaction. Like, “I don’t care about hope! I care about what’s possible. Brass tacks. What can be done—or not—to move the needle?” But you use the word hope a lot in the book, so I thought I should ask: Why?

I would say that hope and optimism are muscles that we need to exercise. My first homework assignment in any class is for students to go home and research things in the environment that are better today than they were 50 years ago. That list is long. It’s lifespan and childhood mortality. It’s water and air quality. It’s a decline in global poverty, despite the injustices that remain. Then there’s a long list of targeted regulations that have saved us money and made us healthier.

The phaseout of leaded gasoline has literally made us smarter and made lead levels in our kids’ blood drop 95 percent. There’s the Montreal Protocol that saved billions of cases of skin cancers and cataracts. And there’s my favorite example—the Clean Air Act—that saves 100,000 American lives a year, a bipartisan bill at a 30-fold return on investment.

So, I think by acknowledging past successes we make future successes in climate more likely, because we can see a path to a better future. And I guess I believe strongly that it’s very easy in my world to sink only into the latest statistics of drought and disasters—but it doesn’t seem to motivate people.

So, it’s a sort of hope grounded in facts and history.

Yes, but the undercurrent is there, which is, you know, I’m afraid and angry, because we’ve wasted decades. We’ve sprinted right to 1.5°C—something that people thought was unfathomable 20 years ago—and we seem to be sprinting towards 2°C. So yes, I’m hopeful, but I’m also angry and afraid for all of us.

Given the urgency, do you think that this upcoming election could partially determine whether catastrophic outcomes are locked in?

I’m an environmental scientist, and at this point in my life, there’s only one party that seems to take climate and the environment seriously. It wasn’t always that way. My biggest regret is how politicized and polarized the environment has become. Republican administrations created the EPA and signed the Montreal Protocol. Even Margaret Thatcher, she once said something like, “We have treated the atmosphere like a dust bin.” She of course backtracked later in her career, but she was a chemist and scientist, and she understood.

I regret the fact that we are in a place where a Republican who mentions climate gets defeated in a primary by someone farther to the right. I don’t want to pick parties, but I’m deeply concerned about this election. We can’t afford another administration undoing climate rules. It isn’t just for the climate. It’s killing millions of people around the world and hundreds of thousands of Americans. Let’s be frank about it.

$2 Billion for Farmer Discrimination. On July 31, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack announced that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) had successfully distributed more than $2 billion to 43,000 farmers who had experienced discrimination while attempting to secure USDA loans.

The announcement marked a historic moment in a long saga. Farmers have alleged discrimination in the agency’s loan programs for decades, and multiple lawsuits have been filed over the years by women, Indigenous, and Black farmers who said they were treated differently when applying for loans, driving many out of business.

In 2020, lawmakers set aside $4 billion specifically to compensate Black farmers for race-based discrimination, but the program was thrown out in the wake of lawsuits, many of which were filed by Republican officials who alleged discrimination against white farmers. So when Democrats passed the Inflation Reduction Act, they authorized a new, race-neutral fund that would compensate any farmer who alleged discrimination based on race, ethnicity, gender, and other factors.

During a press call announcing the news, Vilsack said the agency received 58,000 applications and ultimately approved 43,000. While the agency could not compensate farmers for losses or pain endured, he said, “I think it represents USDA acknowledging and responding to reported discrimination.”

Vilsack could not provide statistics on how many of the individuals who received funding were Black farmers, but said that analysis may become available in the future. He also pointed out that the states with the most farmers awarded funding were Mississippi and Alabama.

In addition to the payments, he said the agency has been working to root out and prevent future discrimination and break down barriers to access within its loan programs with, for example, “new processes that reduce the need for human discretion in loan decision-making.”

Many Democrats in Congress and advocacy organizations released statements applauding the USDA’s progress on the issue. “Today marks an important milestone for USDA and for our collective efforts to hold the Department accountable in addressing a history of acts of discrimination against perpetually marginalized agricultural producers and their communities,” said Michelle Hughes, Co-Executive Director of the National Young Farmers Coalition, in a press release. The coalition was one of the cooperating organizations, along with others like the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, that helped the USDA get the word out to farmers about the application process.

Dangerous Drift. According to a report published last week by the Midwestern Prairie Rivers Network (PRN), herbicides sprayed primarily on row crops in Illinois are drifting far from targeted fields, damaging trees and other plant life. Researchers at PRN monitored symptoms of pesticide drift—such as curled leaves—and collected tissue samples from plants over six years. They found symptoms of drift during 677 out of 679 total visits to nearly 300 sites. Of 127 tissue samples taken from trees and other plants, 90 percent contained herbicide residues. Herbicides detected included 2,4-D, atrazine, dicamba, glyphosate, and seven others.

Many of the sites where researchers documented incidents of drift were more than 500 feet from the likely source of exposure, suggesting the chemicals are drifting significant distances. “Our monitoring and tissue sampling program indicates that current legal safeguards/protections and regulatory efforts are inadequate at protecting people and the environment from herbicide drift,” the researchers wrote.

At a press conference for the release of the report, co-author Kim Erndt-Pitcher said the results pointed to the fact that herbicides are playing a significant role in the decline of tree health across the state, and residents and farmers expressed concerns about potential risks to animals and their families’ health.

Patsy Hopper, an organic farmer and landowner south of Urbana, Illinois, said her land long produced a bounty of fruits and vegetables. At one point in time, she remembered harvesting 50 gallons of cherries in a season. “In the past few years, we’ve hardly had a harvest because of pesticide drift. The trees are dying,” she said. “This year, we had enough cherries for one pie.”

Farm-State Veep. On August 6, Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris chose Tim Walz as her running mate, catapulting agriculture and other food issues into the 2024 presidential election in a new way.

As a member of the House of Representatives, Walz served on the Agriculture Committee. There, he played a role in three farm bill cycles, sponsoring various proposals focused on expanding on-farm conservation efforts and supporting beginning farmers and ranchers.

As Governor of Minnesota, Walz has advocated for biofuels, a key priority of commodity ag groups, and local advocates for small farms say he fought consolidation to keep more farmers on the land. He also championed and ultimately signed into law a universal school meals program in the state.

The post A New Book Dives Deep Into the Climate and Health Impacts of Gas Stoves appeared first on Civil Eats.

Farm Stops Create New Markets for Small Farms

Paige Hodder — Mon, 12 Aug 2024 09:00:35 +0000

At Argus Farm Stop, the shelves are full of locally raised vegetables and fruit, herbs, beef, chicken, fish, and more. Beets from one local farm snuggle up against sunchokes from another, across eggs from yet another. Above many of the market’s displays hang smiling pictures of farmers alongside their produce.

And when these same farmers make a delivery to Argus Farm Stop, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the staff treat them like minor celebrities: free coffee, shout-outs from the owners, the works. “They are like rock stars,” says Bill Brinkerhoff, Argus’ co-owner, a tall, friendly businessman with a passion for local food. “It’s like, ‘Farmer John is in the house!’”

Argus represents an emerging business model, the farm stop, which connects consumers and farmers in a local food web. A farm stop sells food on consignment from nearby small and medium farms, landing it somewhere between a grocery store, a farmers’ market, and a food hub. Here, farmers deliver freshly harvested produce to a brick-and-mortar retail shop with a full staff. The farmers set their own prices and keep the bulk of the revenue.

Bill Brinkerhoff, Argus Farm Stop co-owner. (Photo credit: Paige Hodder)

Farm stops operate quite differently from typical mainstream grocery stores like Kroger or Albertson’s, which rely on industrialized food systems and complex supply chains. They are also distinct from a farmers’ market, which requires farmers to either be there for sales or hire someone to sell for them. With farm stops, retail consumers have better access to local food, and farmers can spend more time farming.

It’s a small but expanding niche. At least six farm stops operate in the Midwest, and many of them opened over the past decade, including Bloomington Farm Stop Collective, in Indiana, and the Lakeshore Depot, in Marquette, Michigan.

At Argus, the hope is to make life easier for farmers. Too many small farmers quit, Brinkerhoff says, because “there is not enough money and it’s too hard. We are trying to change that narrative: to make it sustainable, economically, to be a small farmer.”

A Niche for Smaller Farms

Smaller farms in the U.S. are buckling under the weight of financial, legal, and logistical challenges. A farm could try to supply a grocery store, but the major chains don’t pay enough to cover the higher costs of independently grown produce. Even if a store did pay adequately, a small farm might struggle to meet licensing and regulation requirements designed with industrial farming in mind.

“We have to trust that they are going to supply us, and they have to trust that we are going to take good care of their products.”

As a result, smaller farms are disappearing. From 2012 to 2022, the number of farms in the U.S. decreased by almost 10 percent, according to the USDA’s 2022 Census of Agriculture, while the average farm size increased 6.7 percent, from 434 acres to 463 acres. That has created a food system that may be more efficient, but is also less resilient. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the complex supply chains of large-scale systems proved vulnerable to shock, while smaller-scale operations were able to adapt and pivot. Such adaptability will prove essential as climate change continues.

In the meantime, the current industrial system is hard on smaller farm operators, who are forced “to be price takers instead of price makers,” says Kim Bayer, the owner of Slow Farm, which sells organic produce at Argus.

Farm stops can change the equation. Slow Farm, based on the north side of Ann Arbor, typically makes two deliveries a week to Argus from May to October: a small run on Wednesday, directly to the market, and a larger one on Sunday, for Argus’ community-supported agriculture program (CSA), with customers picking up their weekly boxes at the store. And, like all of Argus’ farm suppliers, Slow Farm earns 70 percent of the retail price for their food, at prices Bayer herself sets. That’s a significant difference compared to the average of 15 percent of retail going to growers who sell to supermarkets.

Kim Bayer, owner of Slow Farm, with farm managers Zach Goodman and Magda Nawrocka-Weekes. (Photo credit: Paige Hodder)

The model relies on a “mutual trust relationship” between the food stop and the farmers, Brinkerhoff says. “We have to trust that they are going to supply us, and they have to trust that we are going to take good care of their products.”

Better Food, Better Access

For customers, meanwhile, farm stops supply ultra-fresh goods that are otherwise hard to come by.

In Michigan, corn and soy farming dominate the agricultural economy, and smaller vegetable farms are less common, says Jazmin Bolan-Williamson, the farm business coordinator at the Michigan State University Center for Regional Food Systems. So large grocery chains in the region often fill their shelves with heavily processed foods that are transported from thousands of miles away.

Farms supplying Argus, by contrast, produce a wide range of crops, including heirloom varieties. All of it travels only a few miles to arrive on the shelf. The food is not only fresher, but its carbon footprint is lighter, another boon.

The benefits of farm stops extend to larger groups, too. Argus hopes to become as a single point of contact for school kitchens in the community, making it easier for them to source locally grown food. This creates a network of support for a resilient local food system. And not just in farm country. The model can also help create those networks in cities, too.

In Rock Hill, South Carolina, for example, FARMacy Community Farmstop provides quality food to the city’s lower-income residents. A farm stop’s flexibility, size, and community-centered focus are uniquely suited to help, FARMacy’s founder, Jonathan Nazeer, says.

FARMacy employs a pay-what-you-will system, where lower-income customers pay what they can and others pay above sticker price to compensate. The farm stop has received funding from the South Carolina Dept of Local Food Purchasing Assistant for produce at the market and in weekly boxes.

FARMacy also cultivates learning and gathering around food, Nazeer says. In the seating area outside the store, FARMacy hosts concerts, workshops, and cooking classes. Here, people connect more deeply with what they’re eating, while they create community. When people value and understand their food, he says, “we empower them to take charge of their health and feel good about how they are participating in this system.”

Paving a Path for Farm Stops

Creating alternative food systems comes with its own set of obstacles, some of which are regulatory.

Farmers’ markets typically work under cottage food laws, which allow farmers to sell unregulated food as long as they are present for the sale. Farm stops, however, operate outside of this regulatory system, which can create some unusual challenges—and ad hoc solutions.

For example, in 2016, after receiving a complaint, the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development (MDARD) cited Argus for selling eggs from small farms that hadn’t processed their eggs in a licensed facility. Under Michigan law, unlicensed egg producers can only sell their eggs directly to consumers. An inspector visited the farm stop and seized 90 dozen eggs, according to the MDARD.

Over the following weeks, Argus worked with the department, local farms and experts, and elected state officials to find a way for the unlicensed farms to sell directly to customers. Now, Argus merely holds the eggs (in a distinct refrigerator) but takes no money; customers pick up the eggs they’ve purchased from farmers.

“MDARD has been working in collaboration and partnership with Argus Farm Stop for many years,” says Jennifer Holton, a spokesperson for the department. “It is a success story in Michigan from a farmer perspective, in that they provide a way for farmers to get their products to an enthusiastic, supportive customer base in an economically viable way that respects the limited time farmers have for selling their products away from the farm.”

Eggs from Shady Glade on display at Argus Farm Stop. (Photo credit: Paige Hodder)

Other challenges are financial and practical.

Establishing and maintaining a farm stop takes a lot of time and money, says Michigan State University’s Bolan-Williamson. It can be tricky to find the right building for a market, and it can cost millions to build a grocery-ready facility from the ground up, she says.

Getting a bank loan could prove difficult, too. It’s likely a bank would want to see local interest in a farm stop before lending funds, Bolan-Williamson says. She suggests that farm stops hold town meetings, gather signatures or even seek donations as proof of that interest.

Despite these challenges, Brinkerhoff says, if you find the right niche, a farm stop can be entirely supported by consumer demand. He and his partners founded Argus roughly 10 years ago with $180,000. Argus now operates two markets and two cafés, employs 65 people, and partners with roughly 200 local farmers, food producers, and artisans. In 2023, the store made $6.5 million in sales.

Argus is now taking a leading role in expanding the movement. Its success, and its galvanizing effect on local farms, provide a beacon: In the past decade, the acres of farmland in Washtenaw County—where Argus is located — actually grew, according to the USDA census of agriculture.

In March, Argus held the first-annual National Farm Stop Conference in Ann Arbor. The conference hosted roughly 120 participants from across the country, including existing farm stops, representatives from communities looking to adopt the model, and policymakers hoping to understand more about it.

They’re learning from each other. Nazeer, who attended the conference on behalf of FARMacy, says different cities can adapt the model to their needs, and each has unique strategies to share. In fact, after the conference, Argus visited FARMacy to learn more about its approach.

Senior representatives from the USDA were also at the conference; they connected with Argus and expressed interest in using the model to grow local food systems.

Employee Tess Rian checks new herbs on display at Argus Farm Stop. (Photo credit: Paige Hodder)

Rebecca Gray, director of The Wild Ramp farmers’ market in Huntington, West Virginia, felt energized by the event. She says she recognized the chance to learn from successful, long-running farm stops, and appreciated how a span of a few days helped bridge the gap between politicians and small farmers. “It was a really great opportunity for these two groups of people to connect and learn about each other’s operations,” she says, and “for policymakers to see what their policy is actually doing.”

Besides hosting the farm stop conference, Argus also offers monthly hour-long webinars and sells three-day online courses for anyone interested in starting their own farm stop, plus private consulting.

Brinkerhoff is not looking to open more farm stops, but he remains committed to helping other communities do so. Farm stops are “efficient, effective, enjoyable, and affordable,” he says. “Any town that has a farmers’ market can do one.”

This article was updated to correct one of the sources of FARMacy’s funding.

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‘Shelf Life’ Peeks Into the Nooks and Crannies of the Cheesemaker’s World

Nicole J. Caruth — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 09:00:39 +0000

“Milk is one of the simplest things in nature,” says Jim Stillwagon, an eccentric cheesemaker standing in his cluttered kitchen somewhere in the Pyrenees. “When a child vomits on your shoulder, those are the earliest vestiges of cheese.”

Stillwagon’s strange philosophical musings on curd set the tone for Shelf Life, a new documentary about the parallels between cheese aging and human aging. Produced by Robyn Metcalfe and directed by Ian Cheney (whose films include King Corn and The Search for General Tso), Shelf Life premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in June, where it won the award for Best Cinematography in a Documentary Feature.

Filmed in more than six countries over three years, Shelf Life takes us inside the work spaces of artisan cheesemakers and specialists to observe them at their craft: through the halls of underground cheese vaults in Vermont. Under the microscope with a cheese microbiologist in California. Behind the scenes of the World Cheese Awards in Wales. Into a children’s classroom in Japan for a cheese-making lesson. And to the cheese-laden dining-room table of an award-winning cheesemonger in Chicago (see “Five Questions for Alisha Norris Jones,” below).

Cheesemaker Jim Stillwagon in his kitchen somewhere in the Pyrenees. (Photo courtesy of Wicked Delicate Films)

Wonderfully diverse in scope, we even get to visit an archeologist’s dig site in Egypt to learn about cheese in the afterlife, observe a traditional hand-pulled cheese practice in Tbilisi, Georgia, and descend into the shadowy basement stacks of a cheese librarian in Switzerland. Metcalfe calls this remarkable cast of characters “the poets of the cheese business.”

Shelf Life captures the vast and complex universe of cheese, acknowledging its place in the food system without getting into its politics—even when there’s a lot to say: The global cheese market is estimated at around $187 billion, according to one report, but this monetary worth comes with a sizable carbon footprint. According to a joint study by the Environmental Working Group and the firm Clean Metrics, dairy-based cheese is the third-highest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, trailing behind beef and lamb.

Some have advocated for vegan cheese as a potential solution to environmental troubles. But dairy-based cheeses play an important role in local economies and culinary traditions worldwide, enriching people’s stories and ways of life—something Shelf Life celebrates.

Although film is a relatively new medium for Metcalfe, her connection to the food industry goes back to her grandfather, Roy Diem, who worked with entrepreneur Bob Wian to build the first Bob’s Big Boy. Metcalfe grew up spending time at the restaurant, famous for its double-decker hamburger. She went on to study historical food systems at Boston University, where she earned her Ph.D., and taught modern European food history at the University of Texas, Austin. At one time, she conserved rare breeds of livestock in Maine.

Metcalfe has authored several books on the food supply chain, including Food Routes: Growing Bananas in Iceland and Other Tales from the Logistics of Eating (featured in Civil Eats’ 2019 summer book guide). She also founded Food+City, a nonprofit storytelling platform that delves into how cities are fed, and the Food+City Challenge Prize, a pitch competition funding food-tech startups around the world.

We spoke with Metcalfe recently about why she made the documentary, the future of vegan cheese, and how aging builds character both in cheeses and humans.

What inspired you to make a documentary about cheese—and why now?

The first urge to pursue this subject came from an unanswered question I had as I finished a book called Humans in Our Food. My interest in food, oddly, is not so much about the food; it’s about the systems that bring the food to the table. Often, they feel industrial and disconnected from humans.

One of my curiosities was, what are the food stories we’re not hearing? Who’s missing and unseen? I sensed that it was the people building pallets, working in food service, driving trucks, packing, and all of that stuff. I wondered if what we imagine about them is true—for example, that they’d all rather be doing something else. Or that they’re working for very little money, are pretty much exploited, kind of a sad picture, and not very smart. Some people think, “Well, if you were really smart, you would not be doing that work.”

What I did [for the book] was travel all over the world and look at a really simple dish, like a slice of pizza in New York or a rice ball in Japan. Then, I went to see who brought those things together. In doing so, the answer I got was, these unseen people are aspirational. For many immigrants in particular, it’s the way they get in and up and move onward. Some of them, surprisingly, love their jobs. Not all of them, but the assumption was so much one way, and I discovered it’s much more nuanced. One group I was really curious about was affineurs, people who work in caves. [You] might be familiar with going through a winery and seeing people who age wine, but not many people know who’s in caves aging cheese.

The second thing is that, in becoming older, I was really put off by the conversations that people wanted to have with me even a decade ago, which were, “Oh, are you still doing X?” It was all about decline and being careful and not taking any risks and certainly not building up, but designing down. It was disturbing to me. This is not what anyone wants to hear. And how much of it is a self-fulfilling prophecy, after all?

So, I’m holding this thought about how cheese ages and I thought, “I wonder if we can learn something about aging a cheese, which gets better over time or transforms [and becomes] what it wants to be in terms of character. Might we push back on this human conversation of decline?” Those two things are why I chose this subject. It wasn’t because I was a cheese lover who wanted to make a film about cheese and found a way.

Did making ‘Shelf Life’ turn you into a cheese lover?

At one point, I got a cheese certificate at Boston University because that’s how you learn about things. But if someone said to me, “Robyn, what’s the difference between these two blues?” or asked me to tease out all the different flavor molecules, I would be absolutely helpless. [But cheese is] a wonderful lens to look at life.

A cheese expert feels the rind that develops during the aging process. (Photo courtesy of Wicked Delicate Films)

What were some challenges you faced when filming?

It was a challenge getting [the cheesemakers] to talk about aging. I mean, how many people do you know who like to talk about aging? People, especially younger generations, want to be relatable and supportive, and they’re curious about being older, but it’s an awkward conversation.

(Instead,) everyone wanted to share their cheese [process]. We would get responses like, “Thank you for contacting us. This is how we make our cheese.” But we weren’t actually that interested in the how but more the why. That was very hard, because people are over the moon about cheese and want to talk about it. So, we spent more time getting to know our characters before they felt they had told us their story about cheese and would speak to us about other things.

Did you learn anything new or surprising from the conversations about cheese and aging?

Absolutely. There were a lot of really fun little paradoxes. Initially, we talked to a cheese-making nun who was featured in a New Yorker article [but didn’t make it into the film]. She had a very interesting spiritual approach to what’s going on with cheese. I was really surprised to see how you could draw a metaphor about cheese as a body. Generations of microbes transform the cheese. They eat the cheese, then they die, and leave it for the next generation of microbes . . . changing the landscape of that cheese as it develops into its character.

Also, I appreciated cheesemaker Mary Quicke’s comments about multiple peaking. People talk a lot about how I’ve “passed my peak,” “I’m not in my prime,” or “Are these the sunset years of my life?” I was surprised by her clarity and understanding that you have a lot of peaks, and you’ll have more peaks. There’s not a limited supply of peaks; it’s just a limited imagination.

Were any of the people you interviewed for the film concerned about climate change?

Some people were attaching sustainability to their farming practices—for example, Jasper Hill, in Vermont. But some of the cheese companies and cheesemakers we spoke to are so small-scale that, in most cases, climate concerns never came up. Jasper Hill uses milk from, shall we say, a largish dairy and sort of sits on the edge of artisanal and scale. That’s the conundrum, isn’t it? If you want to have good food available at a low cost to as many people as possible, then you have to get bigger. In Shelf Life, you can see that Jasper Hill already has a robot flipping cheese.

A quality control group in the underground cellars at Jasper Hill Farm in Vermont. (Photo courtesy of Wicked Delicate Films)

As a historian, were there specific experiences or people you encountered while filming that stuck with you more than others—for instance, the notion that cheese, for Egyptians, was a food they envisioned in the afterlife?

I could relate to the archeologist in Egypt trying to read artifacts and divine a story from them. Historians often don’t have the actual pieces of things and are always groping and learning how to tell the story. I was surprised to hear about the Egyptians’ concept of cheese, because you don’t read much about that.

I was fascinated by the use of old historic buildings being used to age cheese, like old breweries, for example, and some of the bunkers in Europe. Or weird places like subway halls. These repurposed spaces bring up a terroir sort of conversation about the minerals, the humidity, the bacteria, and all of that. I’m not in the cheese business, but all these moves for new sanitation standards—removing the bacteria and original wooden shelves where cheese has aged—are disheartening, because often it’s that magic elixir of all those things that make cheese special.

**

Alisha Norris Jones. (Photo courtesy of Wicked Delicate Films)

Shelf Life offers a glimpse into the life of Alisha Norris Jones, an artist and professional cheesemonger based in Chicago. Jones is the creative mind behind @_immortalmilk, an “underground” cheese shop that pops up at different locations, offering curated cheese boards inspired by various aspects of culture, from art books and Instagram to Jones’ mood and travels.

Her work has garnered acclaim, leading to multiple awards and social media praise. Recently, she took first place at the inaugural Cheesy Chopped Championship hosted by the Cheese Culture Coalition, an organization promoting equity and inclusion in the cheese industry. We caught up with Jones to learn how she got started, what makes a good pairing, and how economic status influences our relationship with cheese.

How did you find your way to the fine cheese business?

I’m originally from Boston and moved to Chicago about 16 years ago. I got my start in food and hospitality by working at Publican Quality Meats, serving and making coffee. I eventually became a pastry assistant.

I was a really bad pastry chef. I lasted about three months and left before I could get fired. But one of the things that caught my attention was working with the cheese case. I went to school for religion and anthropology and have always been interested in food and food justice. Cheese seemed like a really cool way to talk about justice, class, culture and also food, wrapped all up into one thing that’s a living and breathing product—because all cheese is still alive, for the most part, when it arrives on your plate.

From there, I fell in love with cheese, worked at a couple more restaurants, and then took a break from fine dining to work in the specialty department at Whole Foods. I ended up being there for about five years and realized I could go for my cheese certification and become more of a professional in this field. It kind of took off from there.

Tell us more about how cheese is a conduit to conversations about justice and class.

Almost every culture that can produce cheese, across the globe, does. It can be a sign of the elite and bourgeois—a person might only go to France for Brie or pay $300 for a tasting menu. On the flip side, cheese is what got us through industrialization. By preserving milk, a person could bring it to a factory and eat it over the course of a 12-hour shift.

It was also a way for people to survive through the ‘70s and ‘80s with government cheese. I think it’s fascinating that some folks to this day believe that cheese isn’t for them because it’s perceived as a white thing or a rich thing, when it really affects all levels of society. I can almost tell you where you grew up and what you’ve had access to through what your favorite cheeses are.

As far as justice, seeing the way that land rights can also factor into cheese makes me think about who we’re advocating for. Some cheesemakers have gotten into growing marijuana because they’re not getting dairy subsidies anymore or because their land is being encroached upon by large growers or multinational dairy companies.

As an artist with a background in anthropology, how do you approach curating cheese boards?

I think about the season, especially what’s available in produce and cheese. Then, I think about my mood. Say it’s early spring: A lot of beautiful Loire-style French goat cheese is coming out [then], so I’ll look towards France and get into French cheese culture, like French movies or French visual artists and pick up on whatever palettes and moods they’re using and incorporate that into the larger board.

How do you know when a cheese pairs well with something? What are you looking for?

I’m looking for a volume match. If I have a loud cheese, I want something that’ll either be just as loud on a palate, or through texture, to complement it. I’m also thinking about acidity—again, I want something that won’t overpower the cheese—and something interesting that you haven’t really seen before, without necessarily talking down to the person eating it. There’s been this trend of matching junk food with cheese, where I’m like, “This is cool, but we can be a little bit better about this. Let’s get some fruit in here. Let’s get out of the candy aisle.”

Cheese raises questions about climate and whether vegan cheese is better for the environment. Do climate concerns come up for you in your work?

In past years, no. But I am thinking about it now, especially after going to the American Cheese Society conference and hearing fellow industry folks say we need to talk about this. With droughts and hotter temperatures, there is a concern about the cows and what milk they will provide when they’re literally overheated. And do we have enough money to keep them in an air-conditioned barn, which is insane to think about.

There’s not one solution to the climate question. I think more folks should be eating better cheese; sometimes, that means eating vegan cheese. Some vegan cheese artisans are doing cool things informed by traditional cheese making, and there should be room for everybody at the table. But cashews and almonds take up a lot of water. [Vegan cheese won’t] solve anything unless we’re careful about climate altogether.

These conversations have been edited for length and clarity.

To find a screening of Shelf Life, or to host one, visit https://www.shelflifefilm.org/

The post ‘Shelf Life’ Peeks Into the Nooks and Crannies of the Cheesemaker’s World appeared first on Civil Eats.

Farmworkers Push Kroger’s Shareholders for Heat and Labor Protections

Grey Moran — Wed, 24 Jul 2024 09:00:47 +0000

For years, U.S. farmworkers have been pressuring Kroger, the nation’s largest supermarket, to come to the table to establish stronger labor protections on the farms supplying its fruits and vegetables. Specifically, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), a worker rights organization in Florida, has repeatedly asked Kroger to join its Fair Food Program, which has implemented the strongest heat protections in the nation.

Farmworkers took this a step further at Kroger’s annual shareholder meeting in late June, directing their plea for stronger human rights to the major financiers whose dividends depend on the under-recognized labor of farmworkers. They called upon the company’s shareholders—whose top investors are Vanguard, BlackRock, and Berkshire Hathaway—to support a proposal that Kroger publish a “just transition” report examining “how the risks to workers are changing due to rising temperatures” in its agricultural supply chain.

In a speech at the meeting, Gerardo Reyes Chavez, a former farmworker and current organizer with CIW, painted a picture for shareholders of the stark reality faced by U.S. farmworkers laboring under record-breaking temperatures—with no mandatory right to shade, water, or breaks in most states. The proposal, introduced by Domini Impact Investments, one of Kroger’s shareholders, adds pressure to the company to address these growing risks.

“Kroger’s current supplier policies contain vague expectations and do not include binding obligations that effectively keep workers safe.”

“We must establish the gravity, indeed, the dire urgency of this resolution. The stakes of a just transition for Kroger are nothing less than life or death for the farmworkers who put food on all our tables,” Chavez said in his address to the shareholders. “Even just taking a break to drink water has been met with harassment and violence from a supervisor. I know this because it is the reality I myself have lived as a farmworker.”

Kroger did not respond to a request for comment by press time.

Meanwhile, earlier this month, the Biden administration unveiled a heat protection rule, the first federal standard of its kind, which would require employers develop an emergency plan for heat illness and provide outdoor workers with shade, water, rest breaks, and training to manage and identify heat risks. But its pathway to implementation is murky. The rule likely won’t be finalized until the end of the year. Also, it may be halted under a Trump administration, and it will likely be challenged in court by industries already fighting it.

Currently, only four states—California, Oregon, Washington, and Colorado—have mandated similar rules to protect farmworkers from extreme heat. In the meantime, the consequences are dire: Farmworkers are 35 times more likely to die of heat stress compared to workers in other industries.

The investors supporting the proposal claim that Kroger’s existing policies are failing to protect workers from climate risks and other human rights abuses, pointing to the death of a worker at Kroger’s distribution center from heat stress in 2023. Investors also cited Kroger’s track record of supplying from multiple farms linked to modern-day slavery, including sourcing from a watermelon farm in Florida where workers—held against their will in a barbed-wire encampment—escaped by hiding in the trunk of a car.

“Kroger’s current supplier policies contain vague expectations and do not include binding obligations that effectively keep workers safe. For monitoring, Kroger relies on social audits or voluntary self-assessments, which have been widely critiqued and discredited for their failure to deliver human rights outcomes and remediate harms,” states the proposal.

Instead, the proposal encourages Kroger to join the CIW’s Fair Food Program, which it describes as “the only farmworker program with a demonstrated track record of success in protecting farmworkers in U.S. agriculture from climate-related risks.” (Previously, Domini Impact Investments filed a proposal asking Kroger to join the Fair Food Program as a pilot program, but it was determined to be against SEC rules.)

The Fair Food Program offers binding labor protections through a contract between farmworkers, farmers, and major food retailers, which is monitored by an independent council that operates a 24/7 trilingual complaint line. The program has been widely recognized for rooting out some of the most persistent abuses, including sexual assault and forced labor, that often plague corporate supply chains. The shareholder proposal asks Kroger to examine how its current policies compare to the Fair Food Program.

The investors’ proposal also took issue with the company’s “siloed approach” to environmental issues without considering workers. For instance, “Kroger’s recently released nature-based strategy, developed to reduce pesticides with the goal to protect pollinators and biodiversity, does not make any mention of farmworkers who apply pesticides,” shareholders noted in the proposal. It’s estimated that pesticide exposure unintentionally kills around 11,000 people per year, particularly farmers and farmworkers.

In the end, despite Chavez’s plea, just over 80 percent of shareholders voted against the proposal; while 460 million shareholders voted against the proposal, 98 million voted for it. Prior to the annual meeting, Kroger’s board of directors had advised its shareholders to vote against adopting the proposal, according to SEC filings.

“We will continue to encourage Kroger to join the Fair Food Program, because we think it will deliver meaningful human rights outcomes.”

“The company already provides robust annual reporting on sustainability and social impact topics and engages stakeholders to inform content,” stated Kroger’s board of directors, citing the company’s existing environmental, social, and governance (ESG) strategy. “People are at the heart of Kroger’s purpose-driven approach and shared-value ESG strategy: Thriving Together. As outlined in our ESG report, we aim to advance positive impacts across three strategic pillars—people, planet, and systems.”

Mary Beth Gallagher, the director of engagement with Domino Impact Investments, the company behind the shareholder proposal, was still encouraged by the percentage of shareholders who voted in favor of adopting her proposal. “It signals that enough of their investor base sees this as a risk that they should be managing differently,” she told Civil Eats.

“We will continue to encourage Kroger to join the Fair Food Program, because we think it will deliver meaningful human rights outcomes,” Gallagher said. “It will protect against this risk, and it will strengthen its human rights programs and performance.”

Major Farmworker Union Endorses Vice President Kamala Harris. The United Farm Workers, the largest farmworker union in the U.S., endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris just hours after she announced her campaign for U.S. president. “Kamala Harris stood with farmworkers as CA’s attorney general, as U.S. senator, and as vice president. There is work to be done, and we’re ready. Sí, se puede!” said the union on the social platform X. The endorsement came hours after President Joe Biden’s departure from the race on July 21.

U.S. Farmers Turn to Drinking When Stressed. A new study from the University of Georgia found that one in five U.S. farmers use excessive alcohol to cope with high levels of stress. “It really is a public health issue because there are drastic, traumatic outcomes associated with not being able to ask for that care, using alcohol to cope, and then feeling hopeless,” Christina Proctor, the study’s lead author, said in a press release. She identified mental health care stigma and lack of rural healthcare access as barriers to farmers receiving the care they need.

The post Farmworkers Push Kroger’s Shareholders for Heat and Labor Protections appeared first on Civil Eats.

A US Court Found Chiquita Guilty of Murder in Colombia. What Does the Ruling Mean for Other U.S. Food Corporations Abroad?

Grey Moran — Tue, 25 Jun 2024 09:00:00 +0000

There is no justice for the families of massacred banana workers in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Their deaths are only remembered by the massacre’s sole survivor, José Arcadio Segundo, who spends the rest of his life trying to convince others in his town of what he witnessed. In the book’s final scene, even the town is “wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men.” The fictional banana company’s power is so vast that it can bend history and memory—and murder its workers with impunity.

The novel is a parable for how the United Fruit Company, the U.S. multinational giant that rebranded as Chiquita in 1990, sustained its banana plantations across Latin America through ruthless, bloody tactics, confronting consequences only rarely. The fictional massacre is based on real events: In 1928, Colombian troops killed striking United Fruit Company workers in a town not far from where Márquez grew up.

Despite this history, the banana giant’s pattern of violent repression wiped out by the wind has arrived at a new chapter.

After a 17-year legal struggle, survivors of Chiquita’s violence in Colombia received a rare, groundbreaking legal victory. A South Florida jury found the U.S.-headquartered agribusiness liable for financing murders carried out by the right-wing paramilitary group Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC) between 1997 and 2004.

During these years, Chiquita secretly paid upwards of $1.7 million to the AUC, a designated terrorist organization, to act as a security force pacifying the banana-growing region in the midst of Colombia’s decades-long civil war.

This marks the first time a U.S. court held a corporation liable for human rights abuses committed in another country—which lawyers and advocates describe as a historic legal milestone against transnational corporate abuse.

“The level of this victory is so great,” said Charity Ryerson, a human rights attorney and the executive director of Corporate Accountability Lab. “I hope that we spend the next three decades unpacking what this means, and that it spurs many, many, many additional cases on this basis, so that we can try to redevelop an area of law that does actually keep up with globalization and really protects the people who are most vulnerable.”

The U.S. legal system has not kept up with the globalization of the economy, Ryerson continued, resulting in few legal mechanisms to address transnational corporate abuse, including the absence of a comprehensive U.S. federal statute. Even when U.S. corporations are under fire in a lawsuit, cases involving transnational crimes can be dragged out for decades and historically have evaded a public trial before a jury and a verdict.

“These big companies usually involved in horrific acts in other countries often settle rather than have those facts see the light of day in court,” said Marissa Vahlsing, a lawyer with EarthRights International, which represented the plaintiffs.

In this case, “[Chiquita] tried every defense under the sun,” she said. “They tried to bring it to Colombia. We had to fight for years to keep this in American courts. I think that they felt the plaintiffs would just get tired and the lawyers would get tired and give up.” But they didn’t. “It was a very tiring case, and we’re not done,” Vahlsing said.

The jury ordered Chiquita to pay the family members of eight victims a total of $38 million for its crimes. This is just one of many cases representing thousands of victims—the families of banana workers, social activists, and union organizers—seeking to hold Chiquita accountable for murders in partnership with the AUC. The plaintiffs include many wives and children of the men killed, who often “had to leave their homes, leave their farms, move to cities, take refuge somewhere,” said Vahlsing. “Their lives were turned upside down.”

Beyond its direct effect on its employees and their families, the United Fruit Company has been described as a “pioneer of capitalist globalization,” developing a business model for global, multinational food corporations operating often in resource-rich and poverty-stricken regions of the Global South. This model has continued to be linked to violence and horrific abuses and is rarely held accountable, let alone put on trial before a jury. Still today, many of the largest U.S. food corporations have subsidiaries or parts of their supply chain associated with ongoing human rights abuses.

For instance, the production of cocoa in the Ivory Coast has a long history of documented human rights abuses, including child slavery on the plantations that supply Mars, Nestlé, and Hershey, prompting a 2023 federal lawsuit against the Biden administration. In Indonesia, the supply of palm oil to U.S. commodity traders ADM and Bunge has been linked to deforestation, violent confrontations with state security forces, and land grabs. More recently, an investigation by The New York Times found that PepsiCo supplies its sugar from plantations in India that push young girls into receiving hysterectomies and entering into child marriages to work alongside their husbands in the fields.

The recent verdict illuminates one pathway—a feasible legal avenue for comparable cases—for holding U.S. corporations accountable for human rights abuses abroad. The case was litigated in the U.S. under Colombian law, relying on the bedrock legal doctrine that a U.S. court can hear a defendant in their jurisdiction for crimes anywhere in the world. It’s one of few legal options, following a 2013 Supreme Court decision limiting the capacity for cases of international corporate abuse to be heard under federal law.

“[The Chiquita verdict] helps reinforce that there’s no law-free zone,” said Agnieszka Fryszman, a human rights lawyer with Cohen Milstein, which represented the plaintiffs. “If companies are operating overseas, in an area where there’s a weak rule of law and weak institutions, they could still be held to account here in their home state and home jurisdiction.”

Wildfire Smoke Is a Health Emergency. The devastating health impacts of wildfire smoke are becoming clearer. A recent study, published in Scientific Advances, found that fine particulate matter from California’s wildfires led to between 52,500 and 55,700 deaths between 2008 and 2018. “These are very irritative, very small particles that could cause damage wherever they go in the body,” Dr. Thomas Dailey, who works in pulmonary medicine at the Kaiser Permanente Santa Clara Medical Center, told CBS News. These health risks are concerning for farmworkers who work long hours outdoors, often with no guaranteed protections. Currently, only three states—California, Oregon, and Washington—have regulations to safeguard workers from wildfire smoke exposure.

Farmers Challenging Vehicle Emission Standards. Both the National Corn Growers Association and American Farm Bureau Federation are part of a new lawsuit challenging the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s rule for heavy-duty vehicle emissions standards, which aims to curb smog, soot, and greenhouse gas emissions. The groups claim that the standards transition to electric vehicles will cause economic harm, while leaving out the role of ethanol in lowering emissions from vehicles. It’s not a surprising claim coming from the National Corn Growers Association, which represents farmers growing the corn that is used to produce ethanol, a controversial biofuel.

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Climate Solutions for the Future of Coffee

Anne Connor — Tue, 21 May 2024 09:00:40 +0000

There’s not enough coffee in the world. In 2023, the world produced 3 percent less than it consumed. Growing consumer demand in Asia exacerbates the deficit, while climate change affects supply. Coffee is susceptible to heat and drought. It needs predictable conditions to thrive, and conditions now are anything but predictable.

Heat and novel rain patterns harm plants and encourage coffee rust, a devastating fungal disease. Rains may come too early or too late. There may be too much rain or too little. Or all of the above.

Climate models show what farmers are already experiencing on the ground: Climate change and arabica are incompatible, at least where coffee is currently grown.

Climate change causes labor problems and hurts farm owners, too. Lower yields mean less cash flow, contributing to wage stagnation. Underpaid pickers don’t show up, and coffee cherries rot on the ground, wasting the harvest. Heat can also cause coffee to ripen before pickers are available; again, the cherries fall and are wasted. Some harvests last for six months instead of the standard two, and some are shockingly short.

Climate also intersects with infrastructure. Sometimes, the coffee is picked, but heavy rains wash out the roads, and farmers can’t get their product to market. Or harvests are compressed into a two-week period, and the coffee mills can’t handle the tsunami of cherries waiting to be processed.

With increasingly tight margins, farm owners can’t afford the upgrades needed to make their coffee production more water-efficient, and they can’t buy new cultivars that resist coffee rust and heat.

If smallholder farmers are “deciding between ‘feed my family,’ or ‘renovate the farm,’ they’re going to feed their family,” says Maria Cleaveland, a coffee industry expert and board member of the U.S. chapter of the International Women’s Coffee Alliance (IWCA). Without hope, people leave—and many of them head for the U.S.

A Shift in Coffee Growing Regions

About 70 percent of global coffee is arabica, favored in the U.S. But climate models show what farmers are already experiencing on the ground: Climate change and arabica are incompatible, at least where coffee is currently grown.

In this map, green areas are projected to be favorable to coffee cultivation by 2050, while brown areas will not be. (Map source)

Some 50 percent of current coffee-growing land will likely be unsuitable for arabica by 2050. Brazil, Vietnam, Colombia, and Indonesia, four of the biggest coffee nations, are on that list. Growers there are looking for ways to delay the tipping point.

On the plus side, locations further from the equator—the U.S. Gulf Coast, China’s Yunnan province, and parts of Uruguay and Argentina—will likely be coffee-friendly by 2050. Enabled by increasingly favorable weather in Yunnan, coffee production there has soared by nearly 500 percent since 2006.

Coffee plants usually take three to four years to produce their first yield, making the crop a gamble at startup, but rising global demand may provide the incentive. In fact, coffee is increasingly grown in California, says Cleaveland.

Coffee roasters and retailers strategically adjust their sourcing to regional conditions. “We definitely think a lot about that,” says Andi Trindle Mersch, vice president of coffee operations and sustainability at Philz Coffee. “I consider this to be our job as coffee buyers now.” Trindle Mersch says that Philz plans 10 to 15 years ahead in sourcing and is strongly invested in Brazil. Beyond 15 years? “We’re going to keep tasting and trying.”

Could the Answer Come From Trees?

“Working in the field at very high temperatures has been exhausting,” says Miriam Monteiro de Aguiar of Brazil’s Cachoeira Farm, which has produced certified organic coffee since 1994. The blazing heat also harms the fragile coffee plants, driving Monteiro de Aguiar back to coffee’s agroforestry roots.

Even considering agroforestry, growing coffee in the shade, is unusual in Brazil. Most farms there still use open-field agriculture—but this approach may not work for much longer in the new climate reality.

Globally, many coffee farmers are moving uphill into forested areas to escape the heat. Coffee was once grown exclusively in the forest, shaded by native trees.

“We have been experimenting with shade-grown coffees,” Monteiro de Aguiar says. “More recently, we’ve been fascinated by and experimenting with syntropic agriculture.”

Syntropic agroforestry involves carefully trimming the tree canopy, balancing sun and shade to prevent fungal diseases. As they prune, workers pile leaves and branches on the ground. The biomass retains water and decomposes, enriching the soil. Using fruit trees for shade improves food security for the producers, too.

Although these regenerative models are “vigorous,” as Monteiro de Aguiar says, they are still rare. “Many producers, scientists, and researchers believe and invest more in the scientific development of drought-resistant varieties,” she notes.

Globally, many coffee farmers are moving uphill into forested areas to escape the heat. Coffee was once grown exclusively in the forest, shaded by native trees. Agroforestry reduces the ambient temperature, enriches the soil, and controls evaporation so the plants don’t dry out. It also protects coffee blossoms against frost.

But shade-grown coffee has its own problems. Perhaps most damningly, it increases the incidence and severity of coffee rust by 22 percent, although new techniques like syntropic agroforestry could help. Harvesting shade-grown coffee can be costly and difficult, as workers must contend with roots, branches, machetes, ants, and snakes while reaching for coffee cherries.

Attracted by the higher yields of sun-grown coffee, some conventional farmers clear-cut the hills, a practice that robs the coffee of shade and the land of biodiversity. One study found that arabica’s move into forested areas could result in the loss of 35 percent of threatened vertebrate species, including mammals, birds, and amphibians, due to clear-cutting.

Policy changes could offer new hope for agroforestry. Starting in late 2024, the E.U. will prohibit coffee imports from countries with new deforestation. “It’s in the air; everybody wants to know how this will affect their relationship with their buyers,” says Blanca Castro of Guatemala, executive director of the IWCA.

Some national governments have set policies to encourage shade-grown coffee. This includes Mexico, says Santiago José Arguello Campos, Coordinador General de Agricultura of Mexico. Agroforestry is “very important to preserve biodiversity,” he says. The agriculture department backs up this recommendation with technical assistance. That help is working: 96 percent of the coffee grown in Mexico is now shade-grown. Mexico has nearly 1.5 million acres of shade-grown coffee, much of it bordering protected natural areas.

Coffee worldwide is increasingly grown alongside other crops, such as avocados, plantains, cacao, sugarcane, nuts, citrus, and spices. Castro says this intercropping offers shade for coffee plants and financial stability for farmers.

Some Mexican producers grow coffee under banana trees, for example. The fruit is for farmers to consume themselves, says Arguello Campos, and farmers sell the large banana leaves to the U.S. food market for tamale wraps. This practice can generate up to 30 percent of their total income.

In places that are increasingly too hot or dry to grow coffee, such crops may someday support former coffee producers, but for now, they supplement coffee revenues.

Buying Time

Daniele Giovannucci, a former coffee consultant for the World Bank and founder of the Committee on Sustainability Assessment, sees coffee’s climate adaptation as splitting into two paths. One is specialty coffees, such as shade-grown gourmet varieties. The other, which is easier to scale, is varietals suited to new climate conditions.

A coffee plant wilts in the sun on a plantation near Manizales, Colombia. (Photo courtesy of the author)

Hardier coffee plants could buy time in the coming decades. One possibility is robusta, popular in Europe for espresso and more heat-resistant than arabica. A 2022 study predicted that about 83 percent of the world’s future coffee-growing areas would support robusta, but only 17 percent would support arabica.

Arabica’s ideal temperature range is 64-73 degrees Fahrenheit, with 47 inches of rainfall annually. By contrast, robusta thrives (in some places) at 72-86 degrees Fahrenheit. Notably, a study of robusta’s ideal temperature in Southeast Asia found it to be less heat-tolerant there. Robusta also requires more rainfall, at least 69 inches annually.

Robusta has vastly greater genetic diversity than arabica; most of its thousands of varieties have yet to be explored.

David Pohl, founder of Pohl Coffee Consulting and a certified coffee quality rater, says robusta is starting to be recognized as a specialty coffee. To bring out its best flavors, robusta must be processed, roasted, and brewed differently from arabica. Robusta prepared like arabica would not be considered a fine coffee.

Despite robusta’s potential climate advantages, Big Coffee has yet to embrace it fully. Robusta didn’t get its own quality standards until 2010. Pohl was one of the first “R-raters,” experts trained by the Coffee Quality Institute in robusta standards. Before 2010, robusta was judged by the same standards as arabica, which is rated on its “bright notes” and is rewarded for acidity. Robusta is less acidic; a fine robusta is balanced between sweet and salty, for example.

Robusta has vastly greater genetic diversity than arabica; most of its thousands of varieties have yet to be explored. The best robustas Pohl has tasted are from Africa. “They just have more to work with. And so, their coffees tend to be really, really good, whether or not they’re known to the world,” says Pohl.

Hybrid coffee plants are another possible climate solution—for farms that can get them. One hybrid, Centroamericano, introduced in 2010, scores well in “cupping” or taste ratings. It is high-yielding and rust-resistant and thrives in the shade at high altitudes. However, “only a handful” of hybrids “have become commercially available to farmers in the last 15 years, and only in select countries,” according to the nonprofit World Coffee Research.

World Coffee Research has operated a non-GMO breeding program to develop more climate-resistant coffee varieties for the past two years. They use a vast dataset to determine future conditions by country and aim for plants that will thrive in specific regions.

Trindle Mersch says Philz Coffee would be open to robustas or hybrids if the right flavor profiles came along. So far, however, they haven’t tasted one that works for their blends. She notes that Philz supports World Coffee Research. “We’re definitely believers in using science to create quality hybrids and breeds we can work with,” she says.

In 2012, coffee rust hit Mexico and Central America hard, depressing yields through 2015. Mexico’s agriculture department distributed rust-resistant cultivars such as Oro Azteca, Marsellesa, and Costa Rica 95, along with technical assistance on Fair Trade and organic certification. The project also encouraged shade-planting.

Arguello Campos says the three-year project put 200 million plants a year directly into the hands of farmers. The organizers released them in waves, allowing the original plants to yield what they could while the new ones matured.

“The goal was to increase density and resilience,” says Arguello Campos. The Mexican government invested the equivalent of $70 million per year in the project, supplemented by corporate investments and farm labor, in what Arguello Campos describes as a public-private-social venture.

Beanless Coffee

What if these options can’t hold back the impact of climate change? Scientists are exploring sustainable coffee alternatives in laboratories around the world.

A Seattle startup, Atomo Coffee, says it has cracked coffee’s flavor code—without coffee beans. Atomo extracts compounds from ingredients such as ramón seeds, which the ancient Mayans used to make a hot beverage with notes of chocolate and dark-roasted coffee. Atomo also uses date pits that might otherwise end up in landfills; for millennia, date pits have been used to make a coffee-like beverage in the Middle East. The company uses a mass spectrometer to compare its product to coffee at the molecular level.

Atomo founder Andy Kleitsch says the company started its global hunt by analyzing these traditional ingredients and wartime substitutes like chicory and acorns.

“What we found is that these substitutes don’t taste like coffee. And we don’t think consumers are ready to give up conventional coffee to drink a substitute. For us to be successful, we had to create a product that is an exact replica of coffee,” says Kleitsch.

Large coffee companies are concerned about the looming crisis, he says. “They’re all looking to address supply chain problems and quality issues.” Atomo, whose factory starts production in spring 2024, plans to introduce its product as a sideline in existing coffee shops.

Atomo coffee being brewed. (Photo courtesy of Atomo)

In San Francisco, Minus Coffee uses an upcycled approach similar to Atomo’s but with different ingredients, like chicory, millet, and carob. Founder Maricel Saenz, who grew up in Costa Rica, says Minus distributes canned cold brews to large food-service companies. The company donates 1 percent of its profits to a group called Doselva, which equips coffee farmers for intercropping.

And yes, both companies add caffeine—it’s extracted from tea.

Will consumers accept beanless coffee? Kleitsch and Saenz say their products fare well in blind taste tests. Atomo’s backers think there’s a market; they include Horizons Ventures, an early funder of Impossible Foods, and S2G Ventures, an early funder of Beyond Meat.

Trindle Mersch says these alternatives are “just a different product,” like carob versus chocolate. And, she says, “I never moved away from chocolate.”

Beanless coffee can also come from coffee plants.

A research team in Finland released a proof-of-concept study on lab-cultured coffee in late 2023 in hopes that food scientists would find it useful. They used a bioreactor—a container of liquid growth medium—to grow coffee from plant cells, like brewing beer, but without the fermentation.

“The benefit of this technology is that it’s not location-specific; you can run it wherever you want,” says Heiko Rischer, principal scientist and head of plant biotechnology at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland. He notes that the closed system gives growers control over water purity and nutrients.

VTT’s Heiko Rischer with coffee plants. (Photo credit: Vesa Kippola, VTT)

Cultured coffee grows fast, in about 10 days, and inexpensively in the lab, and it’s real coffee. It doesn’t look like a coffee bean but is easy to harvest because it’s essentially pre-ground. When the floating mat of coffee cells is drained and dried, it yields a fine powder, ready to roast. Of course, roasting powdered coffee requires a different approach than roasting whole beans, a challenge for this emerging product.

But is lab-cultured coffee good coffee? The research group readily admits that the flavor profile needs some tweaking. Its primary flavor is a smoky burned-sugar aroma with “appropriate bitterness.” Cultured coffee’s flavor can be refined with experimentation, says Sarah O’Connor, a molecular biologist at the Max Planck Institute in Germany. For example, changing the media in which cells are grown can have a dramatic effect.

David Pohl thinks it’s too soon to take coffee production into the lab. In a doomsday scenario, with farmed coffee no longer viable, he’d be happy to have alternatives. But for right now, “it’s not necessary,” he says. “You have millions of coffee farmers around the world looking for viable ways to produce coffee, and you’ve got a lot of scientists trying to do the right thing.” He adds, “We do have hope for the future.”

This article was updated with Blanca Castro’s home country of Guatemala.

The post Climate Solutions for the Future of Coffee appeared first on Civil Eats.

Strawberry Farmworkers Fight for a Living Wage

David Bacon — Wed, 24 Apr 2024 09:00:59 +0000

Driving north from Santa Barbara on California’s Highway 101, you wind through miles of grapevines climbing gently rolling hills. It’s a bucolic vision of agriculture, with hardly a worker in sight.

As soon as you drop into the Santa Maria Valley, that vision changes. Here, from March through October, endless rows of strawberries fill the valley’s plain. Along the dirt access roads, cars sit parked in the dust, most of them older vans and sedans. Dozens of workers move down the rows.

Eduardo Retano plants root stock of strawberry plants. (Photo © David Bacon)

You might notice tall plastic screens hiding some of the fields. Growers claim these screens keep animals out, but actually, they’re a legacy of the farmworker strikes of the 1970s, when growers sought to distance workers from strikers in the roadway calling out to them to stop picking and leave. The abusive and dangerous conditions of strawberry workers today, and their protests over them, make the screens more than just a symbol of past conflict.

Picking strawberries is one of the most brutal jobs in agriculture. A worker picking wine grapes can labor standing up. But the men and women in the strawberry rows have to bend double to reach the berries, in raised beds about a foot high, covered in plastic. The pain of this labor is a constant, and it’s worse at the beginning of the season. Workers will say you just have to get through the first week, when your back hurts so much you can’t sleep, until your body adjusts and the pain somehow gets less. In March, rain fills the rows with water and the cart must be dragged through the mud. When summer comes, the field turns into an oven by midday.

Through it all, workers have to pick as fast as possible, filling plastic clamshell containers—eight to a flat, the flat balanced on a cart they push between the rows. “It’s hard to pick even five boxes [flats] an hour, but if I can’t make that, or if I pick any green berries, it gets called to my attention,” said Matilde, a worker who didn’t want her last name used for fear of retaliation from her boss. She’d been picking for three weeks, her fifth year in the strawberry fields. “The foreman tells us we’re not trying hard enough, that they don’t have time to teach us, and if we can’t make it we won’t keep working. Some are even fired there in the field.”

“Not many people can do this job,” said Matilde’s coworker Juana, who also did not want her last name disclosed. Juana came to the Santa Maria Valley from the village of Santiago Tilantongo, in the Mexican state of Oaxaca. Like many strawberry pickers here, she speaks Mixtec—one of many Indigenous languages in southern Mexico—in addition to Spanish. She’s been a strawberry worker for 15 years. “I have permanent pain in my lower back,” she said, “and when it rains it gets very intense. Still, I get up every morning at 4, make lunch for my family, and go to work. It’s a sacrifice, but it’s the only job I can get.”

In both photos, immigrants from Oaxaca pick strawberries. (Photos © David Bacon)

On April 1, the Alianza Campesina de la Costa Central (Farmworker Alliance of the Central Coast) held a press conference in the city of Santa Maria. The alliance, formed by the Mixteco/Indigena Community Organizing Project (MICOP) and the Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy (CAUSE), announced their new report on the harsh working conditions and low wages that are the norm for farmworkers in the region and across the country. A powerful, 44-page document, Harvesting Dignity: The Case for a Living Wage for Farmworkers documents in shocking statistics what Matilde and Juana know from personal experience.

Low Wages, High Cost of Living

The report cited the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s living wage calculation for Santa Barbara County, one of the most expensive places to live in the United States, at $36.53 per hour apiece for two working parents with two children. Total income required for all basic expenses: $99,278.

Juana and Matilde, both working parents with children at home—Juana three, Matilde two—made less than half of the MIT calculation: $16 an hour, the state minimum wage. That would translate to a yearly income for each of $32,640.

Because strawberries are only in season for eight months, though, the women’s annual income was actually much lower. Full-time work at minimum wage for eight months would earn them $21,760. But at the beginning of the season, with not enough berries for eight hours of work each day, Matilde only got 36 hours a week—even working on Saturdays too. Juana’s week was 15 to 20 hours.

At the height of the season, instead of paying by the hour, growers begin to pay a piece rate of up to $2.20 per flat. To make the equivalent of the minimum wage, a worker has to pick more than seven flats an hour, and can earn more—but that means working like a demon, ignoring the physical cost. “Champion pickers can do eight or nine an hour,” Matilde said. “But not everyone can. Six or seven is normal.”

Most of the county’s farmworkers live in the city of Santa Maria, where the median rent is about $3,000 per month. Because of the high cost of living, a quarter of all California farmworkers sleep in a room with three or more people, according to a UC Merced/California Department of Public Health survey quoted in the report.

The Diaz family, Mixtec immigrants from Oaxaca, sleep and live in a single room in a house in Oxnard, where other migrant families also live. The Diaz family are strawberry workers. From the left, Guillermina Ortiz Diaz, Graciela, Eliadora, their mother Bernardina Diaz Martinez, and little sister Ana Lilia. (Photo © David Bacon)

Out of her strawberry wages, Juana and her husband, who works in the field with her, are paying $2,000 a month for rent, or $24,000 a year. While three of her children are grown, the other three are still at home. “We have to save to pay the rent during the winter when there’s no work. If we don’t, we don’t have a place to live,” she explained. “There are always bills we can’t pay, like water. By March there’s no money at all, and we have to get loans to survive.”

The loans, she said, come from “friends” who charge 10 percent interest. “Plus, I have to send money to my mama and papa in Mexico. There are many people depending on me.”

Matilde and her husband and their two children share a bedroom in a two-bedroom house. A family of three lives in the other bedroom, and together they pay $2,200 in rent.

“Fortunately, my husband works construction and gets $20 an hour, but the same months when there are no strawberries, the rain cuts his hours too,” she said. “Often there’s just enough money for food. We don’t eat beef or fish, just economical foods like pasta, rice, and beans. And even with that, sometimes we have to get a loan too.”

In the spring and summer a Mixtec family, living in an apartment complex in Santa Maria, works picking strawberries. Leobarda Hernandez, her daughter Rosa Seferino, and their children Carolina, Michael, Elena, Porfirio and Jorge Garcia. (Photo © David Bacon)

This poverty affects all farmworkers in the state, in all aspects of life. Only about half of farmworkers surveyed have health insurance, an unaffordable luxury. That number drops further for undocumented workers, to less than a quarter.

Because reporting bad conditions—and even more so, protesting them—is much riskier for undocumented workers, having no papers affects survival at work as well. “In Santa Barbara County in 2023 there were two farmworker deaths, both related to poor supervision and training of agricultural equipment usage,” the report noted. “In one instance, farmworkers reported they were told to continue working in a Cuyama carrot field alongside the body of their fallen coworker.”

Workers Calling for Change: The Wish Farms Strike

Santa Maria strawberry workers have repeatedly protested this unfair system. In 1997, a Mixteco worker group organized a strike that stopped the harvest on all the valley’s ranches, which lasted three days.

More recently, workers at Rancho Laguna Farms protested the owner’s failure to follow CDC guidelines during the pandemic, and won a 20-cent-per-box raise by stopping work. In 2021, 40 pickers at Hill Top Produce used the same tactic to raise the per-box piece rate from $1.80 to $2.10, which was followed by similar action by 150 pickers at West Coast Berry Farms. At the beginning of the next season in 2022 work stopped at J&G Berry Farms in another wage protest.

“During the pandemic, these workers provided our food, even though as consumers we can be oblivious of that fact,” said Erica Diaz Cervantes, an author of the Harvesting Dignity report and senior policy advocate at Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy (CAUSE). “When the workers have initiated these strikes, it has put more attention on their situation.”

Last year, workers carried out a dramatic and well-organized strike at Wish Farms, a large berry grower with fields in Santa Maria and Lompoc, and headquarters in Florida. The story of the strike, and its aftermath, is a case study in the multiple challenges workers face in their struggle for justice.

Left: Strawberry workers on strike at Wish Farms call out to workers to leave the field and join them. Right Strawberry workers at Wish Farms hold a meeting at the edge of the field and decide to form an organization, Freseros Unidos por la Justicia, or Strawberry Workers United for Justice. (Photos © David Bacon)

At the height of the season, to increase production, the company promised a wage of $6 per hour plus $2.50 per box, a rate they’d paid the previous year. When workers saw their checks, however, the piece-rate bonus was a dollar less.

They met with Fernando Martinez, an organizer with MICOP. Martinez and MICOP organizers had helped workers during the earlier work stoppages, and urged the Wish Farms strikers to go out to the fields to call other workers to join. “We helped them form a committee,” Martinez said, “and in a meeting at the edge of the field, they voted to form a permanent organization, Freseros por la Justicia [Strawberry Workers for Justice].”

Workers say that after they walked out, the company brought a crew with H-2A guestworker visas into one of the fields to replace them. The H-2A program allows growers to import workers from Mexico and other countries for less than a year, after which they have to return home.

Replacing domestic workers with H-2A workers during a labor dispute is a violation of Federal regulations. Wish Farms did not respond to requests for comment about the strike.

During the walkout, Concepcion Chavez, one of the strikers, told me, “We are always afraid they’ll replace us, because they give a preference to the contratados [H-2A workers]. That’s what the supervisors say, that they’ll replace us and send in the contratados.”

After two days, strikers reached an agreement with Wish Farms and went back to work. In September, however, as the work slowed for the winter, Chavez asked if she would be hired again the following season. “In the office they told me they had no job because the company was already filled up,” she recalled. “But when I went back to my foreman, he said the company had told him not to give me a job. That happened to other workers who were in the strike too.”

Another Roadblock to Change: Union Busting

Martinez pointed out an additional obstacle that farmworkers face. After strikes, he said, “workers usually don’t want to continue organizing because the company brings in anti-union consultants.” Wish Farms brought in Raul Calvo, a man with a long history as a union buster.

At the Apio/Curation Foods processing facility in Guadalupe, a few miles from Santa Maria, Calvo was paid more than $2 million over eight years to convince workers not to organize with the United Food and Commercial Workers. After the union was defeated in 2015, Curation Foods was bought by ag giant Taylor Farms for $73 million.

Following huge wildfires in 2017, Calvo appeared in Sonoma County in 2022 to thwart proposals for worker protections in vineyards. He organized a committee of pro-grower workers, who testified at hearings in opposition. (An ordinance including some of the protections was finally passed by the county Board of Supervisors later that year.) Most recently, Calvo was hired by the Wonderful Company to organize another anti-union committee to oppose nursery workers in Wasco, CA, who are trying to join the United Farm Workers.

This kind of opposition to unions and worker organizing activity is one reason why strawberry wages remain close to the legal minimum, said Diaz Cervantes. “[Workers] win small improvements and wins, but always in the piece rate, never the basic hourly wage. And the actions don’t go on longer because workers can’t afford to.” The net result: no permanent worker organizations.

The Impact of H-2A Workers

Immigration status also plays a role in low wages. “Eighty percent of farmworkers in Santa Maria are undocumented, and without them there is no agriculture,” said Jamshid Damooei, professor and director of the economics program at California Lutheran University and a principal advisor for the report. “Yet the median wage, which in 2019 was $26,000 a year for farmworkers born in the U.S, was only $13,000—half that—for the undocumented.”

Even though undocumented labor is cheap, strawberry growers in Santa Maria increasingly use the H-2A program to bring in workers from Mexico and Central America. Last year, the Department of Labor gave growers permission to bring 371,619 of these workers, about a sixth of the entire U.S. farm labor workforce. Growers provide food and housing. Because employment is limited to less than a year, workers must apply to recruiters to return each year.

Growers say labor shortages make hiring H-2A workers necessary. According to Western Growers president and CEO Tom Nassif, “Farmers in all sectors of U.S. agriculture, especially in the labor-intensive fruit and vegetable industries, are experiencing chronic labor shortages, which have been exacerbated by recent interior immigration enforcement and tighter border security policies.”

That is not the case, at least in the Santa Maria Valley, Diaz Cervantes responded. She says the 2022 census reported 12,000 workers there. Fernando Martinez believes the true number is double that. “I do not think there’s a shortage of farmworkers here,” Diaz Cervantes continued. “We know it’s a lot more, because many undocumented people are afraid to be counted. There are always people ready to work and put in more hours. It’s just a way to justify increasing the H-2A program.”

H-2A workers themselves are often not treated fairly. Almost all are young men. The program has a long record of complaints of overcrowding, substandard conditions, and enforced isolation from the surrounding community. Workers who aren’t fast enough, or who protest their living quarters or limited mobility (for activities like grocery shopping), can be fired at any time and sent back. Federal regulations establish a wage for them, which last year in California was $18.65 per hour—no unemployment or disability, saving growers that cost. Many H-2A workers report not being paid what they were promised, according to the Harvesting Dignity report.

Left: This complex was listed as the housing for 160 workers by Big F Company, Inc. and Savino Farms. It was formerly senior housing, and the contractor built a wall around it, with a gate controlling who enters and leaves. Center: Bars on the windows of the same complex. Right: This trailer was listed as the housing for six workers by La Fuente Farming, Inc. (Photos © David Bacon)

Last September at Sierra del Tigre Farms, in Santa Maria, more than 100 workers were terminated before their contracts had ended and told to go back to Mexico. The company then refused to pay them the legally required wages they would have earned.

One worker, Felipe Ramos, was owed more than $2,600. “It was very hard,” he remembers. “I have a wife and baby girl, and they survive because I send money home every week. The company had problems finding buyers, and too many workers.” In March Sierra del Tigre Farms declared bankruptcy, still owing workers their wages. Last year Rancho Nuevo Harvesting, Inc., a labor contractor, was forced by the Department of Labor to pay $1 million in penalties and back wages to H-2A workers it had cheated in a similar case.

“The H-2A program should be phased out . . . . We should not become a democracy that is half slave and half free.”

Rick Mines, a statistician who designed the original National Agricultural Workers Survey for the U.S. Department of Labor, is unsparing in his criticism of the H-2A program and its effect on both H-2A and domestic workers here. “There are about 2 million farmworkers in the U.S., mostly immigrant men and women who live as families with U.S.- born children. They are being displaced by a cheaper, more docile labor force of single male H-2A workers.

“The H-2A program should be phased out and replaced with a program of legal entry for immigrants who can bring their families and eventually become equal American citizens. We should not become a democracy that is half slave and half free.”

A New Way Forward

As the strawberry season unfolds in Santa Maria, growers will feel increasing pressure to get the ripe berries from the fields to supermarket shelves. Juana and Matilde will need the work to pay past bills and hopefully save for future ones. The Alianza Campesina’s support could have a big impact on their wages and lives.

“Perhaps there are different ways to change things,” speculated Martinez, the community organizer. “We’ve thought about a local ordinance like ones we’ve seen for other kinds of workers,” he continues, referencing hotel workers and fast-food workers in the state. He hasn’t lost hope that unionizing might be possible someday. “A union could also raise pay and bring benefits and holidays.”

Alondra Mendoza, a community outreach worker for MICOP, talks with a farmworker outside the Panaderia Susy early in the morning before work. (Photo © David Bacon)

MICOP and CAUSA are holding house meetings with small groups of workers and a general meeting every two weeks. “Right now we’re trying to popularize the idea of a sueldo digno [dignified wage] and explain the justice of this demand,” Martinez said. “The idea is to increase workers’ knowledge. And since so many of us are Mixtecos, we’re getting workers to reach out to their workmates from the same home communities in Oaxaca.”

Matilde has already made up her mind to get involved.

“Why should we get $2 or $2.20 per box when $3 or $3.50 is what’s fair? People have to unite—and we need big demonstrations. It’s necessary to pressure the ranchers so they value our work. Without us they have nothing. We do all the work. I am willing to help organize this, because it will make life a lot better. I hope it will happen soon.”

Correction: This article was updated to correct the location to the Santa Maria Valley, not the Santa Ynez Valley. We apologize for the error.

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The Shrimp on Your Table Has a Dark History

Grey Moran — Wed, 17 Apr 2024 09:00:17 +0000

A few months ago, along the coast of Andhra Pradesh in eastern India, Josh Farinella drove 40 minutes out of his way to visit workers who peel shrimp for Choice Canning, where he worked as a shrimp factory manager. He didn’t travel to the rural area for any of his job responsibilities; he was there to document injustice. He observed a crew of local women quickly peeling shrimp along rusty tables in 90-degree heat, wearing street clothes and flip-flops. They worked for long hours in a shed in a dirt field, far from the main work site, easily escaping the notice of auditors.

“These peeling sheds aren’t supposed to be there. They’re not supposed to be used by anybody,” Farinella told Civil Eats. “There are 20,000 pounds of shrimp per day going through these peeling sheds that are landing on U.S. grocery store shelves.” The high temperatures in the shed could easily lead to pathogen growth, he warned.

Farinella started his work for Choice Canning in 2015 at a production facility in his hometown of Pittston, Pennsylvania. In 2023, when the company offered him a high-paying managerial position at a new facility in Andhra Pradesh, he accepted. But four months into the job, he decided to come forward as a whistleblower, exposing what he says are the deplorable and unsanitary conditions in one of India’s largest shrimp manufacturers.

According to the company’s website, Choice Canning sells shrimp in more than 48,000 retail and food-service locations in the U.S. This includes major retailers like Walmart, Aldi, ShopRite, Hannaford, and HelloFresh, which advertise to consumers their commitments to sustainable seafood sourcing on their websites.

As Farinella was driving back to the town of Amalapuram, he recalled receiving a text from his wife with a photo of officers with machine guns outside their apartment. It was unusual timing. “It was one of those heart-beating-out-of-your-chest moments, like, does somebody know?” he said, worried that the company had caught on to his gathering dirt on its bad practices.

Soon after, Farinella quit his job, filed a complaint with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and flew back to the U.S. He took with him thousands of pages of documents, photographs, and videos, which have since been published by The Ocean Outlaw Project, alongside a vivid, reported account of his experiences at Choice Canning over the course of a few months of employment. According to the Project, this includes text messages that reveal that when Farinella informed the company’s vice president that shrimp had tested positive for antibiotics, which are banned in shrimp by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, he was told to “ship it” to the U.S. anyway.

Choice Canning is far from an isolated bad actor in India’s $8.4 billion shrimp industry. Farinella’s whistleblower account coincides with a three-year investigation, “Hidden Harvest,” published in March by the Corporate Accountability Lab (CAL), exposing the human rights abuses rampant across India’s shrimp sector. The report documents how India’s shrimp is farmed and processed by a highly exploited workforce, rife with horrific abuses, including child labor, sexual harassment, debt bondage, and forced labor—to then be sold to many of the largest U.S. grocery retailers, often with a sustainability promise.

Building on the CAL’s report, the Associated Press (AP) traveled to Andhra Pradesh, the center of India’s farmed shrimp industry, visiting growing ponds, hatcheries, warehouses, and even the hidden peeling sheds. They observed women “barehanded or wearing filthy, torn gloves,” peeling shrimp crushed in ice for 10 hours per day. A local dermatologist told the AP that he treats “four to five shrimp peelers every day” for infections and frostbite on their fingers—at times, severe enough to require amputation.

“I am like a ghost worker,” a worker for Satya Sea Food, one of the many employees working without a contract or pay slips, told CAL. The workers are often recruited in groups and charged a steep fee, which they pay over time through paycheck deductions, forcing them into debt bondage. Surveillance cameras and security guards are often used to monitor the facilities and the shared housing, preventing workers from leaving the premises.

These findings reflect the shortcomings of corporate social responsibility in bringing meaningful reform to supply chains. As Civil Eats has reported, the Walton Family Foundation’s philanthropic commitments to regenerative agriculture and sustainable fisheries is undermined by Walmart’s business model, aimed at “squeezing suppliers and foisting the costs of production onto the small-town landscapes”—in this case, according to the Ocean Outlaw Project, rural India and the women risking their health to bring cheap shrimp to Walmart’s shelves.

This is obscured to even a discerning reader of food labels. Choice Canning, one of Walmart’s suppliers, misrepresented its practices to receive a Best Aquaculture Practices (BAP) certification, as the Ocean Outlaw Project reported. Likewise, many of the retailers named in CAL’s report, including Kroger, Aldi, and Whole Foods, work with the Conservation Alliance for Seafood Solutions (CASS), which recently released new guidance to inform their approaches to sustainable seafood commitments.

When asked about this apparent contradiction, a CASS representative replied: “Many companies are making progress in prioritizing ‘the human factor’ but the industry has a ways to go before social responsibility goals are fulfilled. All companies, even the current best performers, have more work to do.” The representative noted that CASS is not a regulatory agency, but rather focused on educating its members on best practices.

“It’s become increasingly clear that environmental and social responsibility are two sides of the same coin,” said Ryan Bigelow, CASS project director, in a separate statement emailed to Civil Eats. “If a company is treating people poorly, they most likely don’t care about the environment—and the reverse is also true.”

In the case of the Indian shrimp industry investigation, Bigelow said, low pay and inhumane working conditions coincided with environmental contamination from shrimp farm runoff. “This interconnectedness underscores the importance of companies embracing a holistic approach to sustainability, addressing both the well-being of workers and the health of the planet.”

The reports’ findings could have major implications for the domestic U.S. shrimp market, which imports around 90 percent of its shrimp. India is by far the largest supplier of U.S. shrimp, accounting for 40 percent of shrimp imports. The AP investigation concluded that the conditions they documented violated laws in India and the U.S. In March, the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Natural Resources inquired into the issue, asking for further evidence from Farinella of violations of U.S. laws.

For years, U.S. wild shrimp harvesters have been calling to curb imported shrimp, which undermines their shrinking industry. Last year, shrimpers in Louisiana staged a protest at the state’s capital building, protesting their “starvation” wages. “We’d have to catch millions of pounds to survive with these shrimp prices,” a 51-year-old Louisiana shrimper told Civil Eats last spring. The shrimpers pointed to how they are struggling because they are competing with shrimp produced through highly exploited labor, as recent reports confirm.

“It’s absolutely our government’s responsibility to make sure what they’re permitting to come into this country is not being handled by slave labor,” said Kindra Arnesen, a Louisiana shrimp harvester and advocate for the domestic shrimp industry.

Under international trade law, the U.S. can only ban imports from locations that have violated U.S. human rights and environmental standards. “If India’s labor standards do not meet the U.S. labor standards, then yes, [the] U.S. could ban imports,” said Petros Mavroidis, a lawyer at Columbia Law School and former member of the World Trade Organization’s legal division. This has historically been a challenging bar for the U.S. shrimp industry, given the lack of transparency and limited testing of imported seafood supply chains.

“I hope it helps the U.S. industry,” Farinella told Civil Eats. “So much of this product is coming in from overseas at much lower prices. Part of that has to be with all the corners you’re cutting, with food safety and your basic human rights laws.”

Avian Flu Spreads to Cattle. A highly pathogenic strain of the avian flu, known as H5N1, has spread to 16 cattle herds across six states. It’s the first time that the virus—which has been circulating in wild birds and poultry the U.S. since late 2021—has spread to cattle, according to the Center for Disease Control. This recent outbreak also marks the second time the virus has spread to a human in the U.S.: A Texas dairy worker contracted the virus after coming in contact with infected cattle. Fortunately, his only reported symptom was eye inflammation. Experts fear that the flu could have been transmitted through “poultry litter,” a type of cattle feed that contains poultry excrement, spilled feed, feathers, and other waste scraped off the floors of poultry barns.

The Bankrollers of Methane. Major U.S. banks have been accused of undermining their “net zero” climate commitments by financing the livestock industry, the largest source of anthropogenic methane emissions in the world. Between 2016 and 2023, U.S. banks provided the livestock industry with $134 billion in loans or underwriting services, according to a new report by Friends of the Earth and Profundo. The Big Three lenders, as designated in the report, are Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, and Citigroup.

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Florida Banned Farmworker Heat Protections. A Groundbreaking Partnership Offers a Solution.

Grey Moran — Wed, 20 Mar 2024 09:00:45 +0000

April 15, 2024 update: Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill late last week that would ban heat protections for workers. The headline of this article has been updated to reflect the bill’s implementation.

Earlier this month, Florida’s Senate passed a bill banning local jurisdictions from passing measures protecting workers from heat exposure, the latest of a series of draconian laws targeting immigrants and workers in Florida. This bill, which awaits the approval of governor Ron DeSantis, prohibits governments from requiring that employers provide water, shade, and breaks to workers—relatively small measures that can mean the difference between life and death for workers laboring under Florida’s hot sun. This law precedes what is expected to be another record-breaking summer of extreme heat.

“It’s morally repulsive, and it will kill farmworkers,” said Erik Nicholson, a farmworker advocate and the former vice president of United Farm Workers. “I have accompanied the families of too many farmworkers who have needlessly died due to heat stress.”

But Nicholson also highlighted the promise of another avenue to bring strong heat standards to Florida farms: The Fair Food Program (FFP), a groundbreaking partnership between retailers, farmers, and farmworkers that has implemented the strongest, legally binding heat protocols in the nation on Florida’s farms, while bypassing the state’s Republican-controlled legislature.

Originating in Florida’s tomato industry, the program now operates across eleven states and four countries. With the support of a new U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) award, it is anticipated to expand this year to protect farmworkers in 25 states.

“We as workers can’t afford to wait for the Florida legislature to find its conscience,” said Gerardo Reyes Chavez, a former farmworker and organizer with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, in a statement. “That’s why we are focused on our partnership with many of the state’s largest growers and on expanding the Fair Food Program.”

“We as workers can’t afford to wait for the Florida legislature to find its conscience. That’s why we are focused on our partnership with many of the state’s largest growers and on expanding the Fair Food Program.”

The FFP was established in 2011 by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), a worker-based human rights organization with a long history of community-based farmworker organizing in Florida. The program is a unique partnership between farmers, farmworkers, and 14 major food retailers—including Subway, Whole Foods, McDonald’s, Walmart, and Taco Bell—that guarantees a set of legally binding farmworker protections for heat and other workplace conditions, which were drafted by workers. An independent, trilingual council operates a 24/7 worker complaint line and audits the participating farms.

“[Farmworkers in the FFP] don’t feel pressure to keep working under conditions that are placing their lives and their health at risk. And that’s fundamentally different from what happens outside of the program,” said Chavez.

Between April and November, Florida’s hottest months, the program’s heat protocol mandates shade on fields, water with electrolytes, and a rest break every two hours. The addition of electrolytes, explained Chavez, was based on “scientific research about the need to incorporate those so that workers can be protected long term in regards to kidney failure.”

Farmworkers sit underneath shade structures in Georgia. (Photo courtesy of the Fair Food Program)

The shade is provided by a portable structure attached to a pick-up truck that accompanies workers as they move through the field, he said. Whenever workers need to take a break, the shade structure is nearby. Crew leaders also monitor for signs of heat illness, trained to especially look out for new farmworkers still acclimating to the temperature.

And if a worker does develop symptoms of heat illness, they have the right to stop working and take a break or receive medical attention if necessary. The federal government and state of Florida do not mandate any of these worker protections, which means that participating farms have heat protocols that surpass any regulatory requirements.

Currently, only a handful of states—Washington, California, Oregon, and Colorado—have passed heat protections that extend to outdoor workers. In October 2021, the Biden Administration’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) initiated a rulemaking process to develop a federal standard to regulate heat exposure. Yet, after over two years, the regulation has yet to be finalized as global temperatures tick upwards.

“It’s been a pretty substantial amount of time for OSHA not to have actually created a regulation for heat stress,” said Laurie Beyranevand, the director of the Center for Agriculture and Food Systems at Vermont Law School. “In the absence of federal regulation, people are concerned about the health of farmworkers.”

If the standard isn’t finalized by 2025, she adds, another Trump Administration would be in a position to keep the heat standard pending without ever finalizing it, deferring a promise that farmworkers and advocates have long fought to establish for decades.

Last week, Xavier Becerra, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, launched a project in which federal health leaders commit to better protect farmworkers from heat and smoke. In the past, the agency has recommended that OSHA finalize standards.

The FFP, however, offers a more immediate avenue of protection for retailers who are willing to come to the table and collaborate with farmworkers and farmers. Beyond concern for the health of farmworkers, major retailers are incentivized to join the program because it guarantees a level of transparency in their supply chain, eliminating the social liability of contracting with farms rife with labor abuse. And farmers sign onto the agreement because it gives them preferential purchasing from the major purchasers, while also ensuring that their workplace practices are ethical and often helping retain employees.

A Fair Food Program auditor speaks to a farmworker in a tomato field. (Photo courtesy of the Fair Food Program)

“[The Fair Food Program] is not designed to magically erase the problems and risks of harm. It is designed to respond appropriately, and by doing so in a really effective way, reduce the amount and the types of abuse that take place,” said Chavez. “In the case of a heat illness, it’s the most powerful tool that there is in the country.”

FFP has been quickly expanding beyond Florida’s tomato fields to operate across many crops: flowers, sweet potatoes, onions, corn, peaches, melons, and squash. The program recently added international farms that grow flowers in southern Chile, South Africa, and Mexico, with support from the Department of Labor. The USDA also recently launched a pilot to support farms in addressing labor abuses, recognizing the worker-driven social responsibility model as a pathway for achieving the highest human rights standards. This development has incentivized more farms to join the FFP, Chavez said. Based on the applications submitted so far, it could lead to the program launching in as many as 15 new states.

This model pioneered by FFP, known as Worker-Driven Social Responsibility, has been adopted by other industries long plagued by abuse. It inspired Bangladesh’s garment industry to form a similar partnership between brands and trade unions, protecting over 2 million factory workers with a legally binding accord. A similar program, known as Milk with Dignity, has been adopted by Vermont’s dairy industry. The United Kingdom’s fishing industry has been in conversation with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers as they build their own version of this model.

“We see this as the blueprint for workers in other realities,” said Chavez. Even after Florida’s move to ban heat protections, he remains hopeful about the promise of this model to support workers when the government fails. “We are in a great moment in history where there is a cure for many of the abuses that have plagued not just our work but many industries.”

Barriers to Accessing Federal Loans Persist. There is a long history of the USDA selectively approving loans to U.S. farms at their discretion, resulting in the well-documented denial of loans to Black farmers, a pattern that has pushed farmers off their land. This pattern of “broad discretion” continues into today and can “allow for agency bias and discrimination,” according to a new analysis by Center for Agriculture and Food Systems at Vermont Law and Graduate School with partners Farm Aid and the Rural Advancement Foundation International. The researchers also found the USDA tends to “err more frequently when processing loan applications for farm operations that differ from the ‘traditional’ commodity farms,” imposing a barrier to farmers engaged in innovative and climate-friendly practices. On top of this, it’s also harder for smaller-scale farmers, unable to afford high legal fees, to appeal a loan denial.

New Organic Standards. New regulations within the USDA’s National Organic Program will become enforceable on March 20, reflecting the most sweeping update to the program since 1990. The update is largely aimed at stopping organic fraud, by increasing transparency and oversight of imports and of the organic rules in operation on farms. While most organic advocates support the reforms as necessary to maintain the integrity of the organic seal, some say small farms may struggle with the record-keeping requirements. “Organic recordkeeping is already extensive,” Kate Mendenhall, who directs the Organic Farmers Association, told Food Dive last month. “We will likely lose small and mid-size organic farmers from the program if we do not address this issue.”

The post Florida Banned Farmworker Heat Protections. A Groundbreaking Partnership Offers a Solution. appeared first on Civil Eats.

What the Latest Farm Census Says About the Changing Ag Landscape

Lisa Held — Wed, 21 Feb 2024 09:00:49 +0000

Texas has more farms than any other state, but California generates the most money from farming. Young farmers under 35 are more prevalent in northern states. In 2022, nearly 18,000 farms grew blueberries compared to 16,000 farms in 2017.

These are the kinds of data that can be gleaned from the Census of Agriculture, a massive, wide-ranging survey the federal government has been conducting regularly since 1840.

Now completed every five years by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)’s National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS), the census asks detailed questions about who is farming, what they’re growing, and the practices they use, as well as where their farms are located and the economics of it all. Given the essential nature of food and fiber production, it’s crucial to understand as much as possible about the country’s farm landscape, and the resulting data can be then spliced and diced to understand and identify trends and challenges.

For decades, American farms have been disappearing while those that remain have been growing in size. And between 2017 and 2022, that trend picked up steam.

NASS just released the initial, big-picture results from the 2022 Census, which also played a central role at the USDA’s annual outlook forum. (State and county profiles are forthcoming, and additional data on specific topics such as irrigation and aquaculture will also follow later this year.) And while it will likely take a while for the larger ramifications on the future of food, farming, and the climate to truly become clear, some of the top-line changes in this year’s census have big implications. Here are a few initial takeaways.

Farm Loss and Consolidation Accelerated

For decades, American farms have been disappearing while those that remain have been growing in size. And between 2017 and 2022, that trend picked up steam. The overall number of farms decreased by about 142,000. That 7 percent decline “is a larger percentage decrease than what has been seen in the last 20 years,” said NASS’s Bryan Combs. Farm numbers decreased in every size category except one: Those operating 5,000 acres or more. Large farms now control 42 percent of the farmland in the country. From an economic perspective, 75 percent of the country’s total value of agricultural production now comes from farms with $1 million or more in sales.

These conclusions are especially relevant because while previous Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue publicly acknowledged that the system he presided over was mainly designed to help big farms thrive, Secretary Tom Vilsack has said he wants to change that dynamic. Since he took office in 2021, he has tried to simultaneously support large-scale production and the influential companies that drive and profit from it while investing in new markets for small farms and regional infrastructure.

“The question is: Can we do better? Can we aim higher?” he said at the forum, speaking to the loss of farms and continued consolidation. “Can we not only have production agriculture that’s the greatest and best in the world and, at the same time, create an opportunity for small and mid-sized producers to have a way of being prosperous?”

It’s not clear that we can, especially if those large farms continue to grow at the current pace.

More New and Young Farmers, Fewer Black Farmers

America’s farmers are getting older, raising existential questions about who will produce food in the future. Between 2017 and 2022, the average age increased again, from 57.5 to 58.1. However, that number doesn’t tell the whole story, as the number of farmers in the lowest age brackets increased significantly. In 2022, NASS counted an increase of more than 50,000 additional farmers aged 44 or younger. The number of farmers in the census’s “young producers” category increased 4 percent.

There are also signs that some older Americans are getting into agriculture for the first time: The number of “new and beginning producers,” defined as individuals farming for 10 years or less, increased by 11.4 percent and now represents 30 percent of all farmers. Their average age was just over 47.

On a different demographic front, while Vilsack’s USDA has made equity and correcting historic wrongs against Black farmers a priority, their numbers continued to fall during the last census window. The number of farms with Black producers fell by 8 percent, which is just slightly higher than the overall rate of farm loss.

When asked at the forum, Vilsack said he attributed a lot of the losses to the pandemic and pointed to efforts that are ongoing, especially financial assistance programs being administered with American Rescue Plan dollars and investments in local and regional food systems that represent “another opportunity particularly for farmers of color.” USDA also just released an updated equity action plan and is hosting a “National Equity Summit” this week.

Are Solar Panels More Popular Than Cover Crops?

Over the past several years, public, private, and philanthropic funding has been flowing toward helping farmers adopt practices often referred to as “regenerative,” especially planting cover crops and reducing tilling. Given that reality, the officially documented increases in the practices from 2017 to 2022 were relatively paltry. Thirty-eight percent of farms reported using no-till practices, up 1.1 percentage point from 2017. Cover crop acres increased by 2.6 million acres to 18 million total acres, but that’s out of just under 300 million acres of cropland. Meanwhile, the number of certified organic farms decreased (although sales of organic products increased).

One environmentally friendly practice farmers do seem to be embracing is renewable energy: The number of farms with solar panels increased 30 percent, to close to 117,000.

Digester Push-Back. Environmental and animal welfare groups have long questioned taxpayer support for methane digesters built to capture methane from industrial pork and dairy confinements and feed it into the power grid as “natural gas.” And in the past week, two advocacy groups released reports detailing criticisms of the systems. First, the Center for Food Safety (CFS) published an analysis showing California’s system, which is the most significant source of public funding for the digesters and costs taxpayers 17 times more than state officials claim. “California’s subsidize-and-incentivize approach to livestock methane is costly for taxpayers and lucrative for factory farm gas producers and investors,” Phoebe Seaton, co-director of the Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability, said in a CFS press release.

Then Friends of the Earth U.S. and the Socially Responsible Agriculture Project released their own analysis, which found that dairies with digesters increased their herds 3.7 percent annually, or 24 times the growth rate for overall dairy herd sizes in the states examined. The finding supports a key fault advocates often point to: Because digesters depend on large volumes of manure, their construction could incentivize the growth and consolidation of large industrial facilities, which have other negative impacts on animals, the environment, and communities.

Next-Gen Conservation. Last week, USDA announced a new piece of President Biden’s American Climate Corps initiative that will focus on agriculture. Modeled after the historic Civilian Conservation Corps launched in the 1930s, the Working Lands Climate Corps aims to put “at least 100” young people to work on American farms participating in climate-smart agriculture projects. Organizations including nonprofits and state, local, and tribal governments can apply to host corps members through March 8.

Dicamba Debacle. On February 6, a federal court stopped the spraying of the controversial pesticide dicamba across millions of acres of cotton and soybeans. Since 2017, the pesticide has caused millions of acres of damage to neighboring farmers’ crops, trees, and other plants due to drift issues. Environmental groups that sued the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) over its approval celebrated what they called a “a sweeping victory.” But agricultural groups quickly sprang into action.

At the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture’s (NASDA) recent conference, ag officials from around the country joined together to encourage EPA to “immediately use all available discretion regarding existing stocks to ensure channels of trade are not disrupted.” EPA just issued an order allowing farmers to spray dicamba that was “already in the possession of growers or in the channels of trade” during the 2024 season, which it estimated at “millions of gallons.” NASDA also asked EPA to “fast-track registration prior to the 2025 growing season.”

Country-City Labor Woes. Farmworkers on guestworker H-2A visas in New York say farms are retaliating against them by not inviting them back for additional seasons after they participated in efforts to unionize. A change in state law led to the first farmworker union organized in the state in 2022, and California’s storied United Farm Workers has since started organizing there. In New York’s more urban reaches, a coalition of worker groups released a new report and recommendations to improve conditions for food delivery workers.

Los Deliveristas Unidos won historic protections including a minimum hourly pay rate in 2022, but the group and its allies say that companies like Uber Eats, Doordash, and GrubHub have changed their procedures to adapt to the new reality and penalize workers. The report recommends regulating algorithms and expanding protections such as sick leave and worker’s compensation. “Today, delivery apps are in a race to the bottom and putting New Yorkers at risk,” said Danny Harris, Executive Director of Transportation Alternatives, in a press release. “It’s past time to regulate these delivery apps.”

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