Animal Ag | Civil Eats

How a Vermont Cheesemaker Helps Local Farms Thrive

Jake Price — Wed, 04 Sep 2024 09:00:07 +0000

This story was co-published and supported by the journalism nonprofit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

The post How a Vermont Cheesemaker Helps Local Farms Thrive appeared first on Civil Eats.

Senator Cory Booker Says FDA Proposal Could Worsen Antibiotic Resistance

Lisa Held — Wed, 10 Jul 2024 09:00:11 +0000

A pending proposal from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) could “worsen the catastrophic impacts of antimicrobial resistance” if finalized, according to Senator Cory Booker (D-New Jersey).

On Tuesday, Booker sent a letter to commissioner Robert Califf expressing concerns about changes to “duration limits” in the FDA’s revised guidance on antibiotic use in animal agriculture. Continuously using drugs for long stretches is known to lead to antibiotic resistance. And just as antibiotics are now prescribed for humans for the least number of days possible, the FDA has long recognized the need to set limits in feeding them to groups of pigs, chickens, and cows.

However, in the proposal, Booker said, agency officials went in the other direction and eliminated a 21-day limit for the most critical drugs, replacing it with guidelines that allow courses to be determined on a case-by case-basis. “This will set a dangerous precedent by prioritizing the needs of the regulated industry over the FDA’s primary mission to protect public health,” Booker said. “I urge you to finalize Guidance for Industry that meaningfully protects medically important antibiotics from overuse.”

Antibiotic resistance is a looming public health threat that already directly causes the deaths of 1.27 million people (and contributes to the deaths of 5 million) globally each year. Overuse of important drugs (i.e., those that are also used to treat infections in humans, usually referred to as “medically important”) on industrial farms is a key contributor to the problem. As a result, a draft of a United Nations declaration expected to be finalized this September calls for completely ending the routine use of essential drugs in agriculture aside from the treatment of sick animals.

The meat industry in Europe has already taken significant steps toward that goal, but some of the biggest companies in the U.S. have recently been backtracking. Last week, less than a year after Tyson made a U-turn on its decision to eliminate antibiotics in its chicken production, Bloomberg reported the company is also cutting its antibiotic-free beef offerings.

While the overall volume of medically important antibiotics sold for animals is still down compared to a high in 2015, it has been rising in both pork and beef production over the past two years. The FDA is still not tracking exactly how those drugs are being used on farms. However, older U.S. Department of Agriculture data showed cattle feedlots routinely add antibiotics to feed for periods of several weeks or more to “prevent, control, or treat” disease. And in the most recent data collected, some pork producers reported using important drugs primarily for growth promotion, a practice that has been illegal since 2017. In that data, producers reported feeding chlortetracycline to nursery-aged pigs for an average of nearly 46 days.

Chlortetracycline is an active ingredient in several of the close to 100 important drugs approved for use in animal agriculture that still do not have defined duration limits. Since 2003, the FDA has required companies to define limits on how longs drugs can be used as part of the approval process, but many drugs still used today were approved prior to that change.

In its 2019 goals for antibiotic stewardship, the agency said it would “work over the next several years to establish targeted durations of use, so that veterinarians have clear labeling indications and instructions on how long to use a medically important antimicrobial drug.”

But Booker’s letter claims that in revising the documents it publishes to set guidelines for the industry, the FDA is doing the opposite. Booker says the FDA previously required safety precautions for the use of some antibiotics—those most critical to human health—in animals, including limiting overall use to 21-day courses. These new revisions, he says, will replace that limit with directions that say “duration of use will be revised on a case-by-case basis in light of, but not limited to, animal species, disease risk period, and animal management husbandry practices, etc.”

“They’re really letting the industry decide how long [antibiotics] need to be used,” said Steven Roach, the Safe & Healthy Food Program Director at the Food Animal Concerns Trust (FACT). “Our biggest concern is they’re putting animal health ahead of human health.”

Roach is also a senior analyst for Keep Antibiotics Working, a coalition of public health and environmental groups that fights to prevent the development of antibiotic-resistant “superbugs.” In March, a group of organizations in the coalition—including FACT, the Antibiotic Resistance Action Center at George Washington University, and the Center for Food Safety—sent a letter to the FDA laying out many of these same concerns. Booker’s letter amplifies their message.

In response to a request for comment, the FDA directed Civil Eats to a previous response to the Keep Antibiotics Working letter, in which the agency disputed the group’s characterization of FDA eliminating the 21-day duration limit in its revised guidance. “Twenty-one days is not intended to be interpreted as a standard maximum duration,” the agency wrote. The new language, it said, “was added to address the varying differences across animal production systems, and does not change the qualitative risk rankings . . . nor does it limit the Agency from considering additional use restrictions.”

Booker’s letter, however, lays out more specific questions for the agency to respond to—and many of the questions read like he’s looking for answers that could inform Congressional action. For example, he asks whether the agency feels it lacks the authority to suggest drug makers adopt a 21-day duration limit, something Congress could grant through legislation. He also asks what might enable the agency to take more definitive action to curb antibiotic overuse on farms.

“Given the slow pace of action to address the critical public health threat of antibiotic resistance, what additional resources or authorities does the FDA need to take prompt action to protect public health from antibiotic resistance?” he writes.

Of course, regulating animal agriculture is not a popular issue in Washington, D.C., and the current political climate makes it difficult for lawmakers to move any legislation. “Congress could pass legislation that would do this, but that’s really hard to get done right now,” Roach said. “But I think having them ask questions is helpful. Any pressure on them from Congress to do what’s right is helpful.”

Bye-bye to BVO. Last week, the FDA took definitive action on another front when it declared that brominated vegetable oil (BVO), an ingredient used in soda and other drinks to prevent liquids from separating, is no longer considered safe, effectively removing it from the food supply starting in August. Public health experts have been sounding alarms about the ingredient’s potential health risks for years, which prompted industry leaders—including PepsiCo and Coca-Cola—to remove BVO from their products in advance of the law changing. California also banned the manufacturing, distribution, and sale of foods and beverages containing BVO last year. But hundreds of drinks sold by major retailers may still contain the ingredient. “The FDA’s decision to ban brominated vegetable oil in food is a victory for public health. But it’s disgraceful that it took decades of regulatory inaction to protect consumers from this dangerous chemical,” said Scott Faber, senior vice president of government affairs at the Environmental Working Group, in a press release.

Historic Heat Protections. During a week when soaring temperatures threatened the health and safety of individuals in cities all over the country, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) proposed the first federal rule intended to protect workers from injury and illness caused by extreme heat. If finalized, the rule will require employers to evaluate heat risks, develop plans to control heat hazards, and implement solutions such as providing drinking water and rest breaks when heat is a threat.

While it applies to all industries, the rule has major implications for farmworkers, who die of heat-related causes at a rate that is 20 times higher than in other professions. As climate change intensifies heat conditions, some states have passed laws requiring farm operators to provide field workers with protections including shade, water, and breaks, while others have banned local laws that would protect farmworkers from heat.

“This is a bittersweet moment for farmworkers. Every significant heat safety regulation in America at the state, and now federal, level was written in the blood of farm workers,” said United Farm Workers president Teresa Romero in a press release. “Today, the federal government put itself on the right side of history by seeking, for the first time, to establish the precedent that every worker in America has the right to shade, water, and rest while working in temperatures that could kill them.”

Last year, 112 Democrats in the House and Senate called for the Biden administration to implement a workplace heat standard. OSHA has yet to publish the rule in the Federal Register. Once it is published, a public comment period will follow before the rule is finalized. Industry groups will likely mobilize to halt or weaken it, and a Trump administration would likely prevent the rule from being finalized.

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Bringing Back Local Milk, Ice Cream, and Cheese

Naoki Nitta — Tue, 02 Jul 2024 09:00:21 +0000

At Jersey Scoops in Loleta, a small, unincorporated community in Northern California’s Humboldt County, the ice cream is as fresh as it gets. From pasture to parlor, its organic, butterfat-rich milk travels less than 10 miles, produced by a herd of Jerseys pasture-raised on the misty coast.

The shop’s freshly churned ice cream—with surprising flavors like Foggy Pebbles, made with cereal-soaked milk, and Danish Butter Cookie—has been drawing crowds. Since taking over a long-shuttered creamery earlier this year, Jersey Scoops has given the sleepy downtown a much-needed boost; customers routinely spill over to the park across the road, cone in hand, creating a potential reason for new businesses to fill the empty storefronts that once housed a cheese factory, bakery, and laundromat. Beyond Loleta, Jersey Scoops’ rainbow-labeled pints are making waves at local farmers’ markets, stores, and restaurants.

“We want to reinvigorate the community and revive Loleta’s dairy legacy.”

While revitalizing the community, Jersey Scoops adds a high-value outlet for a perishable product, strengthening the industry overall. But the owners of Jersey Scoops didn’t get here on their own; they leveraged a $60,000 grant from the Pacific Coast Coalition’s Dairy Business Innovation Initiative (PCC DBII) to secure both the space and equipment.

Despite the region’s history as a dairy powerhouse, locally made ice cream was previously nonexistent, says Thomas Nicholson-Stratton, who launched the venture with his husband, Cody. The ice cream shop is an extension of the Nicholson family’s sixth-generation, 120-acre farm in nearby Ferndale. Since taking over the dairy a decade ago and branding it Foggy Bottoms Boys, the couple has been bucking convention and helping their rural community navigate changing economic tides.

Foggy Bottoms Boys co-owners Thomas and Cody Nicholson-Stratton with their son at Jersey Scoops. (Photo credit: Will Suiter Photography)

“We want to reinvigorate the community and revive Loleta’s dairy legacy,” Nicholson-Stratton says of the 2,200-square-foot, eight-employee operation, noting the town’s history as a key producer of powdered milk. The scoops are also a platform for amplifying the dairy’s “very deliberate name,” he says, derived partly from the farm’s location on the foggy banks of the Eel River, but also reflecting its owners’ sense of humor: “We want to diversify the face of farming, because there are few places where young and queer people can see themselves in the field.”

The PCC DBII is one of four such initiatives across the country, funded by the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Agricultural Marketing Service. The national program helps small and mid-sized dairy producers squeeze more value out of milk by diversifying their products and markets, reducing waste, and innovating packaging and processing. With family dairies drying up in droves—the U.S. has 39 percent fewer dairies than five years ago, despite the same number of cows producing 5 percent more milk—the support aids smaller players in countering the forces of an increasingly consolidated industry.

A crowd forms outside Jersey Scoops during its ribbon-cutting weekend. (Photo credit: Will Suiter Photography)

The DBII also aims to strengthen the economic health of small and rural communities, says project director Carmen Licon-Cano. Foggy Bottoms Boys ticks many of the initiative’s boxes, creating a local milk product, she says, while invigorating a struggling downtown and adding a fresh take on the industry. “They’re really a shining example of the program.”

Building From the Bottom Up

California, the nation’s leading dairy state, produces nearly a fifth of the U.S. milk supply, mostly on industrial farms in the Central Valley. These farms hold, on average, around 2,300 cows. (Herds in Wisconsin, the second-largest producer, average 177 cows.) Across the nation, mega-dairies are becoming the norm, as more farms mirror the Golden State’s confined animal feedlot operations (CAFO).

These highly productive operations maximize returns in an industry with crushing profit margins. However, critics highlight their outsized environmental impact, including excessive water use and pollution caused by concentrated waste, as well as greenhouse gas emissions. CAFOs also face scrutiny for animal welfare issues due to confinement and extreme production demands. Meanwhile, the perishability of dairy’s main product exposes the industry to supply chain disruptions. At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, failed shipping logistics forced farmers to dump millions of gallons of milk.

“It’s difficult for small businesses like us to be profitable. A lot of people don’t understand why my cheese costs [four times more than] Walmart’s.”

The 2018 Farm Bill established the DBII to spur innovation in the dairy industry and address the downward trend in milk consumption nationwide, caused at least in part by the proliferation of other beverages, including plant-based milks. Since then, the USDA program, which is overseen by Agricultural Secretary Tom Vilsack, a former dairy industry insider, has added post-pandemic support, both financially and technically, for producers and processors.

The initiative aims to “uplift the dairy sector” and strengthen local markets, says Susan Pheasant, director of California State University Fresno’s Institute for Food and Agriculture (IFA), which hosts the Pacific Coast Coalition DBII. With $165 million in total funding to date, regional DBIIs address the specific needs of four individual markets—northeast, southeast, midwest, and west coast. The PCC DBII includes academic partners such as Oregon State University as well as industry groups like the California Dairy Innovation Center. In addition to piloting new equipment, recipes, and processing techniques, the universities facilitate worker training and certificate programs in cheesemaking, food safety, marketing, and other specialized areas.

Some regions have expanded their focus to include climate-smart ranching practices, including managed grazing and resilient cropping systems, which can mitigate the environmental and climate impacts of industrial livestock production. But that hasn’t been the PCC’s focus, Pheasant says. As the last DBII to be established, in 2019, the region has received significantly less funding, so it has only focused on dairy processing. The PCC’s relatively modest grants target small and mid-sized operations, she says, to create an equitable field for producers.

For smaller enterprises, however, even modest grants can be transformative, Pheasant says. One artisan cheesemaker, for example, used a $100,000 award toward a cheese cutter that creates precisely measured wedges, eliminating an onerous manual task and allowing them to tap a new market that operates on uniformity and volume. And, because family, minority, and women-owned businesses often face greater challenges in securing capital, the funding can be “a real game changer,” she says, enabling them to compete at a far greater scale. “It’s a story that gets replicated through these small producers,” she adds.

“As an artisanal creamery, we need products that can really differentiate us from larger [operations],” says Todd Koch, owner of TMK Creamery in Canby, Oregon. Half an hour outside Portland, the 50-acre family farm is known for its ice cream and freshly churned cheddar, made from the milk of 20 pastured-grazed cows and sold a stone’s throw away at the farm stand and in a few local restaurants.

Several years ago, Koch collaborated with Oregon State University to develop a vodka distilled from whey, a byproduct of cheesemaking. “Cowcohol” has become one of TMK’s signature products, enabling the creamery to diversify with a premium, shelf-stable offering while minimizing a costly disposal problem.

Using a $140,000 DBII grant, TMK Creamery is now developing a filtration system to fully extract their whey’s remaining lipids and proteins—which are fed back to the cows, another savings. “It’s difficult for small businesses like us to be profitable,” Koch says. “A lot of people don’t understand why my cheese costs [four times more than] Walmart’s.”

“We’re an important fabric of these rural communities.”

These innovations often have ripple effects. At Nico’s Ice Cream, in Portland, Oregon, owner Nico Vergara concocts his frozen treats using a specialized blender imported from New Zealand. The machine swirls scoops of fresh fruit into the cream—both sourced from farms in nearby Willamette Valley—to create “a light and airy, soft-serve-y texture,” Pheasant says. “It’s one of a kind.”

In just three years, the 25-year-old entrepreneur, who started off with a seasonal pushcart, has opened two shops and now distributes pints to about 60 grocery stores in Oregon and Washington. Using a $40,000 DBII grant, he’s acquired an additional fleet of machines and is working toward nationwide distribution. With flavors that nod to Vergara’s Latino background, such as chamoy, a pickled fruit-and-pepper sauce, and Tajín, a brand of chili and lime seasoning, the company aims to broaden its product line and cater to an increasingly diverse consumer market.

With a third store in the works, Vergara’s success reflects the country’s voracious appetite for dairy—and the industry’s capacity to satisfy it. Despite waning milk consumption, Americans still consume a lot of cheese, yogurt, butter, and ice cream. Between 2021 and 2022, the average annual consumption of dairy products rose by more than 12 pounds per person, to an average of 667 pounds. And though the science is inconclusive around the health impacts, dairy products remain a staple in food assistance programs as a source of protein and other essential nutrients.

As the ballooning demand continues to shape market forces, the shift towards fewer, larger farms is inevitable, says Charles Nicholson, associate professor of agricultural and applied economics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. With smaller-scale dairies harder hit by labor shortages and fluctuating milk prices, “this long-term trend would be hard to change with public policy or private initiatives [alone],” he says.

A few sleek Jersey cows from the Foggy Bottoms Boys pastures. (Photo courtesy of Foggy Bottoms Boys)

Nevertheless, the DBII and similar programs play an important role in supporting individual businesses and local communities, Nicholson says. And although his research found that diversifying milk production through more complex processing isn’t a sure path to profit, concentrating innovation close to the source tends to reduce the financial risks.

Ultimately, maintaining a diversity of production practices and locations bolsters resilience within the industry, Nicholson says, making it less vulnerable to disruptions in regional supply chains and climate-related issues. Consumers also benefit from greater access to a broader array of local and regional products.

The PCC also supports innovation through a larger lens, says PCC’s Lincon-Cano, providing office hours and technical assistance in equipment training and testing, as well as developing business and marketing plans. And by offering resources such as webinars and certificate programs in Spanish, the expanded access helps diversify the industry’s enterprise base, she says, which remains largely white despite the large number of Latinos in the greater workforce. Together, these strategic investments can contribute to a resilient, less consolidated system, one more closely tied to local economies and communities.

More Eyes Per Acre

As one of California’s oldest cheesemakers, Rumiano Cheese has a storied presence in the North Coast’s dairy shed. The company sources organic milk from 23 family farms, all of which pasture their herds within a 100-mile radius of the company’s Del Norte County cheese plant. “We’re an important fabric of these rural communities,” says Rumiano’s chief executive officer, Joe Baird, noting that many of the farms (including Foggy Bottoms Boys) supply them with milk. Many of these connections go back decades, he says, “so we don’t want to screw it up.”

Rumiano is using a $200,000 DBII grant to develop packaging for ready-to-serve and party-size cheese trays for the growing convenience market, which typically depends heavily on plastic. The funds will go towards retooling existing equipment to make new containers with more sustainable materials and less polymer, Baird says, and distinguish the brand from conventional competitors.

With industrial-scale operators flooding the market with “literally a billion pounds” of cheese, Baird says, innovation is vital to the survival of smaller producers. The diversity of players helps foster innovation, “just like tech and Silicon Valley,” he adds. Local dairy also supports the North Coast economy, which has been impacted by price collapses in cannabis, one of the region’s primary cash crops.

Smaller, family-run operations also have a deep commitment to their land and herds, Baird says. Organic and independently certified to meet animal welfare standards, these producers maintain regenerative practices, grazing cows in rotated paddocks to improve soil and pasture health.

These approaches often run counter to the commodity-driven model of CAFOs. Although pasture-based operations can vary in both size and practice methods, foraging requirements tend to limit herds to the hundreds, not thousands, says Steve Washburn, professor emeritus at North Carolina State University’s department of animal science and an expert in pasture-based and organic dairy production.

Run well, smaller-scaled systems have several advantages over confinement operations, Washburn says. Proper rotational grazing relies on pasture as the primary forage, cutting feed costs. Additionally, because cows spread manure uniformly across the paddocks, the waste enriches the soil and emits far less methane than it would decomposing in a collection pool.

Perhaps most importantly, the promotion of more small dairies creates a healthier agricultural ecosystem. The more dairies, the more farmer “eyes per acre,” Baird says, referencing Wendell Berry. “That’s why we’re so committed to supporting the viability of family-scale farms.” And without support for innovation, he adds, “this ecosystem is very much at risk.”

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Medically Important Antibiotics Are Still Being Used to Fatten Up Pigs

Lisa Held — Wed, 12 Jun 2024 09:00:30 +0000

Because scientists have identified antibiotic-resistant infections as a serious public health threat that kills more than 35,000 Americans annually, regulators at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have been working to reign in the misuse and overuse of antibiotics in animal agriculture—which contributes to the problem—for more than a decade. Seven years ago, the agency announced the most significant step to date: ending the use of antibiotics also important in human medicine solely for “growth promotion.”

Putting drugs in feed and water to make animals grow bigger and faster, thereby increasing profits, had been a common practice in industrial animal agriculture for decades. While the FDA didn’t end the practice whole hog, the change meant that going forward, farmers would only be able to use specific medically important antibiotics to prevent and treat disease, not fatten pigs. In 2017, the change contributed to a significant, immediate drop in antibiotics sold for use in animals.

“It was really surprising farmers actually reported their primary reason was growth promotion. Obviously, something is falling through the cracks.”

However, new data released by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) suggests some pork producers may be flouting FDA’s regulations by feeding important drugs to pigs primarily to speed their growth.

The data comes from USDA’s National Animal Health Monitoring System (NAHMS), which collected information on production practices at hog farms housing 1,000 or more pigs between December 2020 and May 2021. At various facilities raising pigs at different points in their life cycle, a percentage of producers reported feeding chlortetracycline, oxytetracycline, tylosin, neomycin, and sulfamethazine primarily for “growth promotion.” All of these drugs are considered medically important by the FDA because they are used to treat infections in humans and are classified as either “highly important” or “critically important” by the World Health Organization.

Public health advocates have long maintained that some farmers would continue to use the drugs for growth promotion because many are still approved to be added to feed for disease prevention. A spike in sales of drugs classified for “therapeutic use” after the FDA ended growth promotion backs up that theory. Now, they see this data as possibly providing more evidence, although they were still confounded by the overt way the practices were reported.

“It was really surprising farmers actually reported their primary reason was growth promotion,” said Steven Roach, the Safe and Healthy Food Program Director at the nonprofit Food Animal Concerns Trust, who has been following the issue for years. “Obviously, something is falling through the cracks.”

An FDA spokesperson declined to provide an interview and instead emailed a statement that read, in part, “The successful implementation of GFI #213 in 2017 means that it is illegal to use medically important antimicrobials for growth promotion purposes in food-producing animals, and all approved uses of medically important antimicrobials in drinking water or animal feed require the authorization (via a prescription or veterinary feed directive) of a licensed veterinarian. The FDA is reviewing the findings and will evaluate them to further our understanding of this issue and assist in our mission to protect public health.”

In response to a request for an interview, a National Pork Producers Council spokesperson sent comments via email. “The pork industry continues to promote judicious antibiotic use of antimicrobials,” they said. “It’s also important to note that veterinarians were not surveyed, and they are the main decision-makers regarding pig health interventions.” The American Association of Swine Veterinarians did not respond to an interview request.

Without more specific details on what each farmer’s veterinary feed directive said and how the data was collected, it’s hard to know whether the statistics are pointing to a serious gap in compliance with FDA’s rules.

A USDA spokesperson said in an email that the agency’s field veterinarians work with producers to collect “nationally representative, anonymized, standardized data on animal health, biosecurity, vaccination, and antimicrobial use,” and noted that participation in National Animal Health Monitoring Systems (NAHMS) surveys is voluntary.

Roach, in analyzing the data, guessed at one explanation. Many of the medically important antibiotics are fed in combination with other drugs that are classified as “non-medically important” or are not antibiotics and therefore can be used for growth promotion. So, for instance, 10 percent of the sites reported feeding chlortetracycline with BMD for “growth promotion.” BMD is not medically important and therefore can be used for that purpose, so it’s possible farmers reported the duo of drugs that way even though one of them was indicated for something else.

USDA’s answers also noted the combinations but went a step further in explaining the practices. For each medically important drug identified, the spokesperson noted that while veterinarians are not permitted to prescribe the drugs “solely for growth promotion purposes,” producers were asked to provide the “primary reason for giving these medications in feed.” (Emphasis theirs.) By that reasoning, if a farmer wants to feed one of these drugs to fatten up his pigs first and foremost, it may be considered OK as long as the drug has a secondary disease prevention benefit.

For many public health advocates, it’s a clear indication that the dividing line between growth promotion and disease prevention is incredibly thin or invisible in many cases. “We’ve always suspected that for some growers the changes were nominal, not actual, that they said, ‘That’s fine, let’s just call it prevention,’” said Lance Price, the founding director of the Antibiotic Resistance Action Center at George Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health. “This provides some empirical evidence for that.”

“You have these drugs that are in current practice not important anymore, but as we become more and more desperate, other drugs become important,” Price said.

In fact, one of the other drugs the data shows pork producers have been feeding for growth promotion, tiamulin, is legal for that use since it’s not considered medically important. However, the FDA is currently reviewing comments on a proposal to move the class of drugs it belongs to—pleuromutilins—to “medically important” status as they’ve are now being used more often in humans. One reason? The drugs are unaffected by resistance that’s developed to other major antibiotic classes, such as tetracyclines and macrolides (which tylosin belongs to).

“We’re still using five times as many antibiotics to raise pigs in the U.S. as they do in the U.K. We could use a lot less.”

According to the experts, then, the only way to truly move all drugs off the conveyor belt toward no longer being effective is for FDA to go a step further and stop allowing the broader practice of putting antibiotics in feed as a prevention mechanism and only allow farmers to treat sick animals.

“We’re still using five times as many antibiotics to raise pigs in the U.S. as they do in the U.K. We could use a lot less,” Roach said. “I would like to see FDA take the next step—and hopefully it won’t take 10 years—to get rid of routine use for disease prevention as well.”

Price also said that given this limited data set that relies on voluntary participation and self-reported questionnaires points to a real issue, it bolsters the idea that federal agencies and researchers need better data overall. “This is an industry that can take thousands of pigs, kill them, package them, and ship them in a matter of hours, but they say they couldn’t possibly track actual drug use,” he said. “They do amazing stuff. They just don’t want to do this.”

PFAS Data Debate. The nonprofit organization Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) is demanding the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) retract a memo it released last year that reported the agency found no evidence of PFAS in its tests of commonly used pesticides. EPA initiated the tests after an environmental toxicologist found alarming levels of multiple PFAS in six out of 10 agricultural pesticides he tested.

Ever since the agency announced no evidence of contamination in the exact same chemicals, scientists and watchdog groups have been working to try to understand and explain the discrepancies. To that end, PEER submitted a FOIA request to EPA. The documents released showed the agency omitted the results of other tests that did find PFAS and left out a detail that could cast doubt on the validity of its tests. EPA maintains confidence in its results, telling PEER that the PFAS found in the other tests was attributable to “background levels” and that the detail on testing did not apply because of differences in testing sensitivity.

The debate over which tests should be relied on is likely to rage on, and the stakes are high given PFAS contamination on farms has already occurred due to other sources including sewage sludge.

Tackling the Tournament System. Farm groups including the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition and Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI) applauded the USDA for introducing a rule that could significantly change how contract farmers who raise chickens for big companies including Tyson, Mountaire, and Pilgrim’s are paid. “This rule from USDA is a landmark moment for poultry growers in their long struggle for basic fairness in their contracts,” Edna Rodriguez, RAFI’s executive director, said in a press release. The industry has long been known for its “tournament system” that ultimately leaves growers in the dark about how much money they’ll make on each flock and can require them to make expensive upgrades to their infrastructure without warning.

The new rule would require companies to set a fixed base price, change how they’re allowed to calculate performance bonuses, and require them to provide a detailed accounting of how and when a grower could reasonably expect to recoup investments made in infrastructure improvements, allowing them to more effectively evaluate their options. It’s the latest in a series of rules related to chicken farmers introduced by USDA as part of the Biden administration’s efforts to increase competition and fairness in the highly consolidated meat industries. The rules are intended to give the agency the tools it needs to enforce the Packers & Stockyards Act, which has been on the books, but with no teeth, for over 100 years.

Yesterday, however, House Republicans included language to overturn the rules in their fiscal year 2025 spending bill and said they were, “reining in harmful regulations that dictate how poultry and livestock producers raise and market their animals.”

Eating Well Is Also Better for the Planet. According to a Harvard study published this week in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, people who eat more vegetables, legumes, and whole grains and less meat, dairy, and sugar may significantly lower their risk of several diseases and live longer. Researchers used data from the Nurses’ Health Study I and II, which followed 200,000 participants for 34 years, to look at the impact of adhering more or less closely to the “Planetary Health Diet,” which came out of the EAT-Lancet commission’s 2019 report on the best way to align diets with both nutrition and climate goals.

They found that people whose diets were most closely aligned with the diet’s recommendations had a 30 percent lower risk of premature death compared to those whose diets were furthest away from the diet’s patterns, and that the Planetary Health Diet produced 29 percent lower greenhouse gas emissions. “Climate change has our planet on track for ecological disaster, and our food system plays a major role,” said author Walter Willett, professor of epidemiology and nutrition at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, in a press release. “Shifting how we eat can help slow the process of climate change. And what’s healthiest for the planet is also healthiest for humans.” Since the EAT-Lancet commission first published its recommendations, the diet has ignited significant controversies around meat eating, micronutrients, and cost.

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What Happened to Antibiotic-Free Chicken?

Lisa Held — Wed, 22 May 2024 09:00:07 +0000

Seven years ago, Tyson—one of the largest chicken producers in the world—made headlines with its commitment to “eliminate antibiotics in chicken.” Then, last summer, the company changed its policy: Instead of “no antibiotics ever” (referred to as NAE in the industry), Tyson’s farmers would go back to using antibiotics. They would refrain only from using drugs considered “important in human medicine.”

Given the company produces about a quarter of the chicken in the country, ripple effects ensued. At the Los Angeles United School District, school nutrition directors were left scrambling to find another supplier in order to honor a long-standing public commitment to get antibiotics out of student meals. Then, in March, Chick-Fil-A—which has used Tyson as a supplier in the past—also backpedaled on a 2014 commitment to serving antibiotic-free chicken, citing supply concerns.

Now, despite all the prior momentum, none of the four largest chicken producers are exclusively practicing “no antibiotics ever” production.

As the impacts came into focus, advocates and experts who had been pointing to the chicken industry as a model for how food corporations could make real progress toward improving practices that threaten public health looked on in dismay.

“When we first started working on this in 2015 and we were targeting McDonald’s, Chick-Fil-A was one of the players that we could point to as already doing the right thing,” said Andre Delattre, SVP and COO of programs at Public Interest Research Group (PIRG). “From that perspective, it’s especially a shame that they’re backsliding.”

Between 2014 and 2018, the percentage of chickens raised without antibiotics rose from 3 percent to 52 percent, and the amount raised without medically important antibiotics soared to more than 90 percent. The Natural Resources Defense Council called it “a stunning success story,” and allied organizations like PIRG shifted their focus to reducing antibiotic use in pork and beef, where medically important drugs are still used routinely in feed and water, at much larger volumes.

While Tyson and most of its biggest competitors still commit to avoiding drugs that are critical to treating deadly diseases in humans, its backpedaling on NAE is significant for several reasons. In chicken, the four biggest companies—Tyson, Pilgrim’s Pride (owned by JBS), Wayne-Sanderson Farms, and Mountaire—control more than half of the market.

Now, despite all the prior momentum, none of them are exclusively practicing “no antibiotics ever” production. And some emerging research suggests that a class of drugs these companies are regularly using may contribute to the development of resistant strains of bacteria that do threaten human health.

The story of the end of the industry’s steady march toward getting antibiotics out of chicken feed is complicated, involving other unmet commitments, including shifting to raising slower-growing breeds that require fewer medications.

And it illustrates the limitations of corporate commitments to more responsible practices, in this and any industry: When the rubber meets the road in achieving capitalism’s goal of maximizing profits, shareholders may prioritize cost savings, especially after consumer attention on any given issue has waned over time.

Tyson did not respond to repeated email and telephone requests for interviews.

What it Takes to Raise Chickens Without Antibiotics

Americans have an insatiable appetite for nuggets, tenders, and boneless, skinless breasts: In 2023, individuals ate an average of 101 pounds of chicken, up from 82 pounds in 2013. To consistently produce that much chicken for billions of people, companies created a system that relies on regular antibiotics in feed and/or water.

Birds bred to grow fast and fat in crowded barns where waste accumulates get sick easily. Antibiotics are an easy fix, since preventing disease is more effective than treating it, and regular doses of the same drugs speed up growth. However, the overuse of antibiotics in animal agriculture is one activity that has driven the development of dangerous antibiotic-resistant bacteria. In the U.S., 2.8 million people now contract hard-to-treat infections each year, and 35,000 die from those infections.

So, over the past decade, at the behest of consumer and public health advocacy groups, many chicken companies switched to NAE production.

At the heart of the issue throughout the industry is an overwhelmingly common poultry disease called coccidiosis, caused by a parasite that is almost universally present in chicken waste.

However, they did it while continuing to increase their production to a staggering high of more than 46 billion pounds in 2023. We’ll give you more chicken at lower prices, they said, while also promising better animal welfare, a lower carbon footprint, and less antibiotic use.

But each year, the percentage of chickens that got sick and died long before making it to a dinner plate ticked up. Now, about 11 million chicks die on farms per week, wasting all the resources that went into breeding, hatching, transporting, and feeding them along the way. A 2023 report from the U.S. Poultry & Egg Association found a direct link between the move away from antibiotics and rising mortality rates.

Multiple sources interviewed for this story said that many companies didn’t invest in changing the conditions in hatcheries and barns that made routine antibiotic use necessary in the first place.

“You shouldn’t ever just go in and pull antibiotics,” says Bruce Stewart-Brown, a senior vice president at Perdue Foods, which is the fifth-largest chicken producer in the country. “That’s not good for anything or anybody.”

Perdue, he said, started to transition away from antibiotics 20 years ago. And while it moved all of its chicken to NAE in 2014, he said his team is still continuously improving the techniques that make it possible.

At the heart of the issue throughout the industry is an overwhelmingly common poultry disease called coccidiosis, caused by a parasite that is almost universally present in chicken waste. When tens of thousands of chickens are crowded into a barn, waste accumulates, and the birds can’t escape it. The more they ingest through contaminated feed, dust, and litter, the more likely they are to get sick.

When infected, coccidiosis affects the birds’ gastrointestinal tracts, causing weight loss, diarrhea, and sometimes death. The intestinal damage it causes also creates conditions in which another common disease, necrotic enteritis, can thrive. Necrotic enteritis has similar effects but is much more deadly.

Stewart-Brown said Perdue starts with cleaner barns for its breeder flocks, which means eggs in the hatchery are less likely to carry the parasite from the get-go. Controlling for the disease on farms that produce meat chickens then involves a mix of vaccination, taking animal byproducts out of feed and adding prebiotics and probiotics (to improve digestive health), managing moisture in the litter that lines the bottom of barns, and using a class of drugs called anticoccidials (which are not classified as antibiotics) when all else fails. They also send chickens to slaughter earlier, which means the birds are smaller but have less time to get sick.

The Appeal of Antibiotics

On the other hand, putting antibiotics in feed can wipe out the need for all of those changes in one fell swoop, holding disease at bay and allowing the birds grow more efficiently. The class of antibiotics commonly used are called ionophores, and the drugs’ effectiveness using is what motivated Tyson’s decision to resume antibiotic use, company executives explained during an August 2023 investor call. In addition to plant closures, CFO John Tyson said the change in antibiotic policy was one of several “meaningful steps to get the cost structure back in balance” in the company’s chicken business. President and CEO Donnie King added that “data suggests the use of ionophores can lead to more uniform birds with consistent weight.”

Ionophores are not used in humans, which is why they’re classified as “non-medically important.” Experts generally agree their use is of less concern than medically important antibiotics like tetracyclines that are widely used in beef and pork; some say ionophores pose little to no risk of contributing to resistance that drives untreatable infections in humans.

“It’s just an attempt to compensate for poor animal husbandry, and those bad practices are not a good justification for taking chances with a cornerstone of modern medicine.”

However, other experts are concerned about emerging research conducted in Europe. Michael Hansen, a senior scientist at Consumer Reports, explained that the studies suggest ionophore resistance genes may be essentially carrying resistance to other antibiotics along with them as they proliferate, driving the spread of bacteria that are resistant to drugs humans do need.

“It’s through this mechanism of co-selection—of being physically linked on the same pieces of genetic material,” Hansen said. “What’s happened over the past 15 or 20 years is that as we’ve used more and more chemicals, not only antibiotics . . . resistance elements to different things are increasingly being clustered.”

This matters because ionophores are also used routinely in beef and pork production. In fact, across agriculture, more ionophores are given to animals than any other antibiotic.

At this point, the science is new and the risks are still unclear, but “our position is that we shouldn’t take chances, to the extent that we’re talking about the routine use of antibiotics,” PIRG’s Delattre said. “It’s just an attempt to compensate for poor animal husbandry, and those bad practices are not a good justification for taking chances with a cornerstone of modern medicine.”

After Tyson reversed course, the Perdue marketing team jumped on the opportunity to highlight the fact that they weren’t backtracking on antibiotics. They launched an entire “Know Better” campaign around the NAE label, complete with a website that casts doubt on the safety of ionophores, a cheeky commercial about “throwing antibiotics” at your problems, and a stunt snack product. (Shake Shack used similar tactics to throw shade at Chick-Fil-A, with a full-page ad in The New York Times offering free chicken sandwiches with this riff on its competitor’s slogan: “Eat More Antibiotic-Free Chicken.”)

But at the same time, Perdue has no concrete plans to meet another related promise it made: To switch to a breed of chicken that grows at a slower pace, is more active, and has a stronger immune system. And some advocates say this is the change that would make NAE truly sustainable while improving animal welfare.

Slow Progress Toward a Slower-Growing Breed

For many years, animal welfare groups have been pushing chicken companies to use slower-growing breeds. The commercial chickens common across the industry are bred to grow fast and fat, with all of their energy sent to breast meat, and as a result they often suffer from immobility and other issues. They also get sick more due to underdeveloped immune systems, which makes antibiotics like ionophores a crucial production tool.

“The idea that people are making headway with slower-growing breeds and reducing antibiotics is just rubbish. Growth rate is generally getting worse, not better.”

In 2019, a coalition of animal welfare groups created the Better Chicken Commitment (BCC) to push big grocers, restaurants, and especially chicken companies to commit to improving the lives of the birds in their supply chains.

Five years later, Compassion in World Farming’s 2023 ChickenTrack report on the BCC’s progress shows 52 companies have made a plan or changes of some kind. Many report improvements on metrics like welfare-improving lighting and “enrichments,” a term for things like perches and straw bales added to barns that allow birds to express their natural behaviors.

Julia Johnson, the leader of CIWF’s Compassion in Food Business in the U.S., pointed to the pandemic as interfering with progress companies might have made faster. This year, she said, she’ll be focused on getting companies to improve their BCC changes to litter, enrichments, and breeds. “We still have a long way to go, but I’m optimistic about the progress that we’ve seen.”

But only a few tiny producers have switched to breeds associated with healthier, happier chickens. Tyson has never committed to any aspect of the BCC, nor have the other big three companies that produce the majority of the country’s chickens.

“When I look at the report . . . there are two companies that have actually made progress towards breed. That’s very dispiriting to me,” said Andrew deCoriolis, executive director of Farm Forward. DeCoriolis said he appreciates that there’s a least a conversation happening on breed, and the other changes the BCC is pushing are certainly not bad for the animals. “But what I would like us to see is a laser focus on companies making progress on breed. The rest of it is, from my perspective, window dressing.”

One of the BCC’s biggest partners is the Global Animal Partnership (GAP), a third-party animal welfare label associated with Whole Foods. GAP commissioned a study of alternative breeds in 2020 and in 2021, and issued a list of approved breeds it found improved chickens’ lives and health outcomes. At the time, GAP said it would require farms certified at all five of its levels to switch to one of the approved breeds by 2024. That has not happened to date. Attempts to reach out to GAP revealed the executive director who was leading the project is now employed only by Whole Foods, not GAP.

Meanwhile, the ChickenTrack report singled out Whole Foods’ lack of reporting on breed progress, despite the company publicizing a roadmap to meet the BCC standards. “If it is not introduced, Whole Foods Market will be recognized as a weakened policy in 2025,” it read.

In 2017, chicken producer Bell & Evans announced it was transitioning all of its chicken to a slower-growing, BCC-approved breed by 2018. Sources told Civil Eats the company has since gone back to a typical commercial breed, but the company did not respond to requests for comment. Meanwhile, two companies that set out to challenge big industrial chicken companies by starting with better breeds and eschewing preventative antibiotics from the get-go—Emmer & Co and Cooks Venture—have both gone out of business within the past few years.

“The idea that people are making headway with slower-growing breeds and reducing antibiotics is just rubbish. Growth rate is generally getting worse, not better,” Matt Wadiak, the founder of Cooks Venture, told Civil Eats. “People are just going with the bigger birds, and those bigger birds absolutely require pharmaceutical inputs.”

Given his departure from Cooks Venture in 2023 and the company’s subsequent, dramatic downfall, Wadiak is unsurprisingly bitter when it comes to the chicken industry. He’s also right on this point.

In 2013, the average commercial chicken weighed 5.92 pounds at the time of slaughter. Last year, it weighed 6.54, after the same number of days. And when you look more closely at mortality numbers, the largest increases in deaths are happening among the heavier birds.

Cooks Venture’s breed, the Pioneer, was the first in a long time to represent a departure from that trajectory, and one that both farmers and animal welfare advocates were excited about. Wadiak said the company failed due to its an inability to secure capital in a wildly capital-intensive industry. He insists, though, that demand was strong and the price premium for his chickens was not that high.

“If Cooks could do that with a slower-growing breed, I don’t understand what is keeping Perdue from doing the same,” deCoriolis said.

“The fact that they’re still sticking with a no antibiotics policy . . . shows clearly that it can be done.”

CIWF’s Johnson insists consumers have not lost interest in better welfare for chickens. She points to sessions at chicken trade marketing events that suggest the companies believe the that they have to at least create the appearance of making progress based on Gen Z’s demands. “They’re talking about the next consumer for 2035, and animal welfare and sustainability are the top two and three concerns.”

On antibiotics, the average person on the street may not be aware of a problem, Delattre said, but “it doesn’t take more than 30 seconds to explain . . . and they understand that it’s a problem. Everybody understands the importance of antibiotics in modern medicine. And these days, almost everybody knows somebody who’s had a scare with a resistant infection,” he said.

In the end, two slightly different paths are emerging within industrial systems. While Tyson is putting antibiotics back into its production and other big players never eliminated them, Perdue is keeping them out. To help the birds survive without antibiotics, Perdue is vaccinating, keeping barns cleaner, and sending them to slaughter before disease risk spikes.

But while Perdue led the biggest pilot of slower growing, naturally healthier breeds to date, that trial run ended without changing anything across the company’s farms. Stewart-Brown said farmers loved raising the more active chickens, but argued that there “wasn’t much difference” in the chickens’ health and well-being compared to raising a standard, faster-growing breed. (Similarly, many independent farmers raising chickens on small farms choose standard breeds in pastured systems and say the chickens are healthy and active; it’s not a settled issue.)

Despite the ChickenTrack report classifying Perdue as “publicly committed to offering compliant BCC chicken,” Stewart-Brown said the company has no near-term plan to change its breed. The thing is: Corporate commitments are easy to make, and they’re easy to break.

And on the antibiotics issue, there are two ways of seeing how things have actually turned out so far. One is to conclude the larger industry will never be able to get routine drug use out of production until the entire system is overhauled, with slower-growing birds as an essential piece of the puzzle. “Our sense is that to truly solve the antibiotic problem, you have to both dramatically improve husbandry and improve genetics,” said deCoriolis.

On the other hand, advocates like Delattre look at Perdue, which has made smaller tweaks, and see a practical opportunity to solve at least one of the problems most pressing to public health.

“The fact that they’re still sticking with a no antibiotics policy . . . shows clearly that it can be done,” he said. “So why isn’t Tyson doing the same?”

The post What Happened to Antibiotic-Free Chicken? appeared first on Civil Eats.

Bird Flu May Be Driven By This Overlooked Factor

Grey Moran — Wed, 15 May 2024 09:00:19 +0000

As federal officials grapple with how to contain the highly contagious strain of avian flu that has infected chickens, turkeys, and dairy cattle on farms across the U.S., a number of scientists are pointing to one factor that could be driving the spread of its virus and its spillover from wild birds to farm animals.

Waterfowl—ducks, geese, and swans—are the primary host of the viruses, and large animal agriculture facilities are often found in close proximity to their remaining wetland habitats. For instance, California’s Central Valley and the East Coast’s Delmarva Peninsula are both critical wintering grounds for waterfowl, along major North American bird migration routes, and epicenters of U.S. poultry production.

As a result, some scientists who track waterfowl question whether this geographic overlap—alongside the shrinkage of waterfowl habitats—creates more opportunities for the virus to spread between infected waterfowl and the animals in agricultural facilities.

In theory, the ongoing destruction of wetlands could also lead waterfowl to concentrate on the remaining “small postage stamps of habitat,” potentially driving the spread of the virus between birds too, said Michael Casazza, a research biologist who tracks waterfowl at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Western Ecological Research Center.

“The basic idea is that the more you concentrate animals into a small habitat, there’s probably a greater opportunity for transmission between individuals, and then the greater chance for disease spread within waterfowl,” said Casazza.

Casazza and other wildlife scientists have documented waterfowl using agricultural facilities—from foraging for grain in feedlots to roosting in effluent ponds—but questions remain about why the birds seek out the facilities and the potential connections to the spread of avian flu. It is, however, broadly understood that biodiversity and habitat loss tend to drive the spread of infectious disease between animals, which has also been linked to the risk of spillover.

These are important questions considering how devastating the circulating H5N1 strain has been for the U.S. poultry industry, resulting in the death of over 90 million domestic birds since January 2022, when the virus was first detected in wild ducks in the Carolinas and then soon after in poultry. It also has spread to the cattle industry, infecting 42 herds to date. And while the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) still considers H5N1 to be low-risk to humans, the only two cases of the virus infecting humans in the U.S. have been farmworkers in the dairy and poultry industries.

“You really don’t want your poultry industry to be centered in really important wintering waterfowl areas where they’re concentrating in high numbers,” said Jeff Buler, who leads a research laboratory at the University of Delaware that uses weather surveillance and radio tags to track waterfowl. “Unfortunately, they overlap a lot.”

Buler is currently tracking wild geese that winter in the Delmarva, along the thousands of small wetlands known as Delmarva bays. These serve as an “important stopover and breeding ground for millions of waterfowl, waterbirds, and migratory birds,” according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The peninsula is also home to the $4.4 billion Delmarva chicken industry, which raised 600 million chickens last year on more than 1,000 farms, according to the Delmarva Chicken Association. Sussex Country, along the peninsula in southern Delaware, is the largest broiler chicken-producing county in the nation.

The poultry farms often grow corn and soy for chicken feed. Buler has been tracking snow geese and Canadian geese using telemetry, affixing a radio transmitter to the geese, which has allowed him to observe the wild birds venturing onto the poultry farms. With this highly precise technology, he has observed that these feed fields often attract waterfowl, who eat the leftover stubble. He’s also observed them using the farm ponds, nearby the long barns that house the poultry.

A female northern pintail marked with a solar powered GPS/GSM transmitter attached like a backpack. (Photo courtesy of Michael Casazza, USGS)

Over the last four winters, Buler says he has documented that one-third of all poultry facilities on the Delmarva have had radio-tagged Canada geese or snow geese spend time within 2 kilometers of farms. He also found that 84 percent of the 68 geese he is tracking have spent time within 2 kilometers of a poultry farm.

The wild birds don’t need to be directly in the barn to spread the virus. It more often spreads indirectly, such as through contaminated feed, footwear, and equipment. Given this indirect spread, the relationship between the proximity of wild birds to poultry facilities and the risk of avian flu remains unclear, a question Buler recently proposed studying in a grant application to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

“We’re seeing higher prevalence of avian influenza in the environment, namely in water and soil associated with these water bodies, in watersheds, where there are a lot more waterfowl,” said Buler. “So, the concern there is that even though the waterfowl might not be in very close proximity—like directly interfacing with the poultry farms—they may be shedding virus into the environment.”

Like the Delmarva, California’s Central Valley is another critical wintering spot for millions of waterfowl. Given that the water typically doesn’t freeze, birds often settle there for months. “The Central Valley is kind of a one-stop shop for wintering birds,” said Casazza. Yet, it’s also a major agricultural basin, formed by draining and diking wetlands, the habitat of waterfowl. This low-lying stretch of land produces a quarter of the U.S. food supply, including as a major supplier of poultry, home to more than 600 commercial poultry farms.

In 2021, Buler and a team of researchers mapped waterfowl distribution relative to commercial poultry farms in the Central Valley. They developed a model that predicted that in the Central Valley, when the waterfowl population peaks in January, the exposure risk to commercial poultry facilities sharply increases—to a point where a third of the poultry farms were highly exposed to waterfowl.

“We have a lot of waterfowl that spend their winter [in the Central Valley], which is not a bad thing, but it just happens to be where we grow all of our commercial poultry,” said Maurice Pitesky, an associate professor at the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of California, Davis, whose research focuses on disease modeling of the spread of avian flu from waterfowl to domestic poultry.

“Historically, that happened because the Central Valley is flat, the land [was] inexpensive, and it’s easy to transport corn and soy from the Midwest,” said Pitesky. However, “We’ve never really thought, ‘Oh, maybe we shouldn’t be growing commercial poultry right next to habitat for waterfowl.”’

But now, those consequences may be coming home to roost—quite literally—in the form of waterfowl roosting on agricultural facilities.

Wild ducks have been called the “Trojan horses” of H5N1 for their ability to spread the virus, sometimes without showing symptoms, to crowded barns of poultry. This is typically the death knell for the entire flock. If the virus is detected in a barn, “that leads to the best way that we know how to control the virus from spreading further from that barn, which is to euthanize all the birds in that barn,” said Pitesky.

Along with poultry facilities, waterfowl also spend time on the cattle farms that are concentrated in the Central Valley, which is home to the vast majority of California’s 1.7 million dairy cows. This is an emerging concern for the dairy industry as H5N1 was detected in U.S. dairy cows in late March after spreading undetected for months. It’s the first time an avian flu virus has been detected in cattle. Recently, USDA scientists linked the original spread to cattle to a wild bird. Recently, USDA scientists likely linked the original spread to cattle to a wild bird by a genetic analysis.

Scientific literature first documented waterfowl birds’ use of poultry and cattle facilities with telemetry in 2022. Led by the U.S. Geological Survey’s Western Ecological Research Center, a team of scientists, including Casazza and Pitesky, affixed a solar-powered radio signal to over 600 waterfowl that travel along the Pacific Flyway, which runs from Alaska to Patagonia.

This telemetry offered a highly precise, day-to-day account of each bird’s movements—and found that 11 birds ventured close to or directly on agricultural facilities in California and Washington. The wild birds made use of the effluent ponds, also called lagoons, which hold slurry manure. They also spent time on feedlots where cattle are fattened with grain, likely foraging for spilled grain.

“We were surprised by it,” Casazza said. “We saw species that we did not expect, like [northern] pintail and cinnamon teal, utilize some of these ag facilities.” He was only expecting this of certain species of waterfowl, like mallards, often spotted in city parks.

H5N1 has been detected in cinnamon teal, northern pintail, and mallards in the U.S., among many other species of wild birds, according to the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service’s data, which tracks detections of the virus, typically in dead wild birds sampled by local agencies and partners.

Casazza views this study as likely indicative of a much larger trend of birds using agricultural facilities. “They are pretty indicative of their cohort,” he said. “If one of the radios mark birds doing something, that probably means that hundreds, if not thousands of other birds, are doing that exact same thing.”

Since then, he has continued tracking waterfowl using telemetry and has observed that wild birds make use of “all kinds of alternative water features on the landscape,” including water sewage treatment plants, golf course ponds, and city ponds. Some agricultural operations can also be beneficial habitats. For instance, waterfowl utilize California’s flooded rice fields as habitat, a beneficial relationship to farmers who rely on birds to eat the rice stubble, which they used to burn.

While it remains unclear exactly what is drawing wild birds to water features on cattle and poultry farms, Casazza suggested that habitat loss may lead some wild birds to seek out alternative habitats, especially during times of drought, when their natural habitats are more constrained, a question he’d like to study. This may also lead the virus to spill over to other species, when wild birds wind up in agricultural facilities, as Casazza and other researchers proposed as a potential pathway.

It’s also a complex issue, he noted. For instance, it’s unclear whether in some cases the wild birds may be attracted to water or other resources on the agricultural facility, which may depend on the species, noted Casazza. It also may depend on whether the bird is migrating, looking for a stopover spot with water, versus moving within their wintering region—when it’s the later, he says, “when they have what they need, we tend to not see a ton of movement.” When this question was posed to Buler, he noted that it may depend on geographies too. California, for instance, is more water-restricted than the Delmarva.

As a solution, Casazza sees promise in creating more wildlife habitat for waterfowl, located away from agricultural facilities. “This would give them an opportunity to settle on habitat that is designed for them rather than these alternative habitats,” Casazza said, adding that this could also involve flooding the rice fields. He also hopes to see an increase in surveillance of waterfowl potentially as a “national data stream” that could track where wild birds are moving to help predict where the virus could be moving next.

Pitesky also emphasized the importance of more widespread waterfowl tracking, pointing to application he developed that tracks the abundance of waterfowl using remote sensing, designed as a warning system for farmers to know to implement higher biosecurity measures. For instance, he notes that farms could utilize geofencing to automatically close the curtains in the barn—used to ventilate the barn—in response to a flock of waterfowl moving toward that facility.

Another option may be that agricultural facilities relocate, so they are not clustered on waterfowl habitats. Of course, neither option is easy, especially in a place like California’s Central Valley, where nearly everyone—including farmers and waterfowl—are seeking the remaining sources of water. But there’s also rarely an easy fix to widespread infectious diseases, emerging and mutating at the complex interfaces of animals and humans, and the fragments of wildlife habitats.

New Bill Supporting Wildlife Habitat on Private Lands. A bipartisan group of senators recently introduced the Habitat Connectivity on Working Lands Act, aimed at “improving wildlife habitat connectivity and wildlife migration corridors” on private land. The bill would enable private landowners to use the USDA’s voluntary conservation programs to address the problem of wildlife fragmentation, including through technical assistance, cost-share, and payouts offered under existing programs. This would include, for instance, restoring wildlife habitat and adopting virtual fencing technology to allow wildlife to move more safely through landscapes.

Protecting Farmworkers From Avian Flu. The CDC recently updated its interim guidance for protecting higher-risk workers—such as poultry workers, slaughterhouse workers, and veterinarians—from the avian flu virus. The agency recommends personal protective equipment, including non-disposable, fluid-resistant overalls, a particulate respirator with a minimum of N95 filters, rubber boots with sealed seams, and properly fitted goggles. The guidance comes after a dairy worker in Texas was infected with avian flu, the second case of H5N1 detected in a human in the U.S. However, the CDC doesn’t have the ability to enforce these recommendations and has already received pushback from farmers who are unwilling to offer this equipment to workers.

The post Bird Flu May Be Driven By This Overlooked Factor appeared first on Civil Eats.

Despite Recent Headlines, Urban Farming Is Not a Climate Villain

Lisa Held — Wed, 03 Apr 2024 09:00:50 +0000

At the end of January, multiple publications including Modern Farmer and Bloomberg ran eye-catching stories on the results of a research study published in Nature. Forbes declared that, “Urban Farming Has a Shockingly High Climate Cost,” a headline that was outright wrong in terms of the study’s findings. Earth.com led with a single, out-of-context data point: “Urban agriculture’s carbon footprint is 6x greater than normal farms.”

On Instagram, urban farmers and gardeners began to express anger and frustration. Some commented on media company posts; others posted their own critiques. In February, students at the University of Michigan, where the study was conducted, organized a letter to the researchers pointing out issues with the study.

The issue most cited across critiques was simple: When urban farms were separated from community gardens in the study, the higher rate of greenhouse gas emissions reported essentially disappeared.

Now, two months later, national advocates for the multi-faceted benefits of growing food and green spaces in cities are working to counter what they see as harmful narratives created by a study they say had design flaws to begin with and was then poorly communicated to the public. Of special concern is funding for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) fledgling Office of Urban Agriculture and Innovative Production, which Congress has been shorting since it was established. A coalition of groups have been pushing to change that in the upcoming farm bill.

“We hope the damage isn’t already done, but we fear that publicity around this paper will minimize the advocacy of urban farmers and partners over the past many years and possibly undermine the continued and necessary investment in urban agricultural communities,” reads a letter sent to the study authors by Michigan Food and Farming Systems, the Organic Farming Research Foundation, Pasa Sustainable Agriculture, and the Ohio Ecological Food and Farm Association.

“We hope the damage isn’t already done, but we fear that publicity around this paper will minimize the advocacy of urban farmers and partners over the past many years…”

Their overall critiques of the study start with the sample set of “urban farms.”

In a conversation with Civil Eats, lead author Jason Hawes, a Ph.D. student at the University of Michigan, said this his team compiled “the largest data set that we know of” on urban farming. It included 73 urban farms, community gardens, and individual garden sites in Europe and the United States. At each of those sites, the research team worked with farmers and gardeners to collect data on the infrastructure, daily supplies used, irrigation, harvest amounts, and social goods.

That data was then used to calculate the carbon emissions embodied in the production of food at each site and those emissions were compared to carbon emissions of the same foods produced at “conventional” farms. Overall, they found greenhouse gas emissions were six times higher at the urban sites—and that’s the conclusion the study led with.

But not only is 73 a tiny number compared to the data that exists on conventional production agriculture, said Omanjana Goswami, an interdisciplinary scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), but lumping community gardens in with urban farms set up for commercial production and then comparing that to a rural system that has been highly tuned and financed for commercial production for centuries doesn’t make sense.

“It’s almost like comparing apples to oranges,” she said. “The community garden is not set up to maximize production.”

In fact, the sample set was heavily tilted toward community and individual gardens and away from urban farms. In New York City, for example, the only U.S. city represented, seven community gardens run by AmeriCorps were included. Brooklyn Grange’s massive rooftop farms—which on a few acres produce more than 100,000 pounds of produce for markets, wholesale buyers, CSAs, and the city’s largest convention center each year—were not.

And what the study found was that when the small group of urban farms were disaggregated from the gardens, those farms were “statistically indistinguishable from conventional farms” on emissions. Aside from one high-emission outlier, the urban farms were carbon-competitive.

“They call out the fact that that tiny sample of seven urban farms that are actually production-focused, competitive with conventional agriculture, but that one line just got buried,” said Hannah Quigley, a policy specialist at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC). This aspect was especially frustrating to urban farming advocates because, as the groups who sent the letter point out, one of their biggest challenges in working with policymakers in D.C. is to get them to “regard urban farming as farming.”

Hawes said he found the critiques around lumping community gardens and urban farms together “reasonable” but that he stood by the method. He hadn’t considered including backyard gardens in rural areas in the sample, he said, even though city gardens were. “We were not necessarily attempting to compare urban and rural food production,” he said. “In fact, we chose to use the word conventional specifically because it pointed to the sort of ‘conventional food supply chain,’ which is often what urban agriculture producers are attempting to intervene in.”

Not only did taking the community gardens out of the picture change the emissions results, the researchers also found that 63 percent of carbon emissions at all of the sites came not from daily inputs or lack of crop efficiency but from infrastructure, such as building raised beds and trucking in soil. But using recycled materials for infrastructure cut those emissions so much, that if all the sites had done so, that would have been enough for them to close the gap and be competitive with conventional agriculture on greenhouse gas emissions.

“That problem can of course be solved by upfront funding,” said Goswami. “Then, bingo, according to the authors, you have systems with very comparable climate metrics.”

Overall, Hawes said he did regret some of the ways media coverage framed the study’s results but that he didn’t feel the framing of the study itself was problematic. “In my opinion, the most important sustainability challenge of our time is climate change, and if we’re gonna talk about sustainability in the context of urban agriculture, we have to talk about carbon emissions,” he said.

“The most important sustainability challenge of our time is climate change, and if we’re gonna talk about sustainability in the context of urban agriculture, we have to talk about carbon emissions.”

However, while climate scientists and sustainable agriculture advocates agree that addressing the food system’s 22 percent contribution to global greenhouse emissions is critical to meeting climate goals, whether carrots are grown in gardens in Detroit and Atlanta or only on huge commercial farms in the Salinas Valley (or both) won’t likely be a deciding factor.

At an event to kick off a new focus on food and agriculture last week, Project Drawdown launched a new series that will focus on food system solutions to climate change. There, Executive Director Jonathan Foley pointed out that the vast majority of food system emissions come from a few big sources: meat and dairy production, deforestation and other land use change (a large portion of which is linked to animal agriculture), and food waste.

As Goswami at UCS noted, that broader context is essential. “The authors . . . don’t at all zoom out to compare this to agriculture’s broader footprint,” she said, so even if there weren’t clear climate benefits to urban farming—which many say the study didn’t clearly conclude—prioritizing other benefits of growing things in cities might still make more sense. Especially given the climate resilience built into decentralizing and diversifying the food system.

Land use is particularly interesting, Quigley at NSAC said, because city farmers and gardeners often reclaim spaces that might otherwise be paved over and developed, adding carbon-holding trees and plants. “Folks who are maintaining community gardens and green spaces in cities to help with water run-off and urban heat island effect providing safe places for community gatherings . . . these are probably people that would be very concerned with their climate impact,” she said. “Can you imagine if they’re gonna be like, ‘Oh my god, should I not be gardening?’”

While NSAC did not sign on to the initial letter sent by the coalition of groups, Quigley is working with those farm groups and the members have since talked to Hawes. Disagreements on the study framing still abound, but they’re now working together on policy briefs that will be available to lawmakers if the farm bill process ever picks up again and conversations around funding urban farms are once again on the (picnic) table.

“Ultimately, one of the motivations behind this study was the fact that urban agriculture is largely discussed as a really useful sustainability intervention, and this study does not take away from that conclusion,” Hawes said. “I also think that to the degree that this starts conversations about the availability of resources for urban agriculture and the support that is available to urban farmers and gardeners for creating low-carbon solutions—I’m happy with that.”

Supply Chain Impacts of the Key Bridge Collapse. One of the most iconic elements of Baltimore’s harbor is the illuminated Domino Sugar sign, below which the sweet stuff can often be seen piled high on massive ships. Now, the sugar refinery is one of many food and agriculture companies that will likely be impacted by last week’s collapse of the Key Bridge, which shut down the shipping channel that leads to the city’s busy port. The port also handles imports and exports of commodity grains, coffee, and farm equipment. On Friday, representatives from the White House and USDA met with more than a dozen farm and food stakeholders including the American Farm Bureau Federation, the American Sugar Alliance, and Perdue Farms to discuss impacts on the industry. On Sunday, officials announced they are working on opening a temporary alternate shipping channel to get the port back open while the clean-up of the bridge and the stranded ship continues.

Climate-Friendly Rice. “My dad taught me to continuously flood a rice field. If you saw dry ground in a rice field, you were in trouble,” said fifth-generation Arkansas farmer Jim Whittaker at a USDA event last week. Now, Whittaker practices a technique that alternates his rice fields between wet and dry, a system he said has cut water use and methane emissions in those fields by 50 percent. Whittaker is one of 30 farmers whose rice is now available in a two-pound bag sold by Great River Milling. It’s the first product to officially hit the market as a result of funding from the USDA’s $3 billion Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities project, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said at the end, holding up one of those bags. And the debut comes at a time when some lawmakers and environmental groups are lobbing criticism at the agency over its broadening definition of “climate-smart.”

Slaughterhouse Rulemaking. More than 800 comments were submitted before the comment period on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) contentious proposal to increase the regulation of water pollution from meat processing facilities closed last week. On one side of the issue, 45 environmental, community, and animal welfare organizations joined together to make a case for the most restrictive set of regulations proposed, arguing that the weakest option, which EPA has said it prefers, is “inconsistent with federal law.” “We call on the EPA to rise above Big Ag’s push to weaken this plan to reduce harms from the millions of gallons of pollution slaughterhouses and animal-rendering plants are spewing into our waterways,” said Hannah Connor, deputy director of environmental health at the Center for Biological Diversity, in a press release. Meanwhile, farm and meat industry groups including the Iowa Farm Bureau and the Meat Institute filed multiple sets of comments asking for an extension of the comment period and arguing for additional flexibilities to even the least restrictive regulatory framework proposed.

The post Despite Recent Headlines, Urban Farming Is Not a Climate Villain appeared first on Civil Eats.

From Livestock to Lion’s Mane, the Latest From the Transfarmation Project

Lisa Held — Mon, 01 Apr 2024 09:00:27 +0000

A version of this article originally appeared in The Deep Dish, our members-only newsletter. Become a member today and get the next issue directly in your inbox.

In an old tobacco barn in North Carolina, Craig Watts completed three trial runs growing shiitakes before he felt ready to scale up. Then, he pulled a shipping container into one of the four giant barns that have been sitting empty on his farm and connected plumbing and electrical systems that once provided water and lighting for thousands of chickens destined to become Perdue products.

Now, he’s working on expanding his vegetable production on the farm, so that by later this spring, once he’s (hopefully) ready to sell his mushrooms at the local farmers’ market, he won’t be “a one-trick pony.”

“The pool of people you can actually help is very limited,” because if a farmer has significant debt from building and upgrading poultry, hog, or dairy infrastructure, and most do, the numbers just don’t work.

Over about a decade, Watts has become an indie rockstar of agriculture, famous among a niche fan base of food-system reformers, animal-welfare advocates, and farmers who—after years of being exploited by big, industrial meat companies—decided to speak up and get out. So it was only natural that he also became a poster child for Transfarmation, a Mercy for Animals program that aims to set those farmers up for an independent, profitable, fungi-focused future.

Civil Eats covered the program in early 2020, shortly after it launched, and Watts’ slow but determined journey illustrates the complicated reality of progress over the past four years. While some of Transfarmation’s farmers have laid a lot of groundwork, the path between feeding livestock and misting mushroom substrate was always bound to be muddy.

Transfarmation’s director, Tyler Whitley, estimates that over the last four years, about 100 farmers have reached out expressing interest. Of those, his team has worked with 12 farmers, nine of whom are still enrolled. (The ones who dropped out, he said, mostly did so due to health issues.)

While Transfarmation farmers also grow vegetables, hemp, and other crops, most focus on specialty mushrooms—including blue oyster, lion’s mane, and reishi—due to strong market demand, infrastructure compatibilities, and the fact that they are quick and fairly easy to grow.

The pandemic hit right after the project launched, and that set the timeline back significantly, says Whitley. Then, as the team identified challenges, they attempted to meet each one along the way. They contracted with an agricultural economics firm to analyze the costs of conversion and return on various crops. When it was clear farmers were having difficulty finding buyers for their mushrooms, they hired a “business engagement specialist” to identify restaurants and other buyers farmers might link up with. When farmers faced technical barriers, they found contractors who could visit each farm and help troubleshoot.

“Growth is always a process,” Whitley said.

Some farmers are now closer to running a viable business than Watts, who balances his mushroom business with his other, related job helping former contract farmers find resources through the Socially Responsible Agriculture Project. The Transfarmation team holds up Tom Lim, for instance, as a model. At a North Carolina conference in early February, attendees enjoyed his mushrooms in a tofu scramble for breakfast and a tartlet for dinner and they went home with a bag of dried mushrooms and instructions to make broth.

Still, Lim’s path to making money on his crop has been rocky. After scheduling challenges made it difficult for him to make a profit at farmers’ markets, the Transfarmation team helped him find wholesale buyers; that approach has been successful so far. Now, in addition to his participation in the pilot project, the program is leasing part of Lim’s farm from him and spending about $200,000 to convert one of his old chicken barns into a demonstration greenhouse that aims to show what’s possible.

“I’ve got to get my shit together and quit tinkering and get this thing working to where it’s replicable….There’s a learning curve that I can shorten for other farmers.”

But Watts said one of the biggest limitations of transition programs like Transfarmation and Miyoko’s Creamery’s Dairy Farm Transition is that “the pool of people you can actually help is very limited.” If a farmer has significant debt from building and upgrading poultry, hog, or dairy infrastructure—and most do—the numbers just don’t work. It’s more complicated than just switching what you grow in a giant, windowless barn. They’re made for one thing, raising chickens, and changing requires investments that can cost upwards of $100,000. Not to mention the fact that small farms growing specialty crops and selling directly to consumers are often barely scraping by.

That leads to a deeper question: Is the system being proposed actually going to be any better, financially, for the farmer compared to what they might make with an industrial chicken contract?

“That’s the $64,000 question,” Watts said. “But here’s the difference: If this doesn’t work out, I can walk away. I’m not going to lose anything.”

(Transfarmation’s financial projections predict an annual operating income of between $26,000 to $284,000, in addition to about $17 per hour in hourly wages to the farmer, based on converting one poultry house to a greenhouse, depending on the crop grown.)

Whitley, meanwhile, said that while the number of farmers may seem small and the finances complicated, the point was never to go out and help farmers transition out of operating concentrated animal feeding operations one by one. He sees each Transfarmation farmer, instead, as a mini pilot project. As they experiment and work out the kinks, the Transfarmation team collects data and documents successes and failures. Then, they write it all down and put it online.

“Our theory of change is working with individual farmers to create publicly accessible resources that anyone can independently implement,” he said. “We’re not trying to recreate another power-holding system.”

Or, as Watts puts it in his characteristically humble way, “I’ve got to get my shit together and quit tinkering and get this thing working to where it’s replicable. I see that as my role. There’s a learning curve that I can shorten for other farmers.”

This story has been updated to better reflect Tom Lim’s experience transitioning to mushroom farming.

The post From Livestock to Lion’s Mane, the Latest From the Transfarmation Project appeared first on Civil Eats.

In ‘Barons,’ Austin Frerick Takes on the Most Powerful Families in the Food System

Twilight Greenaway — Tue, 26 Mar 2024 09:00:10 +0000

With his new book, Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry, Austin Frerick set out to unravel the tangled history of today’s agriculture industry, while simultaneously pursuing the answer to a very personal question: What happened to the vibrant, diverse Iowa he once called home?

“The state is blessed with some of the world’s best soil: ‘black gold,’ which, coupled with consistently good rainfall, makes for ideal farming conditions,” writes Frerick, a fellow at Yale University’s Thurman Arnold Project, a research effort focused on competition policy and antitrust enforcement. “I wanted to understand how this blessing has, over the past 40 years, turned into a curse.” How, he wonders, has the countryside become “so industrial that it no longer feels like countryside at all?”

But Barons, which took Frerick five years to write, is not a memoir. It’s a detailed look at seven families that have risen to power within the food industry and, more importantly, the story of the system that has allowed them to concentrate power, reap enormous profits, and shape our political landscape. He digs into the policies that allowed white farmers to displace farmers of color in the 20th century and contrasts the “New Deal Farm Bill”—his term for the bill as it was originally intended—with today’s “Wall Street Farm Bill.”

“I wanted to call attention to how intentional the rise of industrial farms was by the business community in Iowa, as well as the failure of public servants like Vilsack to do what voters had wanted.”

“I refer to these people as ‘barons’ to hearken back to Gilded Age robber barons such as John D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan because I believe that we are living in a parallel moment when a few titans have the power to shape industries,” writes Frerick, in the book’s introduction.

Some of the barons, like the Waltons and the Cargill-MacMillan family, may be familiar to his readers. But most—including Driscoll’s “berry barons” J. Miles and Garland Reiter; Joesley and Wesley Batista, the brothers behind the Brazilian beef company JBS; and the Reimanns, the German family behind JAB Holding Company, the fast-growing company that has come to dominate the U.S. coffee industry in a single decade—will likely be new.

Civil Eats spoke to Frerick recently about several of the barons, the systemic levers that have allowed food monopolies to thrive, and why he thinks lawmakers should completely rethink the farm bill.

There have been a lot of books about the food system. What did you think was missing from the existing canon and why did you want to write this book?

I didn’t start off with wanting to write a book. I wanted to write about what I’ve seen happen to Iowa. In 2021, I wrote an article [about “hog baron” Jeff Hansen and his company Iowa Select Farms] with Charlie Mitchell. And that started over beers in a bar in Des Moines where a political operative told me the largest donor to the governor in the big race that year was this hog farmer who had given her $300,000.

He had a private jet, and the rumor was that it had “when pigs fly” painted on the side of it. To me, that just said everything about what had happened in my home state in my lifetime, how [a few big agribusiness families] run the state government to the detriment of the environment—and our communities. That article did well online; a whole lot of people reached out to me afterwards.

And I realized that missing in the larger story of the rise of Iowa hog confinement in the media is the fact that people there did fight them for years; there was a rural rebellion—and they lost. In these little towns of 2,000 people, hundreds packed gyms, trying to organize against hog confinements. When [current Agriculture Secretary] Tom Vilsack ran for governor in 2002, he even campaigned against them.

Then, after he won, he oversaw the largest expansion of confinements in Iowa history. So, I wanted to call attention to how intentional the rise of industrial farms was by the business community in Iowa, as well as the failure of public servants like Vilsack to do what voters had wanted. And after working on that story, I realized the baron framework was a powerful way to tell larger structural stories.

You write, “I was born near a Cargill soybean mill and went to church near a Cargill corn mill. I even played soccer next to a Cargill grain elevator.” Yet, like most people, you didn’t know how powerful the company was—it is now the largest private company in America—until much later.

It is truly mind-blowing how massive they are and how little attention they’ve gotten. And it’s because they’re the middleman. The Cargill-MacMillans are like your classic smart monopolists. The best monopolies are the ones that fly under the radar.

Cargill also doesn’t give donations—it funnels money through other people. Ninety percent of the company is owned by one family. That is an insane amount of money and power. I would argue they’re probably some of the scariest barons.

Can you speak to how the farm bill has changed since its inception? You describe what began as a “New Deal Farm Bill” and detail the events that transformed it into what you call the “Stock Market Farm Bill.” How are those different?

The “New Deal Farm Bill” was about managing production. What we saw during the Dust Bowl and after the crash of agriculture markets after World War I was the result of markets overproducing. Farmers were pushing their land [to produce as much food as possible] just to keep their land even though it was cratering the market.

The “New Deal Farm Bill” was an attempt by the federal government to try to figure out a balance between producing enough but understanding that the soil, air, water, etc., are common goods, and we shouldn’t push our lands too hard. And the two programs were tied together; in order to get farm subsidies, you had to engage in conservation programs. The carrot and stick were interlocked. And there were caps—each farm could only get so much in subsidies.

Fast forward to what I call the “Wall Street Farm Bill.” It is designed specifically to incentivize overproduction of grain. If you grow carrots, you don’t really get anything. The dark joke I keep telling after writing this book is that the only farmer really on the free market is the CSA vegetable farmer.

That push to produce corn in places like Iowa led to the ethanol industry. Farmers overplanted corn, and that pushed a lot of animals off the land. But it didn’t happen all at once. It’s like what we’ve seen in the last few decades of deregulation in America—there has been this slow removal of checks and balances. Now you have [farm bill-funded] conservation programs that come out of the Dust Bowl and are now being used to finance hog confinements, a fact that Civil Eats has reported on extensively.

The “New Deal Farm Bill” did some important things, but it was ultimately a bill to support white farmers. Ricardo Salvador [a Civil Eats’ advisory board member] helped me understand that the system has long been broken for farmers of color. Black sharecroppers did all the farming in the South. The white people were just the landowners who pocketed money and kicked Black people off the land.

So, rather than romanticize the “New Deal Farm Bill,” I think we should be looking forward. Because at the end of the day, agriculture in America is rooted in genocide and slavery. The question is: How do we incorporate the awareness we have now and move to a better system?

The GOP is often associated with leading the shift toward free-market capitalism in the ’80s and ’90s, but you highlighted the way the Clinton administration played a rather large role in creating the policy environment that has allowed the barons you write about to thrive. How should we be thinking about the role of neoliberalism in all this?

It was both Republicans and Democrats that led to the system we have now. That said, it wasn’t equal. You still had people like Tom Harkin trying to do the right thing. And in Iowa, the only people standing up against the proliferation of hog confinements were the Democrats. But, yes, you had [Democratic leaders] like President Clinton and Vilsack, who is a former lobbyist, willing to do the bidding of corporate America.

“Today, we have children working in our slaughterhouses, and there are no consequences. I haven’t seen something in modern American history so ripe for bipartisan reform than the meat industry.”

When JBS [bought dozens of meat processing companies in the U.S. and drove down prices for cattle ranchers], Vilsack didn’t stop them. The company will just keep pushing the limit, because they only get slapped on the wrist. They get fined and it’s considered part of the cost of doing business.

There are plenty of politicians out there—take Terry Branstad, governor of Iowa, or [former Agriculture Secretary] Sonny Purdue. They don’t pretend to be reformers. They’re there to do the bidding of corporate America. Vilsack is a different story.

Today, we have children working in our slaughterhouses, and there are no consequences. I haven’t seen something in modern American history so ripe for bipartisan reform than the meat industry. Vilsak had everyone [on his side]. He had Republican-leaning ranchers, the mostly Latino workers, and the consumers being gouged in the store.

All these non-American companies have moved in [in the last decade], and the largest one, JBS, admitted to bribing its way to monopoly status. And Vilsack couldn’t do anything? On top of it, the markets have gotten more concentrated during his second stint. JBS was an intentional creation of the Brazilian government. They realized they were over being shortchanged by international companies, so they decided to create their own monopoly. That was very much an intentional development strategy. But you let concentrated power happen and guess what? It corrupted the political system. And that’s why you also saw the rise of [former Brazilian President Jair] Bolsonaro.

You describe the Biden administration’s investment in small- and mid-scale meat processing to promote competition as “dumping money on Ask Jeeves and wishing it luck in competing with Google.” Can you say more about that? There are people who have attached a fair amount of hope to those investments.

To my knowledge, there has never been an example where markets have been de-concentrated by throwing government money at them. You have these meat monopolies, which have shown how ruthless they are—someone might even argue they’re quasi-mafia capitalists. Do you think they’re going to let an ounce of market share go to a local mom-and-pop butcher market space? No. There are a lot of people excited to get free money from the government to go build [or expand meat processing facilities].

But common sense just tells you the two most likely outcomes. One: they will just create more niche products for the Whole Foods Consumer. And, honestly, that has been the story of the food system for the last 30 or 40 years. Two: Most people assume these facilities will go broke in a few years. Then the big meat companies can buy them for pennies on the dollar. Vilsack will be a lobbyist again at that point. And he got the media he wanted about pretending to care about the little guys.

Here in California, the investments seem to have mostly gone to strengthen and expand existing operations, and there are some early signs that it might help build up the market for regenerative beef alongside institutional procurement.

You have some decent regulators there. But much of the “change the food system with your fork” framework is just concerned about the Whole Foods class. My goal is to change the food in Dollar General and Walmart. None of this does that.

Walmart has made an aggressive move into [producing its own] meat and dairy, and that says everything. My understanding is they did that because they were being gouged by the big meat monopolies, these [other] barons. Walmart is known as one of the most ruthless players, and they weren’t happy. Walmart didn’t fully make a vertical play like Costco did with chicken; it created its own companies to gain cost insights. So, now it knows the cost of beef production, and that way when it negotiates with the [other] barons, they can’t screw Walmart over. That’s where we are now: We’re depending on the world’s richest family to police the markets for themselves.

You write about the way that Walmart has driven prices down to such a degree that the companies who make the food it sells must find other ways to eke out a profit.

Yes, that’s true. My favorite disturbing fact about Walmart is the company’s 30 percent rule, because that’s so much about power. [From Barons: “The company is very cognizant of the power asymmetry between it and its suppliers. It requires that no more than 30 percent of their sales come from Walmart. This rule may seem counterintuitive at first, but an industry expert told me that Walmart implemented it to manage its own supply chain risk. It knows that if suppliers cross that threshold, they are at risk of going out of business because Walmart is such an unprofitable and difficult client.”]

The 30 percent rule shows us how the company just keeps tilting the field toward its own advantage.

In the book’s concluding chapter, you point to the existing tools for dismantling the system in which these barons are able to maintain so much control. Where do you see possibilities for change?

I think the heartland in America hasn’t grappled with what the shift to electric vehicles will mean for us all. It is like watching Wile E. Coyote run full-speed toward a cliff. Cars are moving to batteries; that’s going to happen. And it stands to destroy the ethanol industry—one of the largest markets for corn.

Right now, so much wealth in the Midwest is predicated on land wealth. Farmland is worth over $23,000 an acre right now in Iowa. That will plummet if half the corn’s no longer in use. We’re gonna face the death of ethanol soon. The question is what we do with that?

My silver lining is that we could use that moment to put animals back on the land. Because we’re playing with fire by having so many genetically similar animals packed into these metal sheds. We’re just asking for [more] disease.

“The problem with USDA now is it acts like a chamber of commerce, or a promotional agency for the barons. And with every metric—except corporate profits—they’ve failed …”

You also make a radical set of proposals in the last chapter to scrap the farm bill, completely rethink federal support for farms, and re-organize U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Can you say a little about why?

I think the current farm bill is just too broken. The 2024 Farm Bill will uphold the status quo. They’re going to try to ram it through in the lame duck session after the election. That’s pretty clear at this point. The current “Wall Street Farm Bill” really doesn’t change between [reauthorizations] in my opinion. They add little pilot programs, they do little tweaks, and there’s usually a little bit more deregulation. But I really think a bigger conversation needs to be had over putting the farm bill out to pasture and stripping USDA for parts.

I think a lot of reformers in the food space get played. What Vilsack types do is they bring them into the room, they let them say their peace. And then they can go back and tell their funders, “We had a meeting with the ag secretary.” And the status quo is maintained. That is what you see over and over. Secretary Vilsack oversaw the death of the family hog farm as governor of Iowa, and then he oversaw the death of the family dairy farm as Secretary of Agriculture, and that happened mostly because he didn’t do anything. If you’re not playing on a level playing field [as a farmer] at some point, you can’t play anymore.

I understand food reformers are trying to [make change] day to day, but once in a while, you have to step back and look at the bigger picture. This [bill] was built in a different world. It is so corrupted and corroded. We need to rethink it. And the USDA goes back to the Civil War. It’s not a bad thing to look at reorganizing the system. Let’s put food research under Health and Human Services. Why does USDA have antitrust authority? We should give that to the FTC.

The problem with USDA now is it acts like a chamber of commerce, or a promotional agency for the barons. And with every metric—except corporate profits—they’ve failed: The farmer’s share of the dollar is at an all-time low. One in 10 Americans works in the food system, and the way workers are treated is appalling. And by health standards, Americans are not doing well. It’s hard to make a case that they should continue as-is based on this checklist of failures.

I want readers to understand that the system we have now is radical. It is radical that one man in Iowa raised 5 million hogs a year. The reforms in that last chapter, a lot of it is going back to the way systems used to be—like putting animals back on land. That is not radical; that’s how animals have lived for most of their existence. I understand that the barons and their lackeys will frame me as a radical, but no, it is their corporate capitalist system that is incredibly radical. And you can’t talk about fixing or reforming something unless you have an honest conversation about where it’s at.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The post In ‘Barons,’ Austin Frerick Takes on the Most Powerful Families in the Food System appeared first on Civil Eats.

The Iowa Trout Stream at the Center of a Feedlot Fight

Nina Elkadi — Wed, 13 Mar 2024 09:00:05 +0000

In 2017, Larry Stone heard whispers about construction taking place near his home in Clayton County, Iowa. A retired photographer, Stone pulled up to the site, located around 20 miles away from where he lives, and began taking photos.

“A guy came roaring up on his little ATV and said, ‘Hey, what are you doing?’” Stone recalled recently.

His curiosity eventually landed Stone a tour of the project: Walz Energy, a joint venture between a cattle-feeding operation and an energy company. The idea, the manager explained, was that Supreme Beef would run a feedlot, and Feeder Creek would supply a biodigester, a machine that would process manure and capture the resulting methane to be sold as energy.

“The [manager] said, ‘This is not a feedlot; it’s a renewable energy project. We need at least 10,000 cows to get enough manure for the amount of methane we want to generate,’” Stone said.

“Anything that is a contaminant on the surface can get down into the fractured bedrock very easily and very quickly contaminate the groundwater.”

The biodigester project fell apart, but the plan for a 11,000-head feedlot moved forward. Without the biodigester, Supreme Beef—which is perched on the headwaters of Bloody Run Creek, a spring-fed trout stream filled year-round with rainbow, brook, and brown trout—had to come up with a plan to get rid of its manure, known as a nutrient management plan (NMP), which would need to be approved by Iowa’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR).

According to the DNR, any open feedlot operation with 1,000 or more animal units needs to submit a plan to ensure the operation does not over-apply manure to surrounding cropland.

Seven years ago, the Iowa Sierra Club, the Iowa chapter of Trout Unlimited, and a group of concerned citizens formed the Committee to Save Bloody Run in response to that plan, which they saw as scientifically incomprehensible. Since then, the committee has been opposing Supreme Beef’s operations and fighting the feedlot’s manure management plans.

The scrutiny of these plans is timely, as Iowa now has the second highest cancer incidence in the country, and it is the only state where rates are increasing. Many cancers are linked to nitrates, which are found in drinking water contaminated with manure or nitrogen fertilizer, and advocates are concerned about the link.

The fight to keep Iowa waterways clean is decades long—and the increase in concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) there is only making the fight more difficult. Each year, animals in CAFOs produce twice as much waste as the entire U.S. population. Although the state is known for hog production—hogs outnumber people 7:1—the number of cattle in Iowa feedlots is increasing, too. And for good reason: Cattle is the top-ranked agricultural commodity in the U.S.

The fight is especially contentious in northeast Iowa because the region is unlike the rest of the state, where fertile layers of soil were left behind from glacial drift and now act as a filter for water that moves down into the aquifers below. Northeast Iowa’s Driftless region has not seen glacial drift in over 2 million years.

An aerial view of the Supreme Beef facility taken by drone. (Photo credit: David Thoreson)

Chris Jones, a retired University of Iowa research engineer and the author of The Swine Republic, explains that because of this difference in the soil, the region has never been well suited for large-scale industrial agriculture. “Anything that is a contaminant on the surface can get down into the fractured bedrock very easily and very quickly contaminate the groundwater,” he said. “So, when we try to farm at these very large scales . . . that presents a real acute and chronic hazard to the water resources in that area.”

According to the committee, Supreme Beef likely first moved cattle to its farm in 2021, when it was operating on a NMP approved by the DNR, but that plan was later thrown out after the Committee to Save Bloody Run challenged it in court. In November 2023, DNR accepted a new NMP from Supreme Beef, despite years of opposition.

Advocates say they’re up against collusion between the DNR and the Iowa Legislature, which they believe to be doing everything in its power to keep the cattle feedlot open—regardless of its impact on water quality. DNR claims it is simply following standard procedure.

Now, the committee is attempting to defend against agricultural pollution using a new approach: It’s taking the DNR to court over its water use permit laws.

“All those cattle drink a lot of water,” said Jones, who is an expert witness in the case. “There has been some concern that the Supreme Beef well would rob water from other nearby wells that serve both homesteads and that are used for watering livestock.”

One resident who lives not far from the Supreme Beef operation, Tammy Thompson, claims in the suit that she needed to drill a new, deeper well because their water was contaminated.

“DNR strongly believes that the water use permit should be renewed. They feel that it’s not their responsibility or obligation to determine how the water is being used and how that use might impact the environment,” said Jones.

Supreme Beef did not respond to Civil Eats for comment for this story,

Origins of the Current Fight

Retired chemist Steve Veysey has been fishing in Bloody Run Creek for decades. The creek is 50-70 degrees Fahrenheit year-round, and thanks to natural springs, it never freezes over. He also likes the fact that it’s shallow enough to wade in.

In 2006, Veysey was one of the plaintiffs in a group that sued the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for not requiring the state of Iowa to enforce standards in the antidegradation policy nestled within the Clean Water Act. The policy states that “existing instream water uses and the level of water quality necessary to protect the existing uses shall be maintained and protected.” Veysey and other plaintiffs claimed Iowa regulations did not ensure this.

“In terms of water quality, there was the presumption of crap instead of the presumption of quality,” Veysey said. “And we won. EPA forced the state, essentially, to adopt new rules that presumed a stream or river segment had beneficial uses unless it was proven otherwise.”

As a part of that victory, the state created a list of “Outstanding Iowa Waters” deemed worthy of protection. Bloody Run Creek was one of them.

Then, in 2017, over a decade after the Clean Water Act victory, Veysey found himself again advocating to get the government to keep Bloody Run clean.

“There were a couple of, I would call them, con men, who went to the Walz family, which had a very small cattle operation at that time. They convinced them they could make lots of money by expanding their operation and having it be a methane digester and a waste energy operation,” said Wally Taylor, legal chair of the Iowa Sierra Club who argued the antidegradation case in 2006.

Under the initial biodigester plan, the DNR permitted Walz Energy as an industrial wastewater treatment facility. During that construction, they created and received permitting for an industrial wastewater treatment lagoon. According to Veysey, when the biodigester plan stalled, the feedlot repurposed the basin as a 39-million-gallon earthen lagoon to house raw manure right on top of the Bloody Run watershed.

In a 2021 petition for judicial review submitted in Iowa District Court, the Committee to Save Bloody Run argued that the lagoon directly defied state’s definition of an “open feedlot structure,” but due to a technicality, which states that open feedlots can use “alternative technology” to “dispose of settled open feedlot effluent,” the judge ruled that it was legal.

“If manure gets in a stream [and] decays, it sucks the oxygen out of the water,” Veysey said. “Now, all of a sudden, the dissolved oxygen that fish need to survive goes below a certain threshold and your fish die.”

Steve Veysey fishes for trout in Bloody Run Creek. (Photo credit: Larry Stone)

Pollution by way of the Supreme Beef operation is not purely hypothetical. In 2018, the Iowa DNR fined Walz Energy $10,000 for illegally discharging stormwater into Bloody Run Creek while building the feedlot. They were fined again for other violations, and in 2018, the DNR attorney recommended the case be taken up by the Iowa attorney general’s office.

Then, in an unusual move, the Iowa Environmental Protection Commission (EPC), a long-standing group comprised of Iowans appointed by the governor, decided to allow the DNR to resolve the problem on its own, and gave the agency full jurisdiction over Supreme Beef, without an attorney general investigation.

A DNR for Whom?

In September 2023, Supreme Beef submitted what would become its final NMP and, after multiple revisions, in November, the DNR accepted a revised plan it never opened for public comment.

The day after the plan was accepted, Taylor, legal chair of the Iowa Sierra Club, said Supreme Beef began spreading manure onto nearby farm fields—a move that members of the committee worry will oversaturate crops and result in the remaining manure leaking into the headwaters of Bloody Run.

The advocates say the pattern is part of a familiar history. “We think that the DNR gave Supreme Beef a heads-up ahead of time before they even actually approved the plan,” said Taylor. “The DNR has, for years, taken a hands-off approach on animal feeding operations and let them get by with lots of things.”

“The DNR has, for years, taken a hands-off approach on animal feeding operations and let them get by with lots of things.”

Back in 2021, open records requests filed by a reporter from the Cedar Rapids Gazette confirmed that Senator Dan Zumbach, the father-in-law of Jared Walz, a co-owner of Supreme Beef, worked with the DNR to find ways to get the plant approved. Zumbach, who is vice chair of the Iowa Senate Appropriations Committee, has received campaign donations from Monsanto, Bayer, Koch Industries, Smithfield, and DuPont, all large agribusinesses that might impact his decision. Zumbach did not respond to Civil Eats for request for comment for this story.

In 2022, Veysey, Taylor, Stone, and Jessica Mazour submitted an ethics complaint to the Iowa Senate against Zumbach. They referred to emails between Iowa government officials accessed through a public record request to argue that Zumbach was misusing his power as a state senator to assist with his son-in-law’s feedlot.

The complaint also noted various instances where Veysey attempted to verify the math in the NMP and said he found faulty calculations, which the group believes ultimately allows Supreme Beef to “significantly underestimate the number of crop acres they would really need for manure application.”

“The mistake was clearly pointed out to DNR staff during the public comment period by many reviewers but was ignored,” the complaint read. It was ultimately dismissed by the Iowa Senate.

In response to these claims and the others in this story, the DNR told Civil Eats that it “approved the NMP under the parameters set forth in state law and administrative rules” and then referred to a set of specific requirements and environmental protection codes.

It has been widely reported that Zumbach likely used his position in the legislature to pressure Chris Jones to stop writing his University of Iowa blog, which featured his research on Iowa water quality data. As Robert Leonard reported in Deep Midwest, Jones alleges that the pressure came with an implied threat that funding for monitoring systems could be impacted.

A few weeks later, Zumbach co-sponsored Senate File 558, which was signed by the governor in June 2023 and effectively shifted funding away from water sensors put in place to measure water pollution. Earlier that year, a sensor Jones had installed at Bloody Run Creek measured levels as high as 23.9 mg of nitrate and nitrite per liter. The EPA’s safe drinking water standard is 10 mg per liter, and new research shows that any more than 5 mg puts people in danger

“This was sort of a brazen abuse of power,” said Jones. “He’s defunding the water quality sensors that are immediately downstream from the Supreme Beef operation.

After previous efforts to push back against Supreme Beef’s NMPs proved unsuccessful, members of the Committee to Save Bloody Run are now involved in a lawsuit against the DNR focused on water use permit regulations.

Attorney James Larew is arguing that the DNR did not consider the public interest—which included around 70 comments in opposition—when it renewed Supreme Beef’s water use permit, which allows it to withdraw an anticipated 21.9 million gallons per year. Goat farmer Tammy Thompson, whose farm is located approximately 500 feet away from the feedlot, declared in the suit that “the contamination was so bad that it prohibited us from being able to move forward with our entrepreneurial endeavor of selling goat milk.”

“If you’re doing something right, Satan’s going to keep coming after you. I don’t understand why they keep coming after Supreme Beef.”

The approach to regulation—or lack thereof—is familiar to those who have been watching the farm landscape in Iowa. “There’s only one instance that we could find where an application for a water use permit had ever been denied by the Department of Natural Resources,” said Larew. “We’re talking tens of thousands going back into the 1950s, never challenged. The statutes themselves indicate that it’s not just the quantity of water the department should be concerned with but also these larger public interests.

While Supreme Beef did not respond to Civil Eats’ request for comment, at the hearing in the DNR building in the beginning of February, co-owner Jared Walz expressed frustration about the latest lawsuit.

“If you’re doing something right, Satan’s going to keep coming after you,” Walz said. “I don’t understand why they keep coming after Supreme Beef.”

The Committee to Save Bloody, however, doesn’t intend to stop fighting for clean water. The seven-year battle has been driven by retirees hoping for a better future for Iowa waterways. It’s an uphill battle, but the stakes are high, said Veysey. “If we can’t protect the best [waters] we have, we can’t protect any of it.”

Some farmers are also resisting the expansion of large agribusinesses like Supreme Beef. As Aaron Lehman, president of the Iowa Farmer’s Union, put it, “Food is being controlled by folks who have very little concern for our communities and our landscapes.”

Iowa lakes and streams feed into the Mississippi River, which flows thousands of miles across the country before reaching the Gulf of Mexico, where agricultural runoff is a major contributor to hypoxia in the dead zone.

“Our waterways do not stop at the state line,” Lehman said.

The post The Iowa Trout Stream at the Center of a Feedlot Fight appeared first on Civil Eats.