Investigations | Civil Eats https://civileats.com/category/investigations/ Daily News and Commentary About the American Food System Fri, 30 Aug 2024 22:43:08 +0000 en-US hourly 1 The Hard Work of Bringing Kelp to Market https://civileats.com/2024/07/31/the-hard-work-of-bringing-kelp-to-market/ https://civileats.com/2024/07/31/the-hard-work-of-bringing-kelp-to-market/#respond Wed, 31 Jul 2024 09:00:37 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=57122 “Anything you do on a boat is a long day,” says Scott. Especially if you’re a kelp farmer, trying to make the most of a short, 12-week season. That day, they’d been out to their 4-acre farm and back twice, harvesting a total of 6,300 pounds. The wind had whipped the rubbery, golden-brown kelp fronds […]

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It was nearly sunset on a breezy May afternoon when Scott Lord and his wife Sheena pulled into Port Clyde, Maine, on the Eva Marie. The hull sat low in the water, weighed down by 2,500 pounds of sugar kelp. The Lords had been out on the water since 5 a.m.

“Anything you do on a boat is a long day,” says Scott. Especially if you’re a kelp farmer, trying to make the most of a short, 12-week season. That day, they’d been out to their 4-acre farm and back twice, harvesting a total of 6,300 pounds. The wind had whipped the rubbery, golden-brown kelp fronds across Sheena’s face as she hand-cut the seaweed from the lines raised up from the water onto the deck.

Scott Lord pictured in Port Clyde, Maine. (Photo credit: Alexandra Talty)

Scott Lord pictured in Port Clyde, Maine. (Photo credit: Alexandra Talty)

She and Scott had worked quickly to stuff the kelp ribbons into giant bags. Now those bags were ready to be offloaded into a waiting truck and driven 100 miles southwest to their processor, Atlantic Sea Farms (ASF), near Portland, where many of the state’s kelp companies are based. Maine is the heart of America’s farmed seaweed industry, supplying half its harvest—well over a million pounds—last season.

Largely developed in Asia, seaweed farming is a new venture on American shores. One type in particular, kelp—a large brown algae with many species, including sugar kelp— has been hailed as an ecologically beneficial, nutritious superfood that can be farmed on both U.S. coasts—and could help fight climate change. These remarkable characteristics have helped the seaweed industry attract roughly $380 million in investments since 2018, from government, venture capital, and nonprofits.

Kelp’s Tangled Lines

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However, that’s a drop in the bucket compared to the global $9.9 billion market. And, according to farmers and kelp companies, the U.S. investment doesn’t yet address a range of logistical issues that challenge—some might even say threaten—the success of seaweed production.

A Highly Perishable Food

Scott Lord became a seaweed farmer five years ago to potentially help his other harvests—oysters and lobsters—adapt to rising ocean acidification in Maine; kelp has a remarkable ability to lower the water’s pH. What he calls “kelping” also gives him an additional income stream.

But for small farmers like himself, he says, kelp farming “wouldn’t be possible for us if we didn’t have a good business to deal with.” Atlantic Sea Farms, the largest seaweed aquaculture business in the country, has solved several challenges that seaweed farmers face in Maine and other states.

Transportation is one. For Lord, trucking kelp to Portland would be cost- and time-prohibitive. Obtaining the reliably productive, inexpensive kelp seed for the farm is another. But as part of the ASF co-op, he is one of 40 farmers that the company provides with kelp seed string—nylon or cotton strings inoculated with kelp spores—at the beginning of the season, in early winter. Farmers grow these out in the water, strung between buoys, until the fronds reach maturity in springtime. Then they sell the harvest to ASF, which picks up the kelp on the dock.

The second problem: Compared to other ocean harvests like oysters, lobster, or fish, kelp is infinitely more complicated to get onto store shelves. After reaching maturity, it must be harvested within three months, before the water becomes too warm and the seaweed begins to degrade. Harvested kelp is also incredibly perishable. Immediately after leaving the water, it begins to ferment, so must be chilled and processed to extend its shelf life—through freezing, fermenting, pickling, or drying—within a few days. And that requires space and expensive, specialized equipment that can resist the corrosive effects of salt water.

Frozen sugar kelp at Atlantic Sea Farms. (Photo credit: Greta Rybus)

To date, leading American kelp companies–including ASF and Ocean’s Balance, also in Maine—have poured millions into equipment like industrial freezers and dehydrators. Coastal Enterprises, a nonprofit and lender in Maine, says that most of their loans to the kelp industry are for working capital operations and equipment. Other states with less-developed but emerging kelp businesses—like Alaska, Connecticut, and New York—need processing help even more urgently.

According to a recent paper by Connecticut Sea Grant, a national network of university programs dedicated to marine resources, kelp’s “use as a food product in Connecticut and in other parts of the U.S. is limited, because there is a need for post-harvest and marketing infrastructure.”

Maine: Building a Vertically Integrated Business

Docked at Port Clyde, Sheena Lord stays on the boat, securing the gigantic seaweed bags to a winch while Scott operates a forklift that hauls the 1,000-pound bags off the boat and onto dry land. The bags are then weighed and loaded into ASF’s 18-wheeler.

“This is the moment that they become inventory. Every bag has an individual tag that says the Julian date, weight, farm, kelp type, and farmer,” says Liz McDonald, seaweed supply director at ASF. Driving her 18-wheeler across New England to reach partner farmers, McDonald lives out of Airbnbs for the majority of harvest season and is a familiar sight at small docks and quaint harbors across the coast.

Once the Lords’ bags are all on board, McDonald drives nearly three hours to ASF’s building in Biddeford, Maine, tucked off I-95 next to defunct railway track. At the loading dock, workers immediately haul the bags of seaweed from the truck, moving rapidly and efficiently. During kelp harvest season, the scene is a little like the Olympic Village during the Games: Everyone’s been training for this singular stretch of time.

The Biddeford facility includes a fermentation room, closed to outsiders, as it contains proprietary machines; storage freezers; a packing room; a cultivation room for breeding kelp; a kitchen for recipe development; and offices upstairs for the marketing and communications teams.

Sugar kelp is unloaded at the Portland Fish Exchange. (Photo credit: Greta Rybus)

Workers unload sugar kelp from Bangs Island Mussels at the Portland Fish Exchange in Maine. (Photo credit: Greta Rybus)

“It’s not Instagram beauty like, ‘Look at this beautiful kelp harvest,’” says Briana Warner, CEO of ASF. But she’s visibly proud of the space, beaming as she gives me a tour of the newly built $2 million processing center. At every turn, the air is filled with the briny, spicy smell of the company’s signature Sea-Chi, a seaweed-based kimchi made with fresh kelp.

Atlantic Sea Farms CEO Briana Warner.

Atlantic Sea Farms CEO Briana Warner. (Photo credit: Greta Rybus)

A former diplomat specializing in economic development, Warner knows that her company’s success is built on nitty-gritty details. “The reality is: Machines break. Every machine downstairs we had to create from scratch, because it doesn’t even exist in Asia . . . because they’re eating dried kelp,” she explains. “Every safety protocol, we’ve had to come up with.”

Early on in Warner’s tenure as CEO, the company almost went under due to processing issues. In February 2020, a deal ASF had reached to supply Maine-grown kelp to Sweetgreen, in a collaboration with celebrity chef David Chang, evaporated as the pandemic shut down the chain’s business. Back then, ASF had limited storage space and needed somewhere to store 240,000 pounds of kelp pouring in from its farms when the deal fell through. Warner tapped into her network of Maine businesses, and Bristol Seafood, a fish wholesaler based out of Portland, came to the rescue.

“They froze almost every bag of kelp,” says Warner, getting teary. Bristol gave her a bill for $3,000—far less than the true cost of their services—at the end of the season.

The event was clarifying for Warner. She plunged into fundraising for an ASF processing center and worked on consumer marketing. Now, the company has four products in every Whole Foods in the country, foods in national supermarket chains like Sprouts and Albertsons, and 20 ingredient partners like Thorne and Navitas.

For the 2023–2024 season, they harvested a record-breaking amount of kelp: 1.3 million pounds. “You can’t have this incredibly positive impact on the environment, on the food chain, on our partner farmers . . . unless you run a really good business,” Warner says.

ASF’s dedication to infrastructure also pays off for the consumer. When a shopper buys one of the company’s burgers, they can look up where the kelp grew, who harvested it, and when. This is a markedly different situation than with seafood writ large, where one-third of grocery store labels have been found to be wrong.

Traceability is the cornerstone of a larger shift toward the blue economy, a movement among coastal and ocean nations that equally supports workers’ rights, environmental concerns, and sustainability goals. It is a huge selling point for the millions invested in American-grown kelp.

For seaweed growers outside Maine, the logistics still have a long way to go.

Alaska: Dealing With Distance

After Maine, the next biggest kelp-producing state is Alaska. It’s also the most productive state on the West Coast, harvesting 871,000 pounds in the 2022–2023 season. With more than 33,000 miles of shoreline and 41,000 people directly employed in seafood industries in 2022, according to the state’s Department of Labor, as well as access to marine science institutions like the University of Alaska, many here expected seaweed farming to boom when it was first legalized in 2016.

An aerial view of Kodiak Island. Alaska's thousands of miles of coastline could help the state develop a booming seaweed-farming industry.

Kodiak Island in the summer. Alaska’s thousands of miles of coastline could help the state develop a booming seaweed-farming industry.

Federal officials also bet on Alaska’s rapid transition to seaweed farming. In 2022, the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration (EDA) announced $49 million to jump-start the state’s seaweed and shellfish industry, with a quarter of those funds earmarked for Alaska Native communities.

But for farmers and companies, the kelp boom hasn’t quite happened yet. In 2016, one of the first seaweed companies to open after legalization here went on a hiring spree and immediately started putting buoys into the water. According to former employees, they were expecting to hit 1 million pounds of harvested kelp in a few years. Instead, they’ve significantly reduced operations since then, although they do maintain a farm in Alaska. As for the EDA’s 2022 funding, it is still being allocated, and to an industry that’s just beginning to take shape.

Alaska’s mammoth size presents the biggest hurdle: At 663,268 square miles, it’s much larger than any other state and even most countries. Kelp-producing regions can be thousands of miles away from one another. Many of these coastal communities aren’t connected by road, and the only way to haul kelp from farm to processor is by boat. Even after kelp is made into a final product, it still has to be shipped to Seattle, 2,000 miles south.

“We’ve looked at chartering an Alaska Airlines plane,” says Lia Heifetz, laughing. Heifetz is the co-founder of Barnacle Foods, a vertically integrated kelp company known for its Bullwhip Kelp Hot Sauce. She isn’t kidding; in its early days, her company explored flying thousands of pounds of fresh kelp from Kodiak to its headquarters and processing facility in Juneau, a distance of 500 miles. Heifetz admits that the plan wasn’t cost effective—and came with quite a carbon footprint—so they dropped the idea.

Now in its eighth year of business, Barnacle Foods works only with farms within a 70-mile radius. The company still ships everything by boat, relying on commercial fishing vessels, thanks to relationships with fishers that Heifetz has built over the years. To process their kelp, Barnacle has slowly constructed a 3,000-square-foot production floor and additional warehouse. While Heifetz wouldn’t disclose how much they’ve invested in the facility, she points out that one machine, a “capper” for jars, cost $40,000. Other equipment includes container freezers, container refrigerators, and two forklifts.

“Some level of primary processing or stabilization needs to happen at any port [where] there’s a kelp farm,” she says, adding that a single processing company—and there are only a few others in the state—is unlikely to be able to serve thousands of miles of coastline.

“Most of the profit is coming from having farms double as grant-funded research.”

Farmers and kelp companies say that a cohesive strategy at the state level, particularly around what types of kelp products to initially focus on—food, fertilizer, or bioplastics, for example—could help farmers and kelp companies build infrastructure more efficiently.

As the $49 million in federal EDA funds are being dispersed through the Southeast Conference’s Alaska Mariculture Center, up to $10 million will go toward infrastructure-related projects; other funds include the Native Regenerative fund, aimed at providing money for permitting, equipment, and lease fees for Native Alaskans; a Kelp Climate fund operated by GreenWave, a kelp nonprofit; and the Saltonstall-Kennedy Grant, which can help address processing issues.

An additional challenge for Alaska kelp processing is the cost of energy, which varies widely. Each coastal community is isolated, often operating on its own electrical grid and using a variety of energy sources. Juneau has hydropower, which means Barnacle Foods has relatively low electricity costs, according to Heifitz. In other parts of Alaska, diesel generators can be the only source of electricity, a high-cost option that could deter some types of processing, like freezing.

Because of these expensive bottlenecks, farms have to make money in creative ways. “Most of the profit is coming from having farms double as grant-funded research,” says Brianna Murphy. A former commercial fisher, Murphy and her co-founder, Kristin Smith, created Mothers of Millions in 2021 to do just that, funded by a $30,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Their mobile kelp hatchery, built on a repurposed fishing vessel, means they can navigate straight to farms with spore-laden kelp ready for propagating, instead of waiting for the kelp to come by cargo plane and then working frantically to revive it. Murphy and Smith are kind of a one-stop shop for seaweed farmers: They also offer on-water processing capabilities, shredding harvested kelp directly from the water.

There’s no shortage of interesting and valuable kelp-farming projects in Alaska, including the Native Conservancy’s kelp program, founded to support Indigenous people in starting their own farms. (Native Conservancy founder Dune Lankard was recently featured in the PBS docuseries Hope in the Water for his traditional Eyak kelp cakes.)

Over the next several years, as the EDA grants begin to bear fruit, Alaska could edge closer to realizing the farming potential of its thousands of miles of coastline.

New York: Starting from Scratch

For other coastal states trying break into this nascent blue economy, commercial processing often doesn’t exist. Most kelp companies are based in Maine or Alaska, so farmers elsewhere must rely on themselves to harvest, process, and create end products.

Sue Wicks lifts a line of sugar kelp. (Photo credit: Alexandra Talty)

Sue Wicks lifts a line of sugar kelp. (Photo credit: Cam Burton)

One determined New York oyster grower came up with her own solution.

“This is my bay, a tiny piece of a world that is besieged on every side with climate change and pollution,” says Sue Wicks, the founder of Violet Cove Oysters. Each day, Wicks motors 20 minutes from her house to her 2-acre farm on the Great South Bay, using a Pickerell clamming boat that was designed specifically for this body of water.

“With this little spot, I feel an opportunity, a space to do something tangible,” she says, looking out at her acreage, oyster cages bobbing in the distance as she checks the growth on her kelp lines. She plucks off a furl of young sugar kelp and chews it, enjoying its briny sweetness.

Sue Wicks' sugar kelp in its initial drying phase. (Photo courtesy of Sue Wicks)

Sue Wicks’ sugar kelp in its initial drying phase. (Photo courtesy of Sue Wicks)

A former Women’s National Basketball Association star, Wicks became an oyster entrepreneur after retiring from professional sports, inspired to work on the waters that her family has fished for more than 10 generations.  Her ancestors could harvest shellfish by hand, but wild stocks have plummeted in Wicks’ lifetime, a consequence of warming waters and nitrogen pollution. After witnessing the decline of her families’ livelihood and pastimes—the traditions of clamming, oystering, fishing, and scalloping—she wanted to restore the waters that surrounded her house and hometown. In 2019, she began growing seaweed as part of a research project with Stony Brook University.

After receiving the state’s first commercial kelp farming lease for the 2023–2024 season, Wicks began construction on New York’s first processing center, a dehydrator. Supported by Lazy Point Farms, a New York-based nonprofit, the center cost around $50,000 to build, says Wicks, and is part of a public-private partnership with Suffolk County and the nearby town of Brookhaven. She’s already started using it for this season’s haul.

Wicks first dries her kelp near the water, on racks in the open air, where it shrinks to 20 percent of its original size. Then she moves the racks to a shipping container equipped with a heater exhaust fan and dehumidifier to finish drying completely. Everything is powered by solar, bringing the whole process as close as possible to net-zero emissions.

The shipping container can be converted into a mobile unit, she says, and it’s easily replicated. As for the dried seaweed, Wicks is experimenting with a hot sauce and a seasoning mix, in collaboration with Lazy Point Farms and available through the nonprofit’s website.

“We don’t have working waterfronts on Long Island anymore, and that makes it very difficult,” says Wicks. She hopes her processing center encourages other oyster growers to try kelp farming, since it gives them a way to create their own shelf-stable product, right after harvest. “The fisheries are part of our heritage. It is who we are. Our biggest success is getting other farmers in the water.”

This series was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center’s Ocean Reporting Network.

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]]> https://civileats.com/2024/07/31/the-hard-work-of-bringing-kelp-to-market/feed/ 0 Rescuing Kelp Through Science https://civileats.com/2024/07/17/rescuing-kelp-through-science/ https://civileats.com/2024/07/17/rescuing-kelp-through-science/#respond Wed, 17 Jul 2024 09:00:48 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=56953 What he’s looking for: kelp blades streaked with sorus tissue, a dark band teeming with millions of spores. A wiry man in his 60s, Lindell has developed relationships with homeowners and researchers across hundreds of miles of New England’s coast so he can access the kelp integral to his work—and, potentially, to the future of […]

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Just off the shore in Casco Bay, Maine, marine scientist Scott Lindell descends into an underwater kelp forest, his ears filling with frigid water as he swims down to the seafloor. Lindell’s mission: to find sugar kelp, a golden-brown, frilly-edged seaweed—and, more specifically, sugar kelp in its reproductive phase. Peering through his mask in the swirling, murky water, Lindell can only see a few feet, so it’s not an easy task.

What he’s looking for: kelp blades streaked with sorus tissue, a dark band teeming with millions of spores. A wiry man in his 60s, Lindell has developed relationships with homeowners and researchers across hundreds of miles of New England’s coast so he can access the kelp integral to his work—and, potentially, to the future of seaweed farming in the United States.

After several dives, Lindell has filled his mesh collection bag with cuttings and swims to shore. He stores the prized tissue in a cooler to keep it damp and cool for the five-hour drive, and then sets off for his laboratory at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. Here, over the next 45 days, the spores will be carefully cultivated into seed for farmers and scientists to outplant in the ocean.

Scott Lindell stands in front of a seaweed bioreactor in his lab at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. (Photo credit: Alexandra Talty)

Scott Lindell checks a seaweed bioreactor in his lab at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. (Photo credit: Alexandra Talty)

Every year, every ounce of any kelp variety farmed commercially in the U.S.—now approaching millions of tons—begins with this process. Many growers see it as a bottleneck: Propagation from wild-harvested seaweed is costly, lengthy, and ties rural coastal communities to laboratories that are often hours, if not days, away. It also shortens the seaweed growing season, as sorus tissue can only be harvested for a few months of the year. And, most frustrating to farmers, relying on wild stocks for farmed kelp means that growers have very little control over the final product. What could look underwater like a yummy blade may turn out to be a varietal better suited to feeding snails than pleasing the human palate.

Kelp’s Tangled Lines

Read all the stories in our series:

Lindell’s eponymous lab at Woods Hole may look humble, with low ceilings and cement floors, but it’s meticulously organized, with hundreds of seaweed varietals catalogued and floating in refrigerated containers. As ferry horns punctuate the rushing sound of seawater piped into scores of tanks, a team of scientists toils away at an ambitious project: revolutionizing kelp propagation. They have just mapped a single sugar kelp genome for the first time, and the results are about to be publicized through the Joint Genome Institute in Berkeley, California. Next, they plan to map a genome for the entire species. The project is supported by a $5.9 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy MARINER program, part of more than $66 million that the agency has invested in American seaweed production since 2018.

If successful, their work will put Americans at the front of seaweed science globally, making it possible for laboratories like theirs to select wild kelp with ideal traits and create new kelp “seeds” in two weeks. This breakthrough in selective breeding would be the biggest advance in mariculture in the past hundred years, akin to Punnett’s Square, which revolutionized plant breeding in the early 1900s.

A Keystone Species in Decline

The largest vegetative biome in the world, kelp supports the bottom of the marine food chain, nourishing species like snails and lobsters. Humpback whales play with floating kelp, while sea otters wrap themselves in its wide brown blades. Some kelp can stretch as tall as a 15-story building, with fronds that dance in the ocean’s currents, creating an underwater habitat for species as varied as otters, sharks, and octopus. These underwater forests cover a third of the world’s coastlines, providing a buffer for terrestrial species as well by protecting coastlines from the full impact of hurricanes and monsoons.

Different varieties of kelp have thrived in the world’s oceans for more than 100 million years, along the equator and up toward the poles. In 2023, scientists estimated that kelp forests suck up about a third of the world’s atmospheric carbon; kelp also supports fisheries and removes nitrogen pollution. Together, these benefits are valued at as much as $500 billion annually.

Now, this complex, ancient species is in jeopardy. Globally, kelp forests are receding at a rate of 1.8 percent a year, due in part to climate change and human impact. In 15 years, marine scientists say there may not be enough wild stock for farmers to rely on, especially in states like Maine, where kelp forests are rapidly declining. On the West Coast, kelp loss has been even more extreme, with 96 percent of forests from San Francisco to northern Oregon dying off over the past decade, according to The Nature Conservancy. Beginning in 2013, a series of cascading events wreaked havoc: First, a massive heat wave plunged the kelp into stressed conditions at the same time that purple sea urchins—which feed on kelp—lost their biggest predator, the sunflower sea star. Without sea stars to keep them in check, the urchins multiplied and, in a behavioral shift, left their customary nooks and crannies and began devouring the kelp forests.

Scientists believe Lindell’s work could help save the future of seaweed. By mapping sugar kelp, Lindell is creating a Rosetta Stone of kelp traits and corresponding DNA that can then be used by researchers globally to better understand, and protect, their wild kelp populations.

“We can’t go and remediate 350 kilometers of coastline, but we can certainly create oases along the way.”

For example, for a kelp forest stressed by increasingly warmer waters, conservationists could identify and plant strains of kelp that are more heat tolerant. Tristin Anoush McHugh, kelp project director at The Nature Conservancy, monitors California’s remaining forests regularly, and believes that Lindell’s advances in seaweed reproductive technology could bolster restoration efforts. Scientists could isolate kelp that survive mass die-off events, propagate them in the lab, and then plant them in the open ocean, creating kelp refuges. “We can’t go and remediate 350 kilometers of coastline, but we can certainly create oases along the way,” she says.

A Market Worth Millions

If kelp forests disappear, so would wild-harvested seed for farmed kelp. Investment in American-grown seaweed—roughly $380 million to date from the U.S. government, venture capital, and private investors—would have been for naught. Lindell’s work could benefit U.S. kelp farming by helping restore wild seaweeds—but also through reducing costs.

For decades, China has led the industry, valued at $643.4 million in 2022, a slice of the larger $5.6 billion global seaweed market. According to the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization, China produces 89 percent of the world’s farmed kelp; the U.S. produces less than .01 percent—what one hatchery specialist in Maine calls a “rounding error.”

“I don’t know any other agricultural or aquaculture industry where the cost of seed can be as much as 50 percent of the farmer’s revenue.”

Many kelp companies in the U.S. cite America’s small appetite for seaweed as an impediment, especially compared to Asia, where seaweed is consumed regularly and in many forms. But minimal demand is only one reason for the low market share. The high cost of farming is another.

American farmers can expect to pay about $1 a foot for string inoculated with kelp seed. The yield is an average of 4 pounds of mature kelp per foot, which nets about 50 cents a pound, according to Lindell. “I don’t know any other agricultural or aquaculture industry where the cost of seed can be as much as 50 percent of the farmer’s revenue,” he says with a scoff.

Compared to other seaweed-farming countries, America is an outlier. Korean seed string is sold for 5 cents a foot and yields 30 pounds per foot, according to Jang K. Kim, a professor in the department of marine science at Incheon National University in South Korea. In China, the seed string cost-to-yield ratio is similar, because the government subsidizes that industry, according to scientists there.

Selectively Bred Spores, on Demand

Once the sorus tissue arrives at Lindell’s laboratory in Woods Hole, the cuttings are scraped with a razor blade, dipped in iodine and isolated in sterile seawater. Every seaweed hatchery in the U.S.—there are about a dozen—practices a similar sanitization process, which is costly for small businesses; one technician estimates that she incurs between $3,000 and $5,000 in annual sanitation costs.

illustration of the life cycle of sugar kelp, showing how kelp grows in forests from spores to sorus and everything in between. (Illustration credit: Nhatt Nichols)

Illustration credit: Nhatt Nichols

When the sorus tissue is clean, Lindell’s scientists dry it overnight and then immerse it again in sterile seawater, prompting the tissue to release its spores. These develop into gametophytes—tiny, feathery clumps, male and female—that are selected for desired traits and then bred to create zygotes (fertilized eggs) that develop into kelp seed (or, technically, juvenile sporophytes). Using gametophytes for seed instead of wild-harvested sorus tissue would greatly decrease the costs, since using gametophytes requires no sanitizing and they can be bred for multiple seasons.

“[Gametophytes] allow us to do what animal breeders and plants have been doing for millennia now—make a single-pair cross that we can then ascertain some value to,” explains Lindell. “We can measure—how long is that blade? How sweet is it? Does it resist high temperature?”

Every harvest season for the past five years, his lab has measured these crosses for 30 to 50 traits, creating a tremendous amount of information for breeding commercially attractive future generations—and for potentially restoring wild kelp one day. The lab publishes all of its breeding information on Sugar Kelp Base, an open-source website for global seaweed researchers.

In Asia, selective breeding is common in mariculture, and is why yields can be four to six times larger than on American farms. But in recent years, Asia’s yields have flatlined, possibly due to a lack of genetic diversity after 50 generations of breeding the same genetic lines of kelp.

Instead, Lindell’s genomic selection approach allows his team to conserve genetic diversity while still selecting for specific traits. They’ve also worked closely with Cornell University and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, borrowing crossbreeding techniques from terrestrial agriculture. “In the last five years, we’ve been able to make achievements that took the Asian countries 30 or 40 years to accomplish,” says Lindell.

What is the No. 1 thing they’re breeding for? “Yield. And No. 2 is yield. And No. 3 is probably yield,” says Lindell, laughing. “Every farmer’s business plan and projections are based on yield. Every 10 percent improvement in yield produces probably a 5 percent improvement in their bottom line.”

Increasing yield is part of the focus of the MARINER grant. Currently, the average U.S. farm yield is about 4 pounds per foot. So far, Lindell’s team has been able to triple that yield on average, with hopes of isolating a strain that can produce 25 pounds per foot, approaching the yields of China and South Korea. Lindell is also looking at kelp traits like a strong umami flavor, or thicker blades that make them easier to use as wraps for food, or an ability to resist predation by other marine organisms.

“Every farmer’s business plan and projections are based on yield. Every 10 percent improvement in yield produces probably a 5 percent improvement in their bottom line.”

Creating gametophytes, says Lindell, allows seaweed farmers to become “the orchestrator of your own symphony when it comes to the seaweed planting season. You could start it as early or as late as you choose.” Growers would be able to time their own planting, instead of waiting for wild kelp to mature and produce sorus tissue—and they would have a longer growing season and therefore a larger yield.

Gametophytes also mean less nursery time. Currently, beginning with wild-harvested sorus tissue requires around 50 days to produce kelp “strings”—strings of kelp seeds grown out in a nursery until ready to deploy on a farm. With gametophytes, that time is cut to around 30 days. Additionally, farmers can choose varietals based on their traits, similar to the way apple growers select for flavor, color, juiciness, or other qualities.

The Near Future of Seaweed Farming

Perched at the top of New England and patched with miles of working waterfronts, Maine is the heart of America’s farmed kelp industry. Over the 2022-2023 season, the state pulled in nearly 1 million pounds of kelp—nearly half of America’s farmed output. With its deep, cold waters and naturally occurring kelp beds, the state is home to the country’s first commercial kelp farm and boasts world-class scientists at the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences, in addition to a marine workforce. For kelp farming, it is a near-perfect location.

Except for the warming waters. The Gulf of Maine is warming 99 percent faster than the rest of the ocean, with devastating repercussions for all marine life, from kelp to finfish to lobster. “It’s harder and harder to find reproductive kelp in September to have ready by, say, Halloween,” says Thew Suskiewicz, a seaweed scientist at Maine’s Atlantic Sea Farms, the largest seaweed aquaculture operation in the country. The company provides seed to partner farmers to outplant. For the 2023-2024 season, Atlantic Sea Farms pulled in a record-breaking 1.3 million pounds of kelp for its line of foods.

Suskiewicz operates the farm’s hatchery after a career of studying algae, including at the seaweed food company Monterey Bay Seaweeds. “I’ve been looking at how kelp assemblages have changed in the Gulf of Maine in the last 30 years—and we’ve seen profound changes. Most of the species here have some life stage that is very dependent on the kelp,” he says, noting lobster as an important example. Lobstering is a nearly $400 million annual industry in Maine alone, according to NOAA. Wild kelp’s decline, he predicts, “is going to have a lot of cascading effects.”

Many of Maine’s lobstermen and commercial fishers are already experiencing huge shifts in the marine populations they harvest. That has led some to get into the farmed seaweed industry to diversify their incomes and businesses in the face of warming waters. Establishing gametophyte cultures would make kelp seed string cheaper, offer more predictability, and make kelp farming less dependent on wild kelp beds. Suskiewicz is working closely with Lindell’s lab, and next season will begin raising gametophyte-spawned kelp in Maine’s waters.

“Next year will be the first year we put them out, and we’ll just measure performance—including, how much did they grow? How do they taste? What is their blade length?” says Suskiewicz.

Suskiewicz believes that the American seaweed industry is at an inflection point, and that selective breeding is arriving at the perfect time. Five years ago, Atlantic Sea Farms seaweed salads were available only in specialty food stores. Now, they’re found across the country, thanks in part to the company’s intensive marketing efforts to introduce the average American to kelp.

Now that seaweed is a bit more familiar, Suskiewicz believes that if the cost of kelp seed drops through widespread adoption of gametophytes, the industry will be able to scale up and finally compete with Asia. “People can purchase their kelp from the U.S., from known monitored waters, by farmers in their community, rather than stuff that primarily comes over from China through [South] Korea—dried, dyed, and then shipped over,” he says.

As for Lindell, he sees enormous potential not just for sugar kelp, the species his lab is mapping. His team’s work could help regenerate other kelp species, too, including giant kelp in California and bull kelp in Alaska. And the kelp-farming industry could be the driver. More funding goes into farming kelp than preserving it in the wild, but the science applies equally: “All the learnings of the industry around resilience, growth, health, and disease resistance is going to carry over to conservation.”

This story was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center’s Ocean Reporting Network.

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]]> https://civileats.com/2024/07/17/rescuing-kelp-through-science/feed/ 0 Are Companies Using Carbon Markets to Sell More Pesticides? https://civileats.com/2024/07/09/are-companies-using-carbon-markets-to-sell-more-pesticides/ https://civileats.com/2024/07/09/are-companies-using-carbon-markets-to-sell-more-pesticides/#comments Tue, 09 Jul 2024 09:00:54 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=56872 First, the farmers embarked on a wagon tour. One stop showed off a soybean yield trial. At another, a scientist presented research on a new class of nitrogen-fixing inputs. During a demo of a drone spraying a pesticide over rows of corn, the operators laughed as a gentle breeze blew the mist toward the onlookers. […]

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Last summer, two men shouted friendly greetings from golf carts as they zipped around a field-turned-parking lot, fetching farmers at pick-up trucks and dropping them in front of a barn. It was the annual field day at The Mill, a popular Mid-Atlantic retailer of agricultural products including seeds, fertilizer, and pesticides.

First, the farmers embarked on a wagon tour. One stop showed off a soybean yield trial. At another, a scientist presented research on a new class of nitrogen-fixing inputs. During a demo of a drone spraying a pesticide over rows of corn, the operators laughed as a gentle breeze blew the mist toward the onlookers. “Don’t worry, it’s just water!” they yelled.

Chemical Capture: The Power and Impact of the Pesticide Industry

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Back at the barn, companies that sell their products at The Mill had set up folding tables to talk to farmers and hand out swag. Land O’Lakes, the company known to most Americans only as a longtime purveyor of butter wrapped in bright yellow packaging, had two adjoining tables showcasing two of its more specialized businesses: pesticides and carbon markets.

At those tables, farmers could grab an Advanced Acre Rx hat from WinField United, Land O’Lakes’ seed and chemical company, and a water bottle emblazoned with the logo for Truterra, its carbon market platform, in one fell swoop.

The display exemplified how, as Land O’Lakes’ annual report laid out earlier that year, the agricultural giant is marketing enrollment in a climate-smart farming initiative alongside its biggest profit driver: pesticides and seeds.

Screenshot from Land O' Lakes' 2022 annual report that describes how the company's teams at Truterra and WinField United worked together on soil health and carbon markets.

In this screenshot from Land O’Lakes’ 2022 Annual Report, the company describes how its “teams at Truterra and WinField United worked together to blaze a trail for farmers to improve their soil health and potentially become eligible for future market opportunities.”

Land O’Lakes’ Truterra is unique in some ways, but it also fits the mold of what agricultural carbon markets have come to look like across the country over the last few years.

Carbon markets were first created decades ago as a means for companies to offset their greenhouse gas emissions by paying to reduce emissions somewhere else. Think: planting trees that hold carbon in South America to balance emissions from a factory in South Carolina.

While the highest-profile carbon markets are run by public entities like the state of California, many of the agricultural markets that have made more recent progress are run by powerful companies that are in the business of selling pesticides and fertilizers.

And over the last several years, policymakers, environmental and farm groups, and private companies began hyping the idea that specific markets could be created to pay farmers for adopting practices that could reduce emissions and hold carbon in soil. Flashy startups including Nori and Indigo Ag jumped into the game, Democrats included the idea in their 2020 plan to address the climate crisis, and a bitterly divided Congress passed the Growing Climate Solutions Act on a bipartisan basis in an effort to jump-start the markets.

As a result, a new era of paying farmers for carbon-holding practices became the talk of many farm conferences and climate panels, where the same points came up over and over. Spreading regenerative practices that build soil carbon across more cropland would produce so many other benefits, advocates said. Farmers would be able to hold water and nutrients in the soil, reduce pollution, and increase biodiversity. And over time, not only would they access a new source of revenue, regenerative practices would allow farmers to cut costs as they decreased the use of chemicals—including pesticides and fertilizer—producing yet another environmental win. In 2021, for example, The New York Times put that narrative in print by featuring a carbon-market farmer who had stopped tilling, diversified his crops, and planted cover crops, eventually building his soil health enough to completely eliminate the use of synthetic fertilizer.

However, while the highest-profile carbon markets are run by public entities like the state of California or New England’s Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), many of the agricultural markets that have made more recent progress are run by powerful companies—including Bayer, Corteva Agriscience, and Land O’Lakes—that are in the business of selling those same pesticides and fertilizers.

In addition, even the independent platforms are now working closely with the same companies. Indigo launched a partnership with Corteva in 2021. (Last month, journalists at Bloomberg reported that the company and other startups that set out to disrupt bigger, traditional agriculture companies have struggled to connect with farmers on their own.) Meanwhile, close to half of the credits Nori has paid out to date have gone to Bayer’s enrolled farmers. Seventy-five percent of the credits Nori currently has available for buyers are linked to Bayer’s platform.

“Partnering with Bayer allowed Nori to scale and accelerate the impact we’re able to make, compared to what we could have accomplished by enrolling individual farmers one by one,” Radhika Moolgavkar, Nori’s VP of supply and methodology, said in an email. “We believe that to foster large-scale adoption of these practices, programs like Bayer Carbon are required to help with the monetary hurdles to transitioning to regenerative practices.”

However, others are concerned about the influence pesticide companies are exerting within the growing landscape of paying farmers for carbon, especially as taxpayer money floods in to boost their efforts and farmer field data becomes more and more valuable.

“From their perspective, these are future clients, or they may be existing clients,” said Ben Lilliston, the director of rural strategies and climate change at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. “They’re getting a tremendous amount of data from the farmer-participants. It puts them in a very strong position to help farmers manage whatever they’re dealing with on their farm, beyond climate-related stuff. It’s kind of a win-win: Get a farmer in the program, get the information, and get to sell them seeds or pest control.”

“It’s kind of a win-win: Get a farmer in the program, get the information, and get to sell them seeds or pest control.”

Bayer, for example, has linked its carbon program to other data platforms that drive product sales. And while many practices shown to hold the most carbon—like agroforestry and organic systems—can reduce or eliminate the need for pesticides over time, companies in the business of selling the chemicals are unlikely to recommend them, environmental groups say.

In fact, the two practices that dominate current markets—no-till and cover crops—require herbicides to succeed in the way they’re practiced on most commodity farms. Farmers use herbicides to kill weeds that they could otherwise till under and to kill cover crops before planting a cash crop. And most soil scientists agree that the jury is still out on whether those practices can hold carbon at a depth and for long enough to create meaningful climate outcomes.

New (Carbon) Markets for Products

When Land O’Lakes launched Truterra in 2016, the company set it up to leverage the power of its network of 60 agricultural retailers, which altogether have about 1,000 locations across the country, said Tom Ryan, Truterra’s former president, in an interview last year.

“Farmers place a great deal of trust in their seed dealers,” said Ryan. Those seed dealers, when they recommend products made by companies like Land O’Lakes WinField United, are uniquely suited to also convince farmers to sign on to programs that will pay them to adopt practices with environmental benefits, such as planting cover crops. And recommending the right products at the same time helps the farmers succeed at implementing those practices, he said.

The way Bayer engaged with the stores that sell its inputs was also what caught the attention of Jason Davidson, a food and agriculture campaigner at the environmental advocacy organization Friends of the Earth.

Davidson’s interest was piqued by a 2018 column published in a trade publication. In the article, journalist Paul Schrimpf wrote about a buzzy topic retailers were discussing at multiple industry events. Schrimpf explained that Monsanto (now owned by Bayer) had started including a data product called Climate FieldView in its rebate bundles, meaning retailers would have to also sell a certain number of FieldView subscriptions alongside seeds and pesticides to get company rebates they had long relied on. Many farmers, he wrote, still didn’t want to pay for the program, and he predicted retailers might consider eating the cost and enrolling them so they wouldn’t lose the rebate.

“That got us thinking, ‘Why, in this decade, are pesticide companies all of a sudden super interested in data?’” said Davidson, who later co-authored a report on the topic that was released last year. “I think it’s pretty safe to argue that Bayer and other pesticide manufacturers were interested in data because they saw it as a way to potentially increase sales.”

Bayer’s own documents seem to back that argument up. In its 2022 annual report, Bayer said Climate FieldView “enables us to use novel modeling to make custom product recommendations that are precisely tailored to each individual field. With these insights we can maximize the value of our seed and chemistry portfolio, help farmers expand participation in the carbon markets and food, feed, fiber, and fuel value chains, and lead Bayer toward digitally enabled business models and new opportunities for growth.”

In another presentation that year, the company reported that corn seed customers who used FieldView planted Bayer corn seeds at a higher seeding rate compared to the national average and those who opted for the premium FieldView Plus version generated 5 percent higher sales.

Today, farmers who want to enroll in Bayer’s carbon market have to first enroll in Climate FieldView. In an email, a Bayer spokesperson said its platform collects data that’s needed to calculate carbon sequestration and register carbon credits. “As with all Climate FieldView digital ag platform initiatives, the grower always owns their own data and controls who they choose to share that data with,” he said.

In addition to being the place where farmers input data that will allow them to get paid for carbon, the program recommends planting protocols and offers product discounts. In 2020, Reuters reported that Bayer offered farmers the option to get paid for their carbon in credits for more Bayer products. When asked if the company still offered that option, the spokesperson said Bayer pays growers in cash, “never in product credits.”

The spokesperson did not specifically answer whether farmers enrolled in its carbon program purchased more Bayer products but said, “While Bayer has a broad selection of industry-leading crop protection, seed and seed treatment products, growers are not required to purchase crop protection, seed, or seed treatment products to participate.”

Last year, the company outlined in a press release how it planned to “capitalize on opportunities presented by the shift to regenerative agriculture.” Carbon farming and digital platforms were on a list of market opportunities expected to generate more than $100 billion. “Importantly, by the middle of the next decade, Bayer envisions shaping regenerative agriculture on more than 400 million acres, built on the foundation of its leading agriculture input solutions,” it wrote.

A screenshot of an email sent to Bayer ForGround participants titled

A screenshot of an email sent to Bayer ForGround participants titled “Tips for Herbicide & Fungicide Applications” and with the sub-headline of “top tips and trends in reduced tillage, cover crops and carbon.”

That’s the rub, many environmental advocates and sustainable agriculture experts say: A market truly dedicated to helping farmers move the needle on climate would be grounded in helping farmers reduce fossil fuel-derived inputs over time, thereby reducing resource use, minimizing other environmental impacts, and saving them money.

“There’s a clear conflict of interest if you’re manufacturing a product and then making agronomic recommendations. We are really concerned about the idea that the companies that are manufacturing seeds and pesticides that are used together to make certain products—like neonicotinoid seed coatings—ubiquitous in industrial agriculture, that they are going to be collecting farm data and then using that data to make specific recommendations on how to farm,” Davidson said. “Even though the companies tout precision agriculture and data broadly as a way to reduce inputs, it’s really hard to imagine a world in which manufacturers of a product are going to tell their customers to buy and use less of their products.”

In response to a question about whether the platforms are used to sell farmers WinField United inputs, a Land O’Lakes spokesperson said that Truterra prohibits the use of farmer data for sales and marketing targeting. “Truterra’s programs focus on making practice changes that are best for the farmer and that means agronomically, economically, and environmentally,” they said.

Paying Only for Practices That Rely on Pesticides

Despite years of buzz about agricultural carbon markets, it’s hard to find farmers willing to talk about the experience of actually enrolling and participating.

“Part of it is just that your average farmer is not going to scream it from the rooftop,” said Aaron Shier, the government relations director at the National Farmers Union (NFU), and some of the markets likely come with confidentiality clauses. Still, Shier said that overall, not many NFU farmers are participating. The Iowa Farmers Union told Civil Eats the same. Both organizations, and other farmers we spoke to, said the main reason is the payments are still too low and unpredictable.

“It’s not worth my time,” said Josh Manske, who manages commodity grain fields in Iowa and Southern Minnesota. “Everybody’s getting a huge cut, and we’re left with the pennies.” And while Shier said he hadn’t heard any complaints around farmer data being used to lock in input purchasing or exert control over farmers, he said that “data privacy is very important to our members.”

The heavy lift involved in entering data was a big piece of conversations researchers at Hamilton College in upstate New York had with 17 row crop farmers—some conventional farmers participating in the markets and some certified organic farmers who weren’t eligible—in 2021.

In a paper published last fall, they shared major themes from those conversations, one of which centered on the farmers’ concerns around which practices are rewarded.

While the organic farmers were more worried that carbon markets would only support a small group of practices with climate benefits, both groups “raised concerns that carbon markets would inadequately support a full range of beneficial soil management practices,” the researchers wrote. “Some of these concerns focused on concerns that markets would incentivize activities that required heavy chemical inputs, which a farmer would have to purchase from a chemical company.”

Currently, Bayer, Corteva, and Truterra’s markets all pay farmers primarily to adopt no-till systems and to plant cover crops.

And there is a long history of companies using those specific practices to market pesticides linked to serious health risks. For example, as far back as the 1970s, Chevron Chemical promoted paraquat—an herbicide the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calls “highly poisonous” that is now linked to Parkinson’s disease risk and banned in dozens of countries—as a tool to convert to no-till farming. Farmers still use paraquat as an alternative to tilling for weed control in the U.S., and Syngenta’s website lists the chemical’s use in no-till systems as a key benefit.

For cover crops, standard practice is to kill the plants with a glyphosate-based herbicide before planting a cash crop like corn or soy. For example, on Corteva’s website, the company recommends its herbicide products that mix glyphosate with 2,4-D and lists “Don’t cut herbicide rates” as one key to cover crop success. While the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) maintains that glyphosate is unlikely to cause cancer in humans, the International Agency for Research on Cancer classifies it as a “probable carcinogen,” based especially on its potential link to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

CropLife America, the pesticide industry’s trade association, has dubbed no-till and cover crops “pesticide-enabled” farming practices. “Pesticides allow for sustainable conservation practices, such as no-till and cover crops, to successfully exist,” it says on its website.

Organic farmers who have long planted cover crops without chemical pesticides and some of whom practice no-till farming with a roller-crimper would disagree. But their practices, which have been shown to push carbon deeper into the soil, where it tends to stay put for longer, are typically not represented in these markets, which are designed to reward individual improvements to the standard row crop system.

CropLife America, the pesticide industry’s trade association, has dubbed no-till and cover crops “pesticide-enabled” farming practices.

And while cover crops and no-till practices both deliver multiple proven environmental benefits such as reducing soil erosion and nutrient runoff and holding water on farms, many soil scientists say their ability to meaningfully fix carbon in soil over time is not yet well-established due to questions around depth, permanence, and saturation.

Truterra is going beyond those two practices, and one of the new programs Tom Ryan, Truterra’s former president, was most excited to talk about last year was adding nitrogen management to the practices the platform would pay for. (Bayer also added nitrogen management to its program this year.)

In addition to harming health, rural economies, and wildlife due to water pollution, excess nitrogen applied to farm fields also creates emissions of nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas that has 300 times more global warming impacts than carbon dioxide. As a result, unlike the as-yet-unknown climate potential of cover crops and no-till, reducing nitrogen fertilizer application has clear potential to significantly cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Still, Truterra’s nitrogen management program allows farmers to either reduce fertilizer or add a “stabilizer,” another product that helps prevent nitrogen leaching. Given the choice of which to recommend, it’s hard to imagine a retailer telling a farmer to buy less fertilizer, because doing so could reduce their yields (although stabilizers can help reduce the amount of fertilizer needed). Land O’Lakes’ spokesperson did not share specific data on which path farmers are choosing, saying some “use one or the other or both to best meet the specific needs of their fields.” The spokesperson added that farmers can choose any stabilizer, not just one made by WinField United, to qualify.

Land O’Lakes is specifically marketing enrollment in Truterra in conjunction with WinField United’s Advanced Acre Rx, a product that involves using a farmer’s data to recommend specific seeds, nutrients, herbicides, insecticides, and fungicides and includes “season-long support from your local ag input retailer.” When a farmer is setting out to implement climate-smart practices, Ryan said, “We have to help them build that plan, which includes products.” Advanced Acre Rx is a prescription system that is sold as a way to target inputs for greater efficiency. Bayer also pointed to its resources that help farmers optimize and target inputs.

Impacting the Bigger Picture

Outside of the carbon markets run by pesticide companies, there are other platforms working to reward a wider swath of practices that provide climate benefits while also reducing crop inputs. Nori has one organic farmer enrolled in its market, for example, while Carbon Harvest is setting up a market to pay small farms to implement agroforestry projects.

But the Hamilton College researchers said the farmers in their study expressed concerns that chemical companies “could be involved in setting national government standards for carbon markets, which would then skew all carbon markets toward a specific style of farming and ignore other beneficial practices for carbon sequestration.”

One set of standards is already in the works, and the process is happening partially as a result of lobbying by pesticide companies and the wider agricultural industry.

Representative Abigail Spanberger (D-Virginia) first introduced the Growing Climate Solutions Act to initiate U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) oversight of carbon markets in 2020. It became a top priority for the industry, and in April 2022, CropLife America’s president and CEO Chris Novak praised the reintroduction of the act.

“The Growing Climate Solutions Act offers meaningful progress toward enabling farmer and landowner participation in voluntary carbon markets,” he said in a statement. “Regenerative farming practices such as no-till farming, conservation tillage, and the use of cover crops are made possible through the use of pesticides.” Bayer, Corteva, and Land O’Lakes all supported the bill, which Congress ultimately passed as part of a spending package at the end of 2022.

Now, the USDA is working to fulfill the requirements of the law. In October, it published a broad assessment of agriculture and carbon markets, followed by a February report explaining the next steps, including that it will evaluate the current carbon market protocols, determine which technical assistance providers are qualified to be listed by the agency, and create resources for farmers to navigate the landscape. At the end of May, the agency solicited public comment on those next steps as part of a larger Biden administration announcement around its policies and principles on voluntary carbon markets (which go beyond but include agriculture).

In an interview, Robert Bonnie, the Under Secretary for Farm Production and Conservation at the USDA, said the process for getting companies to share their specific protocols is still being worked out and public comments will help shape it. “Yes, we’re going to need information, we’re going to need to understand what’s behind them,” he said. “The critical part of all of this is that the public, consumers, investors, everybody has confidence that there’s going to be real gains to the climate as we undertake these practices and that the value in the marketplace is real.”

As to the various criticisms around companies that manufacture inputs running carbon markets, Bonnie said private sector investment is crucial to achieving climate progress on farms. “It’s really, really beneficial to have companies out there that are looking for ways to develop technologies and innovations that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions and maintain agricultural productivity. That’s a good thing. We want that,” he said. “I think it puts a very high priority on making sure that the work we do around protocols is transparent and that we do this in a way that maintains public confidence.”

Bonnie said that the agency’s work on carbon markets fits into the larger picture at the USDA, where the agency is using many different tools to support climate-smart practices. “We’re trying to create value for farmers, ranchers, and forest owners that undertake climate-smart practices,” he said.

The crown jewel of that picture is Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack’s $3 billion Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities Program. When the agency solicited input on how to structure that program, CropLife America submitted a letter once again emphasizing the connection between climate-smart farming and pesticides.

“Reduced or no-till soil management and the use of cover crops are two critically important . . . practices that are enabled by pesticide tools,” it read. “There have been significant climate and soil quality benefits from these . . . practices (enabled by pesticide tools) to date, but there is great opportunity for increasing the scale and impact of these practices.”

One company already working to realize that opportunity is Truterra, which the USDA awarded $90 million in Climate-Smart Commodities funds. In September 2022, when Vilsack attended a Truterra kick-off event, it was held at the WinField United Innovation Center. In its agreement with the USDA, Truterra emphasized the impact its connection to the company would have, noting that it is “the largest U.S. distributor of crop inputs” and that its crop input services reach roughly half of harvested cropland acres in the country.

In response to the question of whether, at the core, one goal of carbon markets should be to reduce farm inputs including fossil fuel-derived pesticides and fertilizers, Bonnie said in some cases it may make sense but that in others, beneficial new products could be a better answer.

“We want to keep our eye on the prize here, and it may be that there that there are systems where reducing inputs or changing the mix of inputs or using inputs that enhance efficiency . . . allow us to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while maintaining productivity. In many places, that’s part of the mix. But we’re not here trying to limit inputs per se, we’re trying to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

The post Are Companies Using Carbon Markets to Sell More Pesticides? appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2024/07/09/are-companies-using-carbon-markets-to-sell-more-pesticides/feed/ 3 Can Seaweed Save American Shellfish? https://civileats.com/2024/06/27/can-seaweed-save-american-shellfish/ https://civileats.com/2024/06/27/can-seaweed-save-american-shellfish/#respond Thu, 27 Jun 2024 09:01:57 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=56676 Now, she says, “it takes us a while to even get a couple of dozen clams. That’s not right.” She points out that most of the shellfish she harvests these days have been seeded manually by the town of Southampton and local universities, “almost like a science project,” she says. “The natural way has been […]

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Rebecca Genia walks out into Shinnecock Bay at low tide with a few of her great-grandchildren, using her feet to find hard-shelled quahogs buried in the sand. As a kid, she could fill a trash can with the blue-lipped mollusks in less than an hour—and could also gather other shellfish like oysters, mussels, or scallops, depending on the season.

Now, she says, “it takes us a while to even get a couple of dozen clams. That’s not right.” She points out that most of the shellfish she harvests these days have been seeded manually by the town of Southampton and local universities, “almost like a science project,” she says. “The natural way has been contaminated and polluted by mankind.”

Kelp’s Tangled Lines

Read all the stories in our series:

What’s also not right: the quality of the quahogs. “The shells are so brittle,” she says. The increasingly acidic water in the bay makes it hard for the clams to build strong shells. She points to her necklace of wampum—mollusk-shell beads that are integral to Eastern Woodland Native American culture. Hers is a single large indigo-and-white pendant, half an inch thick, the way shells used to be.

Genia, a member of the Shinnecock Nation, has lived along these waters on the South Fork of Long Island, New York, for most of her life. Shellfish are a traditional food source for the Shinnecock; they were also once the backbone of Long Island’s robust commercial fishing industry. Her tribe witnessed the crash of the clam and scallop fishery in the 1990s and then another crash in the 2000s, which further depleted shellfish stocks and threatened the nascent farmed oyster industry. Both were caused by massive blooms of harmful algae.

In 2020, after watching the decline of Shinnecock Bay—a body of water that has fed her tribe for some 13,000 years—Genia worked with Tela Troge, a tribal lawyer, to form the Shinnecock Kelp Farmers, a group of five Indigenous women who grow kelp to fight climate change. The group hopes to heal their afflicted bay and inspire a new generation to adopt more regenerative practices on the water. “We want our children to be able to go out there and clam and collect oysters and scallops and mussels like we used to,” says Genia. Plus, Shinnecock women are water protectors, she says, and being out on the bay is “in our DNA.”

Recent scientific studies show that as the ocean becomes unfriendly for shellfish, seaweed could offer a solution—in particular, the large brown algae called kelp.

The women’s move toward seaweed as a solution is emblematic of a shift across the country as the world’s oceans change faster than scientists ever expected. Since the 1990s, ocean acidification—caused by more carbon in the atmosphere dissolving into the sea, among other factors—has increased at alarming rates; in the U.S., the West Coast is especially impacted. Increased acidification means crustaceans in their critical larval stage cannot pull enough calcium carbonate from the water to create shells.

By 2015, acidification had become so significant globally that the United Nations addressed the crisis as part of its Sustainable Development Goal 14: Life Below Water. Their guidelines have spurred government investment, university research, and private interest to tackle acidification ever since.

Nitrogen-rich wastewater, another byproduct of rapid human development, feeds huge blooms of algae (known as “red tides” or “brown tides,” depending on the species) that starve other marine life of oxygen. Some algal blooms produce toxins that make shellfish unsafe to eat. The blooms are a particular problem in shallow waterways like Shinnecock Bay.

Volunteers help to hand-harvest the Shinnecock Kelp Farmers 2023-2024 sugar kelp haul on New York’s Shinnecock Bay. (Photo credit: Rebecca Phoenix)

Volunteers help to hand-harvest the Shinnecock Kelp Farmers 2023-2024 sugar kelp haul on New York’s Shinnecock Bay. (Photo credit: Rebekah Phoenix)

These twin phenomena of acidification and algal blooms are deadly for all crustaceans, including shellfish. And they can spell disaster for coastal communities, as 3 billion people globally rely on “blue foods” from the ocean, including shellfish, as a primary source of protein.

But recent scientific studies show that as the ocean becomes unfriendly for shellfish, seaweed could offer a solution—in particular, the large brown algae called kelp. Wild kelp forests form the most extensive marine-vegetated ecosystems in the world. They grow on every continent except Antarctica and provide habitat and food for the ocean’s smallest creatures to its largest.

Rich in minerals, kelp grows quickly and doesn’t require fertilizer. It isn’t seriously affected by acidification or algal blooms, and in some cases, it can even mitigate their impact on shellfish, because kelp soaks up excess nutrients like nitrogen and increases oxygenation in the waters around it. What’s more, the fibrous plant, which can grow two feet a day, also pulls anywhere from five to 20 times more carbon from the atmosphere than any terrestrial crop, something that leading marine scientists are working to quantify right now.

Because of these beneficial properties, kelp is being hailed as a miracle, a panacea for the climate crisis. Scientists, coastal governments, and private industry alike think it could be the cornerstone of a new, blue economy that allows coastal communities in the United States to transition from extractive industries into more sustainable ones.

Bolstered by roughly $380 million in investments since 2018, kelp farmers have proliferated from around zero in 2012 to 108 active farms in 2023, according to Connecticut Sea Grant, part of a national network of university-based programs dedicated to encourage stewardship of marine resources. Seaweed farming, a longstanding tradition in Asia for more than a hundred years, is now gaining a place on U.S. shores.

The Scientists Who Kickstarted American Kelp Farming

The science behind this boom in seaweed cultivation began in New England nearly 50 years ago.

Charles Yarish holding Saccharina japonica seaweed offshore of Wando, South Korea, in 2023. (Photo courtesy of Charles Yarish)

Charles Yarish holding Saccharina japonica seaweed offshore of Wando, South Korea, in 2023. (Photo courtesy of Charles Yarish)

Charles Yarish, now a visiting scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts, is considered the father of American seaweed farming. Gregarious and welcoming, Yarish can talk kelp nonstop. In 1976, as a new assistant professor at the University of Connecticut’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and also its Department of Marine Sciences, Yarish became increasingly fascinated by kelp’s ability to pull nutrients from the water column. He suspected that farming kelp and other seaweeds could help alleviate water quality issues.

Toiling away at his Connecticut laboratory and conducting experiments in the Long Island Sound, Yarish spent the next few decades proving this hypothesis, focusing mostly on how kelp can pull nitrogen from waterways. “The farming of seaweeds such as kelp not only has business applications but is terribly important for ecosystem services, removing [excess] nutrients from ocean waters and lowering pH,” he explained.

Those early studies have impacted the growth of mariculture studies globally. At UConn, Yarish established an internationally known Seaweed Marine Biotechnology Laboratory, and was tapped to advise the Department of Energy’s current MARINER Program, which has invested $66 million in seaweed aquaculture since 2018.

Charles Yarish looks over recently collected kelp with a student in a lab at the Stamford campus in 2013. (Photo credit: Peter Morenus, University of Connecticut)

Charles Yarish looks over recently collected kelp with a student in a lab at the Stamford campus in 2013. (Photo credit: Peter Morenus, University of Connecticut)

In 2016, scientists in Maine, alarmed by their state’s warming waters and increasing acidification, and inspired in part by Yarish’s early work, began studying whether kelp could provide a sanctuary for shellfish. Using the country’s first-ever commercial kelp farm in Casco Bay and funded by a constellation of government, nonprofit, and academic groups, the effort was led by Nichole Price and her team at the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences.

After three years, they determined that co-growing blue mussels with sugar kelp—Saccharina latissima, the go-to variety of farmed seaweed for colder North American waters—led to increased oxygenation in the water. The scientists also documented kelp’s ability to locally raise seawater pH, which allowed the mussels to build thicker shells despite the acidic waters.

Price dubbed this the “halo effect” of kelp. She plans to continue monitoring outcomes to see how farms will fare in the future, since Maine’s waters are predicted to be too acidic for shellfish to calcify for most of the year by 2030.

an illustration showing the kelp halo effect, how it can absorb carbon and nitrogen and release oxygen to support shellfish growth. (Illustration credit: Nhatt Nichols)

An illustration showing the kelp halo effect, how it can absorb carbon and nitrogen and release oxygen to support shellfish growth. (Illustration credit: Nhatt Nichols)

Price said evidence is growing to support the idea that co-growing shellfish and seaweeds can offset the impact of climate change. The scientific field is tackling some big questions that could benefit the kelp farming industry. Including, she said, “Is it a consistent halo effect, or is it only in these protected bays? Or does it depend on the size of the kelp farm? If it’s a really big kelp farm, can it still create a halo even in exposed areas?”

While scientists race to understand the best growing methods for seaweeds with shellfish, the co-growing concept has been widely marketed by Bren Smith of GreenWave, who was first introduced to kelp by Yarish in 2013, after Smith’s oyster farms on Long Island Sound were decimated by hurricanes. Smith’s brand of co-growing focuses on a polyculture ocean farming model that combines shellfish with seaweed, an idea that he propagated in a book, Eat Like a Fish, and in GreenWave’s instruction manuals for “regenerative ocean farming,” which the group said thousands have used.

Although scientists on both coasts are still studying the effects of co-growing kelp with shellfish species like oysters—which fetch higher market value but generally grow in different environments than kelp—Smith promoted the idea of growing shellfish and oysters together, and is widely known in the industry for popularizing this approach.

“We’ve learned the seaweeds can inhibit harmful algal bloom and even represent a direct food source for the bivalves as they slough off microbial cells.”

Growing shellfish alongside seaweeds or finfish is a practice long used in Asia, especially China. However, it has been slower to catch on in the U.S., in part because of the lack of trials here. Inspired by the Asian approach and by Price’s work in Maine, in 2018 marine scientist Chris Gobler began focusing on kelp’s potential to heal his local waterways in New York, where algal blooms posed a bigger threat than acidification.

Eastern Long Island in particular was burdened with aging, failing septic systems that leached nitrogen into groundwater and ponds, lakes, rivers, streams, and bays. That excess nutrient runoff, combined with warmer waters, essentially fertilized the growth of harmful algal blooms yet again that year. Large swaths of open water were closed to shellfish harvesters by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.

Although Price was studying the co-raising of kelp with mussels to offset acidification, there was no scientific evidence yet to show how kelp could help shellfish during algal blooms. Gobler, working out of Long Island’s Stony Brook University laboratory, thought that kelp might benefit oysters. Aided by Michael Doall, a former commercial oyster grower–turned scientist who’d devised a way of growing kelp in shallow waters, Gobler launched a three-year study in 2019, hoping to find a solution for Long Island’s troubled waters that could be applied on both coasts.

By 2022, he had his answer: “We’ve learned the seaweeds can inhibit harmful algal bloom and even represent a direct food source for the bivalves as they slough off microbial cells.”

An illustration of the life cycle of sugar kelp, showing how it grows and develops over time. (illustration credit: Nhatt Nichols)

An illustration of the life cycle of sugar kelp, showing how it grows and develops over time. (illustration credit: Nhatt Nichols)

What’s more, Gobler’s lab had proved that raising kelp with oysters led to faster-growing, healthier shellfish. Gobler dubbed the phenomena the “halo effect”—a nod to Price’s studies—noting that the kelp around oyster cages provided a “halo” of increased oxygenation to the oysters as the kelp grew. At the same time, the kelp removed excess nitrogen from the water column. Backed by Gobler’s studies and studies from Price at Bigelow Labs in Maine, the idea of raising shellfish with kelp is now spreading across the country, including to the West Coast, where acidification is even more pronounced.

A Kelp-Farming Breakthrough

In 2018, seaweed experts believed that sugar kelp, a large brown seaweed with furled, silky tendrils, could only be farmed at depth—as it was in Maine, the center of the seaweed industry. If sugar kelp could only grow in deep water, it couldn’t be deployed for oyster farms, which are often tucked into shallower nooks of rocky coasts or set up in shallow bays.

Michael Doall, a scientist at Gobler’s laboratory, solved the problem. A former oyster grower, he saw the business potential for a crop that not only had ecosystem benefits but could be harvested in winter, opposite the main harvesting time of summer for oysters—providing two income streams from the same patch of water.

To pave the way for a kelp-meets-oysters business model that would work on Long Island, Doall decided to try growing kelp in shallower waters. In December 2018, accompanied by oyster farmer Paul McCormack, Doall began an experiment on Long Island’s Great South Bay. The two men sank metal screw anchors into the sandy sea floor and strung long nylon lines, inoculated with kelp spores, between them. And then they waited.

Over the next few months, the kelp not only grew, but outperformed their predictions. Doall and McCormack were ecstatic. “It worked really freaking great,” recalled Doall. Gobler, using the findings, then put sugar kelp to work in his breakthrough kelp-and-oyster co-raising study.

Using Doall’s growing techniques and the science from Yarish and Gobler’s laboratories, at least 10 sites across New York are now using sugar kelp to pull excess nutrients out of the waterways. They are also collaborating on a recently proposed $700 million project at Governor’s Island that relies in part on seaweed farming to help prepare New York City for climate change.

Although seaweed grown as a bioremediation strategy cannot be used for human consumption—in some cases, as with RETI Center’s project in the Gowanus Canal, the kelp harvested showed high traces of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), a known carcinogen—scientists are experimenting with other potential uses for it, such as a kelp-based concrete.

Kelp Farming for a Tribe’s Future

The first group to raise seaweed using Doall’s shallow-water technique were the Shinnecock Kelp Farmers. In 2020, led by Tela Troge, the women began growing kelp in the bay that surrounds Shinnecock Tribal Territory Nation, roughly 900 acres of low-lying sandy land. For millennia, the tribe has lived, fished, and harvested shellfish on this bay. Mitigating climate change and rising water is crucial to their survival, and seaweed offers a way to do that.

“We are a frontline community and we have nowhere else to go,” said Danielle Hopson Begun, communications director and hatchery manager for Shinnecock Kelp Farmers. Hopson Begun is equally comfortable out on the bay or giving public talks, where she spreads the climate-saving mission of the group.

“When you’re hearing on the news about sea rise and acidification and you’re able to move yourself from Southampton Village to higher ground—good for you. It is not good for us,” Hopson Begun said. “For us, it [is] a moral imperative to preserve our way of life.”

Danielle Hopson Begun hand-harvesting kelp in New York's Shinnecock Bay. (Photo credit: Rebecca Phoenix)

Danielle Hopson Begun hand-harvesting kelp in New York’s Shinnecock Bay. (Photo credit: Rebekah Phoenix)

To start their nonprofit, Shinnecock Kelp Farmers worked with GreenWave and Doall, who provided sorus tissue, the reproductive area of the kelp blade, for propagation. They found a home for their hatchery in a wooden cabin at the nearby St. Joseph’s Villa, a summer retreat for nuns. The wooded estate overlooks Shinnecock Bay, which now holds their kelp lines. For the 2023-2024 season, the farmers planted 30 lines at 100 feet each, a crisscross of golden-brown algae ribbons dancing beneath the water. As a sovereign nation, the Shinnecock did not need New York State’s permission to begin farming, and in 2020, they became the first seaweed growers in the state.

The group dries and processes their kelp by hand, turning the slippery curls of seaweed into hundreds of pounds of nitrogen-rich soil amendment that they use for gardening, sharing it with the local community at farmers’ markets. They lay the kelp out in donated screens, or along the pool fence at St. Joseph’s Villa, first washing the salt off the seaweed and then waiting for the sun to bake the kelp down.

Eventually, the heat crumbles the kelp into a dry, brown powder that plants love. Through this process, the nitrogen sequestered from the water column returns to the soil, a closed-loop nitrogen cycle now in vogue with organic farmers—although Shinnecock have been growing crops using seaweed as fertilizer for thousands of years, said Hopson Begun. Seeing the decline of seaweed in the bay in recent years, and knowing its benefits to shellfish, prompted them to start farming seaweed themselves.

While satisfying, the work is demanding, sometimes requiring the women to get up and work in frigid waters at dawn. For a recent November planting, they waded into 38-degree water during the first snow of the season, unspooling their kelp string as a hushed snow fell. But Hopson Begun wouldn’t trade it for anything. She said, “I love seeing something so small grow into something really incredibly powerful that potentially can make a big difference.”

Is Kelp the Answer for West Coast Shellfish?

On the West Coast, nitrogen pollution poses less of a problem, a benefit of the Pacific coast’s deeper water and colder ocean temperatures. But acidification episodes are much more acute here than in the East: Since the 1990s, it’s been rising precipitously, owing to a combination of increased carbon in the atmosphere and upwellings of deep waters that are rich in nutrients, but also relatively acidic. Many shelled creatures have been suffering as a result, unable to form thick, protective shells.

In 2007, this reached a crisis: Oyster businesses were devastated up and down the West Coast because baby bivalves simply could not grow.

Visualization: Alexander F More, University of Massachusetts/Harvard. (Data source: NOAA, Jiang et al. 2023)

“When it came time for our [oyster seed] orders to come in, the hatchery said, ‘We had a complete crash. If anything survived, we are going to be supplying our own farms, not you,’” recalled Terry Sawyer, co-founder of Hog Island Oyster Co., a Northern California favorite for its shellfish-focused restaurants. “We were sitting there, flapping in the wind.”

Trained in marine biology, Sawyer is an entrepreneur and lifelong ocean lover. When he and his co-founder, John Finger, realized how catastrophic the situation was, it spurred them to embrace a whole new outlook on marine conservation. Hog Island now regularly hosts marine scientists to study the effects of warming waters on nearby marine life. The company also collaborates with the Central & Northern California Ocean Observing System, providing real-time data from their farm on ocean acidification as part of a global effort to understand why the ocean is changing so fast.

Acidification led Hog Island, based on Tomales Bay, just north of San Francisco, to establish their own hatchery further north in Humboldt Bay, so they could ensure their whole line of production, from larvae to finished oyster. The process took about three years, and cost $125,000 in permitting fees alone, paid to the California Coastal Commission. Sawyer said the decision was the only way they’ve survived a situation that is cyclical for West Coast waters. Hog Island buffers the water at their hatchery by adding soda ash to make intake seawater less acidic, allowing the larvae to grow. The technique is now common practice; West Coast farmed bivalves cannot grow in the open ocean anymore.

Hog Island Oyster Company workers supervising a operation in tomales bay. Photo credit: Remy Hale

Hog Island Oyster Company workers supervising a operation in Tomales Bay. (Photo credit: Remy Hale)

“I love to say, ‘If we have a problem, we have to figure out how to eat it,’” said Sawyer, pointing out that seaweeds are a “winner” crop if ocean acidification continues to rise. “We are going to need to look at organisms that aren’t as impacted by pH change.” For now, though, Sawyer has to wait to unfurl kelp lines in Humboldt Bay, as the California Coastal Commission has no regulatory process for inshore commercial seaweed operations.

Instead, Hog Island has been collaborating with GreenWave and The Nature Conservancy on a non-commercial research pilot study since 2021, growing bull kelp at the Hog Island hatchery in Humboldt Bay. The waters are notably less acidic near the kelp lines—a promising result as the Hog Island team waits for California’s permitting structure to change for a commercial kelp farm.

The Promise of Seagrass

Tessa Hill, a professor of marine science at U.C. Davis and author of the book At Every Depth: Our Growing Knowledge of the Changing Oceans, has dedicated her life to understanding how climate change is affecting the ocean. Hill conducted a study in Tomales Bay and found that seagrass “meadows” there also offset acidification, and could increase shell growth by up to 40 percent. She sees the same value in seaweed. “There is a lot of potential for co-culture of seaweeds and shellfish” in the bay, she said.

However, wild West Coast seagrass meadows and kelp forests are declining, and that makes Hill very worried. Subjected to stress from marine heat, acidification, pollution, predation by sea urchins, and human encroachment, these water-based ecosystems may lose their power to help fight ocean warming. “The more we protect habitats like seagrass meadows and salt marshes, the better chance we have at climate mitigation,” said Hill. She sees promise in seaweed farming for the same reasons.

Helpful marine organisms—like sugar kelp, bull kelp, and seagrass—could help reduce some of the worst climate impacts that scientists are documenting on the U.S. coasts. Raised in quantity, they could bring at least some stretches of shoreline back into balance, allowing marine life to thrive again in our waters.

The Shinnecock Kelp Farmers are starting to see it happen, bit by bit. “The most darling was a little tiny scallop that took up space on one of our lines. They’re endangered,” said Danielle Hopson Begun. “To see that little guy holding to and finding a place in our farm was very satisfying.”

This series was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center’s Ocean Reporting Network.

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]]> https://civileats.com/2024/06/27/can-seaweed-save-american-shellfish/feed/ 0 The Promise and Possible Pitfalls of American Kelp Farming https://civileats.com/2024/06/27/overview-promise-and-possible-pitfalls-of-american-kelp-farming/ https://civileats.com/2024/06/27/overview-promise-and-possible-pitfalls-of-american-kelp-farming/#respond Thu, 27 Jun 2024 09:00:50 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=56672 Today, consumers can find burgers, chips, and even a cannabis gummy made from domestic farmed seaweed, and a recent Nielsen report estimated the value of the edible seaweed industry  to be $1.87 billion in the U.S. One particular type of seaweed, kelp, has come to the fore: More than 2 million pounds were pulled from […]

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Five years ago, the American farmed-seaweed industry barely existed. Wild seaweeds had been harvested for thousands of years by Indigenous peoples on both coasts, for a range of uses including insulation, medication, and fertilizer. Later, seaweeds were then harvested from the wild for agricultural fertilizers and the cosmetics industry. As for kelp farms, though, there were only a smattering of them in Maine, selling products to restaurants or natural-foods stores. Most farmed seaweed available in the U.S.—including the familiar sushi nori sheets—came from Asia.

Today, consumers can find burgers, chips, and even a cannabis gummy made from domestic farmed seaweed, and a recent Nielsen report estimated the value of the edible seaweed industry  to be $1.87 billion in the U.S. One particular type of seaweed, kelp, has come to the fore: More than 2 million pounds were pulled from coastal U.S. waters during the 2022-2023 season, and experts predict that the 2023–2024 season will be even larger.

Kelp's Tangled Lines

Read all the stories in our series:

What’s driving this growth? The answer goes beyond seaweed’s industrial applications or the fact that Americans are developing a taste for kelp as a nutritious, low-calorie food. Scientists say this seaweed also offers a multitude of ecosystem benefits. Kelp can pull excess carbon out of the atmosphere—with some estimating that it sequesters at least 10 times more carbon than a terrestrial crop. It reduces ocean acidification, too, and removes the excess nitrogen that feeds massive algal blooms, a threat to other marine life.

This scientific proof of kelp as a regenerative crop that could save our seas has helped the industry attract rapid investment—according to our estimates, roughly $380 million since 2017, from sources including the federal government, corporations, venture capital funds, coastal state spending, and nonprofits. Kelp could also help climate efforts on land, in industries ranging from textiles to plastics to beef.

We’ll trace the rise of seaweed farming in the U.S. and profile small farmers who are using kelp to both mitigate climate change and adapt to its impact.

As Silicon Valley and others turn their sights to this remarkable seaweed, the time is ripe to ask critical questions about the future of an industry that could be rapidly expanding. Will smallholder farmers, whose work has been pivotal in setting up domestic seaweed production, reap the benefits of the industry’s growth? Or will multinationals move in, growing seaweed at scale—potentially boosting ecosystem benefits, but perhaps also introducing the environmental repercussions of monocropping? And will federal money flow to small farms as well as large?

Regulations are at issue as well. Small coastal growers now navigate a tangle of legislation, with no one entity claiming oversight. The country’s first seaweed bills now sit in Congress, with the potential to unleash a new round of investment in an industry that is still not tracked by the U.S. Department of Agriculture or the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Could large investors leapfrog to offshore farms, where the regulatory environment may be more permissible?

In this series, we’ll ask those questions and more. For context, we’ll trace the rise of seaweed farming in the U.S. and profile small farmers who are using kelp to both mitigate climate change and adapt to its impact. We’ll explore how scientists are creating more efficient ways of growing kelp while also protecting the future of wild kelp forests.

Tightening our focus, we’ll look at the main issue vexing kelp producers today—laborious processing—and a company that’s trying to solve that problem. Our final story will go macro, with a view of the venture-funded pilots that may shape a future of seaweed driven by corporate investment.

The stories in this series provide a framework for how we might guide the future of kelp, and how it may—or may not—fulfill its potential as a climate solution.

This series was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center’s Ocean Reporting Network.

The post The Promise and Possible Pitfalls of American Kelp Farming appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2024/06/27/overview-promise-and-possible-pitfalls-of-american-kelp-farming/feed/ 0 Inside Bayer’s State-by-State Efforts to Stop Pesticide Lawsuits https://civileats.com/2024/03/27/inside-bayers-state-by-state-efforts-to-stop-pesticide-lawsuits/ https://civileats.com/2024/03/27/inside-bayers-state-by-state-efforts-to-stop-pesticide-lawsuits/#comments Wed, 27 Mar 2024 09:01:15 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=55770 April 1, 2024 update: Two days after Civil Eats reported on this matter, a group of senators signed a letter addressed to Senate leaders opposing “all efforts to preempt state and local authority to regulate pesticides.” “To me,” she says, pointing at herself with both hands, her eyebrows raised, “Iowa’s farmers matter more than corporate […]

The post Inside Bayer’s State-by-State Efforts to Stop Pesticide Lawsuits appeared first on Civil Eats.

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April 1, 2024 update: Two days after Civil Eats reported on this matter, a group of senators signed a letter addressed to Senate leaders opposing “all efforts to preempt state and local authority to regulate pesticides.”

On TikTok, Iowa State Representative Megan Srinivas is angry.

“To me,” she says, pointing at herself with both hands, her eyebrows raised, “Iowa’s farmers matter more than corporate interests.”

Srinivas, a Democrat, posted the video on February 7 to draw attention to a bill that was just starting to make its way through the statehouse. If passed, the legislation could prevent individuals who use pesticides from suing manufacturers based on the argument that the manufacturer should have warned them the products could cause cancer or another illness.

Srinivas is a physician, and one specific concern added to her outrage. Less than a year earlier, the Iowa Cancer Registry released data showing Iowa now has the second highest cancer rate in the country, after Kentucky, and is the only state where rates significantly increased between 2015 and 2019. For the first time, researchers at the Iowa Cancer Consortium have a plan to evaluate whether the incredible volume of weed- and bug-killers used in the state is a contributing factor (although an annual report released at the end of February focused more on high rates of binge drinking).

However, while other states have seen a flurry of more than 100,000 lawsuits brought by individuals claiming Roundup—the most widely used commercial product that contains the weedkiller glyphosate—had caused their cancers, Iowa stands apart. Especially in agriculture, most people trust the safety of pesticides, locals say, and Roundup is the most common and coveted.

Chemical Capture: The Power and Impact of the Pesticide Industry

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“There’s still that culture of, ‘It’s only Roundup,’” said Rob Faux, an Iowa farmer and the communications manager for the Pesticide Action Network North America (PANNA). “They see it as low-risk . . . and there is a latent fear that glyphosate will be taken away. The standard response we get from legislators is, ‘Well, you know, those are frivolous lawsuits and glyphosate’s safe.’”

That’s a sentiment that Bayer Crop Science can use to its advantage.

Bayer purchased Monsanto, the maker of Roundup, in 2018. Ever since, the world’s now second-largest farm chemical company has been steadily executing a five-point plan to fight back against the aforementioned lawsuits.

Now, insiders say it’s using the outsized sway it holds among the public and elected officials in agricultural states to quietly execute a new strategy: Pass laws, state by state, that take away farmers’ and other individuals’ ability to sue if they get sick.

“I would argue that this is the sixth prong of their plan,” said Jonathan Oppenheimer, the government relations director at the Idaho Conservation League (ICL), where he’s been working with a coalition of groups to fight an identical bill that is also being pushed by Bayer. “It’s written in invisible ink.”

comparing the iowa and idaho bills with identical language

The bills introduced in Iowa and Idaho include some identical text, as highlighted here.

For example, when the Iowa bill was first put forward, “the only lobbyists who were paying attention were Bayer’s lobbyists,” Faux said, “so you can kind of put two and two together.”

Starting in the Iowa House subcommittee hearing that inspired Srinivas to take action, Bayer lobbyists Brad Epperly and Craig Mischo presented the bill to the subcommittee. There, Srinivas said their language on the kinds of studies that exist linking Roundup to potential cancer risk was misleading. “That subcommittee [meeting] had so much misinformation that people just believed,” she told Civil Eats. “To still have a bill [move forward] was very concerning.”

Insiders say Bayer is using the outsized sway it holds among the public and elected officials in agricultural states to quietly execute a new strategy: Pass laws, state by state, that take away farmers’ and other individuals’ ability to sue if they get sick.

In an email, Bayer Crop Science representative Brian Leake said the company maintains that “the overwhelming weight of science as well as the assessments of the EPA and leading health regulators and scientists worldwide” support the company’s position that the product is safe and non-carcinogenic.

While the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) maintains that glyphosate is unlikely to cause cancer in humans, the International Agency for Research on Cancer classifies it as a “probable carcinogen,” pointing to many animal studies and epidemiological evidence that link it especially to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. In court, judges and juries have repeatedly found the body of research presented to be convincing.

They have also been presented with reams of evidence documenting how Monsanto worked to influence scientific studies and discredit any research that found significant risks for years. “There is strong evidence . . . that Monsanto does not particularly care whether its product is in fact giving people cancer, focusing instead on manipulating public opinion and undermining anyone who raises genuine and legitimate concern about the issue,” U.S. District Court Judge Vince Chhabria said during one 2019 trial.

Now, in addition to Iowa and Idaho, similar bills have been introduced in Missouri and Florida. At the same time, the pesticide industry’s trade association CropLife America is working hard to pass a federal law that would bar states from passing their own laws that restrict pesticide use based on risks.

The multi-pronged strategy is just one example of how multi-billion-dollar global companies use their influence to change laws and keep pesticides on the market—and the stakes in this case are high.

The bills don’t name specific chemicals, the companies that make them, or individual illnesses. If passed, then, they could seriously curtail citizens’ ability to seek compensation for any health harms caused by any pesticide. Last year, for example, farmers in multiple states brought lawsuits against Syngenta, the ChemChina-owned company that makes the herbicide paraquat. Paraquat is banned in dozens of countries based on its toxicity and has been linked to Parkinson’s disease.

“We have Iowa farmers who have brought lawsuits recently for Parkinson’s and paraquat,” Faux said. “To emphasize that it’s all pesticides [that are included] would be a very quick way for the bill to lose any support. That’s why the messaging is glyphosate.”

In addition to Iowa and Idaho, similar bills have been introduced in Missouri and Florida. At the same time, the pesticide industry’s trade association CropLife America is working hard to pass a federal law that would bar states from passing their own laws that restrict pesticide use based on risks.

Bayer’s Leake declined a request for an interview and sent a statement that reads, in part, “We support state legislation alongside dozens of other agricultural organizations because the future of American farming depends on reliable science-based regulation of important crop protection products that the EPA has determined safe for use.”

A Syngenta representative declined a request for an interview and the opportunity to provide comments. On its website, the company maintains that “scientific evidence does not support a causal link between paraquat and Parkinson’s disease” and that the herbicide “is safe for its intended and labelled use.” In Iowa, Syngenta backed an early version of the bill, but its lobbyists have since registered against later versions.

Serving Constituents or Pesticide Companies?

On February 6, the day before Srinivas posted her video in Iowa, Idaho Senator Mark Harris, a Republican, began a presentation at a Senate committee meeting. His order of business was to present a bill that matched the Iowa legislation nearly word for word.

Harris represents Soda Springs, where Bayer operates a 540-acre processing plant to manufacture glyphosate. Rather than make his own case for giving pesticide companies’ immunity from claims of health harms, he turned his time over to James Curry, Bayer’s deputy director of state and local government affairs.

Curry led with Bayer’s history of mining phosphorus in Idaho to make glyphosate, which it had been doing since 1952. He argued that when used according to the label requirements, glyphosate was safe. Bayer’s legal costs were creating uncertainties, and according to the minutes, “he stated the industry needed help from the legislature to ensure its ability to mine.”

It was only a month into 2024, but the company had already reported spending more than $6,000 lobbying for the single bill in Idaho, compared to just $800 spent on any lobbying in the state the entire year prior.

Both nationally and in individual farm states, Bayer and other pesticide companies join and support overlapping associations and trade groups that involve industry peers and yield influence behind the scenes. In Idaho, for example, the Food Producers of Idaho have been involved in lobbying for the bill. Bayer is a voting member of the Food Producers of Idaho and one of the organization’s “platinum” sponsors for 2024. Other members include Idaho’s sugar beet growers, who have almost universally adopted planting beets genetically modified to be resistant to glyphosate.

Individuals representing the industry testified in support of the bill at the hearing. In emails obtained by U.S. Right to Know, Monsanto employees (before the Bayer purchase) listed “inoculate key grower associations” as one of a few important steps in a strategy to keep Roundup on the market after IARC’s carcinogen designation.

“The more layers of the onion you peel back, the more you realize how the system is just tilted toward industry,” said ICL’s Oppenheimer, who attended the Idaho hearing.

Back in Iowa, groups including the Agribusiness Association of Iowa and the Iowa Biotechnology Association have lobbied for the immunity bill. The Agribusiness Association of Iowa counts Bayer and all of the other largest pesticide manufacturers among its members and lists a Bayer employee as an “at-large director.” Bayer is also a member of the Iowa Biotechnology Association and holds a board seat.

Last year, the Agribusiness Association of Iowa hosted a “2023 kickoff fundraising reception” for Secretary of Agriculture Mike Naig and two members of the Iowa legislature, Representative Mike Sexton and Senator Dawn Driscoll, both Republicans. Sexton has received campaign donations from both Bayer and Syngenta during campaigns; Driscoll has received donations from Syngenta and the Agribusiness Association of Iowa’s PAC. Outside of the Senate, Driscoll works for an agribusiness consulting company that has worked with Syngenta as a client.

As chairs of the House and Senate agriculture committees, respectively, Sexton and Driscoll have helped move the bill forward in each chamber.

Neither Sexton nor Driscoll responded to requests for comment.

Secretary Naig’s communications director said the Secretary has not been involved with the pesticide immunity bills at all. But Austin Frerick, an Iowa-based agriculture policy expert and author of Barons, pointed to Naig’s resume as an example of how industry ties are commonplace and deeply rooted in Iowa’s state government.

Starting in 2000, Naig worked at CropLife America, the pesticide industry trade association, the Agribusiness Association of Iowa, and then the Iowa Biotechnology Association. From there, he went to work on government lobbying at Monsanto. In 2013, he was hired by the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship. When the top position became available in 2018, Governor Kim Reynolds, a Republican, appointed him.

That appointment “told me where real power is in the state,” Frerick said. “You’ve got to view Iowa as an extraction economy. The whole political class is in on it.”

When Naig had to run for re-election later, Monsanto handed him $10,000, his largest 2018 donation. In elections since, Bayer has donated thousands in most cycles, alongside the other biggest pesticide manufacturers, Syngenta and Corteva Agriscience.

The Fight to Stop the Bills

Still, the elected officials and coalition of public health and environmental advocacy organizations pushing back on the bills are succeeding in their efforts. The mounting lawsuits around paraquat and its foreign ownership are their weapon of choice.

In Srinivas’ TikTok video, her language is pointed, as she calls it out for being “Chinese-government owned.”

Her point? Since Syngenta is owned by ChemChina and makes paraquat, if any of the pesticide immunity bills pass, it would make it harder for American citizens to hold a Chinese company accountable for potential harms.

Plus, unlike Roundup and other products made with glyphosate, China, the European Union, and the United Kingdom consider paraquat dangerous enough to have banned it in agriculture. (A single sip can kill a human.) Despite decades of legal battles and dozens of new studies that link long-term exposure to Parkinson’s disease, the EPA recently reapproved its safety when used with proper precautions.

Whatever the pesticide, Bayer’s argument is that the warnings and precautions the EPA outlines on its labels are adequate. In his email, Bayer’s Leake argued that the bills would not prevent anyone from suing a pesticide manufacturer but rather would ensure the EPA’s labels are sufficient to satisfy health and safety warnings.

But those warning labels focus on acute risks, such as what will happen if you drink the chemical or breathe in the spray. And experts say that the agency’s process is not set up to assess long-term risks of lower-dose exposure.

“It will not warn you about frequent low-dose exposure leading to Parkinson’s,” said PANNA’s Faux, so if more studies are published in the coming years that offer further proof of the link, bills like these would prevent individuals from seeking recourse. Historically, there are countless examples where the risks of pesticides approved as safe came to light only years after they were in use; DDT and chlorpyrifos are good examples. “Iowa likes to say we value our farmers, that’s what we lean into,” he said. “Well, there are some farmers, some family farmers, who stood up and said, ‘We’re dealing with illness that we feel might have been caused by pesticides.’ You don’t abandon them.”

Federal Bills Also Threaten State Power to Label

While the state-level bills agrichemical companies are working to push through would make it harder for individuals to sue companies when they believe products have caused their illnesses, the companies are simultaneously working on federal legislation that would weaken states’ ability to warn residents of risks.

Last year, representatives Dusty Johnson (R-South Dakota) and Jim Costa (D-California) introduced the Agricultural Labeling Uniformity Act, which would prohibit states from putting their own warning labels on pesticides in addition to those required by the EPA.

For example, in California, Proposition 65 requires companies to put a warning label on all products that contain ingredients classified by IARC as “probable human carcinogens.” Since glyphosate fits the bill, Roundup and other glyphosate-based herbicides would have to carry the label (although a court ruling changed that in 2020). If the Agricultural Labeling Uniformity Act passed, it would make it illegal for California to put that label on those products.

Now, CropLife is using its political influence in D.C. to ramp up its campaign to get the language from the bill included in the upcoming farm bill. As the pesticide manufacturers’ membership association, CropLife pools funds from Bayer and other pesticide companies and donates to candidates through a PAC while also courting lawmakers.

For example, at its annual gathering last week, it hosted two receptions where company representatives could mingle with either Senator Jon Tester (D-Montana) or Representative Adrian Smith (R-Nebraska) in exchange for a campaign contribution. The organization also lobbies on Capitol Hill and works on messaging campaigns.

In February, the group ran ads in Politico’s Morning Ag newsletter, influential among policymakers and other key players in D.C, which framed the bill as necessary to protect American farmers. “U.S. farmers’ access to pesticides, which are critical for growing crops in an affordable and sustainable way, is in jeopardy because of misguided state regulatory efforts. . . . Over 360 agricultural and other groups support the bipartisan Agricultural Labeling Uniformity Act to help the U.S. correct course,” one ad read. To garner public support, the group has been running similar ads on Facebook.

What’s Next at the State Level?

At this point, Faux and Oppenheimer are working with a coalition of groups across state lines, and they’re optimistic that their messages are gaining traction.

In Iowa, after the bill failed to move in the House, it passed in the Senate Agriculture Committee but then stalled there. Then, last week, it was reintroduced in the Senate as an appropriations bill. This time, it included a new clause specifying that it would not apply to “any product made by a People’s Republic of China state-owned enterprise.” While the session is nearing its end,  Faux said there is still time for it to move further, since the legislature often goes beyond its posted scheduled.

“We’re sacrificing our future for the present,” said Brian Lenney, a Republican. “And lastly, I don’t think giving lifetime immunity to multi-billion-dollar pharmaceutical companies was on our constituents’ bingo card when they sent us here.”

But even if it fails, the groups are already looking to the next session in 2025. “If it looks like it’s going to go away quietly, we need to be ready for the next [session],” he said, because it could mean that “they decided to modify it based on the lessons learned and come back next year with it.”

In Idaho, the bill has already been modified three times. After the Senate committee narrowly voted it down, a new version of the bill was introduced in the House, with small tweaks meant to get some of the doubting lawmakers on board. However, it was scheduled to be presented in a House committee in early March, when, to everyone’s surprise, lawmakers deleted it from the agenda hours before the meeting started. Then, a slightly modified version was introduced in the Senate last week. Given the limited time remaining in the session, Oppenheimer believes it’s unlikely to pass.

But the bill’s future is still just as unclear as it was in the original Idaho hearing. There, on both sides of the aisle, lawmakers went out of their way to praise the agriculture industry. Some named Bayer specifically. But then, some who presented as supportive went on to say that they were still voting no, often citing family members who suffered through cancer diagnoses and discomfort with the idea that this would preemptively let powerful companies off the hook.

“We’re sacrificing our future for the present,” said Brian Lenney, a Republican. “And lastly, I don’t think giving lifetime immunity to multi-billion-dollar pharmaceutical companies was on our constituents’ bingo card when they sent us here.”

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]]> https://civileats.com/2024/03/27/inside-bayers-state-by-state-efforts-to-stop-pesticide-lawsuits/feed/ 3 Chemical Capture: The Power and Impact of the Pesticide Industry https://civileats.com/2024/03/27/chemical-capture-the-power-and-impact-of-the-pesticide-industry/ Wed, 27 Mar 2024 09:00:54 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=55763  In Mead, Nebraska, one company’s handling of discarded seeds coated with the most common insecticides in the country led to water, air, and soil contamination that killed bees and other animals. Researchers are currently studying how the levels of the chemicals found in area homes might impact residents’ long-term health. At the U.S. Environmental […]

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From Washington to Pennsylvania, farmers diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease have filed lawsuits against the maker of a popular herbicide, based on research that shows a potential link between the chemical and the disease. In California, researchers have connected insecticide exposure that farmworkers’ children experienced in the womb to a higher risk of behavioral problems into adolescence.

In Mead, Nebraska, one company’s handling of discarded seeds coated with the most common insecticides in the country led to water, air, and soil contamination that killed bees and other animals. Researchers are currently studying how the levels of the chemicals found in area homes might impact residents’ long-term health. At the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, officials found those same insecticides are likely to harm as many as three-quarters of the country’s endangered plants and animals.

Chemical Capture: The Power and Impact of the Pesticide Industry

Read all the stories in our series:

For most Americans, the 400,000 tons of chemicals used to kill weeds, bugs, and fungi each year are invisible. But as Civil Eats’ reporting has shown over the past 15 years, the impacts of those pesticides are profound and span the entire food chain—from threatening important organisms in soil to causing illness due to acute exposure during use.

Over the past few decades, attention to those risks has grown in some ways, as evidenced by the annual popularity of Environmental Working Group’s Dirty Dozen campaign, among others. However, as sales of organic food nearly doubled in the U.S., topping $60 billion in 2022, and attention to regenerative agriculture practices soared, pesticide use continued to increase.

In fact, in 2020, American farmers beat out every other country in the world in terms of the volume of pesticides applied, according to an analysis from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). And between 1990 and 2020, the amount of pesticides used per acre increased by 33 percent.

During that same time period, a series of mergers has made the top pesticide and seed manufacturers bigger and more powerful than ever. Four companies—ChemChina (which owns Syngenta), Bayer (which absorbed Monsanto), BASF, and Corteva Agriscience (formerly Dow and DuPont)—now control more than 62.3 percent of the world’s pesticide sales. In the U.S., that number is likely much higher.

And the strategies some of those companies have employed over the years to keep products linked to serious risks on the market are increasingly well-documented in court records.

There are countless questions to be asked, studied, and debated regarding when and where pesticides are necessary or appropriate, which Civil Eats’ regular reporting will continue to explore.

In this series, however, we will investigate whether consolidated corporate power may be contributing to the ubiquitous use of chemicals, making it difficult to sort facts from marketing or engage in rigorous cost-benefit analyses. We’ll report on how chemical companies use their influence to shape what we know about the toxicity of individual pesticides, how pesticides are used, and the federal and state policies that are intended to protect people from risks.

While the glyphosate taking up residence in Americans’ bodies and the neonicotinoids filling the country’s waterways may be invisible, the scale and urgency of the planet’s biodiversity crisis—and the ways in which research finds pesticide use contributes to it—are becoming more apparent.

Join us as we examine the potential role that pesticide companies play in all of this.

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]]> Walmart Heirs Bet Big on Journalism https://civileats.com/2024/02/28/walmart-heirs-bet-big-on-journalism/ https://civileats.com/2024/02/28/walmart-heirs-bet-big-on-journalism/#comments Wed, 28 Feb 2024 09:00:14 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=55440 This article was co-produced and co-published with Nonprofit Quarterly. The Waltons aren’t the only philanthropists pumping money into the news industry, and the family, America’s richest, gives even larger sums to other interests. But with increasing emphasis over the past decade, the Walton Family Foundation and individual family foundations have directed tens of millions of […]

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This article was co-produced and co-published with Nonprofit Quarterly.

From vast riparian watersheds to fisheries to croplands, few corners of the nation’s—and the world’s—food systems have escaped the eyes of the Walton family. The children and grandchildren of Walmart co-founder Sam Walton have long embedded their interests, and, more importantly, their money, among industry groups, policymakers, academics, activists, and NGOs active in the future of food. Now, they’re expanding their philanthropy to news organizations that report on food, agriculture, and the environment and, in turn, amplifying the family’s other efforts.

The Waltons aren’t the only philanthropists pumping money into the news industry, and the family, America’s richest, gives even larger sums to other interests. But with increasing emphasis over the past decade, the Walton Family Foundation and individual family foundations have directed tens of millions of dollars to support journalists, newsrooms, and journalism organizations whose coverage overlaps with subjects about which Walton family members are passionate—and passionately funding.

Aside from the Walton Family Foundation, Walton family members also give to causes and to journalism through other foundations including the Catena Foundation, Builders Initiative, the Penner Family Foundation, the Wend Fund, and the Zoma Foundation.

Walanthropy: Walmart and the Waltons Wield Unprecedented Influence Over Food, Policy, and the Planet.

Read all the stories in our series:

  • Overview: The Long Reach of the Walmart-Walton Empire
    In this ongoing investigative series, we take a detailed look at Walmart and its founding family’s influence over the American food system, over the producers and policymakers who shape it, and how its would-be critics are also its bedfellows.
  • Walmart’s ‘Regenerative Foodscape’ Walmart’s efforts to redefine itself as a regenerative company are at odds with its low-cost model, and combined with the Walton family’s vast investments in regenerative agriculture, have the potential to remake the marketplace.
  • Walmart and EDF Forged an Unlikely Partnership. 17 Years Later, What’s Changed? We talk with Elizabeth Sturcken for an up-close look at the sustainability alliance between the environmental nonprofit and the retail behemoth.
  • Op-ed: Walmart’s Outsized Catch: Walmart and the Walton Family Foundation have relied on a debatable definition of “sustainable” seafood that allows it to achieve its sourcing goals without fundamentally changing its business model.
  • Diving—and Dying—for Red Gold: The Human Cost of Honduran Lobster: The Walton Family Foundation invested in a Honduran lobster fishery, targeting its sustainability and touting its success. Ten years later, thousands of workers have been injured or killed.
  • Walmart’s Pandemic Port Squeeze: While most retailers dealt with congested ports and unprecedented shipping prices, Walmart chartered its own ships, increased sales, and used its market gains to sideline competitors. Then it weighed in on shipping reform.
  • Walmart Heirs Bet Big on Journalism: A wash of Walton family funding to news media is creating echo chambers in environmental journalism, and beyond. Are editorial firewalls up to the task?

Journalism is welcoming the new infusion of philanthropy. Since the decline of the industry’s ad-driven business model was hastened by the Great Recession, more than half of newspapers have shuttered across America and the industry has shed more than 20,000 jobs. Thirteen years ago, fewer than a dozen digital news nonprofits led the charge to shift news to a nonprofit model. Now, there are more than 400 digital news nonprofits nationwide, supported by an ever-growing coalition of philanthropies that include the Walton charities.

It’s not just digital news nonprofits that benefit from their giving; the Waltons also give to legacy newspapers, websites, magazines, radio stations, and trade journals covering such subjects as agriculture, water policy, fisheries, conservation, and climate. That giving has grown even as the family has increased its funding of groups that discuss, study, or promote policy related to these subjects and often drive the news that Walton-funded outlets cover.

There’s more. As Civil Eats has documented, Walmart, the family business, has over the past two decades used its economic and political muscle to lower the bar for what qualifies as “organic” foods and “sustainable seafood” and the Walton Family Foundation has also supported seafood sustainability projects that didn’t ensure safe practices for Central American lobster divers.

Notably, Walton family journalism philanthropy is focused in overlapping areas. The foundation board is legally independent of Walmart. And grants are promised with no strings attached. Nonetheless, with journalists accepting hundreds of millions of dollars in Walton philanthropy, it is important to consider how news coverage may be affected.

Indeed, Walton family funding is so widespread that environment-focused reporters working for nonprofit news organizations funded by Walton philanthropy often cover, interview, or analyze organizations and individuals who are also grantees of the family’s foundation and/or family members’ individual foundations. As the field of potential sources not supported by the Waltons narrows, reporters risk tilting discussions about sustainability, resource management, conservation, or other subjects toward solutions favored by the family’s philanthropies.

“The Walton Family Foundation works from the belief that fact-based, independent journalism is essential to making sure communities have the information they need on the issues that matter most,” said Walton Family Foundation spokesman Mark Shields in a statement to Civil Eats. “Journalists and outlets—including Civil Eats—who receive support from the foundation have full editorial control over their content.” (Civil Eats does not accept grants and donations from the Waltons or their associated charities, although Civil Eats has indirectly received such funding through its work with other partners.)

Observers of the industry, however, are concerned about a new era in journalism in which a limited class of grantmakers is defining narratives and the flow of information.

Will Sennott, a staff reporter with the nonprofit Massachusetts newsroom The New Bedford Light, said reporting on fisheries in New England is complicated because “the world of fisheries policy of today is one that was molded by the Walton Family Foundation.” He said the foundation’s prior grants to NGOs enabled its priorities to seep deep into policymaking through the appointments of its grantees to the regulatory councils that govern American fisheries.

Now, “it’s hard to even extract their influence from fisheries policy,” Sennott said. “When it comes to groundfish especially, all fisheries policy today is based entirely on the kind of policies they peddled about 10-12 years ago.”

The Walton Family Foundation and some individual Walton family members’ own foundations continue to support organizations and media, including trade journals and industry newsletters, that target agriculture and fisheries. They have made engagement on “restorative aquaculture” one of their philanthropic planks, funding numerous ventures on both sides of the notebook.

“When it comes to groundfish especially, all fisheries policy today is based entirely on the kind of policies [Walmart and the Walton family] peddled about 10-12 years ago.”

For example, Lukas Walton chairs the family foundation’s environmental program and, since 2021, has supported journalism-related nonprofits—such as Chicago Public Media, Grist, Sentient Media, and the Reader Institute for Community Journalism—through his private foundation, Builders Initiative. Builders Initiative also gives extensively to seafood and ocean conservation related programs.

Much of Builders’ grantmaking in these areas also supports Walton Family Foundation beneficiaries like the Nature Conservancy and the World Wildlife Fund for programs focused on such subjects as “market-based solutions for Kelp Recovery” and “Seaweed and Mollusks aquaculture,” as well as the “aquaculture media strategy” of seafood advocacy organization, Stronger America Through Seafood, Inc.

The Walton Family Foundation also supports SeafoodSource, the leading industry publication for seafood news. It’s hard for SeafoodSource, or anyone discussing sustainable seafood, to ignore the Walton Family Foundation and other Walton family organizations and interests and the perceptions readers might have about their influence on SeafoodSource’s coverage.

“That’s a really tough one because Walton has their fingers in almost every nonprofit in sustainable seafood,” said Ned Daly, who is a contributing editor at SeafoodSource and a sustainability strategist for its parent company, Diversified Communications. Daly manages grants made by the Walton Family Foundation in support of SeafoodSource’s “Seafood2030” platform. “I think it would be hard to not engage with those groups or work with those groups but in terms of special treatment, I think it’s really more what’s newsworthy and what’s going to drive interest in stories.”

Daly, who writes about sustainability, says the Walton Family Foundation doesn’t have a say in the publication’s coverage, much like other funders of Diversified Communications’ products as well as advertisers in SeafoodSource. But foundations and nonprofits in general, Daly said, do occasionally benefit from blurred lines in Diversified’s content, if to a lesser degree at SeafoodSource.

For the perennially underfunded business of journalism, the idea of using editorial firewalls has served as the best defense against funders seeking to influence reporting. But in the case of Walmart, the Walton Family Foundation, and its family members’ many individual foundations, the funding can saturate an entire region or subject, meaning that reporters doing their jobs simply can’t avoid the Walton family’s influence.

For the perennially underfunded business of journalism, the idea of using editorial firewalls has served as the best defense against funders seeking to influence reporting.

“It’s a sin of omission, not of commission,” said Joel Dyer, the former editor of The Boulder Weekly in Colorado. Dyer spoke to Civil Eats at length about the challenges of reporting on water issues in areas where the Walton family and their foundations have extended their philanthropic nets.

“It’s problematic,” Dyer said. “It’s beyond problematic. In essence there is evidence of oil companies paying for energy coverage, the Waltons paying for water coverage. Nothing actually sort of pisses me off more. Journalists of all people know better than to say, ‘Well, hey, it doesn’t influence what I write.’ We’ve been covering academics that take money from Monsanto and good lord everybody, and we know how much it influences what they do. And journalism is no different.”

Louisiana-based photojournalist Julie Dermansky shares the view that editorial firewalls don’t sufficiently prevent meddling by newsroom funders. Fishermen and others in the Mississippi Delta’s seafood industry have lost all trust in local media, she said, because Walton-backed media and the NGOs working in the area, including many backed by the Waltons, combine to amplify narratives that drown out and marginalize fishermen’s views and avoid reporting that is at cross-purposes with Walton aims.

“I think it’s naive to think you could take massive amounts of money from an organization and then write about other organizations it gives money to,” Dermansky said.

She said fishermen are at odds with a Mississippi River diversion project that’s supported by the Waltons and environmental groups in the delta. In an article published last year in DeSmog, Dermansky notes local fishermen’s belief that the Walton Family Foundation and Walmart’s interests align with the oil and gas industry in the Gulf: By implementing the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion project, independent fishermen’s livelihoods will be destroyed, they say, while also removing a check-and-balance their presence has on offshore oil and gas drilling in the same region, she said.

“I think it’s naive to think you could take massive amounts of money from an organization and then write about other organizations it gives money to.”

The Louisiana fishing industry is one of the last substantial, competitive, independent fishing industries in the world, she said, a dynamic that challenges Walmart’s market dominance. “So you get rid of them, and then they’ve got the market,” said Dermansky, referring to Walton family interests. “There’s an overlap with the desire of oil and gas and the Walton foundation in the case of the Mississippi River because fishermen are a pest for the oil and gas industry because they’re the eyes and ears” on the waterway, she said.

Striking a balance between funding journalism and continuing to use that journalism to hold the powerful accountable is an ongoing struggle. Sara Shipley Hiles, executive director of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, a reporting project based at the University of Missouri that is funded in large part by the Walton Family Foundation, said concerns about the Waltons’ involvement are a reality for newsrooms.

“These issues are not new and they’re not exclusive to nonprofit journalism,” Shipley Hiles said. “Every business, nonprofit or for-profit, have funding sources. We all have to answer for that. Civil Eats has to answer for that.”

“The Walton Family Foundation has been an outstanding funder,” said Shipley Hiles. “From the beginning we were clear that we had to have editorial independence and they did not push back against that. They’ve funded journalists enough now and I think folks who came before us were very clear on that. I can thank all the previous grantees as well for making it very clear that this is how journalism works. Without editorial independence, we have no credibility. We absolutely, fundamentally, must have editorial independence.”

Journalism produced by Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk reporters includes disclosures of Walton Family Foundation funding in part to address concerns about funder influence on reporting.

But what are the impacts on public understanding of complex issues, and on the availability of reporting on important topics, when one interlinked set of funders is so omnipresent? If a reporter can’t find a reputable source without ties to Walton money, how does that inform what news gets published?

History Repeats, in New Ways

Jim Friedlich is executive director and CEO at the Lenfest Institute, a philanthropy that exclusively supports local journalism. He says the tension between journalism and its funding is not at all new. He said, when done well, nonprofit journalism is “non-partisan, inclusive, and reflective of a broad array of voices across the political spectrum or field of ideas.”

Friedlich said Lenfest works to support multiple news organizations in one place to promote a diversity of ideas and concepts, and points to two examples: Spotlight PA, a nonpartisan statewide news organization in Pennsylvania, which distributes government accountability journalism for free. And Every Voice, Every Vote, which covered recent city elections in Philadelphia through grants to 25 different news organizations from nearly every neighborhood, ethnic, and racial group or political affiliation. “The effect was a broad and echo-free journalistic exploration of the issues at hand,” Friedlich added.

Most philanthropy in journalism doesn’t fit that profile, instead funding issue-based work in areas where foundations and donors also concentrate their giving.

“If your first initiative is education, then your second should be news and information around those topics,” said Tyler Tokarczyk, a senior program officer at the Inasmuch Foundation, which focuses on journalism and education. “You should be looking to elevate the conversations around issues in your community that are important to the foundation. I think that’s very common. The need for news and information in nonprofit journalism is pretty overwhelming across the country.”

Indeed, the need for support for local journalism is so acute that a coalition of philanthropies recently came together to seed a $500 million effort called Press Forward to put more reporters in underserved communities.

It is in funding-saturated areas where the sheer volume of giving presents new challenges. In the case of the Waltons, seafood and watershed programs are densely packed with Walton-backed initiatives, as is the attending journalism.

For example, the Walton Family Foundation has had a years-long relationship with the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ), an organization that has long attempted to mirror news outlets’ “church and state” separations between editorial and business operations. Those separations have become more complicated as SEJ funders, including the Walton Family Foundation and groups to which the family has heavily donated, have become more visibly involved in the organization’s events and publications.

Civil Eats is a member of SEJ, and while Civil Eats has striven to not accept funding from the Walton Family Foundation or the individual family foundations, it has been the recipient of grants that might have been funded by Walton Family Foundation donations.

For example, in partnership with Earth Island Journal, Civil Eats produced this story, which was supported by an SEJ grant, and was likely originally sourced from Walton Family Foundation funding, unbeknownst to Civil Eats. Despite some newsrooms’ stringent efforts to avoid Walton Family Foundation funding, it remains widespread in nonprofit news.

Since 2013, SEJ has received more than $1.8 million from the Walton Family Foundation to help develop specialized environmental reporting initiatives and support conferences and other events. SEJ’s former executive director, Meaghan Parker, insisted on a stark line between the fundraising that she oversees and editorial operations, like the content of its conferences and publications, which is managed by member volunteers.

“I talk with the money people,” Parker said, who stepped down from the executive director position at the end of 2023 and is now a senior advisor to SEJ. During her time as executive director, she added that she turned down “huge” sums from potential funders, and that every grant SEJ receives has clearly spelled-out stipulations about its strict firewalls. “In every grant agreement that SEJ has with any funder, we have a line in there that says the donor and the funder have no right of interference or the review in editorial decisions made by the SEJ,” she said.

The Walton Family Foundation’s Shields confirms that journalists who receive support from the foundation have full editorial control, and that the foundation’s priority is fact-based information on important topics.

“For example, in the early phase of the pandemic, the Walton Family Foundation contributed funds to the Society of Environmental Journalists’ Rapid Response emergency story grants,” Shields said in a statement. “Those funds were especially important for environmental journalists at a time when an unprecedented number of jobs were being cut, leaving fewer reporters to cover critical issues.”

Flooding the Colorado River with Walton Funding

Time will tell how much journalism—and the public—will benefit from philanthropic support, but the public relations benefit for donors is clearer. Philanthropic support of newsrooms and reporters is an explicitly stated piece of the Walton Family Foundation’s strategic planning since 2021, and the foundation has been laying the groundwork for this strategy for the better part of a decade.

Perhaps nowhere is the strategic intent more evident than in the family’s myriad investments in the Colorado River Basin, whose waters and surrounding lands are—and have long been—among North America’s most prized and, increasingly, most imperiled, natural resources, and in reporting about the basin. The Walton Family Foundation, Catena Foundation, Wend Foundation, and the Penner Family Foundation (the family foundation of Carrie Walton Penner and her husband, Greg Penner) have all funded journalism in the basin.

These foundations, as well as Zoma Foundation and the Rob and Melani Walton Foundation, have all philanthropically supported other non-journalism initiatives in the basin, and many of the Walton family’s associated businesses have invested in the region.

Since 2016, the Walton Family Foundation has directed more than $200 million in funding to grantees both inside and outside journalism with emphasis on the Colorado River. They’ve been a crucial part of the conversation about the future of the river and the water it provides to the 38,900 farms that generate about $47 billion a year in economic impact.

The Waltons aren’t alone among large grantmakers interested in the Colorado River. For example, in 2016, the Walton Family Foundation formed the Water Funder Initiative in collaboration with six other philanthropies. That collaboration began with these philanthropies committing $10 million over five years to support restoration and management of California’s Salton Sea, an imperiled inland water body in California near the terminus of the Colorado.

Since 2016, the Walton Family Foundation has directed more than $200 million in funding to grantees both inside and outside journalism with emphasis on the Colorado River.

Since at least 2017, the Walton Family Foundation has given millions of dollars to the Water Funder Initiative by way of an Arabella Advisors-managed fund, the Windward Fund, which described its mission at the time as advancing “public awareness about conservation, climate, and environmental issues, sustainable food systems, and the protection of land, wildlife and natural resources.”

Arabella Advisors guides the philanthropy of other Walton family members’ foundations, often through such funds. At least three other members of the Water Funder Initiative gave through the Windward fund. (In 2022, Civil Eats received a $5,000 unrestricted grant from New Venture Fund, which is also managed by Arabella Advisors.)

The same year as the Salton Sea donation, the Water Funder Initiative published Toward Water Sustainability, which it summarized as a “Blueprint for Philanthropy.” This blueprint outlines six “funding action plans” for future water-related giving. One of these plans focused on “Communications and Political Will” and aimed to “identify near-term opportunities, such as expanded water journalism, to improve the field’s communications capacity, build political will, and cultivate diverse constituencies needed to support water reforms.”

The Waltons’ support of SEJ and their seeding of the Colorado River Basin and Mississippi reporting hubs suggest serious interest in how the public discusses the interplay between the human and natural world in the 21st century. One of the goals for the Walton Family Foundation’s most recent giving cycle: learning “how our journalism support could help us better serve communities that may not have access to trusted, accurate, and relevant information.”

That focus has continued through this year, as Walton Family Foundation Communications Director Daphne Moore wrote this November in a report reflecting on a year of community journalism grantmaking.

“We want to learn the most innovative and cost-effective ways to reach diverse sectors of communities through journalism and the news,” Moore wrote.

“I joked about it with a colleague that every time I do an interview, now my last question is, ‘We disclose funding relationships in our reporting, is any of your current work receiving funding from the Walton Family Foundation?’” said Luke Runyon, whose reporting on the Colorado River has been funded by Walton family money since 2017.

That year, Runyon launched the Colorado River Reporting Project at KUNC, a public radio station and NPR affiliate in Greeley, Colorado. Grant money from the Walton Family Foundation funded the position. In leaving KUNC in 2023 for his current position as co-director at the Water Desk, he joined an environmental journalism initiative that the Waltons played an integral role in launching.

Based at the University of Colorado in Boulder, the desk provides focused, ongoing coverage of water issues in the Western U.S., especially the Colorado River Basin and provides grants to reporters to execute that work. It was launched with a $700,000, two-year grant from the Walton Family Foundation, which made additional grants of $600,000 and $900,000 to the Water Desk in 2021 and 2023.

The Walton Family Foundation always respected the editorial control Runyon insisted on, he said. “There was never really an instance where I felt any sort of undue pressure on what to cover as a reporter.” He also made it a policy to disclose as best he could if a source took funding from the foundation as well.

Now that he’s out of the KUNC position, Runyon believes the transparency improved his reporting, after asking about the family’s involvement so regularly became his “running joke.” He told Civil Eats that there’s no avoiding the Waltons’ presence in the Colorado River Basin, whether through the Walton Family Foundation, individual Walton family members’ separate private foundations, or their business or personal interests, like rafting.

“I feel like I knew the landscape pretty well, but that was something that we felt was really important to tell people,” Runyon said. “Not just our relationship to this particular foundation, but also that some of the sources that we’re talking to also have this relationship.”

The ubiquity of Walton-related funding can muddy the waters for reporters covering the beat. A November 2023 article by Annie Ropeik in the SEJ’s online digital news magazine on approaches for reporting on environmental solutions and equity within watershed-level stories shows how pervasive this funding is.

The article itself is based on reporting for a day-long workshop Ropeik moderated before 2023’s SEJ conference in Boise, Idaho. It is a straightforward, thorough survey of the challenges facing watershed managers, conservation groups, and the reporters who cover these beats. However, the article features multiple perspectives from groups extensively funded by the Walton Family Foundation, from photography to quoted sources.

These include the Nature Conservancy (which also receives funding from multiple individual Walton family members’ philanthropies), the Mississippi River Cities and Towns Initiatives, which has received more than $1.1 million from the Walton Family Foundation since 2016, and the Colorado River Sustainability Campaign (CRSC), which is partially backed by the Walton Family Foundation and is also managed by Arabella Advisors.

Sources whose organizations receive significant Walton Family Foundation funding supplied nearly every comment in Ropeik’s piece while example coverage cited links to articles produced by Ropeik’s news organization, as well as the Walton-backed Colorado Water Desk, and their partner newsrooms. The piece’s accompanying images were also supplied by Lighthawk, a Grand Junction, Colorado-based organization that coordinates volunteer pilots and photographers to provide aerial photography to conservation groups. Lighthawk has received at least $300,000 from the Walton Family Foundation since 2018. Its photos have also frequently appeared in both Walton-funded news operations.

How can newsrooms track, much less disclose, all these connections in an era of shoestring budgets and widespread layoffs?

Shipley Hiles, of Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, said her organization has a robust fact-checking operation and constantly discusses ideas over Slack and other venues. “We have put our effort into good reporting, wherever that takes us,” she said. While the network fact checks every piece, she said it has not spent extensive time investigating how subjects of its coverage are funded.

“That would be a very difficult process to do if we had to investigate the funding of every source, unless it becomes a question or an issue,” she said. What matters more, she said, is diverse sources who have something unique to contribute to environmental and agricultural coverage.

When the Water Desk launched in 2019 amid a flurry of activity surrounding the Colorado River’s fate—and a flood of philanthropic investment from the Walton Family Foundation and other major donors—it continued a model for grantmaking toward environmental journalism the Walmart fortune’s heirs have been honing since at least 2013, when it began its support of coastal reporting initiatives focused on the Mississippi River Delta with grants supporting a coastal desk at WWNO and The Lens.

Mitch Tobin, a former consultant who edited the 2016 “Blueprint for Philanthropy” and helped the Water Funder Initiative identify how to deliver funding to journalism through interviews with newsrooms and journalists, took the helm when the Water Desk launched, with Runyon joining the team at the end of 2023. Tobin told Civil Eats that the Water Desk and other philanthropy-supported initiatives present a lot of opportunity to support public service journalism.

“It’s a win-win. They get to support something they think is important, journalists get to do the work that they want to do without any control by the funder or anyone breaching the editorial firewall,” he said. “There are innumerable examples, innumerable Pulitzer Prizes that you can point to that have been funded by philanthropy. And so clearly it works, provided there are guidelines and people are thoughtful and mindful of what they’re doing.”

Tobin said the Water Desk guarantees editorial transparency to its grantees, and vets grant applications from reporters and news organizations through review committees that have included fellow journalists and the Director of the Center for Environmental Journalism (CEJ), where the Water Desk is based. The work is then edited by the publications that accept the journalists’ stories. (Civil Eats, for example, received funding from the Water Desk to produce this story, which was not funded by Walton family donations.)

“Journalists, all journalists, decide on the proposals. We cut a check and we wish people well,” Tobin said. The Water Desk began producing its own reporting only after Runyon’s addition to the staff last fall.

Since its inception, the Water Desk has awarded 113 grants totaling $638,704 to journalists and newsrooms. Tobin said any reporting proposal related to water within the coverage area is eligible for funding. The Water Desk highlights its funders when seeking requests from proposals, and Tobin said he expects grantees will be mindful of who is funding the publications and sources they cite in their work as they report, and to be thoughtful about conflicts. “That’s basic journalism,” he said.

A Problem Bigger than the Waltons, and Bigger than the Colorado River

The influence of the Walton family on the food system is both ineffable and hard to understate—throughout our Walanthropy series, Civil Eats has shown how their philanthropy and business practices are shaping the food system. But stepping back puts the concern in a new light: The Waltons are among a class of billionaires who are reshaping the social, economic, and political landscape.

“We have a barbell class of these super rich tech billionaires who are funding media and influencing how we consume and share news without having any inclination to ensure that journalists are paid a living wage,” said Heidi Legg, a former fellow at the Future of Media Project at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University, whose research deeply documented funding in the news media. Legg has not conducted specific inquiries into Walton-related giving, but said that, in general, giving trends in nonprofit news are worrisome.

She points to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, Laurene Powell Jobs, Google, and Facebook as among the largest emerging media donors, competing with forces like Bloomberg, Sinclair, and Rupert Murdoch in a polarized media environment. While at Harvard, Legg created indexes to help readers navigate media ownership transparently in an era defined by large donors.

Legg says it is increasingly important for journalists to be transparent about funding in an era of influential donors. She echoed Runyon in saying that thoroughness in transparency is the best defense against conflicts of interest, or the appearance of such conflicts, when journalists accept philanthropy or source information from similarly financed networks.

“The Waltons have no intention of buying water rights so that the river can have more water. The only thing they’re trying to save is the economic vitality and the profit that can be made from the Colorado River.”

“The country has lost almost two-thirds of its newspaper journalists—43,000—since 2005,” Mark Shields, the senior communications officer at the Walton Family Foundation, told Civil Eats. “If philanthropy doesn’t support reporters who independently cover environmental issues, how will these stories get told?”

In the Colorado River Basin, Shields says, that means “promoting conservation and nature-based solutions that keep more water in the river. In the sustainable seafood space, that work focuses on supporting healthy ocean ecosystems and the communities that rely on them.”

Dyer, the former editor of The Boulder Weekly, said reporting on the Waltons’ influence on the future of the Colorado River is the most important story in the region. He said Walton philanthropy supports efforts to convert water rights into a market-based system and he believes Walton funding in journalism chills reporting on their initiatives. The effect is that it’s compromising newsrooms and journalists in the same manner that agribusiness dollars, such as from Monsanto, have compromised ag science and undermined academic research, he said.

“The Waltons have no intention of buying water rights so that the river can have more water. The only thing they’re trying to save is the economic vitality and the profit that can be made from the Colorado River.” He points to Imperial Valley farmers, crops grown along the river, and cities like Las Vegas that depend on Colorado River water as among those that will be impacted if water markets take hold.

While Walton money flows to journalism, “the journalists who say it’s not influencing their work aren’t lying in a sense. It’s not influencing the good work they’re doing on whatever tiny part of the Colorado River problem they’re doing,” Dyer said. “I have friends who are getting money from the Water Desk. Good lord, they are doing great work and they wouldn’t be surviving if they weren’t getting it. But none of them can do the story on the Waltons.”

“They’re just not addressing the biggest threat to the river,” he said, “which is turning it into a commercial stream of water. That’s the story that can’t be told.”

Bill Lascher was a member of the Society of Environmental Journalists from 2010-2017. Lee van der Voo, also a member of SEJ, contributed reporting. Lisa Held contributed research.

Civil Eats is a member of the Institute for Nonprofit News, which receives funding from the Walton Family Foundation. Civil Eats participates in News Match, an annual grantmaking INN program, but has not accepted offers of individual grants from the Walton Family Foundation via INN.

This article was updated to clarify when the Walton family began funding coastal reporting initiatives in the Mississippi River Delta region.

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]]> https://civileats.com/2024/02/28/walmart-heirs-bet-big-on-journalism/feed/ 2 The Year in Civil Eats Investigations, 2023 https://civileats.com/2023/12/27/the-year-in-civil-eats-investigations-2023/ Wed, 27 Dec 2023 09:00:18 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=54805 In 2023, our investigative desk followed up on some of our investigative reporting from last year. In addition, we dug into the true cost of tuna, which includes the lost lives of the marine observers tasked with upholding sustainable seafood standards on fishing boats. And we launched Walanthropy, a multi-series project that takes a detailed […]

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Last year, Civil Eats launched an investigations desk to break new ground—and dig even deeper—on topics related to power within the food system. Our five-part series, Injured and Invisible, about the unseen and unprotected workforce behind meat produced in the U.S., won a James Beard Award for investigative reporting, and our piece on the investors laying claim to water in Colorado won first prize in the business category of the 2023 American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA) Writing Awards.

In 2023, our investigative desk followed up on some of our investigative reporting from last year. In addition, we dug into the true cost of tuna, which includes the lost lives of the marine observers tasked with upholding sustainable seafood standards on fishing boats. And we launched Walanthropy, a multi-series project that takes a detailed look at Walmart and its founding family’s influence over the American food system. Over the course of six stories, our reporters uncover the scope of that influence, examining the long reach of the corporation and its family of funders over producers and policymakers.

In one story, for example, contributor Alice Driver traveled to Honduras with photographer Jacky Muniello to report on the Indigenous Miskito lobster divers who support the $46 million spiny lobster industry, exported almost entirely to U.S. markets. While the Walton Family Foundation invested in the Honduran lobster fishery, targeting its sustainability and touting its success, in recent years, roughly 4,000 Miskito lobster divers have been disabled, many are paraplegic or quadriplegic—and at least 400 have died.

Below, find a recap of our year investigating the food system.

A watercolor-style illustration of a marine observer looking through binoculars at a tuna fishing vessel. (Illustration credit: Tina Zellmer)

(Illustration credit: Tina Zellmer)

The True Cost of Tuna: Marine Observers Dying at Sea
The harassment, abuse, and sometimes death of the marine observers who uphold sustainable seafood standards are the industry’s worst-kept secrets. Critics say the people and companies that earn the most money on tuna aren’t doing enough to secure their well-being.

Congress Likely to Preserve OSHA Loophole That Endangers Animal Ag Workers
A 2022 Civil Eats investigation found that a budget rider that prohibits OSHA from spending money to ​regulate small farms leaves most animal-ag operations without oversight. Lawmakers appear poised to renew the rider once again.

This article follows up on the 2022 Injured and Invisible series, and on this article in particular: “Animal Agriculture Is Dangerous Work. The People Who Do It Have Few Protections.”

cattle walking to a water trough in douglas county, colorado. Photo credit: thomas barwick, getty images

Farming in Dry Places: Investors Continue to Speculate on Colorado Water
A group seeking to buy water from farm and ranch lands is turning its efforts to electing water board representatives—who could then make water deals with suburbs easier.

This article follows up on the 2022 investigative piece “As Drought Hits Farms, Investors Lay Claim to Colorado Water.”

a gritty image of a produce section with dollar bills mixed in, showing the intertwined financial and food focuses of Walmart and the Walton Family

(Illustration credit: Civil Eats)

Walanthropy: Walmart and the Waltons Wield Unprecedented Influence Over Food, Policy, and the Planet.

In this ongoing investigative series, we are taking a detailed look at Walmart and its founding family’s influence over the American food system, over the producers and policymakers who shape it, and how its would-be critics are also its bedfellows.

The Long Reach of the Walmart-Walton Empire
Walmart’s annual revenues are larger than the GDP of Sweden; its founding family are prolific philanthropists. Their nexus is poorly understood.

Walmart’s ‘Regenerative Foodscape’
Walmart’s efforts to redefine itself as a regenerative company are at odds with its low-cost model, and combined with the Walton family’s vast investments in regenerative agriculture, have the potential to remake the marketplace.

Walmart and EDF Forged an Unlikely Partnership. 17 Years Later, What’s Changed?
We talk with Elizabeth Sturcken for an up-close look at the sustainability alliance between the environmental nonprofit and the retail behemoth.

Photo of a shark swimming through a school of fish, with a gritty overlay including walmart's yellow and blue colors. (Photo credit: Scott Carr, Getty Images, illustration by Civil Eats)

(Photo credit: Scott Carr, Getty Images; illustration by Civil Eats)

Op-ed: Walmart’s Outsized Catch
Walmart and the Walton Family Foundation have relied on a debatable definition of “sustainable” seafood that allows it to achieve its sourcing goals without fundamentally changing its business model.

Diving—and Dying—for Red Gold: The Human Cost of Honduran Lobster
The Walton Family Foundation invested in a Honduran lobster fishery, targeting its sustainability and touting its success. Ten years later, thousands of workers have been injured or killed.

walanthropy shipping containers and money representing the walton family and walmart using their resources to shift global shipping to their business benefit

Walmart’s Pandemic Port Squeeze
While most retailers dealt with congested ports and unprecedented shipping prices, Walmart chartered its own ships, increased sales, and used its market gains to sideline competitors. Then it weighed in on shipping reform.

The post The Year in Civil Eats Investigations, 2023 appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> Walmart’s Pandemic Port Squeeze https://civileats.com/2023/12/13/walmarts-pandemic-port-squeeze/ https://civileats.com/2023/12/13/walmarts-pandemic-port-squeeze/#comments Wed, 13 Dec 2023 09:00:47 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=54696 With holiday feasts and Black Friday sales around the corner, Walmart’s leadership knew it needed to address supply chain upheaval, according to company statements to shareholders. There were three options: one was to simply pay a premium to skip the queue. “There was some of that that went on with L.A. and Long Beach,” said […]

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In October 2021, the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports were slammed. Lines of ships waiting to unload cargo stretched 80 ships long and some container ships waited weeks before unloading their loot. The bottleneck stemmed from supply chain disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, extreme weather, and labor shortages. About a half a billion dollars in food imports floated aboard.

With holiday feasts and Black Friday sales around the corner, Walmart’s leadership knew it needed to address supply chain upheaval, according to company statements to shareholders. There were three options: one was to simply pay a premium to skip the queue.

“There was some of that that went on with L.A. and Long Beach,” said Captain Kip Louttit, executive director of the Marine Exchange of Southern California, who helped direct traffic at the ports at the time.

Walanthropy: Walmart and the Waltons Wield Unprecedented Influence Over Food, Policy, and the Planet.

Read all the stories in our series:

  • Overview: The Long Reach of the Walmart-Walton Empire
    In this ongoing investigative series, we take a detailed look at Walmart and its founding family’s influence over the American food system, over the producers and policymakers who shape it, and how its would-be critics are also its bedfellows.
  • Walmart’s ‘Regenerative Foodscape’ Walmart’s efforts to redefine itself as a regenerative company are at odds with its low-cost model, and combined with the Walton family’s vast investments in regenerative agriculture, have the potential to remake the marketplace.
  • Walmart and EDF Forged an Unlikely Partnership. 17 Years Later, What’s Changed? We talk with Elizabeth Sturcken for an up-close look at the sustainability alliance between the environmental nonprofit and the retail behemoth.
  • Op-ed: Walmart’s Outsized Catch: Walmart and the Walton Family Foundation have relied on a debatable definition of “sustainable” seafood that allows it to achieve its sourcing goals without fundamentally changing its business model.
  • Diving—and Dying—for Red Gold: The Human Cost of Honduran Lobster: The Walton Family Foundation invested in a Honduran lobster fishery, targeting its sustainability and touting its success. Ten years later, thousands of workers have been injured or killed.
  • Walmart’s Pandemic Port Squeeze: While most retailers dealt with congested ports and unprecedented shipping prices, Walmart chartered its own ships, increased sales, and used its market gains to sideline competitors. Then it weighed in on shipping reform.
  • Walmart Heirs Bet Big on Journalism: A wash of Walton family funding to news media is creating echo chambers in environmental journalism, and beyond. Are editorial firewalls up to the task?

According to Louttit, some retailers chose to go to a different, smaller port to unload, often at a higher cost. Walmart could have also chosen to do the same.

Or, for a hefty sum, it could bypass the system entirely and hire its own ships. And that’s exactly what Walmart did.

“Our merchants continue to take steps to mitigate challenges, including adding extra lead time to orders and chartering vessels specifically for Walmart goods,” Walmart’s then-CFO Brett Biggs later said during a 2022 earnings call. In the interim, Walmart had pushed more than $1 billion in additional capital toward supply chain costs, investments in ecommerce, and other tech and customer-facing initiatives.

During the initial food shocks of COVID, when food was wasting in fields and some people experienced increased food insecurity, Walmart had another plan. Rather than transporting food, clothing, electronics, and toys via containers on massive ships servicing multiple retailers, Walmart chartered its own ships to carry goods for only its stores. The decision to pay for private vessels combined with the COVID aftermath to increase sales, allowed Walmart to increase all inventory by more than 20 percent, ultimately muscling other, smaller retailers aside and sidestepping the choked container terminals altogether.

“Nobody was overtly trying to throw a cog in the wheel,” said Louttit. “They just might be trying to maximize profitability for their piece of the system.”

And maximize Walmart did. While independent retailers and mom-and-pop shops faced shortages and even empty shelves during the 2021 holiday season, Walmart’s sales grew more than 8 percent. And, despite its logistical challenges, the pandemic overall had already proved to be a boon for the retail giant. Long one of the biggest retail businesses in the world, with $572.8 billion in annual revenue, Walmart’s gross profits jumped 7.33 percent by the end of 2021, hitting $138 billion.

While independent retailers and mom-and-pop shops faced shortages and even empty shelves during the 2021 holiday season, Walmart’s sales grew more than 8 percent.

Walmart did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

That the company thrived in the face of the pandemic and the ensuing supply chain disruption, however, illustrates its enormous influence over world trade and global pricing for goods, and how that influence is squeezing other retailers, which further weakens the global supply chain, including for food.

Walmart’s strategy at the ports also showcases how the company supports a network of lobbyists that work to expand its interests. Experts say the combination leaves supply chains too rigid to respond to disruption and makes prices, particularly for food, vulnerable to inflation.

The ‘Elephant in the Room’

The pandemic-induced long lines at port terminals also caused U.S. importers to face sky-high shipping prices. Port bottlenecks led to a shortage of containers, and in turn, the cost of shipping roughly tripled in the first year of the pandemic.

“The pandemic and ‘containergeddon’ was putting these small and medium-sized mom and pops out of business,” said Steve Ferreira, CEO of shipping consultancy Ocean Audit, referring to a term he coined to describe the ocean shipping slowdowns during the pandemic.

Exporters also struggled. American dairy producers, for example, faced unprecedented challenges in exporting goods during the pandemic’s first year. In 2021, the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) was tasked with assessing the supply chain crisis by surveying industries most impacted. As part of that survey, the National Milk Producers Federation and the U.S. Dairy Export Council submitted public comments to the DOT, saying the increased cost of shipping was “significant and damaging” to dairy producers “and the thousands of workers they support throughout the supply chain.”

“There has been a change in behavior by the ocean carriers that is severely harming shippers, including American dairy exporters,” the public comment read.

On January 31, 2021, a record 38 ships were anchored close to the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)

On January 31, 2021, a record 38 ships were anchored close to the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)

Even a year later, in 2022, massive disruption remained for many U.S. producers, including the seafood industry—which includes many small businesses.

“Although the story has been driven off the front page, and the nation’s attention has turned to other challenges, supply chain disruptions at U.S. ports continue to cause severe problems, imposing significant and unnecessary costs on American seafood businesses still trying to recover from the pandemic, lockdowns, food inflation, and other obstacles,” reads a public comment submitted in December 2022 by the National Fisheries Institute in a subsequent Congressional push for reform.

Ultimately, the high cost of shipping also trickled down to American consumers via record-high inflation. According to the International Monetary Fund, the increase in global shipping costs in 2021 caused inflation to increase by more than 2 percentage points.

But Walmart not only bucked those high shipping costs, it turned them into an opportunity.

“Because of Walmart’s sheer size and the fact that they’re the 800-pound elephant in the room, they were prospering during the pandemic,” Ferreira said.

“Flexing that market power over the supply chain is a way to elbow out the competition. They’re able to demand special treatment from suppliers.”

Walmart is the largest importer in the U.S., having imported nearly 1 million 20-foot shipping containers full of goods just last year. Amazon, by comparison, brought in about 3 percent of that, or roughly 33,000 containers. And yet, Ferreira estimates that during the pandemic, Walmart paid less than half what the average importer paid for shipping.

“It all has to do with the leverage that they have in terms of the amount of spend and containers that they have,” he said.

In other words, ocean shippers couldn’t say no to their biggest client.

“Flexing that market power over the supply chain is a way to elbow out the competition,” said Stacy Mitchell, co-executive director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR), who has studied Walmart extensively. “They’re able to demand special treatment from suppliers who are looking at Walmart thinking, ‘Well, you’re a quarter of my revenue. I cannot say no due to the threat of losing you as a customer, which would capsize my company. So, therefore, I have to give you the special deal. And the way I’m going to make up for that is I’m going to raise prices on your smaller competitors.’”

Walmart did not respond to a request for comment about whether the company commanded special treatment from suppliers, or whether consumers inherited the cost of its dealmaking. But the advantage larger companies had in the pandemic marketplace was part of the reason COVID took such a drastic toll on small businesses across the U.S., according to one study by a consortium of economy and business experts. Not only were larger retailers commandeering their own ships and supplies, but they were also leveraging the marketplace in their favor.

Port Reform

In the aftermath of the port frenzy, U.S. lawmakers got to work on legislation to prevent future backups and astronomical shipping costs. The Ocean Shipping Reform Act of 2022 (OSRA), which President Biden signed into law in June of that year, is designed to level the playing field for U.S. exporters and importers by ramping up oversight of the trade system.

More specifically, the bipartisan bill, introduced by Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota) and John Thune (R-South Dakota), aims to crack down on ocean carriers and shipping companies taking advantage of a largely unregulated international shipping system.

The act prohibits retaliation by ocean carriers, requires increased public disclosure by the Federal Maritime Commission—which oversees the shipping industry—and protects U.S. importers and exporters from being denied cargo space when it’s available.

The goal is to “ensure an efficient, competitive, and economical transportation system in the ocean commerce of the United States,” the legislation reads.

In his 2022 State of the Union address, Biden touched on the need for such legislation, saying, “When corporations don’t have to compete, their profits go up, your prices go up, and small businesses and family farmers and ranchers go under. We see it happening with ocean carriers moving goods in and out of America.”

He later applauded members of Congress for supporting legislation that “will help lower costs for American retailers, farmers, and consumers” when the Ocean Shipping Reform Act passed later in the year.

Lobbying disclosure reports reviewed by Civil Eats show Walmart was active in lobbying on the Ocean Shipping Reform Act of 2022, as well as other iterations of the legislation. Between 2022 and 2023, Walmart spent nearly $9.7 million lobbying the federal government on ocean reform and other efforts.

The company annually spends such sums to advance and protect its interests. In the last 10 years, Walmart has deployed lobbyists to affect agriculture policy, labor law, market competition, food safety, trade, climate solutions, and other legislation that affects the company’s bottom line, supply chain, and other interests in the federal arena.

“What Walmart is trying to do is say, ‘Hey, let’s let the free-market play this out.’ And it’s great for them, right? They really want that because they are the market. The less bureaucracy and rules in the way makes them a better player.”

Since 2013, Walmart has spent more than $70 million lobbying. It’s one of the top lobbying retailers in the U.S.

The company is similarly active in state politics. For example, Walmart was involved in a court battle in California over a ban on big-box stores. And the company regularly spends hundreds of thousands of dollars on lobbyists in its home state of Arkansas.

Walmart did not respond to a request for comment on the legislation or the company’s lobbying goals. Therefore, it’s not clear exactly how Walmart lobbied on the legislation. But Ferreira said it’s not surprising that Walmart was active on the issue on Capitol Hill.

“What Walmart is trying to do is say, ‘Hey, let’s let the free-market play this out.’ And it’s great for them, right? They really want that because they are the market,” he said. “The less bureaucracy and rules in the way makes them a better player.”

And not every organization was interested in reform. The shipping industry, for example, lobbied hard against the legislation. The World Shipping Council, which represents the world’s largest shipping companies, spent at least $300,000 and hired a lobbyist known for strong ties in the Senate in order to prevent the legislation from being introduced at all. The Council called an early iteration of the Ocean Shipping Reform Act “unworkable, unnecessary, and duplicative.” It declined to answer specific questions from Civil Eats about opposition to the legislation.

Ultimately those lobbying efforts helped keep things mostly unchanged for large shippers and retailers like Walmart. Despite the legislation being signed into law last year, Ferreira said the legislation contains so many exceptions for the ocean shipping industry that it’s ineffective in moving the culture of an ocean shipping system he likened to a “cartel.”

“It really hasn’t had much of an impact or effect, if any,” he said. “It’s a very broken industry and system, and OSRA did nothing to help it. The bottom line is it doesn’t really have any teeth.”

And with the pandemic and supply chain disruptions largely behind us, combined with the fact that container shipping rates are so low right now, it’s unlikely the issue will garner attention again until the next shipping crisis.

Consequences of Concentrated Power

The loss of many small and medium-sized retailers during the pandemic opened market opportunities for larger retailers that were able to afford to keep their shelves stocked—including Walmart.

“During the height of the supply chain bottlenecks, a lot of independent grocers did not have basic products on their shelves because Walmart had commandeered those products,” said ILSR’s Stacy Mitchell. “So, people were walking into the independent grocer and there’s no baby formula, or whatever it may be. But it’s on the shelf at Walmart, and so that drove business to Walmart.”

Walmart’s tendency to vacuum up business from smaller retailers even has a name: the Walmart Effect, a colloquialism since a book by the same name documented Walmart’s impacts on smaller retailers in the communities it serves. Through its command of the global marketplace, as well as its ability to commandeer its own ships for importing goods, the Walmart Effect deepened retail divides during the pandemic, as Walmart raked in profits and even more market share.

During the pandemic, Walmart dominated sales in almost every category—from groceries to retail goods. Its online sales increased as much as 74 percent.

Mitchell said Walmart’s size and massive market share drove food companies to further consolidate, forcing them to “bulk up,” or merge in order to hold their own against a powerful buyer. That helped craft a highly consolidated market where production has been largely driven overseas and supply lines are consolidated, tenuous, and vulnerable to collusion, Mitchell said.

And Walmart is now one of only a handful of retailers that are able to maneuver that system. That consolidation—both on the grocery and food production level—has contributed to high food prices and inflation overall.

“I would argue that Walmart is actually the primary culprit behind the set of changes in the supply chain that actually led to all of these supply chain problems and to inflation,” she said. “We are so wholly dependent on a small number of corporations who are so top heavy that they’re very brittle, they’re not terribly adaptable. They don’t have any reason to be nimble because there’s no competitor that’s going to come along and eat their lunch.”

“Is it better for Walmart to have the lowest prices and protect American savings account, or is it better to have Walmart and then a hundred mom-and-pop competitors that give the American people more choice?”

In a truly competitive market economy, retailers and supply chains should be nimble, she said. Nothing should be able to cause shortages and bottlenecks to the extent we saw the last few years—not even global pandemics, climate catastrophes, or worker shortages.

U.S. lawmakers are aware of this problem. Last year, the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law held a series of antitrust hearings, one of which focused entirely on the food supply chain for goods, though not specifically on Walmart. Throughout the hearing, committee members heard from workers, farmers, low-income families, and small businesses.

“With very few companies in the lead, the long, complex supply chains that we rely on to eat daily are extremely vulnerable to disruption by health and environmental disasters—and a problem in a single location can ripple rapidly across the nation,” testified Allison Johnson, senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council. “Local and regional food supplies can be more nimble and resilient in the face of adversity, but small businesses struggle to compete in a marketplace skewed toward the largest players.”

President Biden has also been active in combating consolidation in the food sector, including by providing resources to state attorneys general to “crack down on price-gouging and other anticompetitive practices” and by preventing large corporate mergers.

Ocean Audit’s Steve Ferreira adds that, on the other hand, Walmart’s immense power grants it the ability to offer low prices to American consumers. It boils down to a matter of preference, he said.

“Is it better for Walmart to have the lowest prices and protect American savings accounts, or is it better to have Walmart and then a hundred mom-and-pop competitors that give the American people more choice?”

Suzi Parker contributed research.

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