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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read More:
Medically Important Antibiotics Are Still Being Used to Fatten Up Pigs
What Happened to Antibiotic-Free Chicken?
The FDA Is Still Not Tracking How Farms Use Antibiotics

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

Read More:
Op-Ed: The Rise of Ultra-Processed Foods Is Bad News For Our Health
Michael Moss on How Big Food Gets Us Hooked

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

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

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

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

Read More:
As the Climate Emergency Grows, Farmworkers Lack Protection from Deadly Heat
Florida Banned Farmworker Heat Protections. A Groundbreaking Partnership Offers a Solution.
Nighttime Harvest Protect Farmworkers From Extreme Heat, but Bring Other Risks

The post Senator Cory Booker Says FDA Proposal Could Worsen Antibiotic Resistance appeared first on Civil Eats.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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

“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 “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

“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.

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

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/2024/06/12/medically-important-antibiotics-are-still-being-used-to-fatten-up-pigs/ https://civileats.com/2024/06/12/medically-important-antibiotics-are-still-being-used-to-fatten-up-pigs/#respond Wed, 12 Jun 2024 09:00:30 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=56527 Putting drugs in feed and water to make animals grow bigger and faster, thereby increasing profits, had been a common practice in industrial animal agriculture for decades. While the FDA didn’t end the practice whole hog, the change meant that going forward, farmers would only be able to use specific medically important antibiotics to prevent […]

The post Medically Important Antibiotics Are Still Being Used to Fatten Up Pigs appeared first on Civil Eats.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read More:
The FDA Is Still Not Tracking How Farms Use Antibiotics
Ads for Livestock Antibiotics Fly in the Face of FDA Rules. Will the Agency Step In?
What Happened to Antibiotic-Free Chicken?

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

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

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

Read More:
New Evidence Shows Pesticides Contain PFAS, and the Scale of Contamination Is Unknown
PFAS Shut Maine Farms Down. Now, Some Are Rebounding

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

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

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

Read More:
Just a Few Companies Control the Meat Industry. Could a New Approach to Monopolies Level the Playing Field?
Farmers and Ranchers Head to DC to Level the Playing Field

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

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

Read More:
Eat Less Meat: A Small Change With a Big Impact
Eating Less Meat Is a Prescription for Better Health

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]]> https://civileats.com/2024/06/12/medically-important-antibiotics-are-still-being-used-to-fatten-up-pigs/feed/ 0 https://civileats.com/2024/06/03/can-ai-help-cut-plastic-waste-from-the-food-system/ Mon, 03 Jun 2024 09:00:08 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=56425 A version of this article originally appeared in The Deep Dish, our members-only newsletter. Become a member today and get the next issue directly in your inbox. If all goes according to plan, the result will be a Paris Agreement for plastic. Just like during international climate summits, the companies driving the crisis are showing up […]

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

In April, representatives of more than 150 countries traveled to Canada to hammer out the details of an international, legally binding treaty to tackle the plastic crisis. It was the fourth of five negotiation sessions, with the process set to be completed later this year.

If all goes according to plan, the result will be a Paris Agreement for plastic.

“Negotiators need to recognize that plastic pollution is an accelerating global crisis that cannot be solved with fragmented national approaches.”

Just like during international climate summits, the companies driving the crisis are showing up in numbers to try to shape the outcome of the negotiations. Also familiar: Many advocates and experts say that treaty progress is not moving fast enough given the urgency the situation demands. In a press release commenting on the April meeting in Ottawa, World Wildlife Fund (WWF) International pointed out that more than 15 million tons of plastic entered the ocean during the week of negotiations.

“Countries have made important progress in Canada with constructive discussions on what the treaty will actually do, but the big decisions still remain: Will we get the strong treaty with common global rules that most of the world is calling for, or will we end up with a voluntary watered-down agreement led by least-common-denominator values?” said Eirik Lindebjerg, WWF International’s global plastics policy lead. “Negotiators need to recognize that plastic pollution is an accelerating global crisis that cannot be solved with fragmented national approaches.”

Nivedita Biyani, an expert on plastic waste, was in Ottawa attempting to provide policymakers with data they could use to make smarter decisions.

Biyani has been working to understand and improve waste management for about 12 years, in poor neighborhoods in India that lack infrastructure, for the government of Singapore, and now as a researcher at U.C. Santa Barbara (UCSB), where she looks at “mass flows” of plastic—aka “how materials travel through production to end-of-life and become waste.”

Her latest project: the Global Plastics AI Policy Tool, developed with Douglas McCauley, the director of UCSB’s Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory, and Roland Geyer, a prominent industrial ecologist.

Nivedita Biyani

Building on a 2017 paper Geyer published that estimated how much plastic had ever been made, the team set out to show what kind of impact 11 policy interventions—including capping production, taxing plastic packaging, and investing in recycling infrastructure—would have on reducing plastic pollution through 2050. To do so, they used a machine learning model, a form of artificial intelligence, that included GDP and population data to model future years.

The tool estimates that in 2024, 129.7 million metric tons of plastic waste will be incinerated, 173.6 million metric tons will end up in landfills, and 73.5 million metric tons will end up in the environment. From there, without drastic changes to business as usual, the numbers just keep climbing.

Recently, Biyani spoke with Civil Eats to explain how policymakers (and others) might use the tool to reduce plastic waste from every sector, especially the food system.

Can you walk us through how this works?

We start the conversation with mismanaged plastic waste. In this model, mismanaged means it’s in the larger environment, either on land or in the sea, basically not being managed the way it should be.

Click image for a larger version (opens in a new window).

So, what you’re seeing on this axis is you have 2011, and here you have 2050. You can look at, under business as usual, this is the trajectory. Here we are today, at 2024, and we’re at roughly 60-70 million metric tons of mismanaged plastics waste into the larger environment. If we do not do anything, we are likely to reach about 121.5 million tons of mismanaged plastic waste by 2050.

Click image for a larger version (opens in a new window)

(On the left side above,) you have a collection of 11 different policies like, for example, reduced single-use packaging, reduced additives, a cap on virgin polymer production, or implementing a minimum recycled content. You can even toggle the percentage. So, at its highest, for example, implementing a minimum recycled content mandate would reduce the mass of mismanaged plastic waste at 2050 from 120 million metric tons to 64. And we can toggle all the different policies and see what we get. [If we do everything], we get to something like 17 million metric tons, which is as low as it goes.

When you look at this list of policies governments could implement and how each could reduce mismanaged waste, are there any that stand out as being the most effective at reducing the most waste?

Absolutely. Minimum recycled content [a little more than halfway down the list] is one of the biggest ones that actually reduces mismanaged plastic waste. This is saying that every piece of plastic that we put out should have a [20-40%] minimum recycled content of plastic in it. So, this is not only making sure things get recycled, but that the recycled mass is incorporated into new products. This is a big one.

Another one would be to cap virgin plastic production at 2025 levels. If we capped it, we would see a pretty significant delta, about 31 million metric tons of reduction of mismanaged plastic waste.

And then the other one would be waste infrastructure. This is really speaking to the fact that we need to implement systems and incentives to collect whatever we sell. That has a really big effect as well.

What I’m trying to say is that waste is actually a supply chain. No one thinks about it that way. It’s material, it’s useful material, and in this day and age where right now everything is so expensive . . . why are we wasting it?

We cannot keep doing waste management the way we’ve been doing it since the 1950s. Every single industry has changed, has had a disruption. Almost nothing we do right now is like we did in the 1950s except for waste management. Why has that not changed?

When you look at what is being recycled, even after all this time, it’s almost nothing, and most plastic is actually not recyclable. Is it really possible to get to numbers like 40 percent recycled content in all new plastics?

There’s one part of this process, which is the modeling aspect of it, the mass flows. The other is implementing the policies we’ve modeled, and that’s a whole different conversation. When I was working for the government of Singapore, they had a lot of trouble trying to implement some of the policies we’ve talked about. They’re not that easy, and it might be easier for some countries to implement than others.

One criticism I’ve seen of the treaty negotiations so far is that there is a lot of more emphasis on recycling and reuse and not as much on capping production. Based on the data, is it more important to cut production, and can we fix the plastic waste problem without capping? 

We could get to 20 million metric tons of mismanaged plastic waste without capping production, but it’s like trying to get all the water out of the house without turning off the tap.

A lot of the plastic waste in the food system is packaging. Is there a specific policy solution that shows the most promise in that sector according to your model?

Packaging reuse on its own does not have a very large impact on mismanaged plastic waste, but packaging reuse with a minimum recycled content mandate would result in a staggering decrease [from 121.5 to 56.5 million metric tons] in mismanaged plastic waste.

This is saying, “OK, how can we extend the life of one plastic packaging to not just one use?” It’s saying, “Maybe we can get eight to 10 uses out of a plastic packaging and then send it for recycling.” And if you can do that, look at the effect you have. It’s quite staggering. It’s more than half in reduction as opposed to only reuse.

For example, if a very well-known coffee company that sells coffee everywhere in America would implement reuse and collect back the coffee cups and then send those for recycling after eight to 10 uses, potentially even 20 depending on the robustness of the plastic, then you would have a much bigger reduction.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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]]> https://civileats.com/2024/05/29/pesticide-industry-could-win-big-in-latest-farm-bill-proposal/ Wed, 29 May 2024 09:00:27 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=56376 Despite those objections, Caraveo was one of four Democrats on the committee who joined Republicans in moving the bill forward, complete with several controversial provisions that would make it harder for states to regulate pesticides and hamper individuals’ ability to seek compensation for harm caused by the chemicals. Lawmakers have tried, unsuccessfully, to get similar […]

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“As a doctor, I am concerned about eroding protections for those most affected by dangerous pesticide exposures—the workers who apply them,” said Representative Yadira Caraveo (D-Colorado) during last Thursday’s session to discuss, amend, and vote on the House Agriculture Committee’s first draft of the 2024 Farm Bill.

Despite those objections, Caraveo was one of four Democrats on the committee who joined Republicans in moving the bill forward, complete with several controversial provisions that would make it harder for states to regulate pesticides and hamper individuals’ ability to seek compensation for harm caused by the chemicals.

Lawmakers have tried, unsuccessfully, to get similar language into past farm bills. Now,  ongoing lawsuits involving Roundup’s link to cancer and paraquat’s link to Parkinson’s disease and recent state efforts to restrict the use of certain pesticides have raised the stakes. As a result, insiders say the industry is fighting harder than ever before and the new provisions reflect that push.

“This is an effort to not only cut off the ability of farmers, farmworkers, and groundskeepers to hold the companies accountable, it’s an effort to prevent the public from ever learning about the dangers in the first place.”

Bayer, CropLife America (the industry’s trade association), and allied agricultural organizations including the American Farm Bureau are lobbying on Capitol Hill, and CropLife has been running frequent ad campaigns targeting D.C. policymakers. Bayer has also been pushing to get laws passed that would achieve some of the same goals in individual states.

A coalition of 360 agricultural industry groups have signed on to support their efforts, while public health and environmental groups and local government officials have joined together to oppose them.

Some of the language in the farm bill would position the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) pesticide labels the be-all-end-all when it comes to spelling out safety and environmental risks. But Daniel Hinkle, the senior state affairs counsel for the American Association for Justice, said labels are not immediately updated as new research on risk becomes available. And pesticides can be mislabeled, as in the case of dicamba, which was initially approved without protections to prevent drift and subsequently destroyed millions of acres of various crops, including soybeans and peaches.

Those are just a few of the reasons Hinkle believes preserving the ability for individuals to sue companies over health harms is critical.

“Litigation has already revealed that companies have spent decades covering up harm,” he said. “This is an effort to not only cut off the ability of farmers, farmworkers, and groundskeepers to hold the companies accountable, it’s an effort to prevent the public from ever learning about the dangers in the first place.”

Additional language in the bill could also overturn state and local laws that restrict the use of pesticides. For example, many counties and cities around the country have banned the spraying of glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, in parks where children play. And just last week, California lawmakers voted to move a bill that would ban paraquat in fields and orchards starting in 2026 forward.

“Paraquat is a perfect example of a case where there are special circumstances that justify taking action that is stronger than the action taken by EPA,” said Scott Faber, senior vice president of government affairs at the Environmental Working Group (EWG). A growing body of research shows paraquat exposure can significantly increase the risk of Parkinson’s disease, and the chemical is banned in dozens of countries.

In support of the ban proposed in California, EWG has been looking at paraquat use data in the state and found intensive spraying in just a few agricultural counties. Faber said the data also shows many pesticide applicators are using more paraquat than the label permits and are not following practices required for safety. “Farmers and farmworkers are being exposed to far more paraquat than EPA estimates,” he said.

In an email, a spokesperson for the House Agriculture Committee leadership argued neither provision would restrict states’ ability to regulate the sale or use of pesticides in a new way and that they would simply clarify and codify a section of federal pesticide law that is already on the books (and in some cases strengthen state regulatory power over local jurisdictions). The spokesperson said the bill “clarifies that only the EPA can make safety findings related to pesticides” and that it “would still allow for users of pesticides to litigate legitimate claims based on EPA safety findings.”

Yet another less-discussed provision buried in the farm bill text makes changes to how an “interagency working group” set up to improve regulations related to pesticides and endangered species would operate. The provision requires the group, when consulting with the private sector, to “take into consideration factors, such as actual and potential differences in interest between, and the views of, those stakeholders and organizations.”

While it’s not entirely clear how the language would be interpreted, Brett Hartl, the government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said it would likely “tip the scales significantly toward industry.” For example, during past meetings, representatives from pesticide companies, farm groups, and environmental groups offered public comments. As read, the language suggests agencies could make a determination that one group has a greater “interest” compared to another. According to the House Agriculture Committee spokesperson, the provision will ensure the EPA consults the working group “before developing any future strategies for improving the consultation process for pesticide registration and minimizing the impact on agriculture.”

At this point, due to contentious provisions related to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and climate-focused conservation funding, the farm bill is unlikely to pass in the House and is essentially dead on arrival in the Senate. In fact, behind the scenes, most D.C. insiders doubt a farm bill will happen this year at all. If it does, it almost certainly won’t be this exact version.

But Hartl and others still believe stopping the progress of the pesticide provisions is crucial. “While it’s certainly true that Bayer is spending more than ever to try to escape accountability for the harms caused by their pesticides,” said Faber at EWG, “it is also true that ordinary people who are impacted by the harms of pesticides, whether it’s farmworkers, farmers, or school teachers, have never worked harder to defend these protections.”

Read More:
Inside Bayer’s State-by-State Efforts to Stop Pesticide Lawsuits
Paraquat, the Deadliest Chemical in U.S. Agriculture, Goes on Trial
The EPA Ignored the Endangered Species Act for 50 Years. Is Time Running Out?

Inflation Interrogation. During an at-times heated Senate subcommittee hearing last week, Senators battled with witnesses and each other over the underlying causes of high food prices over the last several years. Republican senators invited economic experts from conservative think-tanks The Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute, who bolstered their case that President Biden is to blame by pointing to increased federal spending as a driver of inflation.

On the other side of the aisle, the executive director of left-leaning economic policy organization Groundwork Collaborative, Farm Action’s chief strategy officer, and the owner of a small grocery store pointed to consolidation in the food industry and corporate profiteering as the cause. Consolidation across the food system, from farms to meatpackers to retailers, has been increasing, and the Biden administration has made it a priority to increase competition by both sending funds to small farms and businesses and cracking down on anticompetitive practices, for example, filing lawsuits against the biggest chicken companies for conspiring to fix prices. A March Federal Trade Commission report concluded some grocers used pandemic price spikes to charge even more and increase their profits.

Read More:
Biden Targets Consolidation in the Meat Industry (Again)
As Grocery Stores Get Bigger, Small Farms Get Squeezed Out

Feeding Away Greenhouse Gas Emissions. How much new feed additives could actually reduce methane emissions from belching cows remains unclear, according to a review of the research to date published by the Expert Panel on Livestock Methane. Red seaweed (asparagopsis) and a synthetic compound called 3-NOP (sold as Bovaer) added to cows’ diets have been pitched by many companies as having the potential to reduce the powerful planet-warming emissions by upwards of 90 percent. However, the scientists found that while lab studies found impressive reductions, studies that have measured emissions in animal trials have reported much more variable results, from 6–98 percent in seaweed trials and from 4–76 percent with 3-NOP.

Most notably, the longest and largest trial of red seaweed in cattle produced no reduction in methane intensity (the amount of the gas produced per unit of milk or meat) because the 28 percent reduction in burped methane was offset by the fact that the cattle ate less and gained less weight. The researchers also pointed to barriers in getting the additives to more animals, including the ability to grow enough seaweed without harming ecosystems and how often supplements need to be administered, which currently makes it nearly impossible for farmers to feed them to grazing cattle.

“All of these additives vary substantially in their methane mitigation potential, meaning that it is difficult to confidently say how much of current emissions they will be able to reduce,” the experts concluded. “More studies testing the interactions of different variables are needed to offer robust long-term estimates of their mitigation potential and of their costs, benefits and risks.”

Read More:
Methane from Agriculture Is a Big Problem. We Explain Why.
Can We Grow Enough Seaweed to Help Cows Fight Climate Change?

Forever Contaminated. Organic farmers in Maine are threatening to sue the EPA for its failure to prevent PFAS from contaminating their fields. Over the last few years, farms have discovered the chemicals—which are linked to multiple health risks—in their soils as a result of past applications of sewage sludge. In a “Notice of Intent” to sue the agency, the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardener’s Association (MOFGA) argues that the Clean Water Act requires the EPA to identify pollutants in biosolids every two years and, when risks are identified, to adopt regulations that prevent harm to human health or the environment.

“If the EPA had been regulating appropriately, many of our farmers wouldn’t be facing the harm they are today,” said Sarah Alexander, the executive director of MOFGA. “We demand that the EPA do the work required under the Clean Water Act and stop allowing these toxic chemicals to contaminate the U.S. food and water supply.” MOFGA will file suit if it believes EPA has still not met its obligations within 60 days.

The EPA has also been playing catch-up on regulating PFAS in drinking water over the past several years, and last week released new data showing PFAS are present in drinking water systems that serve 90 million people across the country. Earlier this year, the agency finalized the first limits on PFAS in drinking water.

Class-action lawsuits have already been filed against companies over PFAS contamination, and experts expect the legal battles to heat up in the coming years.

Read More:
PFAS Shut Maine Farms Down. Now, Some Are Rebounding.
New Evidence Shows Pesticides Contain PFAS, and the Scale of Contamination Is Unknown

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]]> https://civileats.com/2024/05/22/what-happened-to-antibiotic-free-chicken/ Wed, 22 May 2024 09:00:07 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=56331 Given the company produces about a quarter of the chicken in the country, ripple effects ensued. At the Los Angeles United School District, school nutrition directors were left scrambling to find another supplier in order to honor a long-standing public commitment to get antibiotics out of student meals. Then, in March, Chick-Fil-A—which has used Tyson […]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What it Takes to Raise Chickens Without Antibiotics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Appeal of Antibiotics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Slow Progress Toward a Slower-Growing Breed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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