Civil Eats

The Government Spends Billions on Food. Who Benefits?

Wed, 29 Nov 2023 11:00:36 +0200

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has an array of programs aimed at farmers growing food that supports rural communities and the environment, but its own purchasing has long revolved around sourcing the cheapest foods available.

Last week, lawmakers in both the House and Senate introduced legislation that could transform the agency’s food purchasing processes, directing the USDA to seek out not just the most affordable foods but also to consider factors including supply chain resiliency, environmental impact, and labor policies when deciding which companies are on the receiving end of the billions of dollars it spends on food each year.

“USDA has an opportunity to use its sizable purchasing power to address our agriculture sector’s compounding crisis of agri-business consolidation, climate change, and worker mistreatment,” said Senator Edward Markey (D-Massachusetts), a lead sponsor of the bill in a press release.

Called the EFFECTIVE Food Procurement Act, Markey’s proposal follows another bill, the Strengthening Local Meat Economies Act, introduced by John Fetterman (D-Pennsylvania) in September. After a ramp-up period, Fetterman’s legislation would require the USDA to purchase at least 20 percent of its meat and poultry from small and mid-sized processors and to prioritize contracts with regional producers, socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers, and companies that have fair labor agreements in place.

Both pieces of legislation, which face long odds of getting included in next year’s farm bill, represent a push to better use federal purchasing power to accelerate progress on goals that the Biden administration has stated are key to its policy vision, including climate action, equity, and improving competition and resilience.

And they’re linked to a larger movement to shift institutional and government food purchasing that has taken root in cities and states around the country, said Chloe Waterman, the senior program manager of the climate friendly food program at the nonprofit Friends of the Earth. The organization is one of several environmental, food, and farm groups that joined forces to create the Federal Good Food Purchasing Coalition about a year ago.

“We got together and said, ‘We now have a decade’s worth of proof-of-concept for this idea of values-aligned food procurement. The federal government is a way bigger player than any of the cities or municipalities or school districts that we’re working with. So, how can we bring this strategy to the federal level?’” she said.

The coalition released its first report earlier this month, which traces how the government spent nearly $17 billion on food in two separate years, 2019 and 2022. And it found that despite an executive order directing agencies to consider greenhouse gas emissions in procurement, another addressing consolidation, and hundreds of millions of dollars granted to small and mid-size farms and processors over the past few years, the government isn’t exactly putting its money where its mouth is.

According to the analysis, the USDA is by far the largest purchaser within the federal government, with programs for school meals, domestic hunger, and foreign aid accounting for more than half of total government food spending. In 2022, USDA spent nearly half of its food dollars with just 25 vendors, several of which represent the same multinational food companies the Biden administration has called out for exploiting American farmers.

The USDA spent the most money—6 percent of its total purchases, or $270 million—on food from Cargill, which is the country’s largest private company and has long been accused of creating unfair markets for farmers and perpetuating deforestation in South America. Tyson, recently the subject of a major child labor investigation, took in $248 million, including 43 percent of dollars spent on poultry and was among the top five beneficiaries of spending on pork.

Interestingly, the largest contracts for beef did not go to any of the country’s biggest meatpackers, although some of the companies are processors that could be sourcing animals from slaughter facilities owned by the big four. (The EFFECTIVE Food Procurement Act would also require the USDA to provide more transparency around its purchasing.) While it wouldn’t affect numbers from the past, the agency did recently commit to only buying red meat from cattle raised in the U.S.

But that won’t impact its relationship with JBS USA, a subsidiary of the Brazilian meat giant. In 2022, the USDA spent more than $60 million on pork and chicken from JBS and its poultry company, Pilgrim’s Pride. More than a year ago, lawmakers asked the USDA to end contracts with the company based on accusations of criminal behavior, including bribing government officials and using child labor in its supply chain. However, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack declined, stating that it would “potentially impair” the agency’s ability to secure affordable food.

To Waterman, that is precisely why change is necessary.

“If we can’t even cut out or suspend purchasing from one vendor who’s a particularly bad actor, what does that say about like the resiliency of that supply chain and the lack of diversification in it?” she said. To illustrate the alternative approach, when Senator Fetterman introduced his bill to diversify the USDA’s meat purchasing, groups supporting the legislation created a map that showed the hundreds of small and mid-size processors that could be tapped instead. Many of those businesses recently received grants from USDA to expand and/or stay open.

A map of the small and mid-sized processors that could supply the USDA with its meat needs.

The report also analyzed greenhouse gas emissions from USDA purchasing and concluded that shifting more dollars toward plant-based foods (pulses, including beans, lentils, and tofu are a particularly tiny slice of current purchasing) could provide a variety of benefits that match the administration’s priorities. For example, it found that replacing 50 percent of beef purchases with plant-based proteins would cut greenhouse gas emissions by 15 percent, land use by 16 percent, water use by 5 percent, and costs by 2 percent.

“Our analysis included this cost element to show that you can reduce emissions and save . . . while also achieving benefits along every metric that we included,” Waterman said.

To date, more than 200 organizations have endorsed the EFFECTIVE Food Procurement Act, while 65 have endorsed the Strengthening Local Meat Economies Act. But the bills are partisan, with no backing from Republicans. And with the farm bill process punted to next year and still no end in sight on the many spending bills Congress plans to pass, their future remains uncertain.

That’s not to say that, if enough momentum built up, the agency couldn’t start to shift its purchases on its own, Waterman said. “Even just from the numbers that we found, it does appear that USDA is moving in the right direction, and they have stated that they share some of the goals of diversifying their supply chains,” she said. “I just don’t think that they’re doing it fast enough.”

COP28 Kicks Off. Starting tomorrow, world leaders, experts, fossil fuel and agribusiness executives, civil society groups, and activists will officially convene in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) for what is being billed as the first global climate summit to pay serious attention to food and agriculture’s role in the conversation. Because it’s also the first COP to be led by an oil company executive who is also using the gathering to strike oil and gas deals, it’s unclear whether it will result in the immediate, dramatic shifts away from fossil fuels that experts say are necessary to curb catastrophic climate outcomes.

Last week, the Council of the European Union published a draft of the food systems declaration world leaders are expected to sign; it barely mentions greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture and stops far short of getting countries to commit to concrete actions and targets to reduce those emissions. “Anything that does not address emissions at this point is really a disappointment and a cop out,” said Wanjira Mathai, managing director for Africa and global partnerships at the World Resources Institute, during a recent media briefing.

The briefing included a panel of experts who said one of their top priorities would be ensuring that small-scale and Indigenous farmers from around the world are given adequate resources and represented in the conversations around food production. A report earlier this month found that while small, family farms produce a third of the world’s food, they have received less than 1 percent of international financing aimed at expanding climate-smart agriculture.

Anna Lappé, executive director of the Global Alliance for Future of Food (and a member of the Civil Eats advisory board), said that her group was seeing “a worrying uptick” in food and agrichemical companies putting money into lobbying and public relations campaigns to try to steer the narrative toward what many experts and advocates see as false food-and-climate solutions. “The challenge will be to ensure that vested interests from the energy, food, and agrochemical sectors don’t undermine calls for real solutions,” she said. “We cannot address the planetary crisis without tackling food system emissions, and we can’t phase out fossil fuels without transforming food systems.”

Avoiding the Next Dust Bowl. Sand and dust storms are becoming much more frequent due to climate change, accompanying droughts, and poor land and water management, and two billion tons of sand and dust now enters the atmosphere every year as a result, according to the United Nations’ Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD). During a five-day meeting, UNCDD experts released three reports on the storms, one of which is specific to agriculture and includes information on how to reduce its role in desertification and the creation of dust and to minimize impacts on farms. Dust storms have been increasing in frequency and severity in dry western states, and agriculture can contribute to them by leaving fields bare between crops and tilling the soil. In May, dust from tilled farm fields caused a storm in Illinois that led to a 72-car crash in which seven people died. The storms can also destroy crops and harm livestock.

Unfair Trade. A new report published by Corporate Accountability Lab, an organization that holds businesses accountable for human rights and environmental abuses, shines a light on abuse faced by farmworkers in Mexico—even while working on farms growing certified “responsible” produce. To gather data, food anthropologist James Daria conducted more than 200 in-depth interviews with workers in Mexico’s San Quintín Valley employed by berry farms selling to Driscoll’s and the company that produces the Good Farms and Heritage brands sold at Costco. While the farms were certified by Fair Trade USA and the Equitable Food Initiative, Daria found incidents of forced labor and widespread violations of policies on sexual harassment, wage theft, and retaliation. The workers themselves described the conditions as “21st century slavery.” Annual audits required by the certifying bodies often failed to reveal the system’s shortcomings.

The post The Government Spends Billions on Food. Who Benefits? appeared first on Civil Eats.

This Indigenous Cook Wants to Help Readers Decolonize Their Diets

Tue, 28 Nov 2023 11:01:36 +0200

Sara Calvosa Olson didn’t set out to write a traditional cookbook. She had spent several years writing a column about the Indigenous foodways of California for the quarterly magazine News From Native California when she landed a book deal with Heyday Books (the magazine’s publisher) to expand on the column. Then, the pandemic hit and Calvosa Olson turned toward her own kitchen and began writing about and developing recipes based on the meals she’d been cooking for more than two decades. Chími Nu’am: Native California Foodways for the Contemporary Kitchen, released earlier this fall, is the fruit of that labor.

Calvosa Olson grew up with a Karuk mother and an Italian father on a homestead in the Hoopa Valley Reservation, near California’s northern edge. She spent a great deal of time during those formative years outside, learning about her plant and animal relatives and eating a combination of commodity foods and the foods her parents grew, gathered, hunted, and bartered for. “Family celebrations and special foods were formative to the way I now show love and connect to my identity as a flourishing matriarch,” she writes in the introduction to Chími Nu’am.

“We are all colonized, our palates are colonized. And it’s kind of impossible to raise children who don’t love Fruit Snacks and other processed foods.”

Although Calvosa Olson moved to the Bay Area, she stayed in touch with the Karuk community and continued to nurture the food traditions with which she was raised. She writes:

“When I had children of my own, I wanted to connect my sons to these family recipes and to being Karuk, as we were living away from Karuk community and traditional lands. By intentionally establishing this connection, I discovered a love for developing new and colorful recipes based on our old family recipes and traditions. Gathering wild foods, sharing, teaching, cooking, and tending have all been an opportunity to grow and heal in the nurturing way I didn’t know I needed.”

Chími Nu’am, which translates to “Let’s eat!” in the Karuk language, is in many ways a record of that process in addition to a compendium of recipes. Organized by season, the book guides its readers in gathering, processing, and cooking with Indigenous foods in hopes of helping us begin to integrate more traditional ingredients into our oversimplified modern palates.

Its recipes range from creative takes on familiar foods—blackberry-braised smoked salmon and elk chili beans—to dishes that will be entirely new to many readers, such as nettle tortillas, miner’s lettuce salad, and spruce-tip syrup. And it includes recipes for nearly a dozen foods made with acorns, including crackers, muffins, crepes, and hand pies, as well as a rustic acorn bread that calls for one cup of acorn flour and two cups of wheat flour.

Calvosa Olson has written a book that will speak to multiple audiences. But whether she’s guiding Indigenous readers to embrace more of their cultural foods or making recommendations for non-Indigenous readers interested in decolonizing their diets in an ethical way (hint: it’s about reciprocity), her voice and philosophy come through clearly on the page.

Civil Eats spoke to Calvosa Olson recently about the book, how she hopes it will reach those very different audiences, and her urgent call to all of us to begin reconnecting to the natural world through food.

How did the recipes in the book take shape, and how did you decide what to include and what to leave out to protect or preserve specific cultural foods and traditions?

I think we can all agree that Native people have lost so much, and so much has been taken, appropriated, and diluted. There are still some cultural foodways that are very similar to the foodways that we have always eaten. And because there are so few, I didn’t feel like it would be appropriate to put those in a book for everybody. Even in the work that I do for my own family, there’s a difference between what is for us in ceremony and what is for us to incorporate in our everyday lives or to maintain our connection to our stewardship.

We are all colonized, our palates are colonized. And it’s kind of impossible to raise children who don’t love Fruit Snacks and other processed foods. But I really wanted them to develop a love for foods that are bitter or fishy—those types of things that we shy away from in Western culture.

“We are all suffering from diet-related diseases. It’s terrible. And it’s so difficult to right that ship for many reasons.”

Different audiences will experience this book differently, but as a non-Indigenous reader, I felt invited in—invited to take part and understand more of the cultural experience behind these foods rather than merely follow recipes. That said, gathering and preparing these ingredients is also going to be a learning curve for some readers.

We all need to develop relationships with our foodways, and our lifeways, and what’s going on around us. Nobody can turn on the news and disagree with that. We need to at least develop some relationships with the rhythms of the world around us right now. So, I want the book to be a warm welcome in to do that.

But also, how you do that is very important. And I love that people are asking: How do I do it ethically? You have this opportunity to go forward intentionally and choose the lens that you want to view this work through, and you can center Indigenous people, and our traditional knowledge and our relationship-building and community-centered lifeways, as you go forward. Which means that you are also building relationship and building community with Indigenous people and we’re all working together.

And how do you interact with Native people who have been deliberately othered in the state, and deliberately made invisible? Growing up in the U.S., we don’t hear from Indigenous people, and that’s what causes a lot of the mystic Indian tropes. And you can see that in the [U.S.] education system, which ignores Native people, and refers to us in the past. But we are still here, and we are safeguarding so much of the world’s biodiversity.

We’re also at the forefront of environmental science; we have incredibly sophisticated people working in our environmental departments. We have climate action plans, we have stewardship plans, we have everything we could possibly need to go forward to rehabilitate the land except power and influence. Even if I only reach one person at a time, and they went about things in a different way and began to understand the value of [traditional ecological knowledge and Indigenous foodways] in a new way, that would be a success.

You recommend that non-Native folks contact their local tribal representatives when they want to learn how to gather acorns and other Indigenous ingredients. What do you say to people who worry that they’d be bothering them in asking for their services?

There are non-Native people out there who run foraging classes and you have the choice to either pay them or you can call or email tribal peoples or tribal entities and say, “Listen, I’m interested in learning more about this. And I can pay non-Native foragers, but I would prefer to put my resources with you. I want to center your knowledge. Do you offer any classes to the public for gathering or know of anybody willing to show us how to gather?”

I realize it’s uncomfortable! Because, again, [people are used to] othering of us, and don’t know how to interact with us. They feel like they’re going to bother us. But that just keeps people going to foragers who are non-Native. But overcoming that awkwardness is important because the worst thing that can happen is that they can say, “Yikes, we don’t know anybody.”

“People are still reliant on commodity food and subsistence gathering. And often when you go out to gather your traditional foods, they’re not there anymore.”

You share strategies for decolonizing your diet gradually by adding, for example, a cup of squash to frybread or a cup of acorn flour to bread to replace processed white flour. Can you say more about that approach?

Because our palates are all colonized, to some degree, we have to reintroduce these foods gradually. There’s a dilution that occurs. But I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing. Because we can’t all go rushing into the forest right now to completely decolonize our diets. It’s impossible. We would we need to set up new food systems that are as robust as the ones we have now before we could do that. This is a gradual change.

One cup of a corn flour instead of one cup of white flour is still one less cup of white flour. In [Indigenous] communities that really matters. We are all suffering from diet-related diseases. It’s terrible. And it’s so difficult to right that ship for many reasons. There’s so little food education, no access to healthy foods. People are still reliant on commodity food and subsistence gathering. And often when you go out to gather your traditional foods, they’re not there anymore. The fish are gone and the fires have burned the mycelium mats, so the mushrooms aren’t coming back the same.

Anything that we can do to start turning this ship around is important. And it’s about eating and nourishment, yes. But it’s also about connecting to community and connecting to our role as people for the environment—and waking up to our obligations to everything around us.

You recommend that readers start to expand their worldview and their approach to Indigenous foods slowly, but you also go on to write, “I want to impress upon everybody the urgency with which we must act to keep our ecosystems healthy.” How do you balance that desire to move slowly and build deeper connections to ecosystems against that larger sense of urgency?

“Hurry up! And go slow”—that’s what I’m telling people. Connecting to this approach requires you to go slow in the beginning, but as you develop your own connections and your own relationships it’s like a snowball; it will start to build on itself exponentially. And you will become more attuned to these issues and more connected to the activism that Indigenous people are engaged in. And then, in a year, you will have so much more knowledge and it will be an exponential leap to the next year. And it goes on from there. If you go too fast, and you’re not developing relationships or practicing reciprocity, then you’re just perpetuating the same cycles of settler colonialism and extraction that got us into this mess in the first place.

You worked with the California Indian Museum and Cultural Center teaching cooking to Indigenous elders during the pandemic. Can you speak to how that work helped shape this book?

Indigenous readers were really the first and only audience that I was considering at first. This whole book took a lot of checking in with community and gut-checking constantly about how to go forward and be inclusive, because I really, genuinely believe that we need everybody together to do this. And I don’t think that Indigenous people alone can do this. But I do want to prioritize the health of our communities first, because I want us to be healthy and ready to keep it up.

“We are reclaiming that history and knowledge, and we have to teach it to our children.”

As lost as [non-Native people] might feel sometimes about how to go forward and who to ask about Indigenous foods and practices, we often feel the same way. Many Native people are disconnected from family and community, and they’re spread out or flung all over the place. For instance, I’m on Coast Miwok land, but I’m not Coast Miwok, so I’m still a guest on this land. How do I go forward here in a way that centers reciprocity? And we’re all asking these kinds of questions.

Most of our foodways were not documented in California because it was considered “women’s work.” We just have smoked salmon and acorn soup. I know we had a massive variety of foods, and it was vibrant, colorful, nuanced, and delicious. And yet, if you were to read documentation about the Karuk tribe, you would see that we only ate two things.

We are reclaiming that history and knowledge, and we have to teach it to our children. And sometimes I teach it to older people who were sent to boarding schools or whose parents were sent to boarding schools and didn’t want to have anything to do with their indigeneity when they returned. It is complicated for all of us. There are not very many people doing this work in a way that is engaging all people. And that’s mainly because there are so few of us and the first focus has to be on fortifying the people in our own communities. But I’m a white Indian, so I want to be able to leverage my whiteness to speak to a non-Native community, and to engage them about how to go about this in a good way. I’m like a liaison.

I have a whole half of me that isn’t Native, and it’s a challenge to reconcile these two sides. But I don’t have to reconcile them right now. What I can do is use what was good on [my Italian side]—the things I learned about family and community and how to show my love through food and laughter and storytelling—to uplift the Native people in my communities.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Acorn Pumpkin Muffins

Muffins are such a forgiving bake, so this is a great place to mess around with some dried fruits and toasted nuts if you like a little extra something in your morning nosh. Muffins are also very easy for little hands to make! Get the niblings involved with this one.

Makes 12 muffins

Ingredients

1½ cups all-purpose flour 1⁄2 cup acorn flour
½ cup chocolate chips (see Note)
¼ cup maple sugar
1½ teaspoons baking soda
1½ teaspoons baking powder
1½ teaspoons pumpkin pie spice
½ teaspoon salt
1⅓ cups whole milk
1 large egg
1 tablespoon pure vanilla extract
1 cup cooked squash puree

Note: This is a very forgiving recipe, so you can add more or fewer chocolate chips or substitute them with dried fruit and/or nuts.

Directions

Preheat the oven to 375°F.

In a large bowl, mix together the flours, chocolate chips, maple sugar, baking soda, baking powder, pumpkin pie spice, and salt.

In another large bowl, mix together the milk, egg, vanilla, and squash puree.

Stir them together to form a batter. Do not overmix. Fill the cups of two 6-cup muffin tins three-quarters of the way full.

Bake for 20 minutes, until a toothpick inserted into the center of a muffin comes out clean.

The post This Indigenous Cook Wants to Help Readers Decolonize Their Diets appeared first on Civil Eats.

This #GivingTuesday, Help Us Celebrate Our Successes

Tue, 28 Nov 2023 11:00:44 +0200

As a small team, we work incredibly hard, and we are always honored to be recognized for the quality of our reporting. We have a lot to celebrate this year: In 2023, Civil Eats was awarded and/or named a finalist for more than a dozen awards and accolades, which we share below.

It’s always nice to dust off our early successes, including being named Publication of the Year in 2014 by the James Beard Foundation and our induction into the Library of Congress in 2019. We also won the International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP) Digital Media Award for Best Group Food Blog in 2020, and a 2022 IACP Award for best newsletter for our members-only monthly column, The Deep Dish. But this year, judges recognized the quality of our work like never before.

This work can’t survive without your support. If you value our critical, award-winning reporting, please donate to Civil Eats on Giving Tuesday.

Donate Today

Your donation will go twice as far, as Civil Eats is once again participating in NewsMatch, a national call to action to support journalism that strengthens democracy from the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN). Through December 31, 2023, NewsMatch will double every individual donation up to $1,000 (including memberships).

We don’t just ask the hard questions, we also report on the positive changes being made in the American food system. Our core mission has remained the same over the last 14 years: We aim to tell the stories behind our food with an eye toward exposing those in power and lifting up voices that would otherwise go unheard. With your support, Civil Eats can dig deeper, grow its audience, and continue this vital work. From all of us at Civil Eats, thank you for helping us shine.

Among our most recent honors and accolades:

Civil Eats was named a finalist for general excellence in online news by the Online News Association in the 2023 Online Journalism Awards, the prestigious global prizes for digital journalism.

Associate Editor Christina Cooke, former Senior Reporter Gosia Wozniacka, and Contributor Alice Driver were awarded a James Beard Foundation Media Award for excellence in investigative reporting for our 2022 investigation series on animal agriculture workers, “Injured and Invisible.” Here is a short video clip of Cooke and Driver accepting the award on behalf of the team. Driver and Civil Eats were featured in this piece in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

Cooke and Senior Staff Reporter Lisa Held both also won OEMME Awards: Cooke for the first article in our “Injured and Invisible” investigative series, and Held for an article on why OSHA and the EPA are not enforcing standards to protect farmworkers from pesticides.

Former Staff Reporter Anne Marshall-Chalmers and Staff Reporter Grey Moran won Excellence in Journalism Awards from the Northern California chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. Their stories on climate crisis solutions, including a surge in drought-resistant agave farming, flooding fields after heavy rains for groundwater restoration, and planting hedgerows for carbon sequestration and other environmental benefits, were named best environment reporting. Marshall-Chalmers also won a 2023 International Association of Culinary Professionals Food Writing Awards Finalist for her agave reporting, which we produced in partnership with Edible Communities.

Civil Eats was named a finalist for the Insight Award for Visual Journalism by the Institute for Nonprofit News Awards 2023 for “Civil Eats TV: Women Brewing Change at Sequoia Sake.”

Former Senior Reporter Kalen Goodluck won second place in the 2023 Native American Journalists Association’s National Native Media Awards for his story, “This Pilot Program Is Supporting Tribal Food Sovereignty with Federal Dollars.”

Donate Today

Reporter Gabriel Pietrorazio won second place in the National Association of Agricultural Journalists’ (NAAJ) 2023 Writing Contest for his profile of the Indigenous-led nonprofit Wild Bearies. Pietrorazio also won third place in the group’s 2023 Next Gen Young Writers award for his reporting for for the site, and Staff Reporter Grey Moran also won an honorable mention for their reporting for Civil Eats, with the judges noting, “This writer provides a strong voice to those who might be considered non-mainstream agriculturalists.” Held won an honorable mention from NAAJ in the news category for her investigation on frac sand mining for, “providing useful details on the issue and going beyond the familiar narrative.”

Reporter Jennifer Oldham’s “As Drought Hits Farms, Investors Lay Claim to Colorado Water” won first prize in the business category of the 2023 the American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA) Writing Awards. The judges noted: “This story is a captivating tale about the collision of water rights, economic growth and rapid population growth. The author provides extensive information about the owners of water distribution companies and the conflicts between farmers and non-rural users of water. As water resources become scarcer, this story sheds much-needed light on a topic that profoundly affects our lives and the lives of generations to come.”

Alice Driver’s “Tyson Says Its Nurses Help Workers. Critics Charge They Stymie OSHA.” received an honorable mention for the 2023 Donald Robinson Memorial Award for Investigative Journalism from ASJA. The judges noted: “We felt this story also showed extensive reporting and interviewing, which was well incorporated into a story along with statistics and an exploration of federal standards and rules. The story did an excellent job of portraying what has been found in federal investigations. It was a tremendous enterprise story.”

Senior Reporter Wesley Brown’s story, “Black Farmers in Arkansas Still Seek Justice a Century After the Elaine Massacre,” was selected for inclusion in Best American Food Writing 2023, guest edited by Mark Bittman.

Earlier in the year, Staff Reporter Grey Moran reported on voter suppression and retaliation within the second largest farmworker union, the Farm Labor Organizing Committee. The union reached an agreement with the DOL and will be conducting a new, supervised election by September 2024.

The Center for Health Journalism awarded contributor Virginia Gewin a reporting grant for a story for us on how toxic dust from the Salton Sea affects the health of migrant farmworker families in the Imperial and Coachella valleys. Her reporting was named “Story of the Week” by the Institute for Nonprofit News, and the Center republished the reporting.

We are so grateful to be recognized for our unique, high-impact reporting. We can’t do this work without your support, so please consider donating, becoming a member, or giving a gift membership today. From all of us at Civil Eats, thank you for supporting our work.

Donate Today

The post This #GivingTuesday, Help Us Celebrate Our Successes appeared first on Civil Eats.

Can Virtual Fences Help More Ranchers Adopt Regenerative Grazing Practices?

Mon, 27 Nov 2023 11:00:38 +0200

At Georges Mill Farm in northern Virginia, Molly and Sam Kroiz’s goats are on the move. Some roam through pastures testing bunches of fescue, a cool-season grass, for the sweetness the frost brings. Others push into a strip of bushes, munching through brambles. One scales a boulder and balances on its hind legs to take bites out of a tree branch.

This herd, however, is not quite as free-range as it appears.

All 70 of the animals wear what look like big, boxy cowbells around their necks. When one goat gets close to an invisible fence line the farmers set up on an app, the box emits a high-pitched tone, eliciting an immediate response. Any goat within hearing distance perks up, freezes, and then slowly moves away from the line, despite the lack of any physical barrier.

The system was created by a Norwegian company called Nofence, and Molly and Sam are among 43 pilot farms testing it ahead of an official United States debut expected in early 2024. And Nofence is just one of several companies getting into the virtual fencing game. U.S.-based Vence, which was acquired by veterinary pharmaceutical giant Merck Animal Health in 2022, has been slowly rolling out a similar system on larger cattle ranches across the West since 2019. Other systems, including eShepherd and Corral Technologies, are also in development.

Virtual fencing is gaining traction in American agriculture because it can save farmers time and money. But it could also enable them to more easily adopt practices—and entire systems—that promote environmental benefits. When farmers are able to control how, where, and when their animals move between pastures, they can more easily accomplish ecological goals that might include increasing soil carbon, reducing water pollution, or incorporating trees. The technology also has the potential to rid the West of barbed wire that negatively impacts wildlife migration and adapt grazing to an age of increased wildfires by making it easy to keep cattle out of burned areas.

Virtual fencing is gaining traction because it can save farmers time and money. But it could also enable them to more easily adopt practices—and entire systems—that promote environmental benefits.

Given how few farms are using it, there are still many questions about limitations—like the absence of cell service in some rural areas, farmer acceptance, accuracy, and ongoing costs—but buzz about virtual fencing’s applications continues to grow. In September, a project dedicated to sustainable beef production in the Southwest created a Virtual Fence Forum for farmers on Facebook; in November, ranchers gathered in Arizona for a workshop on the technology.

“People have been talking about virtual fencing for a long time,” said Juan Alvez, an extension research associate at the University of Vermont’s Center for Sustainable Agriculture, whose expertise includes grazing management, “and now it’s just coming to market.”

More (Virtual) Fencing Facilitates Animal Movement

Sam’s family has been farming Georges Mills’ 90 acres since the 1750s, and the infrastructure harkens back to a time before farmers used even simple machinery. At night, the goats sleep in a barn built in the mid-1800s from large blocks of local stone and weathered wood.

But since the couple took over about a decade ago, they’ve been looking to the future to make their goat dairy and cheesemaking operation more sustainable—both financially and ecologically.

In past grazing and milking seasons, which run from March through December, Sam regularly had to move fencing—sometimes every day—to keep providing them access to new fields with fresh plants and keep their waste dispersed across the landscape. He also had to construct pathways to move the goats back to the barn for milking.

“He was having to put out posts, roll out four wires. He put a lot of steps in, and it took a lot of hours,” Molly said of Sam’s efforts. Now, with the virtual system, “Sam can update the fence lines while he’s drinking his coffee in the morning.”

He does that using Nofence’s app, which creates and updates the boundaries by GPS, with no physical infrastructure other than the collars worn by the goats. Each collar is outfitted with tiny solar panels to continuously charge the battery, and Molly said it’s usually about a month until they have to take them off to charge them manually.

While physical fencing for cattle can be slightly less involved than for goats, since a single electrified wire will keep cows in place (most of the time), cattle grazers need a lot of fencing and frequent movement if they’re pursuing climate and other environmental goals.

To effectively build soil health, Alvez said, farmers and ranchers who use systems referred to as rotational, intensive, or mob grazing, should move their animals to new pastures at least once a day. While continuous grazing depletes pastures and overloads fields with waste, these alternative approaches build soil health by naturally spreading the manure, fertilizing new grass growth, and building healthy communities of microbes.

Traditionally, many farmers struggle to set up enough paddocks for continuous movement, because installing fencing can be expensive and labor intensive, Alvez said. “More paddocks versus less is always better for grazers and climate-smart goals, because you’re always moving these animals to a fresh pasture,” he said. “Fresh pastures mean most [of the other] pastures are in a vegetative state, often accumulating carbon from the atmosphere into the soil where it belongs.”

With virtual fencing, there’s an upfront investment, but adding new paddocks can be done on the fly, without additional costs. Nofence’s collars cost $299 each for cattle and $199 for goats or sheep, and come with a five-year lifespan. In addition, farmers then have to pay a monthly subscription fee that varies depending on herd size and other factors. It’s no small cost—for Georges Mill farm’s 70 goats, it would cost around $14,000 for the collars—but fencing, depending on the type, generally costs thousands of dollars per acre upfront, plus the added daily labor.

The biggest limitation with virtual fencing, however, is connectivity—Nofence needs a cell phone signal to operate, which can be a challenge in many rural areas.

One drawback is that since the lines the system draws are not as exact as a physical barrier, farms may still need to put permanent physical fences up in places where a hard stop is needed, like along busy roads. At Georges Mill, for example, a physical fence creates the overall farm barrier, while virtual lines create pasture barriers.

The biggest limitation with virtual fencing, however, is that depending on the system, connectivity could be an issue. With Nofence, strong Wi-Fi is not required, but a cell phone signal is, and Meghan Filbert, the company’s adoption program manager, said that if a farmer can’t typically receive calls or texts in their pastures, the system won’t work for them.

That could be a major issue in lots of rural places, including Alvez’s neck of the woods in Vermont, where cell service often cuts in and out. It’s something he hopes will improve (and there are many efforts currently underway to improve broadband in rural areas around the country) because he believes his area could benefit more from virtual fencing.

“In areas where it’s more mountainous, with rugged landscapes and lots of marginal land, having this technology would really simplify the amount of paddocks you can establish,” he said. That’s because putting physical fencing in those places is more difficult compared to areas with flat, open terrain.

Controlling Grazing Near Water and Trees

Virginia’s landscape also has unique characteristics that make virtual fencing an attractive option said Alston Horn, a restoration specialist at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation who works with farmers, including Molly and Sam, to implement conservation practices.

In the field at Georges Mill, Horn said that a lot of land in the hilly, populated region is better suited for grazing than other types of agriculture and that he got interested in virtual fencing through his work making sure that grazing benefits the Chesapeake Bay watershed instead of contributing to its pollution. Continuous grazing that allows manure to build up can result in excess nutrients ending up in waterways, and cattle getting into streams can also deposit nutrients and contribute to erosion.

He sees the technology—which can enable more movement and control where animals are in relation to water sources and trees—as one tool farmers could use to better manage pastures.

“Well-managed pastures [are] good for water quality because we’re actually infiltrating more water, and there’s less runoff going down to our local creeks and streams,” he said. “If our local creeks and streams are cleaner, ultimately, the rivers—and as we go east, the Bay and everything else—they have better water quality too.”

Virtual fencing may also aid farmers in implementing agroforestry practices that reincorporate trees into farm systems and come with significant climate and biodiversity benefits. For example, a quick swipe of a finger on a virtual fencing app could allow a farmer to protect riparian buffers, strips of bushes and trees alongside streams that prevent runoff and support wildlife, from cattle until the plants are well-established.

That’s the application Alvez is most excited about, because the difficulty of putting up fencing that can contain animals and also protect trees as they grow is often a complicating factor in getting agroforestry systems off the ground.

And in a system where sheep are grazing in alleys between fruit trees, a farmer might try to put up a fence and encounter difficulties because of tree roots. “With virtual fencing, you could put the line six feet off the trees and still have the benefit of the shade for the animals and at the same time protect the trees,” he said.

The Way Forward for Virtual Fences

At this point, of course, agroforestry systems are about as novel as virtual fencing. And even with the many companies gearing up to expand, it will be some time before the systems are widely available. Nofence is prioritizing its sales in Norway, the United Kingdom, and Spain, where it is already widely available. While the system will officially roll out in the U.S. in 2024, Meghan Filbert said it will be slow and that “availability will be limited.”

Alvez is working with a developer in Brazil to bring another product to the U.S. that works in a similar way but uses an ear tag instead of a collar. That system will also provide data like body temperature from the cattle that wear it, and Alvez hopes to begin using it as a research tool.

Back at Georges Mill, Molly and Sam didn’t opt to use virtual fencing in order to better incorporate trees and livestock, but during their pilot of the system, that happened naturally.

One recent morning after a thunderstorm, they moved the goats to a distant field across a road. Only after they got them there did they notice a cherry tree—which is toxic for goats—had fallen in a thicket within the field.

In the past, Molly said, that would have meant “moving the herd all the way back into the barn while Sam totally cuts it up and clears it out, because you can’t have any of the leaves around—if they eat them, they’ll die. It’s a huge disruption, a huge amount of time.”

This time, however, “We were able to just draw an exclusion zone around it and keep everybody off of it,” she said. “That was huge.”

The post Can Virtual Fences Help More Ranchers Adopt Regenerative Grazing Practices? appeared first on Civil Eats.

With Season 2, ‘High on the Hog’ Deepens the Story of the Nation’s Black Food Traditions

Tue, 21 Nov 2023 11:01:05 +0200

The Pullman porters. The Nation of Islam. The Black Panther Party. These are just some of the legendary groups that the Netflix docuseries High on the Hog: How African American Cuisine Transformed America explores in its wide-ranging second season, which airs Nov. 22.

The first season offered a poignant history of Black American food, linking it to its West African roots and enslavement in the United States. The current season leaps ahead to the 20th century and explores the momentous changes Black Americans experienced during that period and how they informed their relationship with food.

These changes include the Great Migration, which took place from roughly 1916 to 1970, and saw over 6 million Black Americans leave the rural South in hopes of better jobs and fairer treatment in the industrialized North. As the Great Migration unfolded, African Americans working for the railroads became unionized for the first time, forming in 1925 the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Maids. In the second season’s opening scene, host Stephen Satterfield dines on a train car and speaks with a 99-year-old former railway waiter and the son of a porter to examine food’s role in the Great Migration.

Just as trains took the Pullman Porters all over the country, Satterfield takes viewers across America—stopping in cities including Chicago, Atlanta, New York, and Los Angeles. At times, Dr. Jessica B. Harris, the culinary historian and author of the book from which the series takes its name, joins Satterfield on the journey. The strength of the second season lies in its exploration of the little-known links between food and Black American progress. Most people know that civil rights activists desegregated lunch counters, but it is lesser known that Black restaurateurs hosted civil rights strategists, while home cooks sold cakes and pies to fund actions such as the Montgomery Bus Boycott. During the Black Power Movement that followed, the Black Panther Party launched their free breakfast program for children, an idea the federal government would later appropriate.

In addition to speaking with activists to uncover the links between food and justice, Satterfield visits Villa Lewaro, the palatial estate of self-made millionaire Madam CJ Walker. Once a cook, the wealthy entrepreneur and her daughter, A’Lelia Walker, entertained the nation’s Black elite before and during the Harlem Renaissance.

Civil Eats spoke with Satterfield and Harris about High on the Hog’s sweeping sophomore effort and how, like the first season, it highlights the ways that Black innovators have left an imprint on the country’s culinary landscape.

This season of High on the Hog mentions that many Black people have avoided agricultural work because of its association with enslavement, but points out that they are increasingly starting urban farms. Are Black Americans’ perceptions of working the land changing?

Jessica Harris: It is changing in the Black community, but we are far from monolithic. A lot of people moved away from the land, and with deliberateness. I think what has happened is many of those folks who migrated to the North lost land that they owned, or their families lost land, so now they have a desire to return to the land. There are people who, like Matthew Raiford—who is not in the episode but he’s a sixth generation farmer who has returned to his land in Georgia—and Karen Washington, who is in the last episode. She has a group for Black urban gardeners, and it’s an enormous group that’s bringing people back to the land in real and productive ways.

Stephen Satterfield: In part of the scene where I have a conversation [with former sharecropper Elvin Shields], I have an expression on my face like I’ve heard something surprising. He is inferring that the plantation . . . is something to be reclaimed. I had frankly not ever thought about that, and I felt challenged by that notion. But I thought it was a perfectly logical position, especially considering his life, what he’s seen, and what he’s fought to protect. So I appreciated him for that enlightenment.

Dr. Harris, you mentioned Karen Washington. The fact that she coined the term “food apartheid” is discussed in this season. How much of a game changer is this term and why is it more accurate than “food desert” to describe challenges to food access?

Harris: Apartheid is caused by someone. Deserts are caused by nature. So, I think that’s part of the distinction that Karen may have been making very deliberately. I think the whole notion of where do you go for what you eat is something that merits a considerable amount more discussion than it’s getting, and it gets some of that discussion in episode four. Where do people get their food? What kind of food are they getting? Can they walk to it or do they have to have a car? Is there public transportation? So, you have all of those questions as well.

I found the interview with the former railway waiter and son of a porter very interesting. Can you discuss the significance of these workers both in terms of food and the labor movement, because Pullman porters really paved the path for other Black workers.

Harris: The Pullman car porters are important in the foundation of African-American wealth and the migration of African-American food. [George] Pullman came up with his railroad cars within a decade or two of emancipation. So a lot of people who had been enslaved as house people got jobs on Pullman cars, because they knew something about service. The Pullman cars then took them all over the country. Anybody who was alive, or who has been alive as long as I have, will never forget A. Philip Randolph, who was the head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and the way that he organized his union. The way that that union advocated for African Americans was of cardinal importance. He was one of the forces behind the 1963 March on Washington. He was galvanizing and that all grew out of that same culture of African Americans on trains in service.

Stephen, your grandfather was a Pullman porter, so this history is personal for you, right?

Satterfield: I never had a chance to meet my grandfather; he died before I was born. But he, like many Black folks, left the South to migrate to Chicago in the mid-20th century, as one of the modern industrial revolutions was underway. So, my family story is a pretty accurate microcosm for this story that we were telling about migration. Even though I was aware that he was a porter for many decades, I had never been on trains. There’s, of course, something to be said for the visceral quality of the lived experience. Really being there with someone close to my grandfather’s age, hearing him tell me about the hard parts of the job but, also, the mundane parts, was really a joy and, hopefully, a revelatory story about that part of our history.

Stephen, what was it like visiting Madam CJ Walker’s famous estate?

Satterfield: For someone like A’Lelia [Walker] and Madam CJ Walker—food is at the center of everything. Whether it’s street food, rent parties, or the food in a juke joint, we’re going to get it in. The [Harlem] Renaissance was all about a kind of maximalist creative expression of brilliance from a very specific moment in time, a specific geographic radius in the way that’s like—you had to be there. Of course, for many of us who weren’t there, that lore and that magic still lives on. I think we tried to capture that in our Harlem episode.

Dr. Harris, your book and this series discuss the important connections between restaurants and the Civil Rights movement. Restaurants like Paschal’s in Atlanta served activists returning from demonstrations, for example. They sold desserts like pies and pastries to help fund the Montgomery Bus Boycott. But many of these stories have been ignored. Why was it important for High on the Hog to highlight these links?

Harris: [The Rev. Martin Luther] King strategized in places like Paschal’s and Deacon’s. The idea of Black restaurants as community hubs was very important to that time period. Places like Dooky Chase’s in New Orleans were safe spaces, some of the few places where African Americans and whites could meet. It was illegal, but they could do it.

Georgia Gilmore and the Club from Nowhere baked pies and sold them in Black beauty shops and barber shops to fund the bus boycott. All of those things are the hidden underpinnings of the Civil Rights movement that we will hopefully now begin to talk about. Think about the church suppers. Think about the restaurants that fed the Freedom Riders when they returned from jail. Think about all of those things. And when you put all of that together, you somehow manage to get a full picture. Food is a basic part of the human condition. If we don’t eat, we die. So food is connected to all of it.

Stephen, what was it like to meet some of the activists who fought to desegregate lunch counters as Atlanta University Center students?

Satterfield: It was a real highlight for me personally, especially in my hometown. It was extraordinarily humbling. It was one of those moments when I was rather unconcerned with the cameras. I was bearing witness to their detailed, gripping, and inspiring journey in a very historic restaurant, sitting at the same tables where people like Martin Luther King, organized, and strategized at for Black liberation. I felt a huge amount of pride, and I hope if people take anything away from that scene, it will be to consider how much planning, strategizing, and coordination went into those activations.

I also loved the inclusion of the Nation of Islam and the bean pies they sell. The show referred to it as a sort of “food ministry.” Many people who don’t belong to the NOI are fans of the group’s bean pies, including Meghan Markle and her mother, Doria Ragland. What is the appeal of the bean pie?

Satterfield: I loved [the bean pies] growing up. The one I had on the show was amazing. When something’s really good, there will be a market for it; it will likely be coveted. People will try to replicate it or, maybe, imitate it, but they can’t. I think that’s the larger point. Why is that? We touched on that a little in the scene, but it’s a source of pride in community.

Harris: Most people don’t know that [longtime Nation of Islam leader] Elijah Muhammad actually wrote two food treatises. They are about foods that he felt were digestible and foods that he felt were indigestible and that go beyond the rules of haram in Islam. The bean pie grows out of that. He felt that those beans [in the pie] were the most digestible of beans. I certainly remember it being sold on the streets of Brooklyn, along with what was called Muhammad Speaks.

High on the Hog also includes an interview with a former member of the Black Panther Party that discusses the party’s free breakfast program, which influenced the federal government’s decision to begin providing breakfast to students in schools permanently. In some ways, that is a success story. In other ways, this is a sad story because the government sabotaged the party’s program.

Harris: All history is complicated if you look at the multiple sides of it. I wish they’d been given credit, but I’m glad that kids are eating. Those are my thoughts in a nutshell. I was alive during that point in time, and I didn’t know that [the national school breakfast program] was a result of the Black Panther Party. But, once I did, I appreciated just how extraordinary that was, and I think it is one of those things that will [show] all Americans how our food. . . .influenced and informed the foodways of this country.

Satterfield: One of my favorite stories in US history is about the social programs of the Black Panthers. My favorite is the free breakfast program. It really speaks to an active, vibrant, and flourishing movement that is bringing our people back to the land in urban spaces.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

The post With Season 2, ‘High on the Hog’ Deepens the Story of the Nation’s Black Food Traditions appeared first on Civil Eats.

Op-ed: Walmart’s Outsized Catch

Tue, 21 Nov 2023 11:00:45 +0200

Portions of this essay were previously published as “Walmart’s Ocean: Certifications, Catch Shares, and the Ripple Effects of Corporate Governance on Marine Environments” in Big Box USA: The Environmental Impact of America’s Biggest Retail Stores. Eds. Bartow Elmore, Rachel Gross, and Sherri Sheu. 2023. Colorado University Press.

In March 2023, consumers filed a class action lawsuit against Walmart. This is not unusual—Walmart gets sued about 20 times per day. What was unusual was the reason: The lawsuit alleged that Walmart misled consumers by selling seafood products “certified sustainable” by the nonprofit Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), advertised with a prominent blue checkmark in the shape of a fish.

The lawsuit alleged that “as Walmart knew or should have known, MSC hands out this certification to those who use industrial fishing methods that injure marine life as well as ocean habitats with destructive fishing methods . . . Reasonable consumers believe the fisheries providing these products are maintaining healthy fish populations and protecting ecosystems.”

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.

In fact, the MSC standards themselves promise such protections for the oceans, marine life, and humans. However, the suit also alleged that MSC-certified fisheries engage in the suffocation and crushing of dolphins caught in fishing nets, the killing of endangered sea turtles caught on hooks, and entangling critically endangered whales in fishing gear.

“Walmart failed to ensure that the fisheries only sourced using sustainable means, making its promises meaningless,” the lawsuit claimed.

The litigation is unlikely to result in a massive payout for Walmart shoppers. Walmart has moved to dismiss the lawsuit and has stated that “the MSC URL included on the product packaging . . . informs a reasonable consumer what ‘sustainable’ does and does not mean in this context,” while the MSC—which has responded to similar criticism in the past—has not issued a statement.

As a historian of science researching the history of fisheries science, sustainability, and ecosystem and food system management, I believe that this litigation, and similar critiques, raise questions about the Marine Stewardship Council’s rapid rise to prominence and its unique relationship to the world’s largest retailer.

MSC’s influence extends far beyond Walmart. Perhaps the most prominent sustainability certification label for sustainably caught wild fish, it can be found at restaurant chains from McDonald’s to Red Lobster and Olive Garden, and on canned tuna brands including Bumblebee and Chicken of the Sea. Retailers from Costco and IKEA to Whole Foods increase MSC’s credibility among shoppers.

“Walmart’s support has been essential to the development and scaling up of MSC’s certification, and perhaps also key to what critics view as the certification’s weaknesses.”

But it turns out that Walmart’s support has been essential to the development and scaling up of MSC’s certification, and perhaps also key to what critics view as the certification’s weaknesses. To understand the rise of MSC, we need to look back into the history of Walmart.

The Story Behind This Story

What began as a single general store, “Walton’s 5-10,” in 1950, has become almost incomprehensibly vast, operating on a scale that is larger than that of many countries. Each week, 265 million people shop at Walmart somewhere in the world. By 2018, Walmart controlled 26 percent of the grocery market in the U.S. (as much as 90 percent in some locations), and was called the largest fish retailer in North America by 2015.

In 2006, however, Walmart faced two serious problems, one relating to supply and the other to demand. On the supply side, Peter Redmond, Walmart’s vice president for seafood and deli, fretted over insecurity in Walmart’s supply chain as the retailer rapidly expanded into the grocery sector.

“I am already having a hard time getting supply,” he reported. “If we add 250 stores a year, imagine how hard it will be in five years.” Walmart’s business model requires suppliers to be consistent, reliable, transparent, and agreeable to changes, particularly price reductions. A complex seafood supply chain where a single fillet might change hands half a dozen times met none of these criteria.

Redmond was concerned about receiving inferior products—or possibly none at all. Over the prior two decades, several huge, historically stable fisheries, including the famed Newfoundland and Grand Banks cod fishery, had collapsed, and a controversial but widely reported scientific paper warned that all commercially fished stocks could collapse by 2048.

On the demand side, put simply, Walmart had an image problem. Once considered “America’s Most Admired Company,” Walmart had begun receiving a torrent of negative publicity on issues ranging from alleged bullying tactics over a proposed store location to allegedly encouraging employees to rely on Medicaid and food stamps (and in one case, holding a food drive for its own food-insecure employees) to compensate for Walmart’s low wages.

Into this breach stepped Rob Walton, son of founder Sam Walton, whose family remains Walmart’s most influential investors. Rob was growing concerned with both the company’s image and the planet’s environmental trajectory. He arranged for his close friend and diving buddy Peter Seligmann, chairman of environmental nonprofit Conservation International, to meet with Walmart’s then-CEO Lee Scott. Seligmann helped convince Scott that a commitment to sustainability would provide much-needed good publicity, while helping secure the stability of volatile supply chains like seafood.

The Rise and Rise of the MSC

In August 2006, Walmart announced a multi-faceted campaign to go green. For seafood, the corporation began selling seafood products with the Marine Stewardship Council MSC-certified label. They started with 10 products from Beaver Street Seafood and AquaCuisine but had bigger ambitions: “We have set a goal to procure all wild-caught seafood for North America from fisheries certified by the MSC within the next three to five years,” Redmond announced.

Founded in 1997, MSC allowed fisheries to apply to receive its signature blue checkmark by hiring a third party to assess the fishery according to 23 principles. Those principles included priorities such as helping overfished stocks recover and avoiding overfishing and practices that degraded ocean habitat. The assessment was then opened to public comment and objections, redrafted, and the fishery certified or rejected. Certified fisheries undergo reassessment every five years. The process is similar today.

Photo credit: Giordano Cipriani, Getty Images; Illustration by Civil Eats

At the time, MSC publicly rejected the role of governments, centering the roles of consumers, environmental groups, and industry instead. A 1996 paper by MSC founder Michael Sutton featured a prominent epigraph from the Secretary General of the U.N. Environment Program (UNEP) stating simply, “The market is replacing our democratic institutions as the key determinant in our society.”

“Walmart’s partnership with MSC turned certifications from a value-added product to a necessity for its seafood suppliers. Those businesses now had to pay for the MSC certification process.”

Despite UNEP’s warning tone, Sutton saw this not as a problem, but as an opportunity; the state had failed to manage fisheries sustainably, so it was time to let market forces work their magic. “Government, laws, and treaties aside,” Sutton wrote, “the market will begin to determine the means of fish production.” This pro-market belief fit well with their future partners at Walmart: the Walton family, who own a controlling share of Walmart and whose eponymous Walton Family Foundation was garnering a reputation in the early 2000s for supporting free market causes, including charter schools and school vouchers.

Walmart wasn’t the first retailer to adopt MSC certifications, but it was the biggest, and where Walmart went, other industry players followed. Walmart’s partnership with MSC turned MSC certifications from a value-added product to a necessity for its seafood suppliers. Those businesses now had to pay for the MSC certification process (a cost MSC estimates between $15 to $120,000 in consultant fees), if they wanted to keep selling to Walmart (as well as an additional 0.5 percent in royalty fees to MSC if they want to use the MSC logo).

Within the decade, many other major retailers including Aldi, Carrefour, IKEA, and Tesco, and restaurant chains like McDonald’s and Darden, the owner of Olive Garden and Eddie V’s Prime Seafood, had partnerships with MSC.

MSC also received money from the Walton Family Foundation, run by the children and grandchildren of Sam Walton, including Rob Walton, who helped convince Walmart’s CEO to embark on the conservation program in the first place. In 2010, the foundation was MSC’s largest single donor, contributing $4.5 million. Walton Family Foundation donations to MSC fluctuated over the next decade but often exceeded seven figures, including a 2021 grant of $1.05 million.

“In 2015, 73 percent of the organization’s income, or $14 million, came from charging seafood companies 0.05 percent of the wholesale value of sales to use its label, according to a leaked WWF report.”

In 2010, in the same newsletter announcing their partnership with Walmart, the MSC also announced a “new strategic plan [that] sets out how we will scale up our activities and accelerate the delivery of our mission.” After “an intensive planning process generously funded by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation,” MSC accelerated development. Their budget increased from a little over $2 million in 2005 to nearly $20 million in 2013, and the number of certified fisheries increased seven-fold from 2006 to 2013.

But scaling rarely comes without turbulence, and an enlarged MSC quickly found itself navigating rougher seas. An increasing number of scientists and conservation groups, from Greenpeace to Pew Environmental Group to MSC’s co-founding organization, World Wildlife Fund (WWF), found fault with MSC practices.

Some were concerned with MSC’s objection process, in which any outside organization concerned about a pending certification—often environmental groups or fishers from adjacent fisheries—paid up to £15,000 to lodge complaints (in August 2010, the maximum fee was lowered to £5,000). Those objections were also handled by lawyers who were explicitly instructed not to consider biological critiques, and objections almost never succeeded.

Others were concerned that MSC had a significant, and increasing, financial interest in certifying fisheries: In 2015, 73 percent of the organization’s income, or $14 million, came from charging seafood companies 0.05 percent of the wholesale value of sales to use its label, according to a leaked WWF report. The MSC thus had direct financial incentive to certify more fisheries and allow larger catches.

“MSC’s definition of sustainable fishing was loose enough to justify the certification of fisheries that were overfished or where overfishing was ongoing. Those words—overfished and overfishing—don’t have a universally agreed-upon definition.”

WWF characterized MSC as having “aggressively pursued global scale growth” and said it had “begun to reap very large sums from the fishing industry.” MSC Science and Standards Director David Agnew denied “any conflict of interest with his organization’s logo licensing or financial model,” while WWF characterized the report as an unofficial working document that was part of an “ongoing dialogue that we are having with the MSC to drive positive change in the marine environment.”

But there was an even deeper critique. MSC’s definition of sustainable fishing was loose enough to justify the certification of fisheries that were overfished or where overfishing was ongoing. Those words—overfished and overfishing—don’t have a universally agreed-upon definition. So, MSC, critics say, set the bar low, using one of the most permissive definitions. Under a more stringent definition, a third of its certified fisheries failed to meet the mark in a scientific review.

And MSC-certified fisheries can also do enormous environmental damage. Even though MSC’s principles clearly state that certified fisheries should not damage ecosystems, the only fishing techniques that are explicitly banned are dynamite, poison fishing, and shark-finning. Other fishing methods that have been attributed to high rates of bycatch and ecosystem damage—including bottom trawling and longlining, the standard practices of well-capitalized, wealthy countries like the U.S.—are not considered inherently unsustainable but run against its principles, although they are still permitted under the certification. For instance, the MSC-certified Northeast Arctic saithe fishery uses bottom-trawling, and therefore catches endangered golden redfish, too.

“Proponents of the MSC argue that it serves as an incentive for those in certified fisheries to avoid overfishing, no matter how large or industrialized, while detractors suggest that it can greenwash unsustainable and damaging fisheries, all while keeping demand high among unsuspecting consumers.”

This is just one way MSC certification has benefited wealthier fishers and their industries. Smaller-scale fishers, often from heavily fishing-dependent communities, are also less able to afford the certification fees and never get certified in the first place. In a marketplace saturated with MSC’s blue checkmark, they lose market leverage, even if they use more environmentally friendly techniques, are more sustainable, and provide greater employment and food security.

Even so, small-scale fishing vessels were alleged to disproportionately feature on MSC’s promotional material in a 2020 study in PLOS, the nonprofit academic journal. MSC disagreed with this analysis, in particular defending the potential sustainability of large industrial fisheries, but also affirmed that as of 2020, “the percentage of small-scale fisheries achieving MSC certification [was] . . . around 16 percent,” while “small-scale fisheries account for roughly 90 percent of fishers.” MSC also called attention to a new initiative, the Ocean Stewardship Fund, which has dedicated over $4.9 million to over 106 diverse fishery improvement projects in small-scale and developing nations fishing programs.

Walmart-Scale Sustainability Standards Have Mixed Results

But did MSC actually improve the stocks of the fisheries themselves? Proponents of the MSC argue that it serves as an incentive for those in certified fisheries to avoid overfishing, no matter how large or industrialized, while detractors suggest that it can greenwash unsustainable and damaging fisheries, all while keeping demand high among unsuspecting consumers.

Walmart’s own shifting sustainability goals fed detractors’ concerns: It amended its initial goal of only stocking certified sustainable fish to include fisheries “on their way” to earning a sustainability label. By 2017, Walmart’s official Seafood Policy claimed that by 2025 all seafood would be sourced from fisheries that are “third-party certified” by the MSC (or some other certifier recognized by the Global Sustainable Seafood Initiative), or “actively working toward certification.”

Photo credit: Digipub; Illustration by Civil Eats

The MSC itself has also issued certifications for fisheries aspiring to, but not yet achieving, sustainability. WWF, no longer affiliated with MSC, raised the alarm, arguing that the certification of fisheries targeting endangered bluefin tuna by Japan and France at the time was premature. Wasn’t the MSC supposed to certify fisheries that were already sustainable, not reward aspirations alone? Now Walmart’s “100 percent sustainable” seafood department could stock products from fisheries “on their way” to receiving a certification that said they were on their way to sustainability.

MSC later claimed that WWF’s concerns had been addressed, arguing, “The assessor’s recommendation for the MSC to certify the fishery is informed by the latest scientific advice,” with contributions from marine scientists and NGOs, including WWF.

“Walmart’s partnership with MSC has helped make the concept of sustainable fish—the concept of sustainability itself—into a commodity, sellable through a blue checkmark.”

Nevertheless, this is how Walmart’s partnership with MSC has helped make the concept of sustainable fish—the concept of sustainability itself—into a commodity, sellable through a blue checkmark. In some cases, MSC certification may have saved thousands of seabirds and other marine life, while in others it may have greenwashed unsustainable fishing practices and hurt other conservation efforts.

It also has a clear effect on the fishing industry, which now must navigate an expensive new market of certification consultancies that favors large industrial fisheries over small community-based ones. MSC has heard this criticism, and has worked toward getting smaller-scale fisheries in poor countries certified. Unknown, however, is whether those fisheries can still support local communities once they are part of an MSC program. The programs are, after all, market tools for global supply chains, and can untether local fisheries from their otherwise protein-sparse communities when the resources of poor countries are used to feed rich ones.

The Limits of Stateless Corporate Governance

Despite Walmart’s success in shaping the narrative of sustainability, Walmart’s seafood policy demonstrated the limits of stateless corporate governance. Twenty years later, Walmart may be discovering what other observers believed from the start: Markets have not shown themselves singlehandedly capable of enforcing sustainable fishing. Only governments can enforce the compliance that certifications generally call for.

So, while for decades, Walmart, the Walton Family Foundation, and its partner, the MSC, advocated for market-based environmentalism, all have since had to turn to traditional governing bodies to meet their sustainability commitments and call for more action from regulators. In an interview with me in 2021, Teresa Ish, Walton Family Foundation’s oceans initiative lead and senior environment program officer, said, “It is kind of ironic that it all comes back to that management side, but that’s where we are now.”

“For decades, Walmart, the Walton Family Foundation, and its partner, the MSC, advocated for market-based environmentalism, all have since had to turn to traditional governing bodies to meet their sustainability commitments and call for more action from regulators.”

What this means in practice is that MSC and the Walton Family Foundation, both historic advocates for free-market environmentalism and limited regulation, have recently been in the position of “asking” the governments of countries where Walmart buys fish to bolster their fishery management and regulatory efforts.

This can take the form of open letters like the one signed by Walmart, Carrefour, Nestlé, Publix, and Tesco in May 2020 calling on governments to allow electronic monitoring of tuna vessels during the COVID-19 pandemic so that the retailers could still meet their product commitments while the human observers who keep tuna fishing sustainable were off-duty for safety reasons.

Or devising fishery improvement plans (FIPs)—in which certifiers or industry or others call for a rearrangement of fishery management in exchange for funding—which the Walton Family Foundation’s own consultants have found “must compel governments to adopt changes” in order to succeed and often still result in adverse outcomes for local communities.

For its part, MSC has announced, “Governments must cooperate to seize the opportunities of a blue revolution.” This while its Ocean Stewardship Fund is providing research for international fishery management agencies and hoping to influence multinational fishery management regulations—important work, but not easily classifiable as market-based environmentalism.

“It’s just a definition of sustainability compatible with late-stage capitalism, unlikely to be compatible with complex ecosystems, unpredictable population fluctuations, and a changing climate.”

In some ways, we have come full circle, back to traditional environmental strategies like government regulations that use lawsuits to enforce them. And yet Walmart’s corporate governance strategies have allowed it to rely on MSC’s debatable sustainability criteria in such a way that, combined with charitable giving from the Walton Family Foundation and other philanthropic partners, Walmart can achieve its sustainability goals without fundamentally changing its business model.

This reformulated sustainability doesn’t solve the problems associated with producing low-cost disposable goods and shipping them across the world, or relying on the continued, predictable harvest of wild animals with naturally fluctuating population dynamics. It’s just a definition of sustainability compatible with late-stage capitalism, unlikely to be compatible with complex ecosystems, unpredictable population fluctuations, and a changing climate.

This contradiction at the heart of a sustainable Walmart is elided by the company’s rhetoric. By declaring that MSC certification means a fishery is sustainable, Walmart is shifting the burden of proof onto anyone who says their products are not sustainable, or who has a different, perhaps more rigorous, definition of sustainability. Walmart is relying on both certification itself and whatever ecological results it has as positive environmental outcomes—as sustainable. This is an important aspect of corporate greenwashing: moving the goalposts.

Now, this mismatch between reality and rhetoric could get even more problematic: In 2020, Walmart President Doug McMillan announced that Walmart aims to become “a regenerative company—one that works to restore, renew, and replenish in addition to preserving our planet.” But how can a company whose business model depends on moving cheap goods and extracted resources be, on net, ecologically regenerative?

Barring a substantial shift in that business model, which may entail higher prices on consumer goods, it seems more likely that regenerative, like sustainable, will become a word whose meaning is determined by Walmart.

For additional reading on this subject:

Charles Fishman, The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World’s Most Powerful Company Really Works and How It’s Transforming the American Economy (New York: Penguin Press, 2006); Nick Copeland and Christine Labuski, The World of Wal-Mart: Discounting the American Dream, (London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013); Anthony Bianco, The Bully of Bentonville: How the High Cost of Wal-Mart’s Everyday Low Prices Is Hurting America (New York: 2006); Carolina Bank Muñoz, Bridget Kenny, and Antonio Stecher, Walmart in the Global South: Workplace Culture, Labor Politics, and Supply Chains (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018); Gary Gereffi and Michelle Christian, “The Impacts of Wal-Mart: The Rise and Consequences of the World’s Dominant Retailer,” Annual Review of Sociology 35, no. 1 (2009): 573–91; Adam Levy, “Walmart’s Lead in Groceries Could Get Even Bigger,” The Motley Fool, October 11, 2018; Nelson Lichtenstein, ed., Wal-Mart: The Face of Twenty-First-Century Capitalism, 2006; Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010); Sandra Mottner and S. Smith, “Wal-Mart: Supplier Performance and Market Power,” Journal of Business Research 62, no. 5 (2009): 535–41; Bob Ortega, In Sam We Trust: The Untold Story of Sam Walton and How Wal-Mart Is Devouring America, 1st ed. (New York: Times Business, 1998).

The post Op-ed: Walmart’s Outsized Catch appeared first on Civil Eats.

Building a Case for Investment in Regenerative Agriculture on Indigenous Farms

Mon, 20 Nov 2023 11:00:49 +0200

For three generations, Fanny Brewer’s family has been ranching the same land in South Dakota’s Ziebach County. Encompassing part of the 1.4-million-acre Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation, where she grew up, the county is among the poorest areas in the United States. But for Brewer, her husband, and their four kids, it represents prosperity.

The Brewers run cattle and grow some alfalfa across 12,000 acres of grassland that’s a combination of owned land, leased tribal land, and federal trust land. This complicated arrangement isn’t unusual for Indigenous producers, who experience unique hurdles such as financial lending discrimination, limited land ownership opportunities, additional governance requirements, and disproportionately high poverty rates as a result of colonialism.

“Some Native families never develop that generational wealth, whereas our non-Native neighbor, whose family has owned their land since the late 1800s, has been able to grow their business.”

Despite these systemic obstacles, the Brewers plant cover crops between alfalfa rotations and use fewer chemicals on their crops than most conventional operations. They’d like to use more regenerative ranching practices, including adaptive, multi-paddock grazing, on more land and help prove that those practices are worth investing in.

For those reasons, the ranch is one of 14 operations participating in a three-year study from the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and the Intertribal Agriculture Council (IAC) that is examining the benefits and barriers of regenerative agriculture among Indigenous ranchers and farmers in North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Montana.

“The volatility of leasing land and how it affects your borrowing power with banks has always been a struggle for Native producers,” says Brewer, who also serves as the IAC’s Great Plains technical assistance specialist. “Some Native families never develop that generational wealth, whereas our non-Native neighbor, whose family has owned their land since the late 1800s, has been able to grow their business. Those are the hard realities we have to face.”

She points to a recent example when a desirable plot of land came up for sale. Compared to a local non-Native rancher who could leverage her owned land and secure a bank loan quickly to purchase that real estate, Brewer needed to put up her livestock, machinery, and other material assets as collateral since her family doesn’t own all their land—and it took weeks to assess.

“I don’t hold anything against her, but I didn’t realize until then how differently we approach things,” Brewer says. “At that time, I chose to pull out some of our land that was in trust with the U.S. government and put it in deed status so that the next time I walk into the bank, I have more power. Some people have questioned my moves, but these are choices I have had to make for my family so we can take control of our own destiny.”

This is an all too common experience among Indigenous entrepreneurs, says Skya Ducheneaux, also a member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe and the founder of the Native-focused community development financial institution (CDFI) Akiptan. “Many Native producers aren’t able to list their land on their balance sheet, so they can’t leverage that value,” she explains. “When you don’t have as much equity to leverage, lending institutions deem you risky, and because of that, you get shorter repayment terms and higher interest rates. You end up stuck in this cycle of just surviving.”

Regenerative practices—most of which are already in Indigenous farmers’ and ranchers’ wheelhouses because they align more closely with, and are often based upon, their traditional practices—are much harder to employ because they’re more expensive and labor-intensive.

Brewer chose to participate in the EDF/IAC study because it will yield quantitative data about both those costs—including financial investments and loan terms—as well as the benefits of investing in regenerative practices, such as profitability, soil health improvement, forage quality, and livestock growth. To gather that information, the pilot cohort is receiving technical assistance from the IAC team and participating in the Minnesota Farm Business Management Program. Offered through the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system, it provides one-on-one financial education such as record keeping and performance analysis.

Fanny Brewer, IAC technical assistance specialist for the Great Plains region, discusses the regenerative agriculture projects with Jess Brewer. (Photo courtesy of Intertribal Agriculture Council, www.indianag.org)

All of the producers in the study raise livestock, and some also grows crops. Many are in the process of transitioning from more extractive conventional methods to regenerative practices, with data being collected from 2022 through 2024. Although full results will not be available until the project’s completion, researchers are developing intermediate case studies, including one that should be released before the end of the year.

The researchers hope the study encourages producers to adopt climate-smart practices, such as using adaptive grazing, planting cover crops, and reducing tillage. The larger goal, however, is to urge financial institutions to reframe their understanding of Indigenous ranchers and farmers, who are often considered high-risk given their limited equity.

The shift to regenerative practices can take three to five years and reduce profitability by up to $40 per acre during the transition, according to recent research by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development’s One Planet Business for Biodiversity coalition. But farmers and ranchers can expect a 15 to 25 percent return on investment and profit growth by up to 120 percent in the long run, according to the study, which calls for public and private assistance to alleviate these burdens placed on the individual business owners.

While the term regenerative agriculture hasn’t yet appeared on many food labels, a whole range of interests—including corporate marketing departments and individual producers hoping to earn a higher premium—are anticipating a wider embrace of the term in the consumer market in the coming years. Simultaneously, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is investing heavily in new and existing carbon markets designed to reward growers for the carbon they store on their farms.

Although they’re not the focus of the current study, IAC Regenerative Economies Director Tomie Peterson (Cheyenne River Sioux) says, “Carbon credits are an opportunity that I would like to provide more education on to Native producers.”

Ducheneaux is optimistic that the EDF/IAC study will prompt traditional lenders to better support Indigenous entrepreneurs interested in taking up or highlighting their existing regenerative practices in ways akin to how Native-focused community development financial institutions are already doing so. “We have all this anecdotal evidence about the positive impacts of regenerative agriculture in Indian Country, but we don’t have the quantitative data that the rest of the world likes to see,” she says. “This study is really groundbreaking because it will reinforce what we already know, open the doors for even more producers, and broaden the impact across Indian Country.”

Although she too is eager to address these so-called credit deserts—which have notable overlap with tribal territories—Peterson wants to manage expectations about what this initiative can realistically accomplish. “The study is just trying to find the facts; I don’t know if we can overcome barriers,” she says candidly. That said, she is confident that the project findings will help cohort participants better understand if and how their practices are paying off and therefore make informed business decisions.

“The food system in North America has become very brittle, so a new model of agriculture that focuses on community and connection with the natural world is really important.”

This study closely aligns with the EDF’s objective to promote climate-beneficial farming practices while also helping producers prepare for and mitigate the escalating impacts of the climate crisis.

“Climate change majorly affects farmers and ranchers across the country,” says EDF Climate-Smart Agriculture Manager Vincent Gauthier. “We are focused on developing solutions that allow farmers to invest in the resilience of their farms against those weather extremes and changing conditions.”

Gauthier, Peterson, and the study leaders were very intentional in the language they chose to define the project, since regenerative agriculture is a hot-button topic within Indigenous communities, who used traditional ecological knowledge long before farmers and businesses started using terms like regenerative or organic. Gauthier explains that the team landed on a definition of regenerative they think transcends geographies and methodologies: a holistic approach to revitalizing land and the ecological system that focuses on improving soil’s ability to regenerate over time by involving the entire ecosystem, including humans and wildlife.

Farmer-researcher Jonathan Lundgren, whose grassroots 1,000 Farms Initiative is similarly aimed at studying and quantifying regenerative agricultural systems, notes that a larger paradigm shift is crucial. He underscores how vital hard data—about soil carbon, sequestration, reversal of desertification, promotion of biodiversity, increased farm resilience, and the like—is to incentivizing financial institutions to invest in producers employing practices that many of them have never seen or heard of.

“The food system in North America has become very brittle, so a new model of agriculture that focuses on community and connection with the natural world is really important,” he says.

Lundgren also sees Indigenous producers as an ideal group to receive more investment, as many already have the experience and tools to spearhead efforts to bring about a larger movement toward more regenerative practices. “Traditional Indigenous food systems have a deeper understanding of why the land and the life around them is essential to the long-term happiness and resilience of their culture and community.”

Jess Brewer walks alongside Fanny Brewer, IAC technical assistance specialist for the Great Plains region. (Photo courtesy of Intertribal Agriculture Council, www.indianag.org)

Ducheneaux and many thought leaders agree. They contend that an embrace of Indigenous knowledge is crucial in mitigating the effects of climate change in the years ahead. After all, while Native peoples comprise just 5 percent of the world’s population, they protect around 85 percent of global biodiversity.

“Native producers have been doing regenerative agriculture since time immemorial,” she affirms. “I hope there will be more research into tribal ecological knowledge so that the American agriculture industry as a whole can start to heal itself, and we can all hold ourselves to a higher standard in taking care of the land so it can in return take care of us.”

Back in South Dakota, rancher Fanny Brewer wants to help usher in that shift, but she needs the U.S. food system to provide an on-ramp to make it possible.

“I wish in this country you could make more money simply by doing the right thing—but that’s not how it’s set up,” she says. “I have four kids that I’m trying to raise, feed, and clothe, so I can’t be doing something just because I have a passion for it. I hope this study helps people see that you can do the right thing for the environment and for the health of human beings and animals and that you can still make it. You can be a good steward and still keep your head above water financially.”

The post Building a Case for Investment in Regenerative Agriculture on Indigenous Farms appeared first on Civil Eats.

Relocalizing the Food System to Fight a ‘Farm-Free Future’

Wed, 15 Nov 2023 11:00:47 +0200

Imagine a future where humans live entirely in cities in an attempt to minimize their impact on the natural world. Meat is made in factories and grazing is a thing of the past.

This is not a world Chris Smaje wants to live in. The writer, farmer, and social scientist doesn’t believe that humans need to take themselves out of the natural world to protect it, and he argues for agrarian localism over ecomodernism in his latest book, Saying No to a Farm-Free Future.

Ecomodernists believe that it is possible to protect nature and lessen the environmental impact of human development primarily through technological advances. This is achieved by shifting our development away from the natural world. Agrarian localists like Smaje argue that we can’t separate people from nature, and instead we should focus on reducing our impact by working more directly with our local environments: farming at a smaller scale, incorporating rewilding principles into our farming practices, and relying more on human power than internal combustion.

“Plenty of people are figuring out farming that works for them locally in most parts of the world; there’s an Indigenous tradition of land use that we can build on.”

The book is, at the core, a rebuttal to George Monbiot’s book, Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet. But it’s also much more than that. After his public response to Monbiot’s book elicited a response from readers, Smaje saw an opportunity to write about the role of farming, grazing, and rural places in an increasingly unstable and unpredictable future.

Smaje is a passionate and wryly funny writer. About his initial reluctance to wade into the debate he writes, “There’s something to be said for not . . . ‘paddeling the douchecanoe’ by rising to the bait of ecomodernist provocations . . . Once the veil is removed, what’s left is . . . well, basically just shrill activism and hippy dreaming with a high-tech gloss.”

The book advocates for doing less and doing it more thoughtfully at a time when humanity’s biggest challenges are often being addressed using more tech, more capital, and more emphasis on the role of cities. Smaje champions a future where more people return to rural areas and emphasizes small farms’ role in supporting local economies, healthy environments, and stronger relationships between people and animals.

He writes: “Our societies must turn to low-energy, low-capital, low-carbon agroecological approaches geared to meeting local needs primarily from local land, air and water. . . . Agriculture at its best can do this.”

Civil Eats spoke with Smaje recently to discuss his book, the role of farms in the future, and his view of humans as a keystone species.

While reading your book, I had this image of you sitting down and reading George Monbiot’s book and then furiously typing into the night.

I connected with George in 2015 after the Ecomodernist Manifesto was published. I wrote a critique of it that he read and was very enthusiastic about. He wrote an article in The Guardian critiquing ecomodernism. He mentioned my article, so he gave a boost to my writing, which I appreciated at the time. But gradually, he’s drifted into a position indistinguishable from ecomodernism.

He has been pretty much the only journalist with a mainstream media platform who has been a radical, progressive, green voice, so it matters what he says. He hasn’t written much about food and farming in recent years; this was his big food book. And it’s very, very problematic. I wrote a review on my blog and got into a Twitter argument with him about it. My publisher picked up on that, and almost before I knew it, I had signed a book contract.

I want to move on to making a case for agrarian localism and not be Mr. Anti-George Monbiot, but one of the issues is his book emphasizes how much [his case for lab-cultured meat] is grounded in the science and the data and a lot of people who don’t have the background or the time tend to read a book like that and say, “Oh, look it’s got 500 references in the back, it must be true.” I wanted to write something well-referenced and make a counter-argument. I think there are a lot of problems with his arguments; the energetic aspects of single-cell protein-manufactured foods are quite problematic .

The ecomodernist position emphasizes big-picture, top-down solutions. You’re countering that with what we can do at a much smaller level, fighting against monoculture, advocating for small places, and finding community food solutions. It’s much more challenging to do that on a large scale. Where are people doing this well, and how do we replicate it?

It’s a tricky question. There are loads of people doing it right; the problem is the politics and economics around it that make it so difficult for people to access land and spend time producing food locally.

“We’re overproducing cheap arable grains because it’s so easy to make them extend into landscapes where we probably shouldn’t be farming.”

Plenty of people are figuring out farming that works for them locally in most parts of the world; there’s an Indigenous tradition of land use that we can build on.

Can you talk about agrarian localism?

One of the big debates here in the U.K. is the overproduction of sheep in the upland areas of Britain. That’s partly because the only thing you can produce in upland Britain that you can sell realistically in global markets is sheep, so we’re driven in that way. My argument is that we need the food sovereignty idea developed by Via Campesina: reclaiming food for local communities. Historically, I’ve been a veg grower, and historically, in most places, people would grow their own vegetables, or at least they would be grown locally because it was uneconomic to trot them around. Now, in rich countries, energy is cheap and labor is [expensive], so we import vegetables.

One part of the agrarian localism idea is that if we are moving towards a future of energy constraint, climate change, geopolitical disruption, and, to some extent, the global food system is causing many of those problems, we need to re-localize. Another part of my argument is ecological feedback. If you buy food commodities that come from God knows where, you don’t know the ecological or the social conditions of production, whereas if you’re producing them yourself, or they’re being produced within your community, you are getting ecological and social feedback about the conditions of their production. This is critical for reinhabiting our lived spaces ecologically, making our livelihoods, and knowing the consequences of making a livelihood.

By creating more sustainable and resilient systems that are meaningful to us locally, we can see what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. It’s also self-limiting; once you’ve produced enough food to eat, you stop. We’re overproducing cheap arable grains because it’s so easy to make them extend into landscapes where we probably shouldn’t be farming. With a more localist perspective, you wouldn’t be doing that.

You mention the idea of using less a few times in your book, which I love. What we’re doing now is just not sustainable. There is no magic bullet where people in the developed world can continue to lead their current lifestyle, while we save the planet and feed everybody.

This thinking is a characteristic of ecomodernism. That high-energy, high-capital magic bullet thinking draws a veil over the underlying politics, economic relationships, and inequalities that I think are problematic.

Could you talk about humans as a keystone species?

We get into this mindset where we see humans as gods. We think if we separate ourselves from nature as much as possible, if we all live in cities and let the wild things do their own thing, then we’ll be fine.

“Keystone species are disproportionately impactful species. Humans are clearly a keystone species.”

That’s not going to work at so many different levels. We have to make ourselves the ecological protagonists of our landscapes, which goes back to local traditional farming, wherein people have figured out those ecological relationships.

Humans are great at inventing symbolic systems that overrun the local ecology. Thinking of ourselves as a keystone species gets quite philosophical around human impact; we seem to be in this mass extinction, which is caused by humans.

It’s possible to go to the other extreme, which is part of the ecomodernist view that it’s wrong for us to impact nature in any way. That’s not realistic; we are all organisms that impact each other. Keystone species are disproportionately impactful species. Humans are clearly a keystone species.

We create mosaic landscapes in the same way herbivore-grazing regimes or fire regimes create a mix of open and pit forest habitats, creating niches for all sorts of organisms. Nowhere does it say that humans shouldn’t be part of this push and pull between different species, but we’re getting something badly wrong. We need to find a niche for ourselves to reimagine our relationship with the more-than-human world. How can we be a good keystone species instead of running around knocking over all the china in the shop?

Absolutely. A lot of problems come from trying to separate us from the world.

It’s good to be aware, build in checks and balances, and find a way within our human way of doing things to connect with local potential.

What role, if any, will cities play in your ideal future?

The degree of urbanization in the world has been driven by cheap, abundant fossil energy. Part of the answer to all these questions is about energy futures. If we carry on using fossil fuels, we’re going to torch the planet.

We will likely have to accustom ourselves to a lower energy situation. If we’re manufacturing things and selling them to each other, maybe urbanization is viable [if we are manufacturing food in cities], but I don’t think it’s a long-term, sustainable solution. We’re looking at deurbanization unless there’s some miraculous ecomodernist energy transition. I’d like to think there’s still a place for towns and cities and a mixed landscape of geographic levels. I’m not massively into big cities because, in terms of consumption, they [draw on a great deal of resources from the developing world]. We need to relocalize urbanism so that towns have a real economic and ecological relationship with the hinterland.

There’s a mythology of everyone going to the city to make their fortune. If you think about the history of people migrating to the U.S. and [benefiting from] generating a much bigger economy, then sure. But we’re now in a situation where that isn’t really what’s happening. Increasingly, we’re talking about people in economically precarious situations, a lot of slum dwelling with people in service industries that are very labor-intensive.

The reality of a lot of urban living now, globally, is not particularly positive. What are the implications if we’re talking about more industrial food production—higher yields and less land? Given that one or two billion people in the world are relying on agriculture for their livelihoods? What’s going to happen to those folks?

What do you want readers to take away from this book, outside of being a response to ecomodernists like Monbiot?

We face numerous interconnected problems that aren’t going to be solved top-down by new technologies. The best bet is to work on them bottom up and locally, while connecting positively with people in wider networks. Ultimately, this is going to involve developing new kinds of ecological culture.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The post Relocalizing the Food System to Fight a ‘Farm-Free Future’ appeared first on Civil Eats.

Walmart and EDF Forged an Unlikely Partnership. 17 Years Later, What’s Changed?

Wed, 15 Nov 2023 11:00:47 +0200

Elizabeth Sturcken firmly believes in the power of big companies to make small, meaningful changes that lead to global environmental progress. You’d have to, in order to do what she does, which is work alongside powerhouses like McDonald’s and United Airlines to push them towards setting and meeting climate goals.

Sturcken directs climate impact inside the Environmental Defense Fund’s (EDF) division devoted to corporate partnerships. And her biggest partnership so far is with Walmart. Sturcken has been working with Walmart since 2006, and her team continues to work with the company on its Project Gigaton initiative to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in its supply chains.

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.

The work—and especially the Walmart partnership—has earned EDF both praise and criticism over the years. Some say EDF’s environmental approach is practical and designed for maximum impact, given the power of corporations to effect change at scale; others see only enabling greenwashing in the organization’s willingness to work with companies that often take maximum credit for minimal improvements.

Critics also say that pointing to Walmart’s progress is very much in the interest of EDF: Over the past 20 years, EDF has received more than $100 million from the Walton Family Foundation. In 2021 alone, the Foundation provided EDF with nearly $10.5 million in funding. Lukas Walton’s Builders’ Initiative, meanwhile, gave EDF $530,000, and Ben Walton’s Zoma Foundation gave $140,000. EDF characterizes the relationships as completely separate and says it does not take funding from corporations it works with, including Walmart.

In this interview, Sturcken spoke to Civil Eats about EDF’s work with Walmart, its impacts, and admitted limitations.

Walmart’s goal to become a regenerative company “is a huge, ambitious aspiration. It is where they need to head, and it’s where we need to head as a planet,” she said. “And yet, of course, they’re far from even being a sustainable company despite their leadership over . . . 20 years.”

Walmart’s sustainability work started around 2005, and it seems like EDF started working with the company pretty soon after that. Is that right?

It started with these conversations that were held in the basement of a hotel in Fayetteville, [Arkansas] with a bunch of environmental groups and other civil society advocates. And no one wanted to admit that they had those meetings at that time because Walmart was really under attack from all angles.

I think that EDF saw an opportunity in that Walmart was the most powerful company in the United States—arguably in the world—to try to drive ambitious environmental outcomes. So, we decided to jump in and try to work with them. We invested in being the first and only NGO to set up an office in Bentonville, Arkansas.

I was just coming back from maternity leave in 2005 . . . and when I heard about the initial conversations with Walmart, I’m like, “That’s gonna be big. I want to do that.” So, I jumped in to lead this work, and I have led it for all of these years.

In a 2009 video of you speaking to Walmart leadership, you said two interesting things. First, you said, “I’ve never seen a company embrace sustainability as fully as Walmart.” But then later, you said, “The world will celebrate with you when you show measurable progress towards these goals.” It sounded like you were trying to applaud but also challenge them. Can you say more?

For over 25 years, I’ve been at EDF working with companies, and when we started out, it was an open question whether there was a win-win, like a business win along with an environmental win. And now, there’s no question that that is the case. Not that being a sustainable company doesn’t cost money, it does. But just that the business benefits are tangible, real, and they cover all sorts of different things. There can be cost savings. There are PR benefits. There is employee engagement and customer engagement. And this is key for the food and ag space: there’s supply chain risk reduction.

What we have seen over the years is if a company embraces sustainability and incorporates it deep in the business, there is this positive feedback loop. They continue to do more and step up and lead even further. So, the ripple effect with Walmart goes back to those early days where they communicated to their suppliers that, “We want you to lead.”

We got Walmart to set the first supply chain carbon reduction goal of any retailer. I believe it called for a reduction or avoidance of 20 million metric tons of greenhouse gasses. We jumped in and . . . ultimately figured out where the big buckets of carbon were and where the big opportunities in different product categories and different parts of the value chain were. The answer was to dive in where there was a lot of opportunity both for carbon reduction and for business engagement.

That initial goal around supply chain carbon eventually led to Project Gigaton, right?

That’s right. They ended up meeting and exceeding their goal. It was product energy efficiency, and it was engaging in food and ag . . . and as I said, going after where the lowest hanging fruit was where there was a positive business benefit.

One of the areas of opportunity was fertilizer optimization. That was an opportunity both because . . . fertilizer itself, if it’s synthetic, it’s a petrochemical. So, that has embedded greenhouse gases. And if fertilizer is not taken up by the plant, [nitrous oxide] gets into the atmosphere, and it has more global warming potential [compared to carbon dioxide]. And fertilizer is one of the biggest inputs at the farm level, so there were business benefits to optimizing fertilizer use on the ground.

But it’s not easy to reach that deep into your supply chain and engage on the farm level. For Walmart, it involved bringing their whole supply chain along. So, engaging with big suppliers of food and ag products and trying to make clear what the opportunity was and then work together to try and figure out something that would work for them to engage more deeply in their supply chain. So, it was definitely a ripple-effect project.

“The best way to describe Project Gigaton is that Walmart is rolling out the red carpet to its supply chain and saying, “Come with us on this journey to sustainability. There are business benefits to doing so.'”

Can you say more about how that project actually worked? They don’t buy directly from a farmer growing corn in Iowa, so are they going to the meat companies and saying, “We’re going to send EDF out to farms that grow feed for you.” What were the logistics?

You’re testing the bounds of my memory a little bit, Lisa . . . because it was also my team that was executing this work. But, it was very much working with Walmart’s sustainability team to engage their suppliers. For us, I work in the part of EDF that works with companies. We rely on pooling the best-in-class science from other parts of EDF. So, pooling our knowledge of how to optimize nitrogen . . . and pooling other leaders in our ecosystems team that had direct connections with entities that work in the big corn-growing regions.

I understand that it’s been a long time. But I do have other specific questions on this. EDF shared a lot of specific numbers that we talked about earlier related to this project. Like surpassing that goal of 20 million metric tons of carbon emissions reduced. I’m really interested in what kind of measurement was happening on the ground. What are those numbers based on, and how were you tracking those emissions reductions?

They were numbers that were reported to us. We were engaged quite deeply in helping collect that data. But I believe that it was all self-reported data, which is definitely challenging. It always is with this kind of voluntary corporate work.

Yes, and I have the same question about Project Gigaton. Is that all self-reported data, too? Walmart says that its suppliers are reducing emissions and then the company releases numbers, but there’s no way to understand where the data is coming from, what kinds of reductions the companies might be making and how they’re measuring, or which companies are making them. How can we make sense of those numbers?

Along with WWF [World Wildlife Fund], we at EDF are engaged with Project Gigaton and are working with Walmart on this effort. Internally, Walmart has a team that’s creating a lot of the tools and technology that helps immediately flag any things that are suspicious in terms of double counting or numbers that are too big or don’t necessarily make sense. And to try to double check with the suppliers. Again, all of it is self-reported.

But many of these companies are very much at the beginning of their journey, and Walmart has really been at the forefront of bringing these companies along. We are at this time where we know the IPCC [the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] says that we need to reduce emissions by 50 percent, and emissions are still increasing. So, we know we need to move faster, and yet the challenge is you have to get companies on that journey so that they can actually start to see those business benefits.

The best way to describe Project Gigaton is that Walmart is rolling out the red carpet to its supply chain and saying, “Come with us on this journey to sustainability. There are business benefits to doing so.” They’re laying the breadcrumbs along the path.

“Walmart operates in an environment that lacks any regulation in the United States on climate, right? Even the amazing Inflation Reduction Act is all carrots and no stick.”

If I could wave a magic wand, every single company in Walmart’s supply chain would be setting a goal for its scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions that is aligned with science and be creating a plan and reporting on that transparently and have third-party data analysis. That would be great. But in the United States, at least, where there is no regulation, this [project] is what creates this powerful change—a company that purchases a lot of products and spends billions of dollars in its supply chain saying to its suppliers, “We need you to join us on this journey. Here’s how to do it. Here are the tools. Here’s how to set a smart goal.”

I hear you, but the way other people look at it is that Walmart is so powerful at this point. And while some of the food companies in its supply chains might be just starting out on their sustainability journey, many are well-resourced companies with a lot of money and a lot of power. Other people I’ve spoken to have said, “Rather than inviting them on this journey, if Walmart just said, ‘We’re not going to buy from you if you continue to participate in deforestation,’” for example, the companies would do it, because they don’t want to give up Walmart as a customer. What do you think of that argument? Given how much power they have and how important this is, couldn’t they demand more?

Walmart operates in an environment that lacks any regulation in the United States on climate, right? Even the amazing Inflation Reduction Act is all carrots and no stick. So, in some ways, it’s truly amazing leadership what Walmart has done on sustainability, and it continues to press forward in bigger and bigger ways.

It is true that I would love for Walmart to require thorough, performance-based environmental outcomes from its suppliers. That is an ideal. I always want companies to be more ambitious. I want them to lead on pushing for climate policy, because that piece is super critical. I want them to lead on driving actual results in their own operations for climate and nature and toxics and all of those issues. And I also want them to fully engage their supply chain and to do so in a way that really requires progress. That’s the ultimate goal.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

The post Walmart and EDF Forged an Unlikely Partnership. 17 Years Later, What’s Changed? appeared first on Civil Eats.

Could Dry-Farming Wheat in San Diego Seed a Local Grain Economy?

Tue, 14 Nov 2023 11:00:51 +0200

From 9 to 5, Terry Ellis works as an engineer for defense contractor Northrop-Grumman in San Diego. At 9, and on weekends, he’s a serious sourdough bread baker—and an aspiring grain farmer.

After looking in vain for an affordable local wheat source, Ellis decided to experiment with dry-farming the grain himself on a small piece of land 45 miles north of San Diego, in rural Valley Center.

Waving fields of wheat once stippled the sunny lands of San Diego County, but higher-value crops supplanted it more than a century ago.

On a sparkling spring day in March, Ellis and a crew of volunteers gathered at Rio Del Rey Farm to pull weeds from rows of experimental dry-farmed wheat crops. The months prior had seen a series of atmospheric rivers that brought abundant rain to the region and the six-week-old heirloom wheat was sprouting—to the delight of all involved. Wielding a hula hoe, inch deep in healthy mud, Ellis admitted he hasn’t done much manual labor.

But he’s willing to pour some sweat equity into this experiment. Currently, his best whole wheat source is 350 miles north, in California’s San Joaquin Valley, and shipping costs have recently tripled. As Ellis uprooted weeds alongside fellow baker and martial arts instructor Noris Velazquez, the “Kung Fu Baker,” they commiserated over their supply woes.

Velazquez committed to the project because he wants his customers to have bread baked with local ingredients, grown sustainably, without Roundup weed killer. He’d like to tell them the wheat comes from heritage varieties, with essential nutrients absorbed from the soil. He’s been collecting seeds for years.

“I seek out purity of ingredients, those that speak to my heart, and that is why for the last 10 years I’ve been collecting heirloom wheat seeds—to one day plant and watch them grow, to learn from them, and pass on their radiant life force through a loaf of bread, from the heart,” Velazquez said.

Waving fields of wheat once stippled the sunny lands of San Diego County, but higher-value crops supplanted it more than a century ago. Though San Diego is home to more small farms than any county in the U.S., grain is not a profitable use of the region’s extremely expensive land and water. However, given recent declines in profitability of higher-value crops such as citrus and avocado—and growing demand for local, nutritionally dense ingredients and the resurgence of dry farming in California—conditions might be ripe for the return of a local grain economy in San Diego.

Landrace vs. Modern Wheat

Twenty-five landrace and heritage varieties went into the ground at Rio Del Rey Farm in late January, with guidance from Heritage Grain Trials and consultation from Monica Spiller of Whole Grain Connection, a Silicon Valley-based nonprofit that connects farmers, millers, and bakers interested in building local grain economies. Landrace grains are pre-hybridized varieties that adapted to their local environments as they evolved, optimizing water use, energy, and nutrients. San Diego doesn’t have a native landrace wheat, so it’s up to growers to find what works based on historical wheat crops in the area and experimentation with heritage varieties. Slow Food USA is supporting this experiment and a second crop in 2024 with a $4,000 grant.

Rows of India-Jammu wheat planted at Rio Del Rey Farm yielded 60 pounds, or enough for 7 pounds of flour. (Photo credit: Noris Velazquez)

The small-scale experiment also reflects the larger efforts of multiple organizations around the country working to revive heritage grains, including Golden State Grains in California; Tehachapi Heritage Grain Project in California’s southern Sierra Nevada; Palouse Heritage Grains in Washington; and Native Seeds in Arizona. The collective goal is to revive plant diversity, raise crops sustainably in conditions made more challenging by climate change, and collect successful varieties for future crop resiliency.

The day after planting brought a stroke of good weather luck: several hours of gentle showers to water the seeds. A few days later, Valley Center bean farmer Mike Reeske, who donated half an acre of his small farm for this crop, was already betting on which seeds would be the winners in the slow and steady race to find a heritage wheat that will grow—with rainwater only—in San Diego County.

His top picks: White Sonora, brought to northern Mexico by Europeans in the 1600s or earlier, and grown throughout San Diego and the Southwest before modern irrigation; and India-Jammu, which the University of California Regional Testing Program recommends for rain-fed sites and is touted for its “desirable whole wheat artisan bread-making properties.”

Artisan sourdough bakers like Ellis and Velazquez seek flour that is more nutritious and heartier than the refined stuff from most wheat and commercial mills. Most modern wheat is a high-yielding semi-dwarf variety that does not produce roots as deep as many heritage types. “Landrace and heritage varieties of grains . . . invest in deeper root development and have greater mycorrhizal associations, which afford them vastly greater capacity to scavenge nutrients in low fertility soils,” Reeske wrote in the grant proposal.

Those nutrients are passed to consumers when wheat is milled the “old-fashioned” way: on a stone mill, which breaks up the wheat berries while grinding the nutritious bran and germ into the flour. But most wheat is processed on roller mills that remove the bran and germ to produce a fine white flour, while much of the product marketed as “whole wheat” is actually refined white flour with larger particles mixed back in. Ellis and Velazquez both aim for that nutrient-dense, chewy, bubbly, filling quality of artisan bread—which comes with stone-milled whole wheat flour. Velazquez buys heritage whole wheat berries from Palouse Heritage Grains.

Terry Ellis, Noris Velazquez (both pictured left), and volunteers remove weeds at Rio Del Rey Farm in Valley Center, the site of an experimental wheat-growing operation. (Photo credit: Irvin Gavidor)

A 2019 review of studies on the health benefits of heritage grains concluded that in clinical trials, “all doubts disappear and diets based on ancient or heritage cultivars always showed clear advantages in terms of anti-inflammatory and antioxidant activities.”

That might be welcome news for the seemingly growing number of people suffering from gluten allergies in the U.S.

“People who have gluten allergies tell me they can eat the sourdough I make from true whole wheat,” said Velazquez.

A Local Wheat Movement Takes Shape

“The local wheat movement is a thing, but California is way behind,” said Claudia Carter, executive director of California Wheat Commission. Though California has the most commercial milling capacity of any state, it’s not equipped for small whole wheat batches. The state also lacks infrastructure to market heirloom wheat to buyers and specialty millers. That leaves it up to growers, millers, small-batch bakers, and heritage grain groups to build communities based on locally grown heritage grain.

Whole Grain Connection maintains a list of stone mills throughout the U.S. and connects collaborators to local grain economies. While there are several in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles vicinity, not one mill on the list is in San Diego. And the price of local flour is often considerably higher than conventional flour, making it a tough sell for many bakers.

“I would have thought it would develop faster in the California market, where people are willing to pay more for local foods,” Carter said.

California was the nation’s second largest supplier of wheat in the late 19th century. A staple crop at the state’s missions starting in the late 1700s, the grain proved adaptable to the Mediterranean climate. By the 1870s, farmers in San Diego County grew wheat on a large scale. “The prolific cereal grew with little effort,” said historian Walter Wormer. But intensive cultivation and lack of variety led to challenges in productivity.

By the 1880s, many San Diego farmers were opting to grow fruit trees on the county’s hilly topography. Increased access to irrigation and new transportation options to the East Coast made fruits, nuts, and vegetables more lucrative than low-priced grain. Wheat production in San Diego, and the rest of the state, declined dramatically by the early 1900s.

Wheat is still a tiny part of California’s economy: In 2021, it comprised 380,000 planted acres out of 27 million, or 1.4 percent, and it’s concentrated in the San Joaquin and Sacramento valleys and used mostly for animal forage. Desert Durum, a hybridized variety developed for pasta in the late 1970s, grows in the Imperial Valley, about 100 miles east of San Diego.

Dry-Farming in Dry California

Dryland or “dry” farming means growing crops without added irrigation, using rain and residual soil moisture in areas that receive about 10 to 20 inches of rain per year. The method incorporates planting and tilling techniques that take advantage of terraforms and topography to position plants where water will flow, collect, and percolate through the soil to keep it moist during the growing season. Before modern irrigation, “dry-farming” was just “farming.” As the climate changes, it is becoming a resilience strategy to cope with less water. California farmers also dry-farm wine grapes, tomatoes, squash, and beans.

“Dryland wheat is likely to expand in California as scarcer water resources go to profitable crops.”

Some 120 to 130 years ago—when California was the nation’s breadbasket—most of the crop relied solely on rainfall. “Ten years ago, 80 percent of California wheat was irrigated,” said Carter. “Now some small-scale farmers are trying a dryland approach.”

Wheat is less water intensive than most of California’s other crops, making it well-suited to dry farming: It can be planted in winter, during the “rainy” season, and it’s one of the few crops that “will produce economically under dryland conditions,” wrote a USDA research soil scientist in Riverside back in 1970. Now, with limits on aquifer pumping imposed on growers by the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), dry-farming wheat may be a viable alternative to letting fields go fallow due to lack of water.

University of California, Davis, has multiple studies on dry-farming or reduced irrigation, including a project to breed drought-resilient wheat. Studies show that a hybrid model—adding just 4 to 8 inches of irrigation to supplement natural rainfall—could be the sweet spot for both wheat and water conservation.

Terry Ellis works as an engineer for defense contractor Northrop-Grumman during the day and bakes at night and on weekends. (Photo credit: Leorah Gavidor)

“Dryland wheat is likely to expand in California as scarcer water resources go to profitable crops,” said U.C. Davis agricultural economics professor Daniel Sumner. “It makes sense instead of leaving unused fields unplanted. In good rain years, it can yield a harvest; in dryer years, it can be used for forage.”

That’s already happening in San Diego, with successful results. Ernie Klemm, forage manager at Konyn Dairy in San Pasqual Valley, has been dry-farming grains for 50 years—as food for cattle. Klemm oversees unirrigated fields of triticale and beardless barley, which grew to be 5.5 feet high in this exceptionally rainy year. But Klemm says he sees a decent harvest even in dry years.

Lucky for Reeske and the bakers, this was not a dry year. By March, Valley Center had received 15 to 20 inches of rainfall, about 150 to 200 percent above normal. Dry-farming wheat in San Diego seems viable in a rainy year like this one, but it’s hard to forecast how the seeds would do in a drought.

Avocados or Grains?

North American grain production is mostly concentrated in the Great Plains, where infrastructure and way of life have supported the Grain Belt economy for over 100 years. It’s hard for smaller grain producers in other areas to compete. In San Diego, the focus for farmers for the past 100 to 125 years has been citrus and avocado, which don’t grow well in many other places.

In 2020, avocados occupied 14,500 acres, the largest share of planted acreage in San Diego County, and brought in almost $153 million. Total citrus sales were $146 million. Hay and oats, the only grains on the county’s crop report, brought in just about $500,000.

Valley Center bean farmer Mike Reeske donated a half-acre to the wheat-growing experiment. (Photo credit: Leorah Gavidor)

A 2020 University of California Cooperative Extension study on double-planting avocado trees (which San Diego growers do to maximize water efficiency) estimated $10,000 net profit per acre; net returns for wheat in the Sacramento Valley, at maximum yield and highest market price, were $117 per acre in 2016, when the price per bushel was about $4. Wheat prices set records recently due to the war in Ukraine, when bushel price hit a high of $11.02 in March 2022.

Also in 2022, San Diego avocados brought in less than $100 million for the first time in more than 25 years. Productivity of trees dropped nearly 50 percent due to drought, though prices rose. Water costs and availability are major considerations. In Valley Center, an acre-foot of water for ag purposes costs $1,900, compared to about $80 in Kansas, the nation’s top wheat-producing state. An acre of avocados needs about 4 acre-feet, or about 40 to 50 inches of rain; wheat needs 12 to 15 inches.

Water is only part of the equation. “In San Diego and Los Angeles, the biggest challenge to wheat production is land cost,” said Carter at the Wheat Commission. “Land cost has pushed out lower-value crops. Farmers ask themselves, ‘Why am I selling wheat for $4 a bushel when that was the same amount my grandpa was getting for it?’”

Agricultural land values for avocados in San Diego and Riverside counties ranged from $13,300 to $35,000 per acre in 2020, while the average is $4,610 in Kansas. Cost to rent farmland in San Diego is three times the national average. That makes lower-profit wheat a pretty hard sell.

Some San Diego citrus and avocado growers are transitioning to other less thirsty crops, like wine grapes, to squeeze some profit from the land while reducing water use. Jameson Meust, who works on water efficiency with Mission Resource Conservation District, is interested in growing wheat as a cover crop in vineyards, though it hasn’t taken off in San Diego.

Reaping the Benefits—Literally

The California Wheat Commission touts the grain’s value as a rotational crop to help manage disease and improve soil conditions. Ellis the baker hopes small farms in San Diego will want to incorporate wheat into their rotations and supplement their income, while reaping the soil health benefits.

Klemm sees these benefits firsthand at Konyn Dairy. Growing grain not only feeds hungry cows, Klemm said; it also helps him retain topsoil, develop soil structure, and improve water filtration. But Klemm and the dairy are not concerned with separating the chaff and milling the wheat. They just cut it, bale it, and feed it to the cows. And they don’t worry about consistent quality, like Ellis and Velazquez would need for baking. Craig “Dr. K” Kolodge, who manages soils and compost for the dairy, said it would be tough to ensure predictable yield on rainwater alone.

Even with a steady supply, processing wheat in San Diego would be a challenge. But Lauren Silver, who mills flour fresh daily at her bakery in Pacific Beach, about 10 miles north of downtown San Diego, sees local wheat as a growing trend.

“I think more people are trying to do it; it’s coming. People get stuck on [need for] combine [harvesting], threshing, cleaning. Establishing something like that here would be a huge incentive.”

Silver is considering purchasing a larger stone mill and starting a test plot of wheat. For now, her milling is very small-scale—and the wheat is from the San Joaquin Valley. Wheat berries arrive on a 1,000-pound pallet from Jon Eck’s sweet potato farm, where he grows heirloom wheat as a cover crop. Customers definitely taste the difference, Silver said.

“Once people have tried and enjoyed it, it transforms how they see wheat and grains,” added Carter of the Wheat Commission.

‘Bring Your Own Scythe’

By mid-March on Rio Del Rey Farm, it was clear that the India-Jammu sprouts were the most vigorous; by late April, the Jammu was 3 feet tall and had outpaced the other varieties. Reeske’s hunch was correct.

Harvest day finally arrived on June 25, after two months of uncharacteristically overcast weather that delayed the drying process. Ellis rounded up volunteers and advised them to bring their own scythes. Not counting manual harvest time, Velazquez’s first haul of Jammu took about two hours of threshing and winnowing—involving a leaf mulcher and a big fan—and yielded 7 pounds of flour. He estimated the overall yield was about 60 pounds.

Terry Ellis shows off his locally grown wheat berries, which he mills into fresh flour that he’ll use in his sourdough bread. Photo credit: Irvin Gavidor)

Velazquez, Ellis, and farmer Reeske are already planning to scale up and streamline the process. Reeske is donating land for another crop, and Ellis convinced a friend to let him grow wheat on 1.5 acres in a former horse pasture. He recently bought a $750 thresher and sunk some savings into a commercial kitchen. Velazquez envisions investing some of the $4,000 grant in equipment, warehouse space, and a small crew to harvest and process the heirloom wheat he will encourage farmers to grow.

“Farmers are more than happy to receive packets of our seeds and sow them. But when it comes to weeding, harvesting, threshing, cleaning—they’re not as invested,” Velazquez said, “because they don’t have equipment and labor.” He hopes to eventually sell wheat berries to a small but growing cadre of local artisan bakers. He’s also talking with local brewers who are hoping to use San Diego-grown wheat to create the county’s first estate beer.

Ellis’s first day of trial and (mostly) error with the Jammu brought him a precious handful of wheat berries to load into his home flour mill. The result was beautiful: a hearty pink-speckled whole wheat flour, with a sweet scent and earthy taste—markedly different from refined white flour. The engineer and baker parts of Ellis’s brain worked in concert as he sifted the fresh Jammu flour through his fingers. For this first harvest, he will parse out the local flour to mix with his supply from Northern California. He might even make a Jammu sourdough starter.

“I can tell customers, ‘This bread is made with 10 percent locally grown and milled flour.’ No one else is doing that here,” said Ellis.

Meanwhile, Reeske sees heirloom wheat as an opportunity to “achieve something really unique” in San Diego County. “We could even do a local wheat beer, with local hops, too,” he said.

And if done well, those who like the idea of a local baker using local wheat may be willing to pay more for it, said Sumner, the economist. Ellis and Velazquez are counting on it.

The post Could Dry-Farming Wheat in San Diego Seed a Local Grain Economy? appeared first on Civil Eats.

Critic Soleil Ho: Are We Asking Too Much of Restaurants—or Not Enough?

Mon, 13 Nov 2023 11:01:50 +0200

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.

Soleil Ho spent four years in the role of restaurant critic for the San Francisco Chronicle before becoming a broader cultural critic for the publisher earlier this year. And while Ho, who uses they/them pronouns, did indeed visit restaurants and write about the experiences they had there, that was often where the similarity between their work and more traditional restaurant criticism ended.

Instead of stopping at the flavors, service, and ambiance, their columns often aimed to broaden readers’ awareness of everything from the intention behind the business and the way it treated workers, to the role it played in preserving or pushing cultural boundaries.

And while Ho—who founded Racist Sandwich, a podcast that delved into the politics, race, and identity within the broader scope of food and restaurants, before moving to the Chronicle—has had their gaze firmly fixed on the Bay Area the whole time, their influence has been felt beyond the region. For all these reasons, we figured they’d have some interesting things to say about the future, and the present, of the restaurant.

What made you want to work as a restaurant reviewer for the Chronicle, and what has made you want to expand that role to write other forms of cultural criticism in the last year?

I never planned on becoming a restaurant critic. It was just this thing that happened. From 2016 to 2019, I was really interested in meta-narratives about food. Having been involved in food media and in the restaurant world to a pretty big extent, I was really curious about how we talked about food and restaurants. And I certainly included restaurant criticism in that bucket.

I applied for the job at [the Chronicle] for the experience. I was surprised that they wanted to hire me, and I accepted the job because it seemed to be a really exciting opportunity to see how far I could go in setting certain guardrails for how I wanted to write about restaurants. I was asking: How do you do it in a consistently equitable way? And in a way that de-centers a lot of the a priori assumptions about who goes to restaurants and who’s interested in food media.

It was based on this idea that restaurants and food could serve as cultural texts worth decoding. A wide range of choices being made at all kinds of levels—from governmental to individual—manifest in food culture, and it says a lot about what we want as people, but also what we are told are the limits of aspiration.

So, all of that was included in my vision for the role. And I think it naturally expands to other things, because from the beginning, I was appropriating an analytical lens that has been more readily applied to other types of media and other kinds of material culture. I was zooming into foods, and applying other sorts of principles of analysis to something that had hitherto been maybe underexamined, in my view.

Now you are back to using that wider critical lens. How will your work continue to intersect with restaurants?

It will still intersect with restaurants on occasion. I recently wrote a piece about the first lab-grown meat being served at a restaurant in the United States, which happened to be at a spot in San Francisco, so I went and tried it. And I spent a lot less time writing about the service and the flavors and more time on the big questions about lab-grown meat, like why its funders aspire to recreate animal flesh.

I am still curious about the idea that a restaurant, or really any small or medium-sized enterprise, can be a vehicle for cultural change. Because I think that’s something that many people in food media have to take as an assumption. There’s so much coverage that centers around the restaurant as a locus for change, or as the canary in a coal mine.

We saw that a lot with COVID and how we talked, and continue to talk, about the way people adapt. I’m interested in playing with that idea and problematizing it and finding new ways to talk about alternative modes of empowerment and sovereignty when it comes to food and economic and financial stability for people who generally are the most vulnerable in our economic system. I danced around it a lot when I was a restaurant critic, and I’m hoping to be more explicit in really thinking about the restaurant as a concept—not just restaurant concepts.

I often have thought of the food system—and restaurants as the most visible aspect of the system—in the same way that I’ve thought about real estate bubbles or tech bubbles. So much of the true costs are externalized—from the workers often needing to rely on SNAP to the costs of environmental destruction caused by conventional ag falling on the taxpayers. COVID was kind of like a bursting of the bubble in some ways. But I wonder if that bubble was going to burst anyway. Do you have thoughts about that?

This newfound or reinvigorated labor movement in the U.S. was so informed by COVID. I don’t think we would have had a hot union summer without COVID. Broadly, and then also in the food industry, I think people were fed up with being put at risk for, essentially, burgers and fries. I feel like the pandemic is so inextricable from how we understand labor and food now.

People have written to me, saying that if they had a choice, they wouldn’t think about labor. So, it’s through the efforts of people who are advocating for food workers, and writing about food labor, in spaces like within food media, and that repetition has been really helpful. Readers have been reminded about the people behind the plate.

Given the rise in the number of fast-casual restaurants, and the shortage of people interested in working in restaurants after the pandemic, I’ve wondered: Is the idea of being served as it once existed an outdated concept? Or will it always be a product of the (growing) class divide?

I think it is very much a product of class. And, at least if TikTok and Yelp are any indication, we still have a lot of vocal people who care about service. But I wonder if the backlash to tipping, for instance, and automation are going to add to this sort of deterioration of old service models that require a human who wants to be tipped?

Eating in restaurants has gotten much more expensive than it was before the pandemic. Are you seeing more people get priced out?

In the Bay Area, we saw a lot of restaurants close early in the pandemic. Some were older restaurants that were near the end of their long-term leases and I think they were kind of lucky for getting out when they did, because things are so hard now. I’ve heard from so many restaurateurs and cooks that raw ingredients are now so expensive. And there are so many ways in which that trickles down. Prices are crazy, and I eat out maybe once a week these days. For a lot of people though, the more relevant thing is grocery stores. Restaurants are a budget item that’s optional, but buying food for your home is not. And that’s the tough thing. There was such an apex of restaurant culture in the past 10 years, and I think that’s over. I think we’re going to see a major compaction in the industry that is only going to continue.

What do you see as the best-case scenario for restaurants in the next decade?

Part of what will enable restaurants to thrive is a reduction in the overall number of them. There are just too many. And too many that were opened by people who just thought they were making easy money. It does feel like we’re headed towards more austerity, and maybe the positive thing is that more restaurants are going to have to have a clearer vision of what they’re supposed to be. I think that’s good for restaurants, because any sort of project that is done half-heartedly is pretty disappointing to experience.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The post Critic Soleil Ho: Are We Asking Too Much of Restaurants—or Not Enough? appeared first on Civil Eats.

Food Insecure Veterans Are Less Likely to Seek Help

Thu, 09 Nov 2023 11:00:33 +0200

This article originally appeared in The War Horse and is reprinted with permission.

About eight years ago, Carl Davis stared at his bills and decided which ones not to pay. Without the financial jigsaw, he couldn’t afford food for his family. Davis, who has a 100 percent disability rating from Veterans Affairs (VA) for service-related injuries to his wrist and lower back, relies on his VA compensation for income.

As he struggled, his longtime partner was also out of work after she hurt herself on the job at a college dining facility. With three kids under one roof, they were stretched beyond their means.

Davis’ sister told him about the Feed Our Vets food pantry near his upstate New York home. Initially, the Army vet was reluctant to seek help, but when he learned a veteran founded the food pantry for veterans, it put him at ease. He’s been going ever since.

“It’s not just a food bank,” he says. “We all talk the same language. I like to say we’re all brothers from another mother, at this point.”

“Some are too prideful and some don’t want to go that route.” Others may not qualify.

During Davis’ visits to the food pantry, he’s met veterans who fought in Vietnam, Korea, Desert Storm, and the post-9/11 wars, some of whom struggle far more than his own family does to afford meals. While this group of vets is comfortable stocking up on food at the Feed Our Vets pantry, many of them, Davis says, avoid signing up for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program—the federal nutrition program formerly known as food stamps.

“Some are too prideful and some don’t want to go that route,” Davis says. Others may not qualify. The VA benefits Davis receives, for instance, count as income and make him ineligible.

Davis’ observations bear out in a recent RAND report that found veterans who are eligible for SNAP are less likely to participate in the program than their nonveteran counterparts.

Food insecurity—the inability to secure enough food to maintain health—can involve relying on cheap, unhealthy food. Adjusting for a range of characteristics, including age, the RAND report states that veteran status was associated with a 7.4 percent increased likelihood of living in a household with food insecurity, and a 9.2 percent increased likelihood of being very food insecure, which means regularly skipping meals.

Among food-insecure veterans aged 70 and older, only 29 percent were likely enrolled in SNAP, compared with 39 percent of their nonveteran counterparts. Among food insecure veterans who are not working because of a disability, about 45 percent are likely enrolled in SNAP, compared with 54 percent of similarly disabled food-insecure nonveterans.

In a 2020 congressional hearing, Dr. Thomas O’Toole, who was then the Veterans Health Administration senior medical adviser but is now the Deputy Undersecretary of Health, explained the significant consequences of food insecurity: “Research has consistently shown the link between lacking regular access to food and poorly controlled hypertension, diabetes, HIV disease, asthma, depression, anxiety,” he said. “Among older adults, it is associated with reduced activities of daily living and being over two times more likely to report poor health.”

Even more concerning, particularly for VA, which has made preventing veteran suicide its top clinical priority, is the link between food insecurity and suicidal ideation. In a survey of more than 1,000 randomly chosen post-9/11 veterans across all branches, those who reported food insecurity had nearly four times higher levels of suicidal ideation when surveyed one year later than veterans who did not struggle with accessing food, a report released earlier this year showed.

In 2020, 6,146 veterans died by suicide, according to the most recent National Veteran Suicide Report. On average, that’s nearly 17 deaths per day. And while rates have improved since 2018, they’re still 57 percent higher than the nonveteran population.

Overall, the rate of food insecurity among veterans is lower than nonveterans, Rand found. But the group estimates that 1.4 million veterans are food insecure. Younger veterans with families, women, low-income veterans, and those with underlying depression or psychiatric illness are all at more risk to experience it.

“In one study, 27 percent of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans reported food insecurity,” O’Toole said during the 2020 congressional hearing. “In another, 48.5 percent of homeless and formerly homeless veterans lacked regular access to food.”

States administer SNAP—though it’s a federal nutrition assistance program—and those states can make eligibility and enrollment either easy or cumbersome.

Tamara Dubowitz, senior policy researcher at RAND and one of the authors of the report, says when they analyzed state policies, they found a few were associated with higher SNAP enrollment for both veterans and nonveterans. One includes a “combined application program,” she says. Essentially, if someone applies for a federal benefit like Social Security, that individual automatically applies for SNAP.

And more veterans enroll when they can file paperwork by phone or online, rather than in person.

“Basically, if you live in a state where you have a lot of policies that make it easier, then that helps,” she says. “If you remain in a state that has very few policies, then you’re enrolling at a much lower rate.”

A 2021 RAND report found that Florida and Texas have the highest number of veterans enrolled in SNAP at 116,000 and 97,000, respectively. But that’s because those states have large numbers of veterans, rather than because they have policies that make it easier to enroll, Dubowitz says.

New York and California have tried to simplify SNAP enrollment. A few years ago, when money was tight, Davis looked into enrolling in SNAP. But the pension and disability benefits he receives from VA made him ineligible.

“It all goes by your income, unfortunately,” he says.

States that include VA benefits in income calculations may push veterans who could use the extra help out of the eligibility threshold, Rand found.

“So the food-insecure veterans who are enrolled in SNAP are our most desperate,” Dubowitz says. “They are the food-insecure veterans who are sort of absolutely most in need, but there’s this whole huge group that seem to be getting VA benefits and other benefits that are making them ineligible to enroll in SNAP.”

Income guidelines for determining food assistance eligibility also hit the active-duty military population. Service members receive a basic allowance for housing—a nontaxable entitlement to offset housing costs. Though many federal programs don’t consider this income, SNAP does. Josh Protas, vice president of public policy at MAZON: A Jewish Response to Hunger, a nonprofit working to end food insecurity, says that pushes many low-income, junior enlisted service members with kids out of eligibility.

And he worries that those struggling service members will carry their food insecurity with them after they leave the service.

“If you were a military family that maybe applied for SNAP when you’re in the service, and you were denied, you might feel more reluctant to seek help,” Protas says, “because you’ve had that negative experience.”

‘We Think There’s Real Opportunity’

In 2016, VA established the Ensuring Veteran Food Security Workgroup, which is led by the Veterans Health Administration. Out of this workgroup, VA medical center staff now use a two-question screening tool that aims to capture food-insecure veterans. Staff refer those who screen positive to a dietician and social worker who can help the veteran sign up for SNAP.

VA doesn’t collect data on how many veterans screened positive for food insecurity sign up for SNAP, which hunger advocates would like to see tracked. And VA needs to better evaluate and monitor its efforts to address food insecurity, according to a 2022 Government Accountability Office report. Earlier this year, VA established a Food Security Office that will assist the workgroup with oversight of its activities.

“Our mission is to ensure that all veterans have equitable access to nutritious, affordable, and culturally appropriate food to support veteran whole health,” says a VA spokesperson.

Protas says a better understanding of exactly how VA assists veterans is critical, though, because if they simply hand veterans a SNAP application, the “likelihood that the veteran follows through is pretty small,” he says. The application process should begin instantly, he says: “So eligibility screening, [then] application assistance on site right away—and it’s not clear to what extent that level of intervention happens throughout the system.”

And there are many veterans who are not VA-connected, Dubowitz says. About half of American veterans get care through VA, and the other half of veterans, who either avoid VA or are not eligible for benefits, will never encounter the food insecurity assessment.

Earlier this year, Congresswoman Jahana Hayes, a Democrat from Connecticut, reintroduced the Feed Hungry Veterans Act. It aims to expand which veterans can be exempted from the work requirements necessary to participate in SNAP. Only veterans with a 100 percent disability rating qualify for exemption, and the law would lower that threshold to a service-connected disability rating of 60 percent. The legislation may wind up in this year’s Farm Bill, which is overdue.

In the meantime, Protas says he’d like to see more state SNAP offices partner with veterans service organizations to get out the word.

“There’s been lots of evidence about the power of veteran-to-veteran outreach on a variety of different things, whether it’s suicide prevention or connected to VA benefits,” he says. “We think that there’s a real opportunity to do that.”

Rich Synek, a Navy veteran, founded Feed Our Vets in 2009. The nonprofit has food pantries in New York and Ohio—as well as a grocery gift card program for low-income veterans and their families across the country—and it has distributed more than 3.2 million pounds of food and served thousands of veterans.

After nearly 15 years of interacting with veterans who struggle to afford food, Synek says pride keeps many from enrolling in SNAP, as well as the mentality ingrained in the military that they can survive anything, and that others need the help more than they do.

“We find that at the pantry—that ‘I won’t take as much because somebody else is worse off than me,’” he says. “We have people from SNAP who come down and try to register at events. You do hear a lot of them say, ‘No. I don’t need it.’”

Researchers weren’t able to definitively conclude why veterans, particularly older veterans, may be especially resistant to SNAP, but it’s likely tied to generational differences, Dubowitz says.

“There might be a stigma attached to not only the use of SNAP, formerly known as food stamps, but any other safety net programs,” she says. The abundant paperwork around applying to SNAP can also become a hurdle. “Enrolling and navigating the system around these programs is not easy, especially if you’re older and not necessarily computer literate.”

The first veteran Synek ever assisted was a World War II vet he met while working as a postmaster at a small post office. Occasionally, the small-framed man would shuffle in to buy one stamp, saying that’s all he could afford.

The two would talk about their years in the service, and over time, Syneck learned the man had dropped out of school after eighth grade, got drafted into the war, and worked as a farmhand much of his adult civilian life. He and his wife lived in a trailer. At one point, Synek said something like: “At least you got food in the house.”

The man stayed quiet.

This War Horse feature was reported by Anne Marshall-Chalmers, edited by Kelly Kennedy, fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar. Abbie Bennett wrote the headlines.

The post Food Insecure Veterans Are Less Likely to Seek Help appeared first on Civil Eats.

The FDA Is Still Not Tracking How Farms Use Antibiotics

Wed, 08 Nov 2023 11:00:53 +0200

When bacteria develop resistance to front-line antibiotics, health care professionals lose their ability to treat deadly infections, leading to more than 35,000 deaths annually in the U.S. and more than 1.2 million worldwide. For that reason, antibiotic resistance has been held up by the World Health Organization as one of the most pressing threats to global health.

Researchers see the potential overuse of those antibiotics in agriculture as a key driver of antibiotic resistance—but they’ve often struggled to access basic information about how many animals are receiving the drugs, for what purpose, and for how long.

Collecting that farm-level data is a critical missing piece in the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) five-year plan, launched in 2019, to improve “antimicrobial stewardship” in animal agriculture, advocates say. Now, the deadline is approaching. And while the agency has made other significant regulatory changes in the years before and since, the FDA is not regularly tracking or reporting how antibiotics are used on farms, nor does it have a plan in place to do so in the short term.

“The data is at the feed mills. If the agency really wanted this information, they could figure out how to get it.”

Instead, the agency funded a few small pilot projects that collected data in 2016 and 2017 and published one-time results in 2020. Then, in 2021, FDA commissioned an 18-month “stakeholder engagement” project run by a partner foundation to explore setting up a voluntary antibiotic use reporting system in collaboration with the animal agriculture industry.

Neither effort has proven very effective. According to multiple experts, however, FDA does have access to some important data that could be a game-changer if the agency chose to use it.

That’s because most antibiotics given to farm animals are mixed into their feed at feed mills, FDA-regulated facilities that are required to keep records on prescriptions and distribution. And although those records could begin to paint a picture of what antibiotic use on American farms looks like and help uncover ways to prevent overuse, FDA is simply not collecting them.

“The data is at the feed mills,” said Laura Rogers, deputy director of the Antibiotic Resistance Action Center at George Washington University. “If the agency really wanted this information, they could figure out how to get it.”

Data Sources

In an email, FDA spokesperson Veronika Pfaeffle emphasized that the agency “is committed to antimicrobial stewardship in veterinary settings,” and pointed to other steps it has taken on the issue.

For instance, since 2017, the agency has made at least three changes experts consider consequential: It outlawed the use of antibiotics solely to promote faster animal growth (although many of the same drugs now used for disease prevention also boost growth), gradually made veterinary prescriptions a requirement for all antibiotics also used in human medicine, and set new limits on how long drugs should be administered.

But efforts to gather basic data on how farms use antibiotics day to day—which Pfaeffle agreed “is important to help us understand what drives antimicrobial resistance in animal agriculture”—has lagged.

Every year, animal drug manufacturers are required to report sales data to the FDA, and the agency releases those numbers broken down by which animal species the drugs were sold for. After a large dip in 2016, when the FDA banned antibiotics used solely for growth promotion, sales in the pork and beef industries have gradually ticked back up. Chicken is the exception, as large swaths of the industry have eliminated medically important antibiotics entirely from their production based on consumer demand.

“Overall, the lack of creativity at FDA on this issue is so disappointing.”

When it reports on the overall quantity of antibiotics sold each year, the agency emphasizes that the sales numbers “are not indicative of how these antimicrobial drugs were actually used in animals.” In other words, the FDA tells the public that just because the drugs were sold, it can’t be assumed that they were administered to animals, because farmers could buy more than they end up needing and store or toss the rest.

That’s in contrast to how the data is reported in Europe, said David Wallinga, a physician who has been doing research and advocacy work on antibiotic resistance at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) for years. In Europe, it’s standard practice to use overall sales numbers and animal production numbers in calculations to estimate the volume of antibiotic use per animal.

Still, even if the FDA did start making those calculations, those numbers would only reveal the amount of antibiotics used per animal. Data that has more details on what the drugs are used for and for how long is universally understood to be of much higher value in preventing overuse. That’s what the feed mills have.

“The CDC [the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] has really been pushing on this point for the last several years and they’ve beefed up their efforts to track antibiotic use in hospitals and in clinics, figure out how much overuse is happening, and then take steps to address it,” Wallinga said. But CDC only has authority over human medicine, while FDA handles drugs given to animals. “That’s what’s missing on the animal side.”

At feed mills, when employees mix antibiotics into feed, they are required to hold onto the prescriptions for two years. Wallinga and others have long been lobbying the FDA to collect and share that data.

In her response to detailed questions from Civil Eats, the FDA’s Pfaeffle said that the agency does review some of those records during on-site inspections, but that it doesn’t collect them. She emphasized that the agency doesn’t believe collecting the feed directives would provide a clear or complete enough picture of antibiotic use, since distribution is also not the same as “use,” and that the agency would still need “to gather information on other dosage forms of antimicrobial drugs being used in food-producing animals (e.g., medicated drinking water, injectable, intramammary, other oral dosage forms).”

However, Laura Rogers at ARAC said that even if collecting the data would result in an incomplete picture, it would be a huge step forward. “Overall, the lack of creativity at FDA on this issue is so disappointing. If collecting the data from all the feed mills is too taxing, they could focus on three states: California for beef, Arkansas for chickens, and Iowa for swine . . . and analyze use,” she suggested. “It would not be the full picture, but it would be pretty good indicators of how and why the drugs are being used.”

Plus, the FDA’s own pilot studies on antibiotic use show that feed accounts for the majority of antibiotic use in the most important sectors. Based on 2016 and 2017 data from 22 cattle feedlots, nearly 80 percent of antibiotics were administered in feed. At the large hog facilities studied, that number was about 70 percent.

Steve Roach of the Food Animal Concerns Trust (FACT) and the public health-focused Keep Antibiotics Working coalition (KAW) has been working on the issue for 20 years and collaborated with Wallinga to push the FDA to collect feed mill records. Roach believes the agency is downplaying the value of the records and their potential to provide reliable estimates of how farmers are using antibiotics.

“I don’t believe that people are actually purchasing large amounts of feed and then just dumping it on the ground,” he said. “It’s really good data.”

Problems With a Voluntary Collection System

But the FDA believes it has a better plan: Partner with animal agriculture companies to get farmers to voluntarily provide data on how they’re using antibiotics. To that end, the agency commissioned the Reagan-Udall Foundation for the FDA, an independent nonprofit created by Congress to advise the agency and gather feedback from the many individuals and groups engaged in the issue to explore how that could happen.

Starting in January 2022, Reagan-Udall began the first fact-finding phase of the project. Public health representatives, including Wallinga at NRDC and Roach at FACT, were among the 30 stakeholder groups included in that process. But when the foundation released a report summing up the first phase, the advocates said they did not see any of the significant concerns they voiced reflected in the text.

Producers using antibiotics responsibly might be more likely to submit voluntary data, while those overusing might be motivated to opt out.

The project’s second phase is focused on designing the antibiotic use tracking system, and the Reagan-Udall team has shifted to meeting with industry groups, including the North American Meat Institute, the National Pork Producers Council, and the U.S. Poultry & Egg Association.

That shift was necessary, said Amar Bhat, the chief operating officer at Reagan-Udall, because his focus was on figuring out how to make the “public-private partnership” work. “For that, I needed to talk to those who would be contributing data,” he said. “It was about the mechanics.” In terms of whether the public health groups’ earlier concerns were considered, Bhat said, “I think we gave ample opportunity to them to share their views.”

One of the group’s biggest concerns, communicated in public comments submitted by KAW, was that it’s unlikely that enough producers would contribute data to a system that is entirely voluntary. And, they noted, the voluntary nature could hide overuse patterns rather than reveal them: Producers using antibiotics responsibly might be more likely to submit voluntary data, while those overusing might be motivated to opt out. “It will end up giving you a very distorted picture of how antibiotics are used on farms,” Roach said.

Bhat said Reagan-Udall didn’t consider other approaches to tracking antibiotic use data because the entire directive from the FDA was to evaluate how to create a voluntary system based on a public-private partnership. His team did look at the systems that agencies in California and Maryland—where state laws in recent years have mandated antibiotic use reporting—have set up as a point of comparison. “It was useful to know what they’re doing—what they’re succeeding at doing and what the gaps are,” he said.

For example, in 2022, the Maryland Department of Agriculture (MDA) sent notices to over 1,000 veterinarians asking them to submit information on antibiotics they prescribed that year. A total of seven submitted data.

That number may not be as minuscule as it seems, though, said Nancy Jo Chapman, who was assistant state veterinarian at the MDA when the antibiotic use law passed and helped implement the law’s provisions. For one, veterinarians are only asked to report if they prescribe antibiotics for the largest farms. In Maryland, there are very few cattle or pig operations that meet those size requirements.

And yet, even with only seven veterinarians responding, the report provides useful annual info that the federal government doesn’t currently collect. For example, veterinarians prescribed more chlortetracycline than any other medically important antibiotic in 2022. They wrote scripts for about 6,000 pounds, for intestinal infections in 1,000 cattle.

Still, in an email, MDA director of communications Jessica Hackett said that the low response rate was also “because the submission of the information from veterinarians is voluntary.”

Chapman agreed it had to be a factor. “I love my veterinarians, but I can’t say they’re all reporting, and there’s no enforcement,” she said, which she considers a good thing because she didn’t like the idea of policing veterinarians. In the end, she said, “it’s just not reliable data,” but added, “it would be better to get it from the feed mill. That’s the real number.”

The post The FDA Is Still Not Tracking How Farms Use Antibiotics appeared first on Civil Eats.

Congress Could Roll Back Pesticide Protections in the Farm Bill

Tue, 07 Nov 2023 11:00:16 +0200

More than 4,000 elementary schools are located within 200 feet of farm fields. And while many states have acted to restrict farms’ ability to spray pesticides near those schools, Congressional lawmakers are considering multiple proposals that could block them from doing so in the future.

Because children’s nervous, immune, and other bodily systems are still developing, acute and long-term pesticide exposures are more dangerous than they are in adults and can lead to learning disabilities, organ damage, and some cancers. One long-term study in California has found that children regularly exposed to agricultural chemicals had higher rates of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms and more difficulty learning.

In Hawaii, when pesticide drift incidents sent middle school students to the hospital, schools and parents responded, galvanizing a growing movement. In 2018, the state became the first to ban chlorpyrifos. In 2021, the EPA banned chlorpyrifos nationwide, but a federal appeals court last week overturned that ban, sending it back to the agency for further consideration.

“States know that pesticide spraying is a risk to students,” said Senator Cory Booker (D-New Jersey), at a press conference announcing the results of new analysis on the topic from researchers at the Environmental Working Group (EWG). “Despite all of that . . . some members of Congress are proposing to preempt all of these laws, stripping states and localities from being able to do what’s necessary to protect their children.”

The proposal that would almost certainly curtail states’ ability to impose buffer zones and other restrictions around schools was first introduced in 2022 by former House Republican Randy Davis, who at the time said he was concerned that local communities were trying “to usurp some of the federal rules and regulations that we fought so hard to put in place.” The bill had strong support among groups that represent the agriculture, landscaping, and pesticide industries.

Now, according to Booker and policy staffers at EWG, lawmakers are planning to reintroduce the bill as part of the upcoming farm bill (or as part of a separate spending package). And it’s just one of three proposed bills that EWG and its allies are concerned would constrain state and local efforts to regulate pesticide use.

In June, in anticipation of farm bill negotiations, Representatives Dusty Johnson (R-South Dakota) and Jim Costa (D-California) introduced the Agricultural Labeling Uniformity Act, which would prevent states from putting their own warning labels on pesticides that differ from the ones the EPA has already approved.

For example, in California, Proposition 65 requires companies to provide warnings on products that are “known to cause cancer, birth defects or other reproductive harm,” which is beyond what the EPA requires. “State labels . . . threaten public confidence in the agency’s authority and science-based regulation and undermine the critical role pesticides play in sustainably feeding a growing world,” Tom Haag, president of the National Corn Growers Association (NCGA), said in a press release. NCGA is one of 360 agriculture and pesticide trade and advocacy organizations that are backing the legislation.

Finally, while ranchers and meat industry groups have been battling over the Ending Agricultural Trade Suppression (EATS) Act, it could also impact state pesticide laws. The EATS Act was introduced as the next chapter in the long saga over California’s Proposition 12 animal welfare law.

When the Supreme Court declined to overturn Prop. 12, lawmakers created the EATS Act to prevent other states from regulating how animals are raised on farms. Now, they’re working to get it included in the farm bill. However, the bill could have much more far-reaching implications. An analysis out of Harvard Law School identified more than 1,000 state laws that could be overturned as a result of the broad language in the EATS Act and found that it “also could affect certain state and local regulations on pesticides and fertilizers.”

In September, a coalition of more than 180 public health, agriculture, and environmental organizations sent a letter to federal lawmakers urging them to oppose all three bills. “These efforts serve only to limit the ability of the EPA, states, and localities to protect their people and environment from the harms of pesticide use, while shielding companies from liability for their products’ harms,” they wrote.

EWG’s new analysis is in support of that larger push, and it included two maps—one of schools across the country that are situated near crop fields and another that shows the state and local pesticide laws that it sees as threatened.

“I will be one of these people taking every measure possible not to let this . . . happen,” Booker said, emphasizing that because federal rulemaking moves so slowly, other entities that can move faster should be able to step in on behalf of public health. “States and local communities being able to act is a vital tool in the toolbox in protecting Americans,” he said.

A Flurry of Food-and-Climate Reports. As the chance to spotlight food and agriculture at the upcoming global COP28 climate conference approaches, organizations are rushing to release reports to inform the conversation.

The Global Alliance for the Future of Food took a look at fossil fuel use and estimated that the food system accounts for about 15 percent of use around the world, with the most use occurring during processing and packaging and retail consumption and waste.

Meanwhile, the German Research Institute of Organic Agriculture, (Forschungsinstitut für biologischen Landbau, or FiBL), evaluated nitrogen use in agriculture and found that 85 to 95 percent of the nitrogen fertilizer used is wasted—at which point it enters the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas or pollutes nearby waterways. FiBL concluded that there is plenty of room to reduce the overuse of nitrogen while maintaining food security.

Ceres, a group that targets investors to move the needle on climate and other issues, also published a report that outlines how food companies can drive agricultural innovation. And As You Sow, a shareholder advocacy group, released a scorecard grading how much progress the 100 largest U.S. companies have made on climate goals. According to the scorecard, while the majority of companies are now disclosing greenhouse gas emissions and many are setting clear targets to reduce them, very few have demonstrated real progress on reductions. In the food and agriculture sector, As You Sow gave Bs to grain giant Bunge and PepsiCo; Walmart, Coca-Cola, and McDonald’s received Ds; and Costco got an F.

Roundup on Trial. Courts ruled against pharmaceutical and agrochemical giant Bayer in two separate cases last week that involved men who claimed Roundup use caused their non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Juries awarded $332 million in damages in California and $175 million in Pennsylvania. Bayer acquired Monsanto, the maker of the country’s most widely used weedkiller in 2018, at a time when thousands of lawsuits were being filed based on the company’s failure to warn of the cancer risk associated with glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup.

On a related note, a documentary following the story of the first successful case against Monsanto will be released on streaming services on December 8.

Biden Courts Farmers. President Biden traveled to a corn and hog farm in Minnesota on Halloween to announce more than $5 billion in new investments in agriculture and rural development. The money includes extra funding for oversubscribed conservation programs intended to help farmers implement environmentally-friendly practices. The administration injected extra funds earmarked for climate-friendly practices into those programs last year, but some lawmakers are attempting to use the farm bill to reallocate it to other farm programs that don’t focus on climate outcomes.

Goodbye to BVO. Less than a month after California banned five food additives from its food supply, the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) proposed banning one of those—brominated vegetable oil, or BVO, often found in sports drinks and sodas—nationwide. FDA’s proposal is based on animal studies that show thyroid toxicity and other potential health risks, and it’s open for public comment through January 17, 2024.

Rural Energy Boost. Climate Breakthrough awarded Jane Kleeb, founder of Bold Alliance, $3 million to fund her efforts to increase clean energy development in rural America. Kleeb is known for her successful efforts to fight the Keystone XL pipeline by building alliances of farmers and ranchers, indigenous leaders, and climate activists.

The post Congress Could Roll Back Pesticide Protections in the Farm Bill appeared first on Civil Eats.

Animal Welfare Advocates Want a Say in the Next Farm Bill

Mon, 06 Nov 2023 11:00:30 +0200

This is the latest installment of our series Faces of the Farm Bill, wherein we set out to humanize the real-world impacts of ag policy.

The 2018 Farm Bill expired on September 30th, and it doesn’t seem likely that the House and Senate will have drafts of the new bill before the end of the year. But that doesn’t make the once-every-five-year piece of legislation any less important.

This time around, animal welfare groups have even stepped up their efforts to shape the bill. The nonprofit Farm Sanctuary, the first shelter for farm animals, is among the groups that has spent the past couple years calling for substantial reforms to the farm bill as part of a growing recognition that animal and human rights are connected.

“Animal-centered organizations have both an ethical responsibility to include and elevate impacts for people and the planet. And we have a tactical responsibility too,” said Aaron Rimmler-Cohen, Farm Sanctuary’s advocacy director.

Aaron Rimmler-Cohen, Farm Sanctuary

Civil Eats spoke with Rimmler-Cohen about the divisions in Congress that threaten this legislation and the changes that he hopes to make it into the upcoming bill.

Farm Sanctuary has recently expanded to advocate for broader changes across the food system, beyond ending animal agriculture. Could you describe how this shift came about?

There has always been a recognition that while the beings that we center are farm animals, the interrelated issues caused by factory farming hurt all of us—animals, people, and the planet. And what we’ve tried to do over the past two and a half years is reach out to 2,500 national and local organizations working in various aspects of food, all across the supply chain: farmers, workers, environmental justice advocates, health advocates, doctors, and other animal-centered organizations. We’ve tried to understand where we have common ground. We believe it’s the next step in what the vegan and animal-centered movement has to do.

“We need a robust and vigorous debate over what a farm bill should do and how it can best support families, farmers, communities, animals, people, and the planet. And we’re not getting that.”

In the 1980s, when [founder] Gene [Baur] first got going with Farm Sanctuary, a lot of what he was doing was mainstreaming critiques of factory farming that had already existed within the environmental justice and social justice communities for decades. And he was mainstreaming those concerns and critiques around factory farming through compassion and empathy for animal beings. We can do the same thing in the 21st century, except instead of mainstreaming some of these critiques, we can also mainstream some of the solutions and actions being taken by environmental justice and social justice organizations.

While the central impact that concerns us as a movement is animals, we recognize that the way in which we collectively affect change is through food. And so we have to do a better job as an animal-centered movement of prioritizing food, elevating food, and integrating [those conversations] with a concern for animals and factory farming.

How does the current gridlock in Congress impact the farm bill?

We need a robust and vigorous debate over what a farm bill should do and how it can best support families, farmers, communities, animals, people, and the planet. And we’re not getting that. We’re getting the can kicked down the road.

This is very reminiscent of the Merrick Garland 2016 Supreme Court nomination—when the Republicans kicked the can down the road and eventually waited until the next presidential election to pick a Supreme Court nominee. If we have the same thing happen with the farm bill, then Donald Trump [if re-elected] could sign two consecutive farm bills [in 2018 and 2025]. We need a robust public debate, but we also need to make sure we get a farm bill across the finish line.

How do you see the farm bill shaping the U.S. food system? Why is this bill so important?

On the one hand, you have critical nutrition support for over 40 million American families and American consumers. The proposed Gus Schumacher Nutrition Incentive Program (GusNIP) Expansion Act, which would build on the programming that we have to grow [the purchasing power for] fruits and vegetables under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is amazing. But we have to better use those programs to nourish more people to advance health equity, and to support farmers who are growing crops that nourish our communities in the process. So, that’s 75 percent of the farm bill right there—that nutrition spending.

Then you have the other 25 percent, which is predominantly commodities, crop insurance, and farm conservation programs, and what that funding does is it skews the entire food system, through cheap, publicly subsidized credit, to grow predominantly feed crops for animals or ethanol fuel. Then you’ve got 70 percent of the crop insurance subsidies going to the largest farms in the top 7 percent, and most of them are growing corn and soy.

Has the farm bill always supported what you see as a “skewed” food system? How did it get to this point?

Many of us think about factory farming or industrial agriculture as something that has been around forever, or at least for a really long time. But when you go to Iowa or North Carolina, the food and farm systems that folks are living with now are very different from what’s in their living memory or certainly their grandparents’ living memory.

“Over the last 50 years, what we’ve seen is more and more lobbyists and special interests have taken a hold of the food and farm process.”

The original intent of the farm bill was to support farmers during [the Great Depression], one of the worst economic crises the world has ever seen. Then, under the Nixon administration, in the first White House Conference on Food, the U.S. had this amazing vision for food and farm systems that said, “Everybody should be nourished and we should support every farmer who’s contributing to the system and every worker who is contributing to the system.” You had this fairly broad, holistic vision.

But over the last 50 years, what we’ve seen is more and more lobbyists and special interests have taken a hold of the food and farm process. It’s easy to do with the farm bill because it only gets passed twice per decade. So, if you’re Tyson, Cargill, or one of the other big corporate conglomerates, you can spend money influencing the farm bill and then reap those returns for the next five years. That’s slowly what they’ve been doing—chipping away at a vision of the farm bill that says universal nutritional security and sustainable farm[ing] opportunities should be the goal of the legislation.

We have to pass SNAP and WIC, the nutritional support that’s critical for millions of American families. Big Ag interests use that as a lever to say, “We’re not going to cut SNAP too much, just as long as you let these big millionaire landowners and billionaire consolidators get what they want.” As part of the negotiations process—in order to protect U.S. families’ nutritional security—we end up giving things up on the food supply end. That political bargain used to be referred to as a union between farmers and families, but because of the insidious nature of corporate interests in this country, the Big Ag interests succeed and they use families as a cudgel to get what they need.

Can you describe how the EATS Act became a potential part of this farm bill?

California passed by voter referendum a bill, Proposition 12, that would ban [in-state sale of meat and poultry resulting from] gestation crates. Then the National Pork Producers Council [and American Farm Bureau Federation] sued the state of California over Prop 12, and the Supreme Court decision came down earlier this year.

In a surprising and inspiring turn of events, the Supreme Court sided with the animal-centered organizations led by the Humane Society of the United States, including Farm Sanctuary, as interveners in the case. And as a result of that victory in the Supreme Court, the Republicans brought back this amendment called the “King amendment” [and called it the “Ending Agricultural Trade Suppression Act” or the EATS Act]. It would both overturn the progress on Prop 12, preventing future states from being able to regulate factory farms in that way, as well as [potentially] overturn pesticide protection laws that are on the books.

You don’t have to care about animals to fight back against factory farming and to say, “I don’t want cancer-causing chemicals in my food.” And that’s the level of regulatory reform we’re talking about with the EATS Act. It’s something that small farmers across the country are rallying to oppose. We recognize that their standing up against the EATS Act in Washington, D.C., is a far more powerful perspective than our own—it means a lot to hear directly from the small producers in the local communities that have been impacted by factory farming and agricultural consolidation.

If the U.S. were to continue down the current trajectory and pass farm bills like those of the recent past, what will that food system of the future look like?

If we continue down the current path, there will be fewer farmers, greater consolidation, an accelerating climate crisis, and a worsening public health crisis—not to mention more animals living in even more consolidated, industrialized conditions. Globally, food systems make up one-third of greenhouse gas emissions, but get 3 percent of public climate funding within the United States. According to the USDA, 85 percent of U.S. healthcare spending, which is about one-sixth of the U.S. economy, is related to diet-related diseases. So, food matters.

Do you have anything else to add?

I think animal-centered organizations have both an ethical responsibility to include and elevate impacts for people and the planet. And we have a tactical responsibility, too. You referenced our shift from “ending animal agriculture” to working for food systems that work for all of us, but in some ways it’s a theory of change. Ultimately, over the long term, we’re going to end animal agriculture by building food systems that work for everybody—animals, people, and the planet. I really think that kind of inclusive, unifying message is one that the animal-centered movement could better use to build bridges to meet folks where they are and to ultimately advance the progress that we care about for animals and the rest of us.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The post Animal Welfare Advocates Want a Say in the Next Farm Bill appeared first on Civil Eats.

Walmart’s ‘Regenerative Foodscape’

Wed, 01 Nov 2023 10:01:32 +0200

Flat, sprawling farm fields fill the screen. A fisherman tosses a net into pristine waters. Then, Rob Walton, eldest son of Walmart founder Sam Walton, enters the frame in an outdoorsy vest over a dress shirt, tree branches blurred behind him. As he begins to talk, family photos appear one by one. First, just a few kids with their parents on a couch, then those kids with their kids outside on lawn chairs. There’s Sam Walton and his wife Helen in front of a waterfall, then paddling a canoe with a smiling little boy in the bow.

“That environmental focus that our generation has latched onto,” says their grandson Tom Walton, picking up the narration from his uncle in the marketing video posted by the Walton Family Foundation in 2018, “Sam and Helen taught us at an early age.”

After years of philanthropic support for fisheries, water, and education, members of his generation (along with some of their elders) are not only accelerating that environmental focus, they’re applying it to food and agriculture in new ways.

As the Waltons turn their attention to how the country feeds itself, the implications are vast: Sam left his heirs more than an appreciation for nature. He also passed on a significant stake in Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, with $611.3 billion in annual revenues. Their ownership of about 50 percent of shares is one piece of a $225 billion fortune that makes the Waltons the richest family in the world. While their investments and philanthropy tend to float under the radar compared to those of other billionaires, already it’s nearly impossible to turn a corner in the realm of sustainable food and agriculture without running into Walton money.

Consider Lukas Walton, Tom’s cousin, who is using a $2 billion venture capital fund to invest in organic chicken, grass-fed dairy, plant-based supply chains, and ag-tech, while supporting food access and fisheries innovations with his philanthropy. His mom, Christy Walton—widow to Sam’s son John—has a net worth of about $11 billion, which she has used to fund restaurants, large ocean aquaculture projects, and a 40,000-acre ranch that offers a “regenerative experience” to tourists and has acted as a site for research on land and livestock management.

She’s also put millions of philanthropic dollars into a demonstration farm in Oregon. And in addition to funding agricultural education in Colorado, Ben Walton—also a cousin to Lukas and Tom—was one of several investors who helped plant-based foods company NotCo raise $235 million in 2021.

While their investments and philanthropy tend to float under the radar compared to those of other billionaires, already it’s nearly impossible to turn a corner in the realm of sustainable food and agriculture without running into Walton money.

Then there’s the Walmart Foundation, which last year gave the Nature Conservancy $1.5 million (among other grants) to help farmers change their practices and launch a “regenerative foodscape” and is involved in a $80 million USDA-supported project on climate-smart rice production. Most significantly, according to our review of Walton Family Foundation tax records, the family’s marquee philanthropy made more than $665 million in grants in 2021, an estimated 10 percent of which touched the food system in some way.

Last year, the foundation supported the production of a report on greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture, which played a significant role in the national conversation around regenerative agriculture. Other recent grantees have included the Center for Rural Affairs, the National Young Farmers Coalition, the Soil Health Institute, and the Regenerative Agriculture Foundation.

These examples represent a drop in a vast sea of varied Walton family investment and philanthropy that impact food and agriculture. But what many of the projects share is a recognition that commodity production that prioritizes yields and profits above all else has harmed the country’s landscape and people. As the Walton Family Foundation’s executive director recently wrote in a blog post, “The relentless demand for increased production and higher crop yields has come with a high cost—degraded soil health and lower water quality.”

Over the past 30 years, one reason that model has come to dominate the food system is the unprecedented demands of a company like no other: Walmart.

In that time frame, the company has continuously expanded its grocery business and maximized profits by focusing on beating competitors on price. While far from alone among a field of retailers racing to consolidate and maximize efficiencies to drive profits, none have come close to matching Walmart’s scale and skill at squeezing suppliers and foisting the costs of production onto the small-town landscapes and people that its food comes from. In the words of one policy expert, today’s Walmart is now a vast monopsony, dominating multiple markets as the largest buyer.

But alas, the country’s relationship with food is changing—and Walmart wants in.

Over the last decade or so, the company has refined its corporate image, becoming a major seller of sustainable seafood and organic produce, launching initiatives to support local foods from small farms, and making a string of promises around sustainability within its supply chains. In 2020, in its boldest commitment to date, Walmart declared it would become a “regenerative company,” promising, among other things, that it would “protect, manage, and restore 50 million acres of land by 2030.”

In the words of one policy expert, today’s Walmart is now a vast monopsony, dominating multiple markets as the largest buyer.

It won’t be easy. Alan Lewis, a food and agriculture policy expert with Natural Grocers, puts it this way: If Walmart executives are serious about being a regenerative company, “they’re saying we are going to downsize our agricultural supply chains, integrate all of those external costs into our margins, and price things accordingly. If Walmart does that, it goes against every grain of their corporate culture.”

But Walmart’s business model appears otherwise unchanged, and its suppliers say the company’s foundational obsession with cost hasn’t waned. “They’ll find whoever has the lowest price in the country, and you have to be less than that,” explained one salad dressing CEO who asked to remain anonymous to protect his business interests. “Then, they’ll lower it every few years. If you don’t say yes, they pull your product.”

Walmart declined repeated requests to provide interviews for this story and declined to answer a detailed list of questions related to our reporting. Instead, the company’s public relations team sent a link to this webpage with data and information on Walmart’s “Regeneration of Natural Resources: Forests, Land, Oceans.”

A representative for the Walton Family Foundation also declined interview requests and sent brief comments via email rather than answering specific questions. The head of communications for Builders Vision, Lukas Walton’s company, declined a request for an interview with Lukas but provided an interview with an executive.

“They’ll find whoever has the lowest price in the country, and you have to be less than that. . . . Then, they’ll lower it every few years. If you don’t say yes, they pull your product.”

That reluctance to engage, paired with their overwhelming influence, makes it hard to predict how the Waltons’ businesses and fortune will shape the food system at a critical moment. (Because of the scale of their wealth and their vast web of trusts, corporations, and philanthropies, it’s also difficult to pin down how connected each family member is to Walmart.)

As the planet faces a climate and biodiversity crisis, the family’s investments could coincide with a fundamental supply shift at Walmart, driving truly resilient, regenerative farming at scale. But past and present evidence points to another likely scenario: Walmart could water down the meaning of “regenerative” to fit into its low-cost model, reducing regenerative farming’s potential to endure and help reverse the effects of climate change.

“Regenerative economics and capitalism don’t play well together. They have different sets of rules,” says environmental scientist and financial activist David LeZaks, the managing director of Food System 6, a company working to accelerate innovations in regenerative agriculture.

‘Big Box’ Organic?

Walmart faced similar tension between its low-cost model and its desire to adapt to market trends in the past, with the organic market. Organic economics are similar to those of regenerative (and the two systems often overlap): Production costs are often higher upfront, and the price of the food reflects that. Yet when demand for organic food began to soar, Walmart snubbed those constraints and vowed to sell organic food 25 percent cheaper than any other grocer.

That decision to drive prices down helped Walmart gain grocery ground. But it also helped to create industrialized organic farms that look entirely different than the organic farms that came before them.

Ron Rosmann can’t remember the exact year, but it was around 2010 when Walmart executives landed their private jet near his farm in Harlan, Iowa. Rosmann’s 700-acre organic operation is an anomaly in the region. He stopped using pesticides in the early 1980s, got certified organic in the ‘90s, and over time, built a highly diversified farm that produces corn, oats, wheat, barley, and vegetables while raising cattle, chickens, and pigs outdoors.

Walmart could water down the meaning of “regenerative” to fit into its low-cost model, reducing regenerative farming’s potential to endure and help reverse the effects of climate change.

He’s especially proud of the fact that because of his self-sustaining system that produces natural fertilizers for his crops, he hasn’t purchased a pound of nitrogen since 1982. “That is just absolutely unheard of,” he says.

Rosmann’s success made him a leader in organic farming, and when Walmart executives visited, they arrived eager to learn more about how they could start selling more food from farms like his. He was happy to educate. However, after the trip, no one from Walmart ever called to place an order, he said. “Their model says, ‘Let’s just buy from as few as sources as possible for uniformity and all these efficiencies,’ so that in itself leaves the small vegetable growers out of the picture,” he said.

Instead, Walmart helped create what those in the industry now call “big box” organic, produced by commercial growers to meet the minimum required by the USDA seal. In other words, the companies don’t use chemical pesticides or fertilizers, but they raise animals indoors and farm tens of thousands of acres of fruits and vegetables, then move them all over the world.

Walmart is “the number one seller of organic, but I’ve never heard of one organic farmer who sells to them,” says Dave Chapman, an organic tomato farmer in Vermont who co-founded the Real Organic Project, a new certification intended to protect the interests of small, organic farmers from the corporate takeover of organic food. “But that doesn’t mean they aren’t affecting all of us. They are. By offering food so inexpensively, they set a standard to which all others are compared.”

Such had been the overall trend since the 1990s, when Walmart began rapidly opening what it dubbed “Supercenters,” and applied the same mantra that fueled its original success in electronics, apparel, and home goods to groceries: the lowest prices, all the time.

Because of its history-making size, Walmart was able to shift costs to suppliers at a scale that no company had pulled off before. “All retailers look to shift burdens to their suppliers for promotions, for stocking, for logistics. At Walmart, however, there is nothing haphazard about the cost shifting. It is continuous and systematic,” Charles Fishman explained in his 2006 deep dive into the company’s practices and impacts, The Wal-Mart Effect. “Walmart will, quite straightforwardly, tell those suppliers what it will pay for their goods.”

To sell at those prices, food companies across the country have had to consolidate and scale up production, pay farmers less, and offload their own costs onto the environment and communities in the form of water and air pollution. Walmart was far from alone in initiating these shifts. Industrial meat, seed, and pesticide companies, policymakers, and other retailers have all participated in transforming the food system into the radically efficient, low-cost, high-external-cost behemoth it is today.

Still, Walmart’s outsized role cannot be overstated. Three decades ago, its stores were just starting to stock Romaine lettuce and Cheerios. Today, it is the largest grocer in American history, with one in three or one in four grocery dollars spent in its stores, depending on the estimate.

Whether Walmart can call itself a regenerative company will be chiefly decided by what kind of meat the company sells on its shelves day after day. Right now, nearly all of that meat comes from CAFOs.

As the largest seller of organic food as well, Walmart has had greater success at adapting organic to its low-cost model than at adapting to the economic realities of organic food.

Walmart’s organic produce bins and refrigerated cases are now cheerfully labeled in purple and green in stores around the country. In a Civil Eats survey conducted in May of six Walmart Supercenters around the country, regardless of region, the displays and fruits and vegetables offered were nearly identical, stocked with the same large bags of apples and potatoes with no indication of origin.

Ditto the same two-pound bags of carrots priced at $1.96, just a few cents over the average price for conventional carrots and 28 percent lower than the organic average. Many of the organic tomatoes came from far-flung companies who use cheaper hydroponic systems, which organic farmers like Chapman believe shouldn’t qualify as organic and drive prices down.

Leaving Local Behind

The economics of local food would prove less malleable.

As research and reporting began to call significant attention to the company’s negative effects on rural economies and the environment, Harold Lee Scott, Jr., Walmart’s third CEO, announced the company’s first public sustainability goals in 2005. In addition to stores running on renewable energy and eliminating waste, he made a supply chain commitment “to sell products to sustain our resources and this environment.”

Five years later, executives announced that they would double their sales of “locally sourced produce” by 2015. They did not specify how much they were currently selling or how they would define “locally sourced,” but they launched the Heritage Agriculture program in service of that goal.

In one promotional video from that time, the company showcased its support of Al Hooks and his son Demetrius Hooks, who were growing vegetables near Shorter, Alabama, on land that had been in their family for 100 years. With Tuskegee University’s help, the duo pooled their produce with other farmers in Alabama’s long-impoverished Black Belt to meet Walmart’s volume requirements. Demetrius was skeptical about selling to such a large buyer from the start, especially when Al got a loan to put up a processing building before they were sure how everything would work out.

Then, he said, Walmart started cutting the prices they’d pay for the vegetables. “Each year it seemed like they were revealing more and more costs on their end that they wanted us to start assuming,” Demetrius said. “But our profit margins are structured totally different than larger corporations. Nickels and dimes and pennies matter.”

The Hooks quit the program after about five years, exhausted. In 2016, Walmart brought in about $121 billion in gross profit.

In the years since, although Walmart executives continued to make new public promises around selling more local food, the program quietly faded away. With organic, Walmart could push farms to get bigger, driving costs down and enabling national distribution. With local food, which can’t achieve the same economy of scale, that likely wasn’t possible, said Stacy Mitchell, the co-executive director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) who has worked on research on Walmart and the Walton Family Foundation over the past two decades. “They’re not set up for that,” she said.

In a Civil Eats survey of six Walmart locations around the country in May, only one box of oranges in Arizona was labeled “local.” Old news stories and press releases about the program live on online.

One place that some small farms are thriving selling food directly to community members, however, is in and around the Walton hometown of Bentonville, where the Walton Family Foundation is pouring funds into the Northwest Arkansas Food Systems project. It’s one among hundreds of other philanthropic and investment initiatives by the Waltons in the region, including restaurants, trail networks, and parks.

Last year, the foundation announced construction was beginning on a 45,000-square-foot, $31 million facility called the Market Center of the Ozarks. The center will house a food hub to aggregate local fruits and vegetables and provide commercial kitchens to local producers. In articles about the center’s launch, small, organic farmers cheered the sales opportunities it would bring. Their enthusiasm around new market and distribution opportunities make sense, given those farmers are likely shut out of larger grocers’ supply chains—including Walmart’s.

Lauren Manning, a rancher in the area, said that the concentration of wealth in the region driven by the Waltons and Walmart has led to this soaring demand for local food, a boon for her and her fellow farmers. “On the one hand, they’re the people buying these regeneratively grown products,” she said. “At the same time, they’re driving up land prices, making it harder to be a farmer. And I see the disappearance of rural America in other places, and it’s hard to reconcile that disconnect.”

In a press release, Tom Walton called the food hub “another bold step to position Northwest Arkansas as a national model for locally grown food.” But it’s hard to envision another place in the country where tens of millions of philanthropic dollars are available to fund a food hub. Absent charitable investment, Walmart is the only stop for produce in many other small towns.

Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Meat are Key to Regenerative Claims

Produce is important, but meat is a more critical consideration when it comes to regenerative food.

The push to scale up regenerative agriculture is amplified by the urgency of the climate crisis, and the Waltons’ role in its development is just taking shape. How it all shakes out will determine which farmers get paid to take part in climate-smart agriculture initiatives and who benefits from markets for regenerative foods.

Without a federal standard to govern the practices, farmer, industry, and government groups from every corner of the agricultural landscape are defining regenerative differently. The Regenerative Organic Alliance and Rodale Institute promote a version of regenerative that rests squarely on a foundation of organic practices without pesticides, while some groups call attention to regenerative practices’ Indigenous roots and believe commitments to regenerative should include justice and equity for farmers, workers, and communities. In California, the state department of agriculture is sifting through various concepts in an attempt to craft an official definition.

So far, Walmart and its suppliers have primarily adopted one version of regenerative: getting commodity crop farmers to embrace practices that reduce emissions and have other environmental benefits while maintaining pesticide-dependent monocrop systems. It has worked with rice farmers in Arkansas to implement practices that reduce methane emissions and alongside Campbell’s to help wheat farmers optimize nitrogen use. In July, the company announced a seven-year partnership with PepsiCo to pay farmers to improve their practices; in October, it publicized a new regenerative partnership with General Mills.

But whether Walmart can call itself a regenerative company will be chiefly decided by what kind of meat the company sells on its shelves day after day. Sofía De La Parra evaluates food producers and retailers at FAIRR, an initiative that tracks data showing how much companies’ animal agriculture supply chains are contributing to issues including greenhouse gas emissions and biodiversity loss.

Based on their expertise and calculations, she said, FAIRR estimates that about 95 percent of Walmart’s greenhouse gas emissions come from its supply chains and that about 33 percent come directly from its meat supply chains.

The deployment of the Waltons’ vast fortune across millions of farmland acres, ocean ecosystems, and food production spaces could boost the regenerative image that Walmart presents as a company while obscuring the fact that the majority of the food on its shelves is still produced as cheaply as possible.

And right now, nearly all of that meat comes from Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), massive industrial animal farms that confine 99 percent of the animals raised for food in this country and which cause widespread pollution that threatens public health. Even if Walmart switched course immediately, said Alan Lewis of Natural Grocers, it would take the company 30 years to get to a place where executives could say their meat supply chains qualify as regenerative. If they made that claim today, Lewis added, it would be “an outright fabrication.”

Walmart sells one line of grass-fed beef that is almost certainly imported, and over the last few years, the company announced several new beef initiatives. It invested in “regenerative ranching” pilot projects that involve helping ranchers improve grazing practices to build soil health and incorporating legume cover crops into growing feed crops.

According to the materials the company provided, its suppliers reported improved grazing practices on 15 million acres in 2023, but it’s unclear what those practices look like. To create its own Angus beef supply, it acquired a stake in a processing plant project in Nebraska and partnered with cattle feeders in Texas. Those systems still involve cattle being sent to large feedlots. One Texas feedlot is in a town where beef CAFO production is so concentrated that communities suffer from regularly breathing in fecal dust.

And the projects are a small share of the meat that regularly fills Walmart’s cases. Walmart’s biggest meat suppliers include Cargill, Smithfield, and Tyson, according to Civil Eats’ in-store survey and Tyson’s public disclosures to its shareholders, which indicate that Walmart accounts for about 18 percent of Tyson’s annual sales. Such large suppliers have a history of environmental pollution. Pollution from Tyson farmers’ corn and soybean fields and poultry and beef CAFOs, for example, has severely impacted Midwest waterways.

What’s more, deforestation is one of the main drivers of greenhouse gas emissions in animal agriculture. According to FAIRR, Tyson has not reported progress on its multiple commitments to end deforestation in its cattle or soybean supply chains, despite their fast-approaching target dates of 2025. Tyson declined to provide comment, but a public relations representative pointed to this report, which shares a 2019 deforestation risk assessment that found most of the company’s beef and soy were at “low deforestation risk” due to U.S. origin.

And Cargill, which provides many of the low-priced, unbranded ground beef and steaks that are ubiquitous in Walmart’s meat cases, is among the largest corporate drivers of deforestation. In September, Global Witness linked the company to the destruction of nearly 50,000 acres of Bolivia’s Chiquitano Forest since 2017.

Glenn Hurowitz, the CEO and founder of the nonprofit Mighty Earth, has tracked Cargill’s impact on the destruction of both the Brazilian Amazon and Cerrado, the world’s most biodiverse savanna, for years. Cargill, he said, stands alone in its destruction of native ecosystems and is holding up the progress that other companies have made to end deforestation.

“For a consumer-facing company like Walmart, what ultimately matters is the identity and practices of their suppliers,” Hurowitz said. “To the extent they’re buying from companies that are driving continued extensive destruction of native ecosystems like Cargill . . . it’s hard to call them regenerative.” Cargill did not respond to requests for comment.

To improve the practices of its suppliers, in 2017, Walmart launched Project Gigaton with a stated goal to avoid one gigaton of supply chain emissions by 2030. Suppliers are encouraged—but not required—to participate. In 2022, the company announced 2,500 suppliers were reporting data on emissions reduction as part of the project and that it was halfway to its goal.

But with no baseline data or public information on who is participating, it’s impossible to determine what that means. A recent report from the investor activism group Ceres gave Walmart credit for being ahead of other food companies in setting goals but also uncovered a potential limitation with Project Gigaton’s data. “They ask their suppliers to report any and all emissions that they have avoided, whether or not it was linked directly to something they sold to Walmart or if it ended up on Walmart’s shelves,” Ceres’ Nako Kobayashi explained.

At the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), which has received more than $166 million from the Walton Family Foundation over the past 20 years, Elizabeth Sturcken works with private companies on climate commitments. She helped Walmart set up Project Gigaton and acknowledged that companies’ self-reporting of emissions data to Walmart creates challenges around accuracy. But despite any limitations, Sturcken sees Project Gigaton as an example of Walmart’s clear leadership on reducing supply chain emissions.

“In the United States, at least where there is no regulation, this is what creates powerful change,” she said. “A company that purchases a lot of product and spends billions of dollars in its supply chain says to its suppliers, ‘We need you to join us on this journey. Here’s how to do it. Here are the tools.’” Sturcken likens it to rolling out a red carpet for suppliers versus requiring them to make drastic changes to adopt regenerative practices.

Given Walmart’s supersized power, however, Hurowitz’s take is that requiring change is something the company could conceivably do. If Walmart drew a line on the sand in terms of deforestation, for example, Hurowitz said he’s sure that “Cargill would immediately announce a new policy banning deforestation and ecosystem destruction. The real problem is [Cargill] hasn’t faced any retail consequences for its actions.”

There’s no evidence Walmart’s headed in that direction. Since 2010, the company has made at least five different public commitments related to ending deforestation in different parts of its soy and beef supply chains. To date there is no public evidence the company is close to delivering, and the commitments always rely on voluntary reporting by suppliers.

At the same time, ZomaLab, Ben Walton’s private wealth management firm with his wife Lucy Ana, supports an initiative called Enduring Earth. It funds one project that involves governments and non-profits working together to conserve an area of the Amazon Rainforest that’s nearly twice the size of Germany. A representative from ZomaLab declined an interview request and the opportunity to answer emailed questions from Civil Eats related to deforestation in Walmart’s supply chains and the family’s ability to improve the company’s supply chains.

A Fortune’s Impacts

As Walmart declares regenerative goals and its founding family invests vast private capital in projects that deploy similar language, the company’s history of selling sustainable food—both the products and messaging—points to two possible outcomes that concern food system insiders.

First, as with organic, the Waltons could play a pivotal role in defining “regenerative,” establishing regenerative markets that fit Walmart’s vision of a low-cost-first food system. Their philanthropy is already moving things in that direction.

For instance, many of the Walton Family Foundation’s most significant grants to agriculture groups in 2021 focused on implementing practices like cover crops and no-till farming on commodity crop acres. Those include $1.65 million to EDF, $375,000 to Field to Market, $210,000 to the Soil Health Institute, and $300,000 to the American Soybean Association.

That’s a good thing, said Johnathan Hladik, the policy director at the Center for Rural Affairs, which got $125,000 in 2021 to fund work on conservation programs and water quality in Midwest ag states. “When we write these grants, we intentionally propose projects that target the mainstream row crop production system,” Hladik said, because of the scale at which corn and soy are grown. “If you can grow conservation programs that will incentivize those producers to implement . . . some regenerative practices, even if they’re not going all the way, and you scale that over 300 million acres, that’s tremendous. You can make such a big impact.”

Also in 2021, the foundation gave $325,000 to the Environmental Working Group (EWG). That money represents long-running Walton support for the organization’s conservation and crop insurance databases and the analyses that emerge from them, explained Scott Faber, the organization’s senior vice president of government affairs. EWG’s database has long been the only source of data for researchers and journalists looking to understand how the federal government spends money intended to improve environmental outcomes on farms.

In the past few months, for example, EWG has used the data to show only a small percentage of one popular program’s funding goes to practices that reduce greenhouse gas emissions and that a third of taxpayer crop insurance dollars in the last ten years have gone to companies, not farmers.

The Walton Family Foundation declined to provide an interview for this story or to answer detailed questions about these and other investments in regenerative agriculture. Instead, foundation spokesperson Daphne Moore pointed to progressive projects funding the planting of native prairie strips and the perennial grain Kernza and provided a broad statement, saying, “We are proud of our work providing significant resources to organizations on the frontlines of the fight to develop more sustainable water practices, adapt to the threat of climate change, and preserve the Colorado and Mississippi Rivers for generations to come.”

Those practices represent real improvements that benefit soil health and water quality. But LeZaks, of Food System 6, said they do it within the same system designed to produce few healthy foods while extracting resources from rural land and communities and pushing the profits toward large corporations. LeZaks and others would like to see the term “regenerative” applied to systems that diversify landscapes for health and climate resilience while also restoring regional food economies.

At Builders Vision, the leadership team is similarly working on what will likely be a more expansive definition of “regenerative.” Builders Vision is Lukas Walton’s “family office,” a quaint term for a financial firm that manages the wealth of one of the richest people in the world. It includes both investment and philanthropic initiatives.

“When I think about regenerative practices, I think about no-till, crop rotation, and cover cropping as kind of the three main pillars,” said Sara Balawajder, a VP who manages sustainable food and agriculture investments at Builders Vision. “And then we have started to think more about the role of livestock and agroforestry in regenerative systems.”

In addition to funding plant-based alternatives to meat and dairy, health- and climate-forward restaurants, and tech-leaning agricultural companies, Builders Vision funds enterprises that could move agriculture toward a more transformative version of regenerative.

Through its $2 billion investment firm S2G Ventures, those include Virginia-based Farmer Focus, which helps farmers raise chickens on pasture; Maple Hill Creamery, a pioneering dairy company that has helped more than 100 Northeast farms transition to grass-fed production; and FoodID, a test to reign in harmful antibiotic use in animal agriculture.

Builders Initiative, the office’s philanthropic arm, has given nearly $180 million to food and agriculture grantees since its founding, including a heralded regenerative chicken project in the Midwest and a research project using new technology to map the location of CAFOs to better regulate their environmental impacts.

These initiatives may lead to real change. But, according to some advocates, they could also contribute to a second outcome: The deployment of the Waltons’ vast fortune across millions of farmland acres, ocean ecosystems, and food production spaces could boost the regenerative image that Walmart presents as a company while obscuring the fact that the majority of the food on its shelves is still produced as cheaply as possible.

Faber, at EWG, wouldn’t say if he shared that concern. “Walmart is the nation’s biggest grocer, and they’re a business like any other, and they’re providing choices to consumers,” he said. “Every grocer in the country can do better, including Walmart.” Hladik, at Center for Rural Affairs, said that he saw a “bright line” between the company and the family’s philanthropy and considered them different things.

But it’s impossible to understand where Walmart money ends and Walton money begins, if a line even exists. For example, Sam’s children currently own about 50 percent of the company’s shares, most of which are held through their family office, Walton Enterprises. In 2021, the Walton Family Foundation reported paying Walton Enterprises $29.4 million for management services, and the organization’s tax filing was prepared by an employee of Walton Enterprises. Steuart Walton, cousin to Lukas and Tom, is on Walmart’s board of directors; his sister, Annie Proietti, is the chair of the board at the Walton Family Foundation. Gregory Penner, Walmart’s board chair, is married to Carrie Walton Penner, another cousin who is on the Walton Family Foundation’s board.

In putting together reports on the company and foundation at ILSR, Mitchell said, “One of the points that we thought really needed to be made was it’s the same family controlling both. There’s no separation between the Walton family agenda and the Walmart agenda.”

There are potential legal reasons to keep church and state separate. Representatives for the Walton Family Foundation and Builders Vision reiterated that separation to Civil Eats on several occasions. In the course of reporting this story, however, they also revealed that they were in communication with each other and representatives at Walmart.

It’s impossible to understand where Walmart money ends and Walton money begins, if a line even exists: “It’s the same family controlling both. There’s no separation between the Walton family agenda and the Walmart agenda.”

When asked about the connection between Builders Visions’ work and Walmart, Balawajder referred to a “strict separation,” but said she hoped their work would result in sustainable food companies succeeding, therefore giving them a chance to be sold in “any store, including Walmart,” because “a rising tide lifts all boats.”

Maybe, but maybe not.

Even if the Walmart fortune is truly creating a rising tide toward a more regenerative food system, it may be unlikely to lift the most battered of boats: those small, regenerative, diversified farms selling healthy food to their neighbors. Because at the end of the day, it costs more. And not only have they been losing money for years, they’re still caught in the everyday-low-price hurricane, trying to stay afloat within a system that rewards producers who scale up to sell at Walmart’s prices.

Ron Rosmann, for example, the farmer from Harlan, Iowa, isn’t angry that Walmart executives never called to buy his popcorn or porkchops after they toured his farm. But he is bitter over the fact that Walmart and other companies like it have been hurting him indirectly ever since. Where he used to sell 700 hogs a year, he’s down to about 300. He just can’t compete on price.

“I get very upset, because I say we need more farmers and they need to be farming in ways that are more climate-friendly and better for local economies and giving people a chance to have meaningful work and have ownership of land,” he said. Companies like Walmart focus on “efficiencies and economies of scale without ever factoring in the externalities. All of that ties together.”

Still, even Rosmann is only a degree removed from Walton money. He was once a leader within Practical Farmers of Iowa. Today, his involvement is limited to hosting field days, while his son remains on the board. Practical Farmers of Iowa has received more than $3 million from the Walton Family Foundation since 2009.

Walmart could make a choice to change its model and prioritize regenerative goals over short-term earnings, LeZaks said. While it seems impossible to imagine, so does the alternative, he said. “At the end of the day, do they want to be in business in 10 or 50 years? Or do they want to maximize wealth generation now? And then it’s going to be them and their stores and the rest of us are out of soil.”

The post Walmart’s ‘Regenerative Foodscape’ appeared first on Civil Eats.

The Long Reach of the Walmart-Walton Empire

Wed, 01 Nov 2023 10:00:06 +0200

In 2005, Walmart needed a war room. Under fire by union-organized critics of its wages, health insurance, and working conditions, the company recruited former presidential advisors to a public relations headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas. Theirs was a battle plan to fortify a wounded image.

The objects of the campaign were consumers then torn between American ideals and the lowest of low prices. Those whose position was still malleable were centered in the crosshairs of new messaging. They were the coveted middle of the market—the undecided shopper—and the objective was to turn them away from a marketplace of alternatives back to a Walmart. The odds were long. Every day opponents were gaining ground in casting Walmart as a small-business-wrecking behemoth whose day-to-day operations were antithetical to a pro-labor ethos.

Through the Walton Family Foundation alone, the Waltons’ contributions … are staggering—totaling $665 million in grants in 2021.

Thus began a relationship with the public and the press that Walmart and its founding family, the Waltons, have continued to unfurl over nearly two decades. Today, Walmart’s public relations efforts combine with the activities of Walton charities and investments in a sprawling buffet of corporate promising, donations, and seed capital directed at a range of social and environmental issues affected by the largest retailer in the world.

The results have vast implications for the American food system, government, schools, the oceans, environment, and the press. In some ways, those implications have been positive, raising the bar on renewable energy and making substantial gains in recycling, the accessibility of organic food and reduced dependence on pesticides.

But Walmart has also grown so powerful that the company can retool the definition of good practice just by setting the lowest bar for it, such as setting a less ambitious standard for organic. And while that may give customers access to cheaper food, its employees may not be able to afford it. A 2020 federal inquiry spanning 11 states, for example, found that more Walmart employees received SNAP and Medicaid assistance than any other company. Thus, Walmart’s impact is complicated and nuanced, even as its corporate image is often less so.

Long retired from its battlefield heyday, Walmart’s public relations team is now no less mighty, even as the corporation itself has faded into the cinderblock indistinction of the viral 2020s; its usual headlines more typical of a big-box narrative. Plans to shutter stores in 2023, for example, along with other retail chains like Bed Bath & Beyond and The Gap, would cast it as marching, in some ways, along a path to obscurity.

But Walmart is far from obscure and its influence has not waned, even in a landscape of devolving brick-and-mortar. In fact, Walmart is stronger than ever: At the close of its 2022 fiscal year, Walmart reported its largest-ever quarterly revenues and employed 2.3 million people. It is also a rare success story in having launched an e-commerce strategy that can compete effectively with Amazon.

At $611.3 billion, Walmart’s annual revenues are larger than the GDP of Sweden, having shown staggering and continuous growth since the year Walmart went public with $44 million in annual sales in 1970.

In 2021, their collective spending on charity totaled $969.8 million.

That extraordinary power and wealth is inextricably tied to the Waltons, who collectively retain control of about half the shares of Walmart and whose philanthropic impact is boundless. Though practiced at flying beneath the radar, the heirs of Walmart founders Sam and Rob Walton are the richest family in America. As a group, they are richer than Bill Gates, richer than Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg, with a commanding combined fortune of $224.5 billion.

Thus, they are prolific philanthropists who preside over an expansive network of nonprofit businesses, family office funds, trusts, and smaller corporations. Many of those enterprises quaintly understate their ties to the ultra-rich and the ultra-connected and the extraordinary power the Waltons have over public life and public resources.

Through the Walton Family Foundation alone, the Waltons’ contributions to education, rivers and oceans, and local initiatives in Arkansas are staggering—totaling $665 million in grants in 2021, the most recent year for which figures are available.

Yet the Waltons also control at least eight other philanthropies, including the Walmart Foundation and the charitable endeavors of individual family members: Builders Initiative, Alumbra Innovations Foundation, the Rob and Melani Walton Foundation, Zoma Foundation, Catena Foundation, and two foundations tied to Alice Walton. In 2021, their collective spending on charity totaled $969.8 million.

Their lesser-known power lies in a network of dozens of corporations, most positioned as investment and seed-capital funds focusing on everything from STEM education to seed growth, aquaculture, and farming techniques. Many of those endeavors may have implications for Walmart and its supply chain. Some are, in their own right, vast enterprises. Innovaciones Alumbra, or iAlumbra, for example, oversees at least 15 subsidiaries focused on commercial ideas to “restore and strengthen both human and natural communities.”

There is nothing secret or untoward about this network. But the fact that it is tied to the richest family in America is often overlooked, the interconnection poorly understood.

All told, the Waltons’ philanthropic largesse means they hold sway with every major conservation group in America, fund fisheries management and ocean policy in countries all over the world, and are championing schools initiatives that have changed public education across the nation. They are also advancing efforts to push water rights toward market-based systems in drought regions.

Walmart has more dominance over land use and associated climate policy than most of the non-fossil companies in the world.

Meanwhile, the Walmart corporation itself has enormous influence over world trade, global pricing for goods, and associated policies and prices for food and agriculture. Its importance is further underscored by the fact that it supports a network of lobbyists that work to advance the company’s interests. In the last 10 years, they’ve been deployed to affect agriculture policy, labor law, market competition, food safety, trade, climate solutions, and other legislation that affect Walmart’s bottom line, supply chain, and Walton family interests.

The company’s success has stunning implications for food and agriculture. Walmart has expanded its grocery business exponentially, now collecting one of every three grocery dollars spent in America, with colossal power to influence food prices for most goods, food policy, and the lives of food-producing regions, families, and towns. As a result, Walmart has more dominance over land use and associated climate policy than most of the non-fossil companies in the world.

In the seafood sector, the Waltons’ philanthropy has already shaped how the global industry defines, and how consumers understand, sustainability. Walton Family Foundation funding has been essential to the development and scaling up of Marine Stewardship Council certification, now considered the go-to label for certifying sustainably caught wild fish. In Walmart stores, the label is displayed prominently on seafood packaging and signage, increasing its credibility among shoppers.

And philanthropic efforts by Waltons to privatize fisheries around the world have had outsized consequences for coastal communities, reducing the presence of small family businesses while opening the door to private investors, hedge funds, and multinational corporations that have come to dominate many fisheries. That outcome has dramatically changed the labor dynamics of fishing and reduced the share of the industry wealth available to seafarers. It’s also deeply harmed those communities that are so closely tied to oceans they are effectively captive to those dynamics.

Attending both the Waltons’ and Walmart’s business are the same war room public relations strategies that first powered on in 2005. They come in the form of mission-focused narratives that portend saving environments and ecosystems. And also in the form of corporate promises to support organic foods, local food from small farms, and, most recently, to transform Walmart’s supply chains to ensure a regenerative future.

Many of those environmental narratives are more complex than they otherwise appear. And many of Walmart’s corporate promises are yet unmet. But media attention to Walmart and the Waltons is elsewhere. Most is a steady drumbeat of grant awards, underwritten initiatives, associated achievements, and occasional celebrity gossip that rarely examines the Walton enterprise as a whole.

Much like Walmart began paying bloggers in 2006, the Waltons now also help fund the American press, channeling more than $8.5 million from the Walton Family Foundation to newsrooms in 2021 and $2.6 million from the same foundation to journalism trade groups and training over the last decade.

In this ongoing investigative series, Civil Eats will take a detailed look at Walmart and Walton influence over the American food system, over the producers and policymakers who shape it, and how its would-be critics are also its bedfellows. We do not accept grants and donations from the Waltons or their associated charities.

The post The Long Reach of the Walmart-Walton Empire appeared first on Civil Eats.

Tribes Are Building Food Sovereignty With Help From the Nation’s Largest Hunger-Relief Group

Tue, 31 Oct 2023 10:00:41 +0200

Like so many Indigenous communities, the Hualapai experienced outsized food insecurity during the pandemic. The northwestern Arizona tribe received sporadic food donations through a local church but wanted to take matters into its own hands. In 2021, tribal council member and emergency manager Cheyenne Majenty started Helping Hands for Hualapai, a volunteer effort to facilitate food donations on a regular basis. The group soon joined forces with the Hualapai food security committee and realized they needed to start producing their own food to address this ongoing challenge.

When Feeding America announced its multi-year Natives Prepared program in 2022, Majenty knew the group needed to apply for the pilot cohort. The national hunger-relief nonprofit has long supported Indigenous groups through its network of more than 200 national food banks but in recent years has endeavored to solidify its partnerships with tribal nations. Leading this effort is Mark Ford (Chiricahua Apache Tewa/Tiwa), who became Feeding America’s first director of Native partnerships in 2021 after spending years working in tribal relations.

“We want to teach our community to be more self-sustaining so that we’re ready if the semi-truck drivers boycott or if the highways or nearby farms shut down.”

The overarching aim of Natives Prepared is twofold: to empower Indigenous groups to produce and/or source their own food and to ensure they have integrated disaster resources. To kick off the program, Feeding America is working with a pilot cohort of five tribal nations: the Hualapai, the Onondaga Nation in New York, the United Houma Nation in Louisiana, the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate in South Dakota, and the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community in Washington.

Each community partners with a local food bank tasked with providing fiduciary and technical support. They’re currently in the process of developing individualized project proposals that will be implemented over the next two years with a maximum budget of $450,000 per participant. From there, Ford foresees this as the first cohort of many.

For the Hualapai, whose emergency operations program launched this summer, the focus is on developing greater food sovereignty through community gardens. “Because we’re in an extremely rural location, we rely heavily on transportation to get our groceries from the next town over, which is 50 miles away,” Majenty says. “We want to teach our community to be more self-sustaining so that we’re ready if the semi-truck drivers boycott or if the highways or nearby farms shut down.”

With assistance from Partnership With Native Americans (PWNA)—an Indigenous-led nonprofit tapped by Feeding America to liaise with tribal nations—the Hualapai committee created a detailed outline of its goals and needs in transforming a dozen empty lots into gardens to grow squash, beans, corn, turnips, onions, and other traditional plants. Majenty hopes that these gardens will eventually cover more of the 1-million-acre reservation to help feed its approximately 1,400 residents.

For inspiration, Majenty looks to the New York–based Onondaga Nation, which has enough food reserves from its farm to feed its tribal members for four years. Since they’re both in the pilot cohort, the Hualapai and Onondaga people can learn from one another and share best practices, which is by design. Angela Ferguson, who oversees the Onondaga Nation Farm, explains that their revered food sovereignty program started small, too.

“With so many tribal nations, there’s an inability to respond to our own disasters, especially when it comes to food.”

“We began with just a few workers who were willing to dedicate themselves to traditional agriculture,” she says. “Part of our responsibility is putting food away for the people, which is what we do with half our harvests each year.” During the pandemic, the Onondaga Nation had ample reserves of traditional foods like bison, venison, fish, corn, beans, and squash to feed its citizens.

Although Natives Prepared project proposals are still in the works, each cohort participant has a unique strategy in mind. The Onondaga Nation wants to develop a command center for distributing its extensive reserves and providing other emergency support. The Louisiana-based United Houma Nation needs warehouse space to store food and supplies, since it’s deeply involved with the volunteer Cajun Navy, which delivers essentials to people by boat during storms and floods. South Dakota’s Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate hopes to build a meat-processing plant to handle their own harvests of elk, deer, and other wild game.

The initiative was born out of this stark reality: After a long history of colonialism, oppression, and harmful federal policies, Native Americans face disproportionately high food insecurity, estimated at nearly 24 percent. Those challenges are exacerbated by emergencies, since Indigenous peoples are among the hardest hit by disasters and the last to receive aid. Ford witnessed this firsthand during his time with the Louisiana Governor’s Office of Indian Affairs, when he helped area tribes in the aftermath of Hurricanes Gustav and Ike.

“With so many tribal nations, there’s an inability to respond to our own disasters, especially when it comes to food,” says Ford. As a more recent example, he points to last December’s Winter Storm Diaz, which pelted South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation with 30 inches of snow and stranded residents in their homes with limited supplies of food, medicine, propane, and other essentials for

Oglala Sioux tribal members called Ford and pleaded for help. Together with Feeding America Director of Disaster Services Vince Davis, he engaged Feeding South Dakota, the state and U.S. agriculture departments, and Partnership With Native Americans to bring in relief. “It reaffirmed just how important it is for to immediately respond to disasters on their own, since they best know what their needs are,” says Ford.

To that end, the Natives Prepared program is driven by self-determination, letting tribal nations dictate what will meaningfully support their self-sufficiency then pulling in adequate funding to execute their highly customized plans. Just as each community’s needs are unique, so too are their policies. For instance, the Onondaga Nation doesn’t accept any government funding, so Feeding America must secure appropriate private donors and partners to bring their project to fruition. Partnership With Native Americans has been instrumental in navigating unique circumstances like this.

“No one knows how to end hunger better than the people who experience it, which is why we want to elevate their voices and solutions.”

“We were brought in to act as an intermediary, provide a safe space, and bring people together to have honest dialogues,” explains PWNA President and CEO Joshua Arce (Prairie Band Potawatomi). “Feeding America can feel like a big corporate entity, and they just don’t have the relationships we have with these communities. We’re here to make sure their voices are heard.”

Natives Prepared is one of the first major joint initiatives between PWNA and Feeding America, and thus far, Arce is encouraged by the efforts. “The financial and personnel investment Feeding America is putting into this is staggering,” he says. “It’s really important that this isn’t just some plan that sits on a shelf. There are tangible action steps that will have positive outcomes and create once-in-a-lifetime opportunities for these tribal nations.”

Arce emphasizes the need for corporations and government agencies to provide meaningful support to Native communities yet acknowledges the lack of trust many Indigenous peoples have for these large entities. He thinks this program could be transformational not only in bolstering tribal sovereignty but also in setting the bar for how a big player like Feeding America can make a big difference.

Feeding America’s Ford is not naïve efforts it will take to repair these relationships, which is why he is personally involved with the pilot cohort in addition to a dedicated team. He also recognizes that Feeding America’s investment in tribal sovereignty might seem counterintuitive.

After all, Feeding America is no stranger to scrutiny. As the nation’s largest charity, it brings in more than $4 billion in private donations. The nonprofit—and the hunger-relief industry at large—has been criticized for its high-salaried executives and reliance on donations from large corporations, such as Walmart, which in turn receive generous tax breaks.

But Ford sees supporting food sovereignty as part of the nonprofit’s three-pronged approach. “We’re addressing hunger by feeding the line—meaning our food banks supply food to people in need—but also by shortening and eventually ending the line through support for the farm bill and initiatives like this,” he says. “No one knows how to end hunger better than the people who experience it, which is why we want to elevate their voices and solutions.”

“I look at food as a form of a reparation. We had a lot of our land taken from us and a lot of our foods destroyed.”

For the Hualapai, it took some convincing to get tribal leadership on board with the Natives Prepared program. Majenty believes they’ll come around when they see the positive impact on the community but also understands the skepticism. “For so long, we have had entities coming in with this attitude of ‘I’m going to save you,’” she explains. “Now the conversation has shifted to, ‘What can we do to help you be successful?’ We need to know these resources are here to actually help us and not extort or abuse us. So far with Feeding America, we’ve had that kind of support.”

Although there’s still much work to be done, the pilot cohort has begun down a path toward healing and reconciliation.

“I look at food as a form of a reparation,” says Ferguson of the Onondaga Nation. “We had a lot of our land taken from us and a lot of our foods destroyed. Even though this happened generations ago, we’re still carrying the historical trauma of our ancestors. Food is the one common unifier that brings all human beings together and lets us start a dialogue about how we can work together to fix these issues.”

The post Tribes Are Building Food Sovereignty With Help From the Nation’s Largest Hunger-Relief Group appeared first on Civil Eats.

A Culinary Worker Strike Could Reshape the Nation’s Restaurants

Mon, 30 Oct 2023 10:00:45 +0200

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 early October, thousands of bartenders, culinary workers, and hotel attendants formed a picket line outside eight casino resorts on the Las Vegas Strip. It was the largest union demonstration on Las Vegas Boulevard in 20 years.

Since April, the Culinary Workers Union Local 226 and the Bartenders Union Local 165 have been negotiating with the city’s three largest companies—MGM Resorts, Caesars Entertainment, and Wynn Resorts—for a new five-year contract. To no avail, says Ted Pappageorge, who has served as the culinary union’s secretary-treasurer since 2022 and was its president for more than a decade before that. “We’ve been respectful, and we’ve been patient,” he says. “But it’s time now to come to the table.”

“To get through the pandemic, people did extra—they did more to save their own jobs, to help save the companies—everybody pitched in. But [it became clear that] regardless of the sacrifices you make, you’re dispensable.”

Meanwhile in Detroit, about 3,700 food and beverage and other workers at the city’s three casinos walked out on strike a few days after the Las Vegas action, demanding improved wages and working conditions.

Across the United States, the labor movement has gained strength in recent years. And while food system workers have historically been less organized than other industries, they are now more frequently using their collective power to push for demands that benefit workers.

In addition to higher wages, health care, and pensions, the Las Vegas culinary union is also fighting for a reduction of workload, expanded on-the-job safety protections including panic buttons to cut down on sexual harassment and assault by customers, and stronger technology protections that guarantee workers advanced notification if a new technology will be introduced that will affect their job, as well as health care and severance pay if they are laid off because of new technology.

While the picketing in early October was meant to apply pressure to the companies, union members have authorized their leaders to declare an active strike at any time. And with the Formula 1 Las Vegas Grand Prix race coming up in November, as well as numerous holiday festivities, a strike would cause challenges for the owners of many properties.

Pappageorge took a break from negotiations last week to explain what led to the latest action, how it fits into history, and what this picket line means for the labor movement across the country.

Ted Pappageorge, the culinary union’s secretary-treasurer, says massive corporations cannot leave their workers behind as they reap massive profits. (Photo courtesy of Culinary Workers Union Local 226)

What led up to workers picketing the Strip in early October?

We came through quite something during the pandemic. We were 25 percent back to work in 2020; 50 percent in 2021; and 80 percent back to work in 2022. Normally we were around 60,000 workers, around 50,000 dues-paying members in Las Vegas, and we leveled off around 40,000. The workers just didn’t come back.

It was for a few reasons. One was companies bringing in technology that eliminates jobs, and another was companies not bringing back workers and not having the same amount of service [but upping their prices]. Like you may not get your hotel room cleaned daily, but they’re still charging you rates that are 30 percent higher than what they were pre-pandemic. And now they have fewer workers doing more work.

All those things put together have given these companies incredible margins. I mean, the Las Vegas economy is on fire. Companies are setting incredible records. [But workers aren’t seeing corresponding improvements.] There are a lot of young people entering the workforce, and many ask, “How am I gonna own a home?” Forget about that. In Las Vegas, we’ve got this whole issue of Wall Street landlords buying up housing, buying up apartments, Airbnbs. Rents are up roughly 40 percent in the last three years. If you want to try to put your kids in college, or you’re mid-life, it’s harder and harder to get by. And if you’re nearing retirement, Social Security is extremely important, but it’s not enough.

These companies are on the wrong track. And we’re trying to push them to understand that time’s running out.

What about this moment has prompted the potential for strikes of these magnitudes?

This is not a Vegas phenomenon. It’s happening all over the country. To get through the pandemic, people did extra—they did more to save their own jobs, to help save the companies—everybody pitched in. But the pandemic made it very clear to workers that regardless of the sacrifices you make, you’re dispensable [in the eyes of the company]. And that’s the message that has come out of this—whether you’re a nurse, or you worked in a grocery store or a hotel.

These massive corporations have been merging and gaining power. Wall Street private equity influence is very powerful, and workers are fearful of being left behind. And that’s something that we see at our sister local in Detroit. We sent staff to help with the strike. Folks have really taken a hit after sacrificing during the pandemic, and there’s a lot of anger and nervousness about where these massive corporations are trying to go.

“We think service workers deserve to own their own homes and have health care, and to be able to take care of their kids.”

How does what’s happening in Las Vegas and Detroit fit into the larger landscape of food and beverage workers across the country?

The reality is a lot of our jobs across the country are poor people’s jobs when they’re not [connected to a] union. If you’re a server, you might do a little better than the cook. But restaurant jobs, room-cleaning jobs—if they’re not union, generally, it’s folks just getting by.

I was born and raised in Las Vegas. My parents worked in hotels. My grandfather worked in the food industry here. And a lot of us are like that. But the difference is we’ve been able to create a standard of living—through long, nasty strikes, really. We’ve been able to get health care and have job security in a restaurant or hotel, which normally doesn’t happen. We’ve been able to create jobs with security, health care, and pensions. We have a housing fund that helps people buy homes. We have a free legal services fund. What we’ve been able to do here is something that helps raise all boats.

The volume of workers here [has historically been very high]. Pre-pandemic, we [numbered] almost 65,000 with the bartender’s union, which is affiliated with us. Around the country, it’s a little different. But we think service workers deserve to own their own homes and have health care, and to be able to take care of their kids. And so our Culinary Workers Union—we’re part of Unite Here—is fighting and standing up and organizing.

The push for union protection is building across the U.S., including for food and farmworkers. What do you see as the biggest challenges confronting that movement?

I think companies have gotten addicted to these profit margins since the pandemic. These are massive corporations; they’re not mom-and-pop restaurants that we’re talking about. People look at MGM Resorts, Caesars Entertainment, or Wynn Resorts, and they get it, they’re all over the world. You have to be able to join together to have the power to beat them.

One of the big issues is the decline of the labor movement [in recent decades]. You’ve got to have scale to be able to take on these companies. It’s a romantic notion that workers can just get together and win against big corporations—it doesn’t happen. If you want to beat Starbucks, it’s not about 30 workers and a locally owned franchise. You’ve got to beat the corporation. Labor has got to say we’re going to put X amount of money and resources and manpower into working with non-union workers and organizing.

Culinary workers, bartenders, and hotel attendants strike in Las Vegas, Nevada, on October 12, 2023. (Photo courtesy of Culinary Workers Union Local 226)

How is this movement for food and beverage workers different from others you’ve seen in your 30-year career?

There’s this idea that in Vegas we’ve been able to succeed because it’s easier. It’s not; it’s tougher. These companies are massive. They’re extremely powerful. It’s like a steel mill town or a coal town. But we’ve been one of the fastest-growing local unions over the last 25 years across the country in a right-to-work state. In other words, legally workers don’t have to pay their union dues, and they would get all the union benefits that we negotiate.

I think there’s understanding now that we can do this, and so I’m very optimistic about that. But it takes real sacrifice and real commitment. If you look at all the polling, the favorability of unions and the idea of belonging to the union is at its highest peak in the last 30 years. And it’s not because unions are doing something different; it’s because workers are seeing the fact that these massive corporations are gonna leave them behind.

It’s going to take unions willing to lay down massive funding to support workers and then workers willing to risk their jobs, and risk their families—to go on strike. It’s a very serious decision. But if workers have a plan to win and are backed up by the labor movement, there is incredible opportunity right now.

What counts as a victory for the Culinary Union, and how could that shape the working conditions throughout the country?

If you win $10 an hour tomorrow, but you can still be replaced by technology and AI, then what do you have? Nothing.

After five years, we’ve got this protection that helps workers deal with technology. Throughout our industry, we’ve been sharing that, and we understand that other unions have been able to go in that same direction.

I think folks are ready to have that fight. In Las Vegas, we’re trying to send a message to these companies that it’s time. And if not, we’re going to have a strike deadline and we’ll end up joining our Detroit brothers and sisters on the picket line.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The post A Culinary Worker Strike Could Reshape the Nation’s Restaurants appeared first on Civil Eats.

Photo Essay: Montana Meat Producers Carve Their Own Paths

Wed, 25 Oct 2023 10:00:19 +0200

For Black Dog Farm in Livingston, Montana, the early COVID lockdowns were a boon for business.

“It’s undeniable that the pandemic had a huge positive effect on our business,” said co-owner Kira Jarosz. “We’re out of chicken every week.”

Over the last three years, Jarosz and her husband Tim Anthony have seen a massive uptick in demand for their locally raised chicken and pork. Last year, they ran out of retail chicken by December and had a gap of six months before their first slaughter date in June.

“I think the increased interest had already started, but the pandemic put fuel on the fire,” said Matt Skoglund, owner of North Bridger Bison in Wilsall, Montana. Skoglund harvested nearly a bison a week out in his pastures last year to meet consumer demand. (Photo credit: Anthony Pavkovich)

Despite the state’s $4 billion-plus agricultural economy, only 3 percent of the food Montanans eat is produced there, down from 70 percent in the 1950s, according to a 2022 report from Highland Economics. Operating within an increasingly consolidated and globalized market, most of Montana’s commodity crops—beef, wheat, barley, safflower, lentils, and chickpeas—get exported out of state.

Producers like Jarosz are working hard to change this figure by raising, slaughtering, and marketing their own meat. At the same time, they are bringing transparency to how meat is raised and brought to dinner tables throughout Montana.

“There are not many people, particularly around here, that are raising thousands of chickens,” Jarosz said. “There aren’t replicable systems for doing this.”

“When the pandemic first hit, we had a huge influx in demand,” said Jaimie Stoltzfus, owner of Cowgirl Meat Co. in McLeod, Montana. “At the same time, we hit a wall with processing.” Despite the increased demand for local food and transparency in the food system, Montana’s infrastructure limits when and where producers can harvest their animals. (Photo credit: Anthony Pavkovich)

Instead of selling to a big meat packer or corporate distributor, Black Dog Farm sells directly to consumers at farmers’ markets and several retailers, wholesale to restaurants, and through a community-supported agriculture (CSA) subscription program.

To meet the demand for local chicken, Black Dog Farm owners Kira Jarosz and Tim Anthony built their own processing facility that allows them to butcher up to 20,000 of their own birds a year.

With funding from the CARES Act administered through the Montana Department of Agriculture’s Montana Meat Processing Infrastructure grant, they are now able to process all their birds on site for local sale.

Lack of market competition in the meatpacking industry has driven the percentage that ranchers receive for every consumer dollar spent on beef in the grocery store down to 40.5 cents, according to federal data.

Four conglomerates control nearly all of the market for meat products across the United States: Cargill, Tyson Foods, JBS, and National Beef Packing. The meat processing industry has experienced significant consolidation over the last 50 years as these large conglomerates absorbed more and more small processors. In 1977, the largest four beef packing firms controlled approximately 25 percent of the market. Today, it’s around 82 percent.

While Montanans have enjoyed relatively low food prices, the consolidation of production has led to less food processing capacity in Montana; more reliance on processing outside of the state and distribution infrastructure; and a smaller portion of retail spending on food going back to the farmer or rancher.

In response, a growing number of producers in Montana are distributing their own meat. “We’ve got more local or regional processing happening so that it’s easier to get the meat into people’s hands nearby,” said Robin Kelson, the executive director of Alternative Energy Resource Organization, a nonprofit that works on sustainability and strengthening food systems in Montana. “It keeps money local, and it keeps jobs local.”

Left: Instead of trucking his bison to slaughter, Matt Skoglund drives out into the pasture and loads his rifle. Waiting for the herd to relax, he looks for the animal he’s going to harvest by reading ear tags with the animal’s age class and observing individual animals for size.

Right:”It’s definitely a bag of mixed emotions when I take animals to town,” said Jaimie Stoltzfus. “It’s never easy to drop them off knowing that I care about the animals, and they’re going to be harvested.” Stoltzfus and her family work with Pioneer Meats, 25 miles away in Big Timber, to process their beef for their own retail label that they sell to restaurants, grocery stores, and directly to consumers in their surrounding community.

However, even with more local processing options, most of the meat Montanans consume is imported to the state after being processed elsewhere, according to Highland Economics.

Montana is known for ranching. There are 2.5 million head of cattle in the state and just over 1 million people, or roughly 2.5 cattle for every person.

Jaimie Stolzfus and her husband Austin manage the P Bar Ranch in McLeod, beneath the towering Absaroka Range, a subrange of the Rocky Mountains. Instead of selling their beef through the conventional market, they started Cowgirl Meat Co. to sell directly to consumers, retailers, and restaurants to capture more of each retail dollar.

“When the pandemic hit, we had the animals outside our door [ready to slaughter], but it’s not easy calling up the processor to get some meat harvested this week or next week,” Stolzfus said. “I wasn’t the only one trying to get meat processed.”

Matt Skoglund harvested around 50 bison in 2022. Once he’s field-dressed the animal and it arrives at his processor, Amsterdam Meat Shop, Skoglund said he’s filled with contentment and satisfaction because he believes so strongly in his process. He’s proud he can give his animals a full life and a low-stress death.

The rancher takes her animals a short 25 miles to Pioneer Meats in Big Timber, where her beef is slaughtered and packaged under her own label. While she appreciates having this local option, the processor is running at nearly full capacity and squeezing in an extra animal when sales are good isn’t a guaranteed option. “We have to plan a year out,” she said.

Stolzfus said there aren’t enough processing facilities in Montana for the current demand from producers.

Not all ranchers in the state can process their meat nearby. During the early days of the pandemic, many were plagued with long wait times for processing, closed processors, and long drives to open facilities.

Left: Despite having a processor that she enjoys working with nearby, Jaimie Stoltzfus said that she has to plan a year out for harvest dates. This bottleneck in processing requires her to estimate how much meat she’ll need for the year and leads her to store meat in her company’s freezer in case she has an uptick in orders. This inflexibility is a constant source of anxiety because she can’t make quick adjustments to inventory.

Right: The butchering team with Warrior Meats can hang up to eight cows in the cooler section of its semi-trailer. Once the meat is transported back to its grocery store in Ashland, Montana, the meat will be aged, cut, packaged, and returned to the rancher. Adam Zimmer is excited to ultimately build a whole new facility that isn’t physically connected to the grocery store, which will provide more jobs on the reservation and let the staff process more animals for the community.

As a way to confront this challenge, Warrior Meat Company on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation bought a mobile meat processing trailer that can be towed from ranch to ranch on the reservation.

As part of the nonprofit Peoples Partners for Community Development (PPCD), Warrior Meat Company is providing processing to build food security for tribal members and the broader community. Associated with the recently opened Warrior Grocery in Ashland, the butchers from Warrior Meat Company process four to five animals a month for local ranchers and cut nonlocal beef for their fresh case at the grocery store.

“Ultimately, our goal is to build a whole facility that isn’t part of the grocery store and become USDA-certified,” said Adam Zimmer, PPCD’s business development specialist. “We want to provide more jobs and handle more animals.”

Left: “How many chickens can we reasonably process with our hands?” Kira Jarosz asked. To increase the amount of chicken they’re able to provide, Black Dog Farm would have to build a bigger facility and hire more staff. It’s an investment Jarosz and her husband Tim Anthony are unsure they can, or are willing to, make.

Right: “The nature of not having enough processing facilities for the demand in Montana is still an issue,” Jaimie Stoltzfus said. Though more ranchers are looking for options to harvest and sell their meat locally, less than 5 percent of cattle born in Montana are processed in the state.

USDA inspection would allow Warrior Meat Company to sell local beef in the retail case at the grocery store, guarantee an outlet for local ranchers, and keep more retail dollars circulating on the reservation.

At the base of the Bridger Mountains, north of Bozeman, in a wide expanse of grass and sagebrush, Matt Skoglund and his family raise a herd of bison for their meat business North Bridger Bison. Wanting to provide the lowest stress option to his animals, he has chosen to field-harvest his bison with a rifle out in the pasture. This way, his animals spend their entire lives on pasture and surrounded by the herd.

Left: “It’s such a rewarding feeling to personally deliver meat that we raised,” Jaimie Stoltzfus said. Besides selling online to individual customers, she sells ground beef to Town and Country, a grocery store in Livingston, Montana, for resale in their freezer section.

Center: Sixty percent of the meat Matt Skoglund has processed stays locally in his community. Due to Skoglund’s field harvesting process, he is only allowed to sell directly to his customers and not through retail outlets like grocery stores or to restaurants.

Right: “Jaimie’s beef flies off our shelf,” said Richard Good, who works behind the meat counter at Town and Country, a grocery store in Livingston, Montana. He’s seen a growing demand from customers for locally sourced meat.

“I experience a range of emotions leading up to the shot,” Skoglund said. “I have a lot of adrenaline and nervous energy, which I consider a good thing.”

“Every day I’m just so grateful for the people that show up at the markets or place online orders,” said Kira Jarosz. “We feel so supported.” Jarosz looks forward to continuing to grow her business and provide more meat to her community.

Out in the field, he kills, cleans, documents with photos, and loads each bison onto his flatbed truck so that he can deliver the animal for further processing at a licensed facility. Last year, he averaged a harvest of nearly one bison per week.

Around 60 percent of the meat Skoglund has processed stays in his community and he’s proud to deliver orders directly to his customers. He says this process builds long-term relationships with his customers that keep his business thriving, and it allows people to ask him questions about his methods, the meat industry, and how to prepare bison.

“Ultimately, it just feels wonderful to meet in person and deliver the meat,” he said. “I always drive away feeling really, really good.”

The post Photo Essay: Montana Meat Producers Carve Their Own Paths appeared first on Civil Eats.