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Farmers are urging the government to include hedge creation in its nature-friendly farming subsidy scheme in an attempt to increase biodiversity.Details about the post-Brexit replacement for the EU’s common agricultural policy have been scarce, with land managers simply told they would get payments for providing “public goods” such as protecting nature.More than 1,100 farmers surveyed by Farmers Weekly, on behalf of CPRE, the countryside charity, revealed a lack of funding was by far the biggest obstacle to planting and maintaining hedgerows.Wildlife and nature corridors are seen as the greatest benefit of hedgerows by almost nine in 10 farmers. Other perceived benefits include providing shelter or shade for crops or livestock and a home for pollinators and pest predators.About 70% of farmers said they would plant more hedgerows if they were given the right incentives by government, while 82% supported the idea of government-funded nature-friendly farming focusing on hedgerows to increase their quality and abundance.CPRE is calling for the government to adopt a target of 40% more hedgerows by 2050 to increase nature in the countryside, and to use the new payments system, the environment land management scheme (ELMs), to incentivise farmers to plant them.Tom Fyans, the interim chief executive of CPRE, said: “Farmers could not have been clearer about the value they place on hedgerows – they really care about supporting wildlife and nature on their land. The government needs to tap into their enthusiasm by using ELMs to provide simple, accessible schemes that support farmers to look after their hedgerows for everyone’s benefit.”A report on hedgerows, authored by the charity and published on Tuesday, suggests farmers could be incentivised to work together to create mosaics of hedges spanning multiple farms, providing valuable wildlife corridors. It found 94% of farmers had found barriers to planting hedgerows, such as the time and money involved, while 59% had created some in the past 10 years and intended to make more in the next five.Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones, a farmer and businessman, says hedgerows are multifunctional and add to the beauty of the countryside. Photograph: The Black Farmer/PAWilfred Emmanuel-Jones MBE, a farmer on the Devon-Cornwall border, said: “Historically, hedgerows were planted as a barrier or to mark a boundary between parcels of land or neighbouring properties, but they are so much more.“Sensitively managed, they are multifunctional and, for me, add to the beauty of the countryside. We all need to find ways to protect nature and the environment as we face the effects of climate change, and if increasing the extent of UK hedgerows by 40% by 2050 can be part of that change, it certainly has my vote and support.”Agriculture has historically been one of the largest drivers of biodiversity loss, with rivers polluted by slurry, forests cut down to graze livestock and produce animal feed, and hills stripped of their flora by sheep.Landowners told the environment secretary, Thérèse Coffey, last week that they were “running out of patience” because of delays to the funding scheme, with details about what farmers could do to increase their income taking years to emerge.Ministers said further information about the schemes would be announced in the new year. | Agriculture |
September 21, 2022 10:22 AM President Joe Biden will announce that the United States will provide $2.9 billion in humanitarian funding with the aim of alleviating a global food crisis. Biden is set to elaborate on the various investments during his Wednesday morning address before the United Nations General Assembly. The president and top administration officials have consistently pointed to the war in Ukraine, climate change, and complications sparked by the coronavirus pandemic as the major stressors on the global food supply. SULLIVAN: BIDEN TO ANNOUNCE 'ROBUST' NEW FOOD SECURITY COMMITMENTS AT UNGA The bulk of the U.S. commitments is happening at USAID, where $2 billion will be allocated to "help save lives in countries facing food security crises, including through food and nutrition assistance, healthcare, safe drinking water, protection for the most vulnerable, and other vital relief." Biden also plans to announce $140 million in new development funding for the U.S. government's Feed the Future program in sub-Saharan Africa, $220 million to set up eight "school feeding projects" in Africa and East Asia through the McGovern-Dole International Food for Education and Child Nutrition Program, $178 million for the Department of Agriculture's Food For Progress program aimed at facilitating "climate-smart agriculture" and trade in Central America, and a $245 million Accelerated Growth Corridors project in Malawi. National security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters Tuesday that Biden will additionally call on countries for the elimination of "export bans and of hoarding so that there is a better supply of food to the world market and overall prices come down." CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER "Because the impacts of climate change on the agricultural land of many countries in many parts of the world is significant and severe, and through some combination of technology and adaptation, we believe we can help protect that land so that we can continue to get the level of food production necessary to reduce global food insecurity," Sullivan added. "He'll speak to all of those things, both with leaders in New York and he will have a robust section of his speech devoted to global food security as well." | Agriculture |
Australian beef and veal exports slumped to a 19-year low in 2022 as farmers rebuilt livestock numbers after years of wild weather, inflationary pressures and labour shortages.Total beef exports reached just 854,592 tonnes in 2022; the lowest they have been since 2003, when mad cow disease caused a substantial reduction in exports to Asian markets.A Meat and Livestock Australia spokesperson told Guardian Australia the decline was due to low slaughter numbers and not decreased demand. They predicted exports would lift in 2023 as the national cattle herd was rebuilt.“The low beef production in 2022 was a result of the national herd rebuild – as producers held on to stock to repopulate their farms rather than getting them processed,” the MLA said. “As a result that national cattle herd is growing in size.” Sign up to receive Guardian Australia’s fortnightly Rural Network email newsletter The Australian agriculture department in its December commodities report forecast a 5% reduction in beef export volumes in 2022-2023 compared with 2021-2022 due to high cattle prices, wet conditions and a limited capacity at processing facilities due to labour shortages.Rabobank’s animal proteins analyst, Angus Gidley-Baird, said forecasts suggested there would be a substantial increase in beef exports in the second half of 2023 as the reconstruction cycle came to fruition.“If we’re not producing more, it’s a bit hard to export any more,” he said.“We had some very dry periods back in 2015 and 2016. Then there was a slight reprieve through 2017 and then 2018 and 2019 were dry again, which caused a large sell-off of cattle.“Since 2020, we’ve had some fairly good seasons. And people have just been rebuilding numbers. So we haven’t had the livestock numbers to generate the production. And, as a result, our export numbers have been declining from those high levels.”However, he warned that labour shortages could restrict production growth. The agriculture industry, particularly meat processors, have faced shutdowns and slowed production due to a lack of staff. Last month the agriculture minister, Murray Watt, announced an expansion of the Pacific Australia labour mobility scheme in an attempt to attract more workers to food processing plants, but industry bodies have warned that will spread an already thin workforce even thinner.Gidley-Baird said, if not dealt with, workforce problems could compound as beef production and herd sizes increased.“We’ve probably been fortunate that these difficult labour situations have come at a time when we haven’t been pushing the envelope in terms of our volumes and numbers,” he said.Gidley-Baird added that increased international competition, primarily from the United States, had likely contributed to the lower exports to markets like Japan, where exports were down 8.3%. The high price of Australian beef compared with the US product may have played a role.However, he said that higher price point, which reflected higher quality, was a boon in some markets: there was a 7% increase in beef exports to China, where more expensive cuts are prized. “Our export numbers depend on the type of product we’re producing,” Gidley-Baird said. “There’s the beef trimmings that are demanded in the United States, And then there’s high quality marbled, Angus/Wagyu grain-fed products and that’s what Japan and China are looking for.“There’s been a higher dominance of the latter in our production recently, because we just don’t have a lot of old cows being killed. But, as our herd rebuilds, we will increase our production of that leaner product.” | Agriculture |
There are just two actions needed to prevent catastrophic climate breakdown: leave fossil fuels in the ground and stop farming animals. But, thanks to the power of the two industries, both aims are officially unmentionable. Neither of them has featured in any of the declarations from the 26 climate summits concluded so far.Astonishingly, the sectors themselves are seldom mentioned. I’ve worked through every final agreement produced by the summits since they began. Fossil fuels are named in only six of them. Just one hints at using less overall: the others propose only to improve efficiency (which, as we have known since the 19th century, can often paradoxically increase fossil fuel use), attempt technical fixes or, in the case of last year’s agreement in Glasgow, phase down “unabated” coal burning, while saying nothing about reducing oil or gas. Not one of them suggests extracting less. If fossil fuels are removed from the ground, they will be used, regardless of governments’ vague declarations about consumption.The other omission is even starker. Livestock is mentioned in only three agreements, and the only action each of them proposes is “management”. Nowhere is there a word about reduction. It’s as though nuclear non-proliferation negotiators had decided not to talk about bombs. You cannot address an issue if you will not discuss it.The call to stop farming animals should be as familiar as the call to leave fossil fuels in the ground. But it is seldom heard. Livestock farming, a recent paper in the journal Sustainability estimates, accounts for between 16.5% and 28% of all greenhouse gas pollution. The wide range of these figures is an indication of how badly this issue has been neglected. As the same paper shows, the official figure (14.5%), published by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, is clearly wrong. Everyone in the field knows it, yet few attempts have been made to update it.Even if the minimum number (16.5%) applies, this is greater than all the world’s transport emissions. And it is growing fast. In the 20 years to 2018, global meat consumption rose by 58%. A paper in Climate Policy estimates that, by 2030, greenhouse gases from livestock farming could use half the world’s entire carbon budget, if we want to avoid more than 1.5C of global heating.An analysis by Our World in Data shows that even if greenhouse gas pollution from every other sector were eliminated today, by 2100 food production will, on its current trajectory, bust the global carbon budget two or three times over. This is largely because of animal farming, which accounts for 57% of greenhouse gases from the food system, though it provides just 18% of the calories.This issue has become even more urgent now we know the heating impact of methane is rising. Livestock farming is the world’s greatest source of methane released by human activities. Yet there is no mention of it in the global methane pledge launched at last year’s climate summit.Governments have not ignored these issues by accident; they have resolutely looked away. A new analysis for Chatham House finds that only 12 nations name emissions from farm animals in their official climate commitments, and none seeks to reduce livestock production. Only two nations (Costa Rica and Ethiopia) mention dietary change: arguably the most important of all environmental actions, as animal farming is also the world’s greatest cause of habitat destruction and wildlife loss.What accounts for this determined silence? I think there are several reasons. The livestock sector’s cultural power greatly outweighs its economic power. Our connection to food is more personal than our connection to energy sources. Most fossil fuel is consumed at a distance. When we use electricity, for example, we don’t think about where it comes from, as long as the lights stay on. But we think and feel a great deal about the food we eat. And, by comparison with the denial sponsored by the fossil fuel industry, the misleading claims of the livestock industry have scarcely been challenged in the media.A scandal broke last week about an academic centre at the University of California, Davis, which turns out to have been founded and funded by livestock lobby groups. It has downplayed the impact of livestock farming, in ways that other scientists have described as highly misleading.But this is just one aspect of the problem. Like the fossil fuel industry, livestock corporations have been ploughing money into public persuasion, using tactics first developed by tobacco companies. Some of this greenwashing has been highly effective, especially the industry’s claims about “regenerative ranching” and the false assertion that pasture-fed meat farming sequesters more greenhouse gases than it releases.In reality, grass-fed meat is by far the most damaging component of our diets, as a result of its massive land requirement, greenhouse gas emissions, and carbon and ecological opportunity costs. Despite a plethora of claims, there is no empirical evidence that carbon storage in grazing land can compensate for the greenhouse gases livestock produce, let alone for the carbon stocks destroyed when wild ecosystems are converted to pasture.A paper in Nature Sustainability found that if permanent livestock pasture in just the rich nations were returned to wild ecosystems, their recovery would draw down 380bn tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, equivalent to 12 years of global carbon emissions. The UK government’s Climate Change Committee reports that, in England, “transitioning from grassland to forestland would increase the soil carbon stock by 25 tonnes of carbon per hectare … This is additional to the large amounts of carbon that would be stored in the biomass of the trees themselves.”Slowly and painfully we have become energy-numerate. Large numbers of people have begun to “do the math” on fossil fuel emissions. Now we need to become food-numerate. An extraordinary feature of this debate is that when you present data, your opponents respond with pictures, generally bucolic images of cows or sheep.Popular food writing is dominated by a disastrous combination of aesthetics and elite tastes. Famous authors propose that everyone eats the food that they like, promoting diets that couldn’t be scaled unless we had several planets and no space on any of them for wild ecosystems. They urge us to use a Neolithic production system (grazing) to feed a 21st-century population, with catastrophic results.We urgently need to put these foolish things aside, to follow and understand the science, and press our governments to focus on the major causes of the climate crisis. They had two jobs, and have so far mentioned neither of them. George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist | Agriculture |
Verdant Robotics
With 50 spray nozzles and a sophisticated computer system, tractors out in California’s central valley are towing artificially-intelligent robots behind them that look set to launch a fourth revolution in agriculture.
Passing over a field they can specifically target individual weeds and crops at a rate of 20 per second, before blasting them with either de-weeder or fertilizer within a millimeter of accuracy.
Verdant Robotics’ SprayBox robot can identify and treat 500,000 plants per hour while using 95% less chemical weedkiller.
Physically mobile robots are already probably more common on big farms than in most other sectors of the economy, but Verdant Robotics feel this is as much a step backwards as forwards.
“Increasingly folks are turning towards things like cover-cropping again, and inter-cropping and other regenerative agriculture techniques that allow us to keep the soil healthy,” said Gabe Siblev, Founder and CEO of Verdant Robotics, in a little mini-doc about their new technology.
“The challenges there have been that it’s difficult to do this at the same sort of scale that we can do monocropping, which is how we feed the world.”
But their robots have a party piece that could create a breakthrough—traditional management techniques that keep the soil healthier, produce more nutritious food and protect the environment, but at the scale currently enjoyed by monocropping.
SIMILAR: New John Deere Tractors Plow Day and Night With No One in the Cab: Autonomous Farming Debuts in 2022
The party piece is that when robots like the SprayBox identify a plant, they don’t simply fire and forget. Rather they’re actively building a centimeter-by-centimeter map of the whole field, complete with the geolocation and ID of every plant therein. This kind of mass data collection is thought to be key to making regenerative agriculture possible at a wide scale, where large numbers of workers would have to be employed otherwise.
“Ironically, it’s kind of returning to how we farmed you know, 100 years ago. Unlocking knowledge that a lot of older growers have, and bringing it back through technology,” said Siblev.
RELATED: Leaving No Molecule Behind: ‘Landfill of the Future’ Turns Farming Waste Into Soaps, Compost, and Candles
The labor shortage of farm workers is one of the reasons that a robotics company is targeting agriculture; another reason is to drastically cut the amount of chemical sprays that can impact our waterways and health.
In a 2019 California Farm Bureau Federation survey, 56% of participating farmers indicated that they had difficulty hiring the number of employees they needed for production of their main crop.
WATCH the mini-doc here… SHARE This Awesome Robotic Farmer With Your Friends… | Agriculture |
Fans of three-egg omelets and bacon-egg-and-cheese sandwiches have more to worry about than just high cholesterol. The wholesale price of a dozen eggs has more than quadrupled year over year, and some experts warn the prices are unlikely to decrease anytime soon.Egg prices peaked during the holiday season, hurting smaller grocery chains that can't compete with larger chains and leading to price increases for restaurants and other small businesses, experts said. The price increase in eggs also comes as the cost of most foods have increased significantly, putting a strain on grocery shoppers and small business owners alike.Caption: The most affordable carton of 12 eggs at the Gristedes supermarket above cost over $5, while larger supermarkets like Whole Foods can undercut smaller competitors with $3 cartoons.ABC News"I've been here 50 years, I have never seen anything like that with control of prices, maybe with Carter in the 70s," said Gus Benetos, the owner of Manhattan's Westside Restaurant.Urner Barry, a company that publishes the "fair market price" for items like eggs, meat, and plant proteins, set the wholesale trade value for a dozen "midwest large" eggs at 89 cents on Dec. 22, 2021. A year later, the price for a dozen eggs skyrocketed to $5.46, according to Karyn Rispoli, the editor of Urner Barry's Egg Price Current. The price beat the previous record high of $3.09 during the pandemic."We blew that previous high, way out of the water," Rispoli said.The wholesale trade value for standard grocery-store eggs increased exponentially in 2022, peaking over five dollars during the holiday season.Via Urner BarySince the holiday peak, Rispoli noted that the egg market has since "corrected" to $4.33 on Jan. 10, mainly due to decreased demand following the holiday season. However, with the avian flu outbreak still impacting U.S. poultry farmers, Rispoli said the price will likely remain high for now.Outbreaks of highly pathogenic avian influenza have killed nearly 40 million hens since February 2021, five percent of the U.S. chicken flock, according to a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Egg production has also declined by 4 percent since 2021, the spokesperson said.Mark Sauder, the CEO of Sauder Eggs, one of the country's largest family-owned egg wholesalers, said he believes most significant factor impacting business is avian flu."This particular strain or this particular outbreak seems to be lasting longer," he said.While the wholesale price has steadily increased, consumers have felt the delayed impact of the price increase due to a few factors unique to eggs.First, the demand for eggs in the short term is inelastic, according to Dartmouth College economics professor Bruce Sacerdote. Their status as a low cost, staple item in the grocery store, and a necessity in many recipes and diets lead many consumers to continue buying eggs in the short term despite price increases.The USDA spokesperson said eggs are still one of the most competitively priced proteins in the grocery store compared to other animal proteins. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in November a yearly 10 percent increase in the overall cost of food."It has gone up, but as a percentage relative to the other spend of my food, it's like it hasn't been that impactful," Leonard Chung, a Manhattan grocery shopper, said about the cost of eggs.Second, according to Rispoli, many grocery stores use a "loss leader" tactic, artificially lowering the price of eggs to attract consumers. Grocery stores recover losses when shoppers buy other items with a higher profit margin. According to the USDA, a 12-pack of brown grade-A eggs cost $3.99 on average for consumers on the week of Dec. 23, while the wholesale cost was significantly higher."Even as the market was rising rather dramatically, consumers weren't always seeing those prices at the consumer level grocery stores," Rispoli said.Sharmilla Dabieden, a resident of Queens who traveled to Whole Foods in Tribeca for lower egg prices, was one of the beneficiaries of this pricing approach. After seeing eggs advertised at roughly $3.29, she loaded her cart with three cartons of eggs."We need eggs, so this is why I'm shopping around, and I look online to see where I can get the cheapest," Dabieden said.Sharmilla Dabieden grabs three cartons of eggs from Whole Foods, traveling into Tribeca from Queens for the more affordable prices.ABC NewsAccording to Rispoli, the price increase in eggs is beginning to become apparent to consumers despite these two factors.While prices cool, small businesses will feel the impact of the price hike alongside consumers."Smaller independent chains, regional chains, you know, they've struggled to be able to offer those same kinds of discounts, and so they've really taken a hit in terms of their sales numbers," Rispoli noted.At the Westside Restaurant, the archetype of a Greek diner in Manhattan, the cost of eggs and food has tightened profit margins. Benetos said that one case of eggs – 30 dozen eggs – has increased from $90 to $160 over a few months, and other food costs have risen by 30 to 40 percent, leading to price increases across the menu. His son Nikos Benetos noted that they priced a recent daily special - a feta cheese, broccoli, and tomato omelet - at over $19.With food prices increasing overall by 30-40 percent, the Westside Restaurant hangs a copy of their menu on a window rather than permanently mounting it; it’s easier that way for when prices change according to the owner.ABC NewsAt a coffee cart on the Upper West Side, employee Santi Sayago said egg prices increased by 150 percent over six months, making it difficult to turn a 50-cent profit on a bacon-egg-and-cheese sandwich.Abi Coffey, a manager at chain Think Coffee, noted that they have increased the price of egg sandwiches by a dollar over the last year, leading to customer complaints.According to Sacerdote, when consumers begin to recognize the price hike at the grocery store, it might validate concerns about inflation."I think that is probably how people get a notion of how bad inflation is when they get their fuel bill for their home, the gas bill for their car, and their food bill," Sacerdote said.While costs have decreased recently, experts say it might take months for the prices to return to normal levels fully."Whether it's going to continue into 2023; obviously, I don't have a crystal ball, but all signs point to yes," Rispoli said. | Agriculture |
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Companies creating lab-grown steak, chicken, and fish see a recent White House announcement as a signal that meat grown without animal slaughter is on the cusp of being legally sold and eaten in the US.
“We are laser focused on commercial-scale production, and for us, that means moving into competing with conventional meat products in scale,” said Eric Schulze, vice president of product and regulation at Upside Foods, a cultivated meat company, as the industry calls itself. The goal is to be selling its meat on the US market within the year.
The traditional meat and poultry industry reacted strongly to President Joe Biden’s executive order last month on biotechnology and biomanufacturing, which observers say could push federal agencies to allow commercial sales of meat grown from an animal’s cells.
“It’s a slap in the face to cow-calf producers and farmers across the land,” said Don Schiefelbein, president of the trade group National Cattlemen’s Beef Association.
The world’s first commercially available lab-grown chicken nuggets were sold just two years ago in Singapore. That’s still the only country where meat grown artificially from animal cells is eaten. But startups and a few established food companies in the US say they have products ready to go; companies in Israel are close to bringing theirs to market; and China signaled it could allow lab-grown meat sales within the next five years. Lab-grown meat producers say their food can limit carbon emissions and agricultural runoff endemic to the livestock industry, virtually eliminate animal slaughter—and create meat that is genetically identical to food Americans are used to eating from cows, chickens, pigs, and fish.
But farmers and ranchers question whether the food should even be classified as meat.
“It should be differentiated somehow, some way, so that the consumer can know whether they’re consuming something that was grown on a farm or ranch—or something that was grown in a petri dish,” said Lia Biondo, an associate at Western Skies Strategies, a public relations and lobbying firm that works with the US Cattlemen’s Association and other agriculture groups.
Read More: Is Beef the New Coal? Climate-Friendly Eating Is on the Rise
How It Works
In marketing alternative proteins, plant-based meat has shown just how important labeling can be. Impossible Foods, which reported last year that its fourth-quarter retail revenue soared by 85%, made its name by selling plant-based “burgers,” “sausages,” and “pork.” And like cultured meat companies, Impossible defended itself against a cattlemen’s group that tried to get meat-specific terms banned on its labels.
Lab-grown meat is genetically meat, not plant protein packaged in a patty to mimic the look and taste of beef or chicken.
The process for growing cultivated meat varies by company and the type of meat, but the steps are similar: collect an animal’s cell samples, place them in a bioreactor, feed the cells, and harvest them after they multiply into meat.
Starter cells can be sourced from a living animal using a biopsy, and “banked” to eventually start multiple growth processes. Each bioreactor needs starter cells, so companies tend to keep a bank of cell lines on hand to draw from as needed.
The cells are fed nutrients including vitamins and amino acids. They then multiply, and ultimately grow into the animal muscles and tissues consumers know as meat. Photographer: Nicholas Yeo/AFP via Getty Images
Lab-grown chicken displayed on Dec. 22, 2020, in Singapore, the first country to allow sale of meat created without animal slaughter. For California-based Upside Foods, which was founded in 2015 and calls itself the world’s first cultivated meat company, growing chicken starts with a master bank of cell lines, which are thawed for about a week before going into a bioreactor, or “cultivator.” Cells begin to duplicate and are fed a growth medium that contains glucose, vitamins, and other nutrients needed to keep them alive and reproducing, which generally takes one to two weeks.
Upside has patented cultivators designed to grow a whole cut chicken. Many other lab-grown meat companies use scaffolding, an edible surface where cells can reproduce. For Upside, the differentiation into specialized muscle and fat tissues lasts for anywhere from a few days to two weeks, depending on the type of chicken.
After three to five days of formulation and packaging, Upside’s chicken is consumer-ready. It doesn’t look like a leg or a wing, but is biologically identical to farm-raised chicken meat, and can be shaped into things like boneless chicken “breast” or chicken nuggets. Upside says it tastes the same, too.
Upside says its chicken can be harvested after as little as two weeks. A live chicken in an industrial farm, in contrast, is typically killed after six weeks at the earliest. While lab growth timelines vary based on the type of meat and the producer, companies like Upside point out that their process can be more efficient than traditional chicken. While most of the hundred or so companies getting into the business in the US are startups, JBS SA, the world’s largest meat producer, is investing $100 million in cultivated meat. It has acquired cultivated meat startup Biotech Foods, and has a research and development center for cultivated protein in Brazil, and a pilot facility in Spain.
See Also: JBS Closes US Plant-Based Unit Amid Sluggish Faux-Meat Sales
Federal Regulation
The US doesn’t yet allow selling meat that isn’t cut from a once-living animal, but in 2018 the Food and Drug Administration and the Agriculture Department agreed to share regulation of the eventual market. What that looks like in reality is still unclear.
The Agriculture Department last year issued an advanced notice of proposed rulemaking on the labeling of cultivated meat and poultry products, and granted $10 million to create a center for excellence in cellular agriculture at Tufts University.
An FDA spokesperson said the agency and USDA will “continue to work in collaboration to develop more detailed procedures to facilitate coordination of our shared regulatory oversight, including developing coordinated labeling principles for livestock/poultry and seafood products made from cultured animal cells. We cannot speculate about the timing of market entry.”
The USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, too, said the agency is working on developing a labeling rule, but can’t yet comment on a timeline.
Once the food is legal for sale, the FDA will regulate the collection of animal cells, while the Agriculture Department will oversee packaging and processing of the final meat products.
“But they still are trying to figure out exactly how that breakdown looks, and I think it’s going to be clunky for companies when they have to go through it,” said Emily Broad Leib, a founding director at the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic.
Deepti Kulkarni, a lawyer at Covington & Burling LLP who’s worked on food regulation, had a similar reaction. “How is that going to work in practice?” she said of the shared regulatory framework. “They’ve already signaled that that requires more details.”
What’s Meat, Exactly?
A Dutch pharmacologist premiered the first lab-grown burger patty in 2013—at a cost of more than $300,000. Startups are now fine-tuning lab-grown meatballs, sausages, steaks, fish—and even foie gras —which they say will eventually be price competitive with farm-raised meat.
Read More: Lab-Grown Foie Gras Receives France’s Support, Tastes Delicious
An open question is how consumers will be able to tell the difference. Photographer: STR/AFP via Getty Images
Dishes made with cultured meat are seen ahead of an exhibition in Hangzhou, China, on Sept. 11, 2019. The US Cattlemen’s Association wants terms like “meat” and “beef” reserved for food from slaughtered animals, and submitted a petition to the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, the agency’s enforcement arm, to ban the terms in lab-grown products. While it was denied, the agency is still deciding what this slaughterless meat can be called.
The lab-grown meat industry largely agrees their products should be labeled differently from traditional meat, contending that customers will want to choose their meat for the climate benefits and novelty. For many in the business, the preferred term is “cultivated” meat, which they see as as transparent but not unappetizing.
“We need to build trust with consumers that way,” said Denneal Jamison-McClung, the director of the UC Davis Biotechnology Program, speaking at the school’s recent Cultivated Meat and Alternative Proteins Summit.
To contact the reporter on this story: Maeve Sheehey in Washington at msheehey@bloombergindustry.com
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Anna Yukhananov at ayukhananov@bloombergindustry.com; Gregory Henderson at ghenderson@bloombergindustry.com
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CHICAGO, Dec 1 (Reuters) - Soaring grain and livestock prices are expected to push U.S. farm incomes to a historic high this year, as producers benefit from strong global grain and oilseed demand amid tight supplies, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported on Thursday.Net farm income - which is a broad measure of profits in the agricultural economy, according to the agency - is forecast to increase to $160.5 billion in 2022 from $141.0 billion a year earlier, an increase of $19.5 billion.Much of the growth in the crop sector came from sales of corn, soybeans and wheat, the agency said, noting that livestock cash sales receipts were also expected to jump nearly 31% to $256.0 billion.In inflation-adjusted 2022 dollars, net farm income would be at its highest level since 1973 and net cash farm income at its highest level on record, the agency said.The difference between net cash farm income and net farm income is based on how the agency accounts for farm income.Net cash income is recorded in the year a commodity such as corn, soybeans or pork is sold. Net farm income is for the year it was produced, and factors in such things as depreciation of assets, including farm equipment.Production costs are up sharply, too, the agency reported. Nearly all categories of expenses are forecast to be higher in 2022 in nominal terms, the agency said, with feed and fertilizer, lime and other soil-related input purchases expected to see the largest dollar increases.Fuel and oil expenses are forecast to see the highest percentage increase - up 47.4% to $20.5 billion - followed closely by interest expenses, up 41% to $27.4 billion.Farm debt in nominal terms is forecast to increase 5.9% this year over last - but fall 0.4% when adjusted for inflation.(This story has been corrected to fix 2021 net farm income figure in paragraph 2)Reporting By P.J. Huffstutter in Chicago; Editing by Mark PorterOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. | Agriculture |
Image caption, Farmer Felix Pangibitan posted a video about his rice cropsFelix Pangibitan runs his hands through what is left of his precious rice crop.The stalks in nearly two-thirds of the field are bent double; most are flattened, others have been snapped at the neck by strong typhoon winds which reached more than 150mph (241km/h)."It looks so pitiful," he says in a video which has now gone viral across the Philippines."It's a waste. It's so hard to be a farmer."It's a loss both Felix and the country can ill afford - especially this year, as food costs have soared to alarming levels.His farm in Nueva Ecija on the main island of Luzon was one of thousands in the path of a powerful storm which hit the country's so-called "Rice Bowl". More than $22m (£18.2m) worth of crops were destroyed in 24 hours."I can't remember all the typhoons and their names but this has been the most heartbreaking one yet," he told us.His simple heartfelt videos struck a chord across the Philippines, especially among the poorest communities which have been hit by multiple crises.As in much of the world, the price of food, fuel and fertiliser have all increased here since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February. But the Philippines is particularly vulnerable. It has to import food - including rice and all cereals such as wheat - to feed its growing population, making it one of the most food-insecure countries in Asia.Image caption, Filipino farmers grow rice but some has to be importedAnd as Felix can testify, even the food the Philippines does grow is far from guaranteed in a country which is the most disaster-prone in the world.Typhoons batter the islands with growing frequency and severity. There have been a total of 16 severe storms this year which have destroyed or partially damaged more than $225m (£186m) worth of agricultural land, according to the latest figures from the Department of Agriculture. This country may need more farmers to feed them, but farmers are already struggling to feed themselves. More than two million people who rely on farming are living below the poverty line."Our situation right now is the hardest so far," said Felix, who's been farming for 30 years."The price of goods has increased, along with fertilisers and fuel. Meanwhile, the price of our crops has stayed the same for decades. It means what we harvest is worthless."Philippines President Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos Jr has appointed himself as minister for agriculture and promised to get the country growing again. But even he has admitted that inflation is running "rampant and out of control" mostly due to rising food costs.Last month's 8% inflation rate is the highest recorded since November 2008, when it soared to 9.1% - and it's hitting ordinary Filipino families hard.Forty-one-year-old Mary Ann Escarda pushes her squeaky cart through a maze of dark back alleys in the capital Manila every morning before dawn. She sells bread rolls known as pandesal to commuters, which earns her around $4 a day - just under the minimum wage in the Philippines. Her husband also brings home a salary. But even their combined income is not enough to feed their four children."To save food, I have put the children on a diet. We used to eat three times a day but now we only eat lunch and dinner," she told us as she gave one of her children the last of the powdered milk.She lives in a small house with 17 members of her family to keep costs low.She's also facing a dilemma. The prices of ingredients for her rolls have gone up. "I can't increase the price to sell them because my loyal customers can't afford that change. They won't buy from me any more if I do."I don't know what will happen later - maybe next month when the prices increase, we won't be able to eat. No matter how hard you work, if the prices are just going up, then it's basically nothing."Mary's family is by no means an exception. Malnutrition is widespread as the number of Filipinos who cannot afford a healthy diet is rising, according to the Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2022 report. More than a quarter of children under five in the Philippines suffer from stunted growth, the World Food Programme says.This is a resilient country - people do what they can to survive.But experts believe millions more will face hunger and malnutrition if prices continue to rise.Image caption, Many children in the Philippines suffer from stunted growth due to poor nutrition"We are a very patient people," says Fermin Adriano, a former policy adviser at the Department of Agriculture."We will always find a way to cope. But that will change if rice becomes unaffordable. In the minds of the ordinary people - if there's no rice, there is already hunger."We can do without sugar, or pork, or white onions. But if there are rice shortages or it becomes hugely unaffordable, then that is the beginning of a real disaster."And for the poor, the food crisis is like a plague that hits all their family members, particularly the young ones."A crisis is hard to detect as dazzling Christmas lights twinkle across Metro Manila. It is one of the biggest holidays of the year and celebrations start as early as September. The effects of spending now may be felt in the leaner months in early 2023.President Marcos has approved the extension of reduced tariffs for vital food imports to the end of next year. He also talks of his "dream" that rice will one day sell for 20 pesos (around $0.36) per kilo.Subsidies may help in the short term, but it's clear that if the Philippines is to one day grow enough food to feed its own people, it will need more farmers.And persuading the next generation to grow crops when they've watched the losses experienced by the current one could be difficult."Do you think we want our children to work in the fields when we experience earning nothing?" said Felix."There needs to be a huge change. All politicians say they love the agriculture industry, but we can't feel it." | Agriculture |
The industry that overwhelmingly uses the most water resources in the West does so for good reason: to provide sustenance for the rest of the country.Globally, the agriculture sector uses 70% of all freshwater withdrawals. In California, that number is ever higher -- at 80% of the state's public water supply -- and farmers are being forced to transform the way they cultivate crops as megadrought that has been plaguing the region for decades intensifies.California is the nation's fruit and vegetable basket and grows hundreds of commodities. But about a third of that water is used to grow just three crops: almonds, pistachios and walnuts -- industries that amounted to about $9.5 billion in exports in 2020 -- nearly half of the state's total, according to the California Department of Food and Agriculture. Almonds, which use about 1.1 gallons of water to grow just one nut, according to Pennsylvania State University, and account for about 10% of the state's water use alone, Arohi Sharma, deputy director of regenerative agriculture for the Natural Resource Defense Council, a nonprofit, told ABC News.As a warming planet threatens to worsen drought and heat conditions in the West, farmers may be called to grow the crops that will be most resilient in the changing climate, Sharma said. That could include lessening the amount of land and water dedicated to "thirsty nut orchards," she said.In this April 25, 2022, file photo, farm workers plant Novavine drought-resistant grapevines at a farm in Woodland, Calif.Fred Greaves/Reuters, FILEPlanting nut trees at the height of the droughtTree nuts are an extremely valuable crop, with growers making a "pretty penny" by selling them, Sharma said. Out of California's $20.8 billion in in agriculture exports in 2020, three of the five most common exports were almonds, pistachios and walnuts, data from the California Department of Food and Agriculture shows.In addition, the almonds are shelf-stable for about two years, Richard Waycott, president and CEO of the Almond Board of California, told ABC News in an email.Using figures from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Sharma calculated that during the height of the last drought, between 2012 and 2017, farmers planted more than half a million acres of new nut trees. Sharma believes the additional plantings were a result in the rise in value of the commodity, combined with the lack of legislation in California that bars farmers from planting drought-intolerant food crops."And without limits or caps on water use, growers will take whatever water they save to simply plant new nut orchards," Sharma said, adding that it will ultimately be government oversight and the implementation of new policies to force the agriculture industry to conserve water.Those almonds, pistachios and walnut groves have now grown to more than 2 million acres of land in California -- out of the state's 43 million acres used for farming -- creating a "disconnect" between the availability of water and the number of acres that are being planted with "these water thirsty, drought intolerant crops," she said. California almonds had two record shipments in 2020 and 2021, with "steady, significant growth in the years before," Waycott said.In this March 22, 2022, file photo, a farmer riding a tractor cleans out the weeds in an old vine zinfandel vineyard on March 22, 2022, near Healdsburg, Calif. After record winter rainfall battered the North Coast last year in October and December, Mother Nature's water spigot went dry with January, February, and March the driest period on record.George Rose/Getty Images, FILECalifornia, with its Mediterranean climate, is one of the five places on Earth where almonds "can grow at any scale," Waycott said. The almond industry has been working for decades on making the industry as sustainable as possible, he added, including the development of micro-irrigation now used on 85% of almond orchards in the state, compared to pre-1982 practices that involved flooding the fields or using large sprinklers.Almond farmers in California have since reduced the amount of water needed to grow each almond by 33% and is committed to another 20% reduction by 2025, Waycott said."While almond farmers have made strides on irrigation efficiency, further improvements are underway," Waycott said.Reducing water while sustaining crop outputThe challenge will be to reduce some of the agricultural land devoted to these crops and make the farms sustainable so they may continue providing jobs and food for the rest of the country, Pablo Ortiz, climate and waters scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told ABC News. In California's Central Valley, the low-flow drip irrigation technology that was implemented by farmers there did not save water in the end because they instead used the conserved water to cultivate more crops, Ortiz said."So, this deployment of technologies needs to be contained by some other policies that would allow you to actually reduce water usage," he said, instead of using conserved water for other purposes.The agriculture industry is one of the many sectors in California that are suffering from an antiquated water sector, experts say.The infrastructure and business models, many implemented in the 1900s, were not created with the forecast of climate change or water shortages. The system of water rights, or legal rights to extract and use a quantity of water from a natural source based on where the property is located, as well as policies such as the California State Water Project and the Central Valley Water Project, which collect water from rivers and redistribute it to cities through a network of aqueducts provide an advantage to some, Sharma said."And now we're facing the repercussions of these very old inequitable water rights systems and water infrastructure," Sharma said.The upshot is that farmers, especially longtime landholders are prioritized over other water customers, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council.In this April 25, 2022, file photo, farm workers plant Novavine drought-resistant grapevines at a farm in Woodland, Calif.Fred Greaves/Reuters, FILEDecentralizing water a potential solutionRobert Bartrop, head of global business development for SOURCE Global, a company that builds custom solutions for water needs, told ABC News he envisions a future in which the water industry decentralizes, in a way similar to the telecommunications and energy industries. In that case, investments would be made to redesign the grids to more efficiently distribute water.In order to prepare for a future with less water, California, and the West as a whole, will also need to transform its water usage in a way that invests and supports its agriculture industry, Sharma said.Part of this entails ending the practice of massive single crop farming, which depletes the soil of nutrients, Sharma added.Instead of growing one or two crops over thousands of acres, farmers are starting to grow a variety in 20-acre tracts to protect the health of the soil and prevent erosion, which will make it so farmers, including those who are reliant on the cultivation of tree nuts, are less reliant on one income stream as well, she added.Farmers will also need to adapt new regenerative solutions, such as building soil health as a drought resiliency tool so that it can hold onto more water despite being watered less, Sharma said, describing regenerative agriculture as a "holistic approach to land management.""We need to start diversifying what's grown on the property as a way to regenerate ecosystems, as a way to fight drought and pest pressures that are coming as a result of climate change," she said.Ranchers and other participants observe drought stressed pasture as they take part in the Soil Health Academy, which teaches regenerative agriculture techniques, on May 31, 2022, in Cimarron, New Mexico.Mario Tama/Getty Images, FILEThe source of the water is important too, Bartrop said. Farmers will need to be more efficient with using recycled wastewater, or gray water, for their irrigation needs, as there is currently too many resources wasted on making water used to irrigate crops and feed livestock potable, he added.Groundwater, which the agricultural industry in California has been depleting over the past century, is not the solution, Ortiz said."With water scarcity and climate change, it's important to know this isn't an emergency event," Bartrop said of current drought conditions and the threat of water scarcity. | Agriculture |
The drought isn’t just likely to change prices in the produce section, but also in the middle aisles of grocery stores, where tomatoes, onions, and garlic are commonly relied-upon ingredients.Photo: Moving Moment (Shutterstock)The Western drought has come for pasta sauce and ketchup. Processing tomatoes, used in innumerable grocery store staples, are suffering from years of subpar rainfall and snowpack in California. The state, which has historically produced about one third of the processing tomato crop’s global supply, is slated to fall short of (already low) harvest projections on tomatoes and other foods, as first reported by Reuters.OffEnglishWith less tomato, onion, and garlic being successfully grown , shoppers should expect prices on the shelves to go up, the president of the California State Board of Food and Agriculture, Don Cameron, told Reuters. From the outlet: “What you’re seeing harvested this summer, that really hasn’t even hit the grocery shelf, is a 25% increase in the cost of the product to the processors – the canners, the buyers downstream,” he said. “The onions and garlic have already been negotiated for 2023, with another 25% increase in price.”Cameron said tomato prices face a similar hike, resulting in a 50% increase in cost to canners and processors from 2021 to 2023.In August, the U.S. Department of Agriculture forecast that processing tomato production would be 2% below the previous year’s production and 10% below what had been projected in May, a few months before. Then, just a month later, the Processing Tomato Advisory Board estimated that growers would only be able to meet 82% of that already low target goal.California and much of the West have entered the fourth year of an ongoing, historic drought that’s left the Colorado river at record low levels. As of writing, the entire state is in drought, and a large chunk of the Central Valley is under “Exceptional Drought.” August 2022 marked the driest three-year period in all of the Golden State’s recorded history. Previously, dry conditions have also affected sriracha and almond trees.And climate change is almost certainly making things worse. Tomato yields in California and elsewhere could decline by about 6% due to climate change over the next 3 decades, according to a study published in June in the journal Nature. Current levels of human-caused warming made the West’s drought 20 times more likely than it would’ve been otherwise, according to a recently released report from World Weather Attribution.Drought and the emerging crop challenges aren’t just the result of lack of rainfall, but also heatwaves, and thin snowpack resulting in less melt to feed the waterways. Plus, there’s the restrictions put into place to try to preserve the remaining water. The Colorado river’s decline imperils drinking water supplies, agriculture, and also electricity production across the West—where hydroelectric accounts for more than one fifth of all energy, according to the National Hydropower Association. In order to prevent dams from losing their power capacity, reservoirs like Lake Powell and Lake Mead need to be maintained at certain levels, and less water is being released to states until more water falls from the sky.Yet, when a short series of rainstorms finally did materialize at the end of September in CA’s Central Valley, it wasn’t all good news. The isolated rains, which weren’t enough to restore soil moisture, fell at the wrong time—causing outbreaks of mold on the near-ripened tomatoes, rendering the fruits unsellable, according to an article from the outlet Tomato News. “Processing tomato harvest resumed, but mold issues increased due to recent rain...Organic cherry tomato harvest neared completion due to damage from wet conditions,” confirmed the most recent USDA report on California’s crops. | Agriculture |
Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comCROCKETT, Texas, Aug 24 (Reuters) - With almost all of Texas in drought, ranchers are sending ever more cattle off to slaughter, a trend likely to increase beef prices over the long term due to dwindling supply from the largest cattle region in the United States.Since mid-July, more than 93% of Texas has been in drought, according to the United States Drought Monitor. As of mid-August, more than 26% of Texas was at the highest level, characterized by widespread loss of pastures and crops as well as water shortages.While conditions are especially acute in Texas, about 54% of all U.S. cattle were in some form of drought as of Aug. 16, up from 36% a year earlier. Cattle slaughter is high nationwide, temporarily increasing supply but portending tighter supplies in future years. read more Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comPaul Craycraft, co-owner of the East Texas Livestock Auction in Crockett, said dry pastures are depriving cattle of an important food source, while making it more expensive for ranchers to supplement their herds' diet with hay and feed."We've had I don't how many 100-degree (38 C) days and you can see out here, you know, the grass is gone," Craycraft said. "The cows are beginning to lose weight. The cows are weak because there's no protein. So we're getting rid of a lot of cows."Brahman cattle are seen on a ranch in Texas, U.S., April 30, 2020. REUTERS/Adrees LatifAbout 75% of the cows sold at auction the past two months have been sent to the slaughterhouse, Craycraft said, up from 30% to 40% in normal years.Wesley Ratcliff, founder of Caney Creek Ranch in Oakwood, said he got an early start selling 50 of his 500 cows this year as the drought worsened."They were older mama cows and they might have gone and had another baby for us," Ratcliff said. "But rather than wait on them to have another baby, we went on to ship them to the meat factory."Texas A&M University agricultural economist David Anderson said consumers can expect higher prices long-term due to what is happening in Texas, which according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture has more than 4.5 million beef cows, or 14% of the U.S. inventory."The pressure will be on for higher prices, higher cattle prices, higher beef prices over the next several years as the effects of this are felt," Anderson said. "We're going to face tighter supplies of beef. And tighter supplies of beef, with nothing else going on, means higher prices."Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comReporting by Evan Garcia in Crockett, Texas
Editing by Daniel Trotta, Donna Bryson and Matthew LewisOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. | Agriculture |
Photo: Joe Raedle (Getty Images)A few weeks ago, a friend sent me a link to an event that was part of New York’s Climate Week. The panel’s title was “Choosing a climatarian diet: the case for including beef”; the description promised a discussion of the “role beef production plays in a climate-smart food system.” I’ve never clicked a “register” button so fast in my life.OffEnglishBeef is, arguably, the least climate-friendly food out there. Cattle farming is responsible for more than 14% of global greenhouse gas emissions, thanks in large part to how cows naturally produce methane as part of their digestive process. I was very curious as to how the industry might attempt to spin its way out of these inconvenient facts, so I signed up for the talk. The panel was a perfect example of the ways a powerful, polluting lobby is working to twist scientific facts to suit their own PR goals.The talk itself, held September 20, was sponsored by the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, the main lobbying arm of the beef industry, and many of the panelists’ viewpoints echoed those found in other materials made by the group—including the “Beef. It’s What’s For Dinner” website. That, in turn, is part of a revitalized marketing campaign from the industry that is paid partially from the Beef Checkoff Program, which was created in the 1985 Farm Bill that mandates beef producers pay a certain amount of money toward the group to be used for marketing. The Climate Week talk appears to be a larger push by the lobbying group launched last year to “share beef’s sustainability story.” (Coincidentally, I got a slew of targeted ads for the site during Climate Week on unrelated websites and social media platforms after I’d signed up for the webinar; it seems like the industry really wanted me to understand that beef could be a sustainable option.)A beef industry ad I saw after registering for the panel.Screenshot: GizmodoA big focus of the first portion of the talk was cows’ ability to do something panelists kept referring to as “upcycling”—a term the industry website has a whole definition page for. Cows, the panelists suggested, are “upcyclers” because they can digest things we can’t, like grass. What’s more, the land that cattle graze on is land that is often unsuitable for other activities, like farming or reforesting.“Cattle can upcycle nutrients and turn it into a human edible protein product,” said panelist Clay Mathis, the director of a ranch management program at Texas A&M University. “That’s climate-friendly to me.” (For those of us who haven’t drank the industry Kool-Aid—er, milk—the plain English explanation of “upcycling” appears to be the simple process of eating nutrients and then growing muscle, as all animals on Earth do.)While all of this spin may make beef sound like a great environmental option, even if cows are eating stuff we can’t, like grass, beef still takes a heck of a lot of resources to produce. Statistics show that beef is the most resource-intensive and emissions-intensive meat, emitting significantly more than other proteins like chicken or pork. Vegetables, beans, and other crops, meanwhile, have an even lower footprint: While beef creates between 20 and 75 kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent gases per 100 grams of protein, beans and peas create just 0 to 2 kilograms of CO2 equivalent for the same amount of protein. And the claims about grasslands being unfit for other uses ignore the historic fact that much of today’s grasslands were actually once forests destroyed for the purpose of raising cattle, a trend that is continuing today as beef demand rises worldwide.“The majority of global pasture land can’t grow crops, so if you’re raising beef and other ruminants on native grasslands, that is a productive use of that land,” Richard Waite, a senior research associate at the World Resources Institute, told Earther. “But there’s also hundreds of millions of hectares of pastureland that used to be forest. If you look into the future, the population is growing, beef demand is growing, and we’re knocking down parts of the Amazon for new cattle pastures.”The Amazon is, of course, not in the U.S., and much of the grassland used for grazing in the U.S. was made decades ago; the American beef industry does have a measure of distance away from deforestation. But in a global economy, the lines between national consumption and production are not so clear. A burger served in the U.S., the second-largest consumer of beef per capita, may or may not be made with beef produced in the U.S. “People say beef in the U.S. isn’t associated with deforestation, and that’s true,” Waite said. “But beef produced elsewhere is very associated with tropical deforestation. It’s a little tricky—where do you draw the boundaries on your analysis about the effects of U.S. beef production and consumption on the climate?”The grasslands the cows graze on themselves were also a topic of discussion at the industry panel. Those grasslands, several panelists claimed, helped make beef “climate-friendly” because they provided habitat for sage grouse and other important animals and ecosystems. The grasslands, the panelists said, can also act as carbon sinks.These arguments are a little odd. Sage grouse are an important species to preserve, but unless you can jerry-rig them to become a new kind of carbon sequestration mechanism, the survival of one bird species has little to do with the significant emissions from an entire industry—conservation is not always the same as fighting emissions.Meanwhile, carbon sequestration through land management is a great idea, and yes, land used for beef grazing can help. But the EPA has actually done the calculations on the emissions created from U.S. livestock farming versus the benefits of the carbon sequestered on those grasslands, and the math doesn’t work out. The agency’s most recent report on agriculture-related greenhouse gas emissions shows that the amount of carbon sequestered from grasslands used in agriculture was nowhere near enough to offset the emissions created from enteric fermentation from livestock. In other words, grasslands aren’t sequestering nearly enough carbon to be worth all those pesky cow burps.The cow burps finally came up during the last 20 minutes of the hour-long panel, when the host turned to address what she called the “elephant in the room”: methane emissions. From the exasperated chuckles that permeated from many of the panelists, it was clear that this is an industry stress point. One panelist pointed out that emissions from agriculture are only a small fraction of overall U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Others complained of a lack of what they see as reliable, publicly available data, insinuating that the public is being misled on beef’s actual impact on the climate. “I see different [emissions] numbers all the time, and I see passionate people confidently giving these numbers, and I have no idea where they’re coming from,” Mary Cressler, a wine and food writer and cookbook author, said on the panel. “It confuses me, and I’m sure it confuses a large portion of consumers out there.”This is a pretty deliberate misdirect, and the numbers aren’t actually that difficult to understand. Per the EPA, emissions from enteric fermentation alone—cow burps—are responsible for a whopping 25.9% of the country’s total methane emissions. Those emissions work out to about 2% of the U.S.’s overall greenhouse gas emissions, which include CO2 and other emissions from big sectors like electricity, transportation, and buildings.That 2% might seem like a really small number, but the U.S. is the second-largest emitter in the world, responsible for more than 12% of the entire world’s emissions. Addressing even what seems like a small percentage of U.S. emissions can make a real dent in the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, and seemingly small changes are still crucial, given how close to the edge we’re coming to runaway climate change. The importance of curbing methane emissions, specifically, cannot be overstated. Methane lasts in the atmosphere for about 8 to 10 years. That’s much less time than carbon dioxide, but methane is about 80 times more potent while it’s up there. Rising levels of global methane in recent decades have meant that warming is revved up by these intense, short-lived emissions. Curbing methane emissions in the short term will be crucial to meeting longer-term climate goals and avoiding runaway warming. The U.S., for its part, last year spearheaded a global effort to reduce methane emissions 30% by 2030; addressing emissions from beef will be a part of those reductions.In absorbing all this pro-beef PR content, I was struck by the similarities to another polluting industry that has produced buzzwords and deliberately misdirected science like this: oil and gas producers. In recent years, we’ve seen Big Oil publicly turn away from its classic tactics of climate denial in favor of PR spin and snappy new phrasing (“carbon-neutral oil,” “lower-carbon future”) to convince consumers that they are working for the planet—a strategy that seems to be at play here. These strategies can be really effective. Making fun of goofy terminology, like calling cattle “upcyclers” for simply eating grass, is all well and fun, but the oil industry has seen real success with its PR tactics: The idea of a “carbon footprint,” after all, was originally coined by BP in the early 2000s in a (successful) attempt to shift the spotlight of climate responsibilities from big companies to consumers.The beef lobby is a decades-old, powerful force, but much of this climate messaging seems to be on the newer side. According to the Wayback Machine, which helps archive parts of the Internet, the “upcycling” page on the beef industry website was only logged for the first time in August 2020. And any ambiguity about the purpose of all this spin can be resolved with the industry’s own marketing materials. The Beef Checkoff website plainly states that campaigns it pays for are intended to “increase the demand for beef at home and abroad.” Regardless of how protected sage grouse are on beef lands, or how cows might be able to eat grass while we can’t, more beef is directly in contradiction to what needs to happen for a human-habitable planet. If I had to guess, the beef industry may turn more and more to using sustainability-adjacent language in the coming years to try and sell us all more beef—and bullshit.“We can’t pick and choose solutions—we have to think about reducing emissions as much as possible,” Waite said. “In places where we consume more beef, like the U.S., we have to think about how to reduce consumption. Doesn’t mean everyone has to go vegan or vegetarian, but it means less meat, it means less beef per person.” | Agriculture |
CHURDAN, Iowa (AP) — In the 1970s when George Naylor said he wanted to grow organic crops, the idea didn't go over well.Back then organic crops were an oddity, destined for health food stores or maybe a few farmers markets.“I told my dad I wanted to be an organic farmer and he goes, ‘Ha, ha, ha,’” Naylor said, noting it wasn’t until 2014 that he could embrace his dream and begin transitioning from standard to organic crops.But over the decades, something unexpected happened — demand for organics started increasing so fast that it began outstripping the supply produced in the U.S.Now a new challenge has emerged: It's not getting consumers to pay the higher prices, it's convincing enough farmers to get past their organic reluctance and start taking advantage of the revenue pouring in.Instead of growing to meet the demand, the number of farmers converting to organic is actually dropping. Last month, the U.S. Department of Agriculture committed up to $300 million to recruit and help more farmers make the switch.“It feels good,” said Chris Schreiner, executive director of the organic-certifying organization Oregon Tilth, referring to the government help. “It’s a milestone in the arc of this work.”Schreiner, who has worked at the Oregon-based organization since 1998, said expanding technical training is important given the vast differences in farming land conventionally and organically. Schreiner noted that one farmer told him that converting a conventional farmer was like asking “a foot doctor to become a heart surgeon.”The key difference is the use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides as well as genetically modified seeds. Most conventional farms rely on those practices but they are banned at organic farms. Instead, organic farmers must control weeds and pests with techniques such as rotating different crops and planting cover crops that squeeze out weeds and add nutrients to the soil.Crops can only be deemed organic if they are grown on land that hasn’t been treated with synthetic substances for three years. During that period, farmers can grow crops, but they won’t get the extra premium that accompanies organic crops.According to the USDA, the number of conventional farms newly transitioning to organic production dropped by about 70% from 2008 to 2019. Organic comprises about 6% of overall food sales, but only 1% of the country’s farmland is in organic production, with foreign producers making up the gap.In the U.S, “There are so many barriers to farmers making that leap to organic,” said Megan DeBates, vice president of government affairs for the Organic Trade Association.While farmers seem hesitant, U.S. consumers aren't. Annual sales of organic products have roughly doubled in the past decade and now top $63 billion, according to the Organic Trade Association. Sales are projected to climb up to 5.5% this year.That growth is clear to anyone pushing a cart in an average supermarket, past bins of organic apples and bananas, through dairy and egg sections and along shelves brimming with organic beef and chicken.The new USDA effort would include $100 million toward helping farmers learn new techniques for growing organic crops; $75 million for farmers who meet new conservation practice standards; $25 million to expand crop insurance options and reduce costs; and $100 million to aid organic supply chains and develop markets for organics.Nick Andrews, an Oregon State University extension agent who works with organic farmers, called the USDA effort a “game changer.” It should be especially attractive to farmers with small parcels of land because the added value of organic crops makes it possible to make significant money off even 25 to 100 acre (10 to 40 hectare) farms — much smaller than the commercial operations that provide most of the country’s produce.“I’ve seen organic farmers keep families in business who otherwise would go out of business,” Andrews said.Noah Wendt, who in the past few years has transitioned 1,500 acres (607 hectares) of land in central Iowa to organic, noted the shift has been “rocky” at times for him and his farming partner, Caleb Akin.But he and Akin recently bought a grain elevator east of Des Moines to use solely for organic crops, the kind of project the USDA program can assist. They hope the elevator will not only be a nearby spot to store grain but provide a one-stop shop to learn about growing and marketing organic crops.Seeing all the organic activity is gratifying for George and Patti Naylor, who farm near the tiny central Iowa community of Churdan. But they say they still value most the simple benefits of their choice, such as evenings spent watching hundreds of rare monarch butterflies that flock to their herbicide-free farm.As Patti Naylor put it, “It really helps to believe in what you’re doing.”___Follow Scott McFetridge on Twitter: https://twitter.com/smcfetridge | Agriculture |
KUNRI, Pakistan, Nov 3 (Reuters) - Near Kunri, a southern Pakistani town known as Asia's chilli capital, 40-year old farmer Leman Raj rustles through dried plants looking for any of the bright red chillis in his largely destroyed crop which may have survived."My crops suffered heavily from the heat, then the rains started, and the weather changed completely. Now, because of the heavy rains we have suffered heavy losses in our crops, and this is what has happened to the chillies," he said, holding up desiccated, rotten plants. "All the chillies have rotted away."Floods that wrecked havoc across Pakistan in August and September, on the back of several years of high temperatures, have left chilli farmers struggling to cope. In a country heavily dependent on agriculture, the more extreme climate conditions are hitting rural economies hard, farmers and experts say, underscoring the vulnerability of swathes of South Asia's population to changing weather patterns.Officials have already estimated damages from the floods at over $40 billion.Pakistan is ranked fourth in the world for chilli production, with 150,000 acres (60,700 hectares) of farms producing 143,000 tonnes annually. Agriculture forms the backbone of Pakistan's economy, leaving it vulnerable to climate change.Before the floods, hot temperatures made it harder to grow chilli, which needs more moderate conditions."When I was a child ... the heat was never so intense. We used to have a plentiful crop, now it has become so hot, and the rains are so scarce that our yields have dwindled," Raj said.Dr Attaullah Khan, director of the Arid Zone Research Centre at Pakistan's Agricultural Research Council, told Reuters that heatwaves over the past three years had affected the growth of chilli crops in the area, causing diseases that curled their leaves and stunted their growth.[1/12] A man stands in front of mounds of red chili pepper, at the Mirch Mandi wholesale market, in Kunri, Umerkot, Pakistan, October 15, 2022. "Last year, at this time, there used to be around 8,000 to 10,000 bags of chillies in the market," said trader Raja Daim. "This year, now you can see that there are barely 2,000 bags here, and it is the first day of the week. By tomorrow, and the day after, it will become even less." REUTERS/Akhtar Soomro Now the floods pose a whole new set of challenges."Coming to climate change: how do we overcome that?” he said. "Planning has to be done on a very large scale. Four waterways that used to carry (excess) water to the ocean have to be revived. For that we will have to take some very hard decisions ... but we don't have any other choice."Many farmers say they have already faced tough decisions.As flooding inundated his farm a few months ago, Kunri farmer Faisal Gill decided to sacrifice his cotton crops to try to save chilli."We constructed dikes around cotton fields and installed pumps, and dug up tranches in the chilli crop to accumulate water and pump it out into the cotton crop fields, as both crops are planted side by side," Gill said.Destroying his cotton enabled him to save just 30% of his chilli crop, he said, but that was better than nothing.In Kunri's bustling wholesale chilli market, Mirch Mandi, the effect is also being felt. Though mounds of bright red chilli dot the market, traders said there is a huge drop on previous years."Last year, at this time, there used to be around 8,000 to 10,000 bags of chillies in the market," trader Raja Daim said."This year, now you can see that there are barely 2,000 bags here, and it is the first day of the week. By tomorrow, and the day after, it will become even less,” he said.Reporting by Syed Raza Hassan; writing by Charlotte Greenfield; Editing by Stephen CoatesOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. | Agriculture |
The Barbados-flagged general cargo ship Fulmar S arrives to the sea port in Chornomorsk after restarting grain export, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, Ukraine August 7, 2022. REUTERS/Serhii Smolientsev/File PhotoRegister now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comANKARA, Aug 13 (Reuters) - Two more ships left from Ukraine's Black Sea ports on Saturday, Turkey's defence ministry said, bringing the total number of ships to depart the country under a U.N.-brokered deal to 16.The Barbados-flagged Fulmar S left Ukraine's Chornomorsk port, carrying 12,000 tonnes of corn to Turkey's southern Iskenderun province, it said. The Marshall Island-flagged Thoe departed from the same port and headed to Turkey's Tekirdag, carrying 3,000 tonnes of sunflower seeds.The statement added that another ship would depart from Turkey on Saturday to Ukraine to buy grains.Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comUkraine's infrastructure ministry said on Saturday that 16 ships carrying 450,000 tonnes of agriculture products had departed from Ukrainian sea ports since early August under the deal which ensured safe passage for vessels.The agreement, signed by Ukraine, Russia, Turkey and the United Nations in July, allowed to resume grain exports from Ukraine's Black Sea ports after they were stalled for five months due to the war.Ukraine hopes to increase its maritime exports to over 3 million tonnes of grain and other agriculture products per month in near future.Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comReporting by Ece Toksabay and Natalia Zinets;
Editing by Alison WilliamsOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. | Agriculture |
Together, these perennials form a hedgerow that will help break the winds that pummel Bumbleroot’s four upper fields year-round, slowly and steadily eroding their nutrient-rich topsoil. The hedgerow fulfills one of numerous climate adaptation and mitigation goals Law and Simon set in 2021 during their collaboration as participants in The Climate Adaptation Fellowship, an ambitious peer-to-peer learning program that paired 37 fruit and vegetable farmers and agricultural advisers from eight states across the Northeast. This growing season, farmers in the region, like regions across the country, once again contend with dramatic weather conditions that impact their crops and, consequently, the food that surrounding communities not only cherish but rely upon.Get The Big To-DoYour guide to staying entertained, from live shows and outdoor fun to the newest in museums, movies, TV, books, dining, and more.“Every season is a different set of challenges in terms of weather patterns,” Law said. “We have had hail storms in July. We had a really serious drought in 2020, and then [last] July, we had an incredibly wet month where our crops were totally pummeled with water for a month straight. Usually, our first frost in the fall happens in late September or early October. [In 2020,] it didn’t happen until early November.”Sarah Simon and Melissa Law smile at a beet, freshly harvested from Bumbleroot's no-till field. Molly Haley for The Boston GlobeBumbleroot’s stunning tract spans 89 acres, though the farm operates on less than eight of those. The Maine Farmland Trust purchased the land in 2016 to protect it from development and support farmer access, subsequently selling it to Law; her husband, Ben Whalen; and co-owners Abby and Jeff Fisher. The sale allowed the foursome to move their farm to Windham; 2016 marked their first season growing organic vegetables, flowers, and herbs there. Law is deliberate when she says they are “stewarding” this land.In addition to a 200-family CSA and roadside farm stand, Bumbleroot has many wholesale accounts in Greater Portland, including local markets and prominent restaurants such as Scales, Fore Street, and Leeward. The farm is not just an entrepreneurial endeavor. Its website articulates the partners’ values clearly, stating they stand for “equity, climate action, and food sovereignty.” Since 2019, Law has served a three-year term with the Maine Climate Council. In 2019, Whalen testified to members of the House Agriculture Committee about organic agriculture, soil health, and climate mitigation. Last year, Bumbleroot and the Maine Farmland Trust co-hosted a well-attended public field walk and discussion centered around Bumbleroot’s efforts to adapt to climate change and improve soil health.Since farming Bumbleroot, Law has found the erratic and unpredictable weather challenging in various ways, including production gaps and inconsistent availability and quality of their vegetables. Frustrated by these conditions and committed to climate action, in 2020 she applied to and was accepted as a fellow in the Climate Adaptation Fellowship. The program paired her with Simon, an agricultural adviser whom she knew through her acquisition of the Bumbleroot property.A three-month-old Gray Dogwood growing in the hedgerow. Molly Haley for The Boston GlobeThe Climate Adaptation Fellowship is a partnership between the University of Maine, the USDA Northeast Climate Hub, and the Rutgers Climate Institute. Farmers and their advisers follow a climate adaptation curriculum and take workshops on climate science, adaptation, mitigation, and communication. Additionally, the fellowship requires community outreach, which Dr. Rachel Schattman, assistant professor of sustainable agriculture at the University of Maine, said is particularly critical: “Climate change has often been a polarizing conversation in the United States, yet our group believes it’s an important topic to think about, talk about, and organize around. None of those things is fully possible without making the climate dialogue that we have with friends, family, and peers as inclusive as possible.” Schattman is one of the program’s three co-leads.Finally, the fellowship provided participants with a team of specialists with climate science training to answer questions and connect fellows to outside sources. Law and Simon worked with Joshua Faulkner, an expert in agricultural hydrology at the University of Vermont Extension Center for Sustainable Agriculture, and Jason Lilley of the University of Maine Cooperative Extension, whose expertise includes reduced tillage and cover cropping.Sarah Simon and Melissa Law with Bumbleroot Farm's no-till field of perennials, edible flowers for pollinators, carrots, and beets. Molly Haley for The Boston GlobeFor Law, the fellowship was an opportunity to look at “the bigger weather patterns taking place.” For Simon, it was a chance to learn from others. “There aren’t that many experts on climate adaptation and agriculture; it’s this new field we’re trying to figure out together,” she said. “So being part of this fellowship was a chance to work with some experts who’ve been thinking a lot about these issues and try to figure out what that looks like on the ground on real farms.”Calendula for the pollinators in Bumbleroot Farm's no-till field. Molly Haley for The Boston GlobeWhen Law and Simon began Bumbleroot Farm’s risk assessment in January 2021, they started by identifying weather patterns — like wind, severe storms, and spring snowmelt — and determining how each affected the farm. One impact stood out among the others: erosion. Law said the impact was most evident on the farm’s sloped fields and showed up in the vegetables that Bumbleroot delivers to its CSA, farm stand, and wholesale customers. “The quality and the nutrient density of the crops . . . wasn’t as good. And we weren’t getting yields that we get on our flat fields. They were succumbing to pest and disease pressure because they just didn’t have the strength and the health that they needed to be able to withstand the temperature extremes, the weather patterns, and the pest and disease.”The farm is not an outlier. Because of cost and availability, the biggest obstacle farmers in the Northeast face — especially BIPOC farmers — is access to farmland, and as a result, many farmers plant on less desirable, sloping fields where erosion is more likely to occur in windy and rainy weather.Melissa Law and Sarah Simon walk through the sloping fields toward the newly planted hedgerow.Molly Haley for The Boston GlobeOnce Law and Simon identified erosion, they spent the 2021 growing season meeting every few weeks to create a plan that included short-, medium-, and long-term goals to address the risk. They immediately pursued a trial to reduce tillage, observing the impact of tractor use on their soils, even taking tractors out of one field entirely.Many other goals have come to fruition during the 2022 growing season. Aided by colleague Daniel Mays of Frith Farm in Scarborough, Maine, who shared his pioneering no-till system, Law and her partners have implemented a more regular use of cover crops, protecting fields from the elements and the soil from erosion.Blair Andrews, harvest and CSA manager at Bumbleroot Farm since 2019, weeds parsley.Molly Haley for The Boston GlobeLaw and Simon walk beyond the hedgerow field and onto the lower part of the farm, eventually reaching the no-till field. Law uses her hands to dig into the dirt. She smiles, pulling up a large, hearty beet, which she shows to Simon — who also belongs to the Bumbleroot CSA. Law says she’s seen greater yields and better quality vegetables from the field this season thanks to the practices she and Simon set in motion, which resulted in fewer weeds and pests and more nutrient-rich soil.The pair also established climate mitigation strategies to lower the farm’s greenhouse gas emissions. Many of these are in place this season, including the use of solar panels. And in addition to preventing erosion, the hedgerow is also a means of climate mitigation in the form of carbon sequestration. Its 400 perennials absorb — or “sequester” — carbon through photosynthesis, while over time, decaying plant matter adds to soil carbon stocks.Melissa Law harvests a large beet from Bumbleroot Farm's no-till field.Molly Haley for The Boston GlobeSchattman gets calls from agricultural colleagues around the world interested in running programs similar to The Climate Adaptation Fellowship. It was, however, a grant-funded pilot cycle, and there is no funding to support another. Schattman’s team plans to send a request to the USDA this fall to fund several fellowship programs in the Northeast and Midwest in partnership with the USDA climate hubs in those regions. Ultimately, she hopes to find a permanent home for the program. In the meantime, the curriculum is available online.In a world where weather events caused by climate change are now the norm, the practical strategies generated by the Climate Adaptation Fellowship, like Simon’s work, are increasingly critical to farmers whose fates depend on the weather and the land. For her part, Simon is energetic and realistic about the task ahead. It is, she says, to “help people work with the land they’ve got to be successful, even in less than ideal circumstances.”Visit the Bumbleroot Organic Farm farmstand Saturdays from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at 196 Highland Cliff Road in Windham, Maine. To learn more about The Climate Adaptation Fellowship, visit adaptationfellows.ne. To learn more about the Maine Farmland Trust, visit mainefarmlandtrust.org. Jocelyn Ruggiero can be reached at jocelyn@jocelynruggiero. Follow her on Twitter at @jocelynruggiero.Entrance to Bumbleroot Organic Farm. Molly Haley for The Boston Globe | Agriculture |
Challenges abound as industrial agriculture is threatened by access to key resources from water to healthy soils. As a devastating and historic drought from Illinois to Texas to California grinds on, sophisticated mapping and data projection bring more bad news: Agricultural areas are among the places in the U.S. experiencing the highest temperature increases. “It’s happening already,” says R.V. Guha, a Google Fellow who created a public database which pulls information from the U.S. Geological Survey and NASA to map water withdrawal for irrigation against projected temperature rises across U.S. counties and discovered a correlation. A changing climate “affects everything from water to crops to insects,” he says. Most affected are almonds, olive oil and other specialty produce from California’s Central Valley, as well as citrus, grape and salad farms elsewhere in the state. California is also home to some of the largest dairies and pork slaughterhouses in the country, and grass-fed cattle ranchers in the northern part of the state. Row crop farmers harvesting corn and soybeans in Arkansas and other midwestern states are also impacted. At least 2,000 cattle in Kansas died this month during a heatwave. WITHDRAWAL RATE OF WATER: IRRIGATION (2015) VS MAX TEMPERATURE (DIFFERENCE RELATIVE TO BASE DATE): RELATIVE TO 2006, BASED ON RCP 4.5 (2050-06) Google's public Data Commons project pulls information from the U.S. Geological Survey and NASA to map water withdrawal for irrigation against projected temperature rises across U.S. counties.Data Commons 2022, CDC nccs.nasa.gov, waterdata.usgs.gov, Data Commons, viewed 24 Jun 2022 The skyrocketing price of water in New Mexico and Arizona have ranchers and other meat-producing operations considering getting out of the business. In Texas, the state responsible for the most greenhouse gas emissions where some western counties have been facing the least rainfall since the 19th century, beef and chicken will require millions of tons of water annually. Drought in Texas is currently responsible for the very poor condition of about 11% of the state's corn crop. The regions America relies on most to feed its people are drying up. As populations have grown, more water has been pumped to residential areas as well as large-scale farms. Aquifers like Oglala in the Midwest and waterways like the Colorado River that flow to California and Arizona are struggling. “This is the defining challenge for the next few decades,” Guha says.
These regions don’t just have water access and drought to worry about. Soil degradation is expected to be one of the central threats to human health in the coming decades. In America’s Midwest over the past 160 years, nearly 60 billion metric tons of topsoil have eroded. Too much is lost every year due to man-made influences like pollution from fertilizers, agricultural chemicals and antibiotics runoff. Some experts predict the earth will run out of topsoil within six decades. The problem can’t be solved on a human timeline. Nature takes 500 years or more to create an inch of fresh topsoil. These conditions will make feeding populations a serious challenge. Modern agriculture has been built on three key assumptions, says David Barber, a partner at agriculture and food investors Astanor Ventures: Cheap energy, free water and consistent weather. “The whole system does not function without that,” Barber says. “It reveals some of this for the house of cards that it is.” “The whole system does not function without that. It reveals some of this for the house of cards that it is.” A hotter planet is expected to produce less nutritious food. The internal chemistry of some staple crops like wheat and rice are disrupted when air is polluted with carbon dioxide. The amount of proteins and vitamins produced tends to decrease, according to several studies. “Our legacy food system is now a food system in transition,” Barber says. “Like clean energy, it is going from what it was to what it’s going to be. It’s going to be better for people and more respectful of soil and ocean and planet, and the consumer wants that. Ignoring it and saying it will never change is not correct.”
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On one side of the fence, in dense forest, the Mỹky people grow their crops: cassava, pequi and cabriteiro fruit. On the other side, ranchers raise cattle on devastated land. That land is the Mỹky’s, they say.Xinuxi Mỹky, the village elder, says this region used to be a forest where different villages thrived. Only one now remains and the farms have cut into that land as well. “This pasture, where the whites live, was also our village, but now they are raising cattle. The land belonged to us: Indigenous peoples.”Although the Mỹky people have lived here for centuries, the Menku territory – on the border of the Amazon rainforest and the Cerrado savanna in the state of Mato Grosso – was only recognised by the Brazilian government in the mid-1970s. Even then, only a small proportion of their land was fully recognised.For decades, the Mỹky have been fighting for the acknowledgement of the full extent of their territory, as established by technical studies. Amid the legal uncertainty, farmers have moved on to the land and the federal government has not evicted them. Under Jair Bolsonaro, the process of formally recognising the land froze. Until very recently, little progress had been made.But an investigation can now reveal that cattle raised here ended up at an abattoir linked to a global supply chain that includes the food and drink company Nestlé – which uses beef in baby food, pet food and seasoning. Other major companies in this supply chain have included McDonald’s and Burger King.The abattoir in question is owned by Marfrig, Brazil’s second-biggest beef company, which states that it does not purchase livestock from farms that illegally encroach on Indigenous land or destroy sections of rainforest.But research by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ), O Joio e O Trigo, NBC News and the Guardian found hundreds of cattle raised inside the claimed Menku Indigenous territory were taken to Marfrig’s Tangará da Serra abattoir.A number of the more than 700 Marfrig cattle suppliers analysed were linked to 150 sq km (58 sq miles) of deforestation in recent years.Marfrig said it could not respond to the allegations without more detailed information.The findings raise fresh concerns about the impact of the beef trade on the world’s largest rainforest – a vital buffer against climate change – and cast doubt on industry pledges to monitor supply chains and combat deforestation.Land and livelihoodsThe farmers on the disputed land are pushing back against the Mỹky’s claims, contesting the demarcation of the territory, and they have the support of some local politicians.The small Indigenous community that lives there – comprised of 130 people – feels under pressure as a result. André Lopes, an anthropologist who works with the Mỹky people, said the community was frequently threatened. “The relationship with local farmers is unstable, unpredictable, and can be one of persecution and open hostility in some cases,” he said.A farm next to Mỹky territory in Brasnorte, part of Mato Grosso state in Brazil. Photograph: Coletivo Ijã Mytyli de Cinema Manoki e MỹkyThe expansion of big agriculture in the region has also affected the Mỹky’s ability to feed themselves, restricting fishing and hunting areas, and contaminating the land with heavy-duty pesticides, Lopes added.For Paatau Mỹky, the farm fences present a barrier to her craft by impeding access to tucum palm trees. Traditionally, women use tucum fibres to make handicrafts such as fishing nets and baskets.“We used to live in that space, but the whites came and took our land and the forest,” she said. “It is from that farm that we took tucum to make the ropes for our nets, and which nowadays has become a place for cattle raising.”Mega meatMarfrig is one of Brazil’s biggest meat producers, with 32,000 workers and revenues in 2021 of about $15bn (£13.3bn). It slaughters as many as 5 million cattle per year in South America. Shipping records show the Tangará da Serra abattoir has exported more than £1bn of beef products since 2014 to various buyers. Destinations include China, Germany, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands and the UK.Details about Marfrig’s suppliers are kept under wraps, but our investigation has obtained information on some of the hundreds of properties in the Amazon and Cerrado from which it buys for its Tangará da Serra plant.Cross-referencing the imagery with public records identified two properties overlapping the territory claimed by the Myky, one of which – Cascavel farm – directly transported cattle to Marfrig in 2019, according to documents obtained by TBIJ. The farm did not respond to the bureau’s requests for comment.Marfrig told TBIJ that it only considers Indigenous lands to be those that have received presidential approval. Since Bolsonaro came to power in 2019, he has not approved any.Nestlé says it “phased out” Marfrig as a meat supplier in 2021 and that this will be reflected in an annual suppliers’ list update. The company said 99% of the meat it sources is “assessed as deforestation-free” and that it is taking further steps to help ensure no meat ingredients from Marfrig enter its supply chain.McDonald’s said it did not source meat from farms overlapping the Menku territory in 2021 and 2022. Burger King said it does not discuss strategic suppliers.Meanwhile, a comparison of satellite imagery and land registry documents shows forest loss over a six-year period inside the perimeters of many of the ranches that supply the abattoir, with more than 150 sq km of deforestation visible in that period.Cattle on Apyterewa Indigenous land in Pará state. Photograph: Rogério Assis/ISA SocioambientalMarfrig has repeatedly been linked to illegal deforestation through its vast supply chain, which includes about 10,000 ranchers in Brazil. In 2020, a Repórter Brasil investigation reported how it directly and indirectly sourced cattle from ranchers who raised animals illegally inside the Apyterewa Indigenous territory in Pará state – one of the most deforested Indigenous lands in recent years.Marfrig claimed at the time that the equipment used by authorities to demarcate land was not precise and allowed for a margin of error. Marfrig told TBIJ that it “ended operations in the state” in March 2020.Last year, TBIJ reported that beef from farmers accused of illegal deforestation had been making its way into global supply chains, including those serving Marfrig.Marfrig says “it has been working continuously to mitigate any link between illegal deforestation and other irregularities in [its] production chain”. The company now monitors 100% of its direct suppliers and is able to monitor 72% of its indirect suppliers in the Amazon. Marfrig says it uses all information available and blocks any suppliers that do not conform to its standards.The company says that without more detail about the properties involved, it cannot check whether those farms have been compliant or not.Law of the landThe Mỹky’s land dispute is being heard in Brazil’s supreme court. A recent preliminary ruling favoured the community over the farmers but the case has yet to be concluded, the supreme court told TBIJ.The state environment authority for Mato Grosso confirmed to the bureau that the farms in question are on Indigenous land but said that, because the land has not yet been formally demarcated according to a policy put in place under Bolsonaro’s administration, the properties are not illegal.Cristina Leme, a senior legal analyst at the Climate Policy Initiative thinktank, sees no foundation for the farmers’ argument. “Brazil’s constitution protects all lands traditionally occupied by Indigenous people,” she said. “There is no justification, from the constitutional point of view, to allow the registration of a property that overlaps the Menku territory.”In Brazil, land registration in rural areas is self-declaratory. As Ricardo Pael, a federal public prosecutor in Mato Grosso, said: “Anyone can claim they own a patch of land, wherever that is. What needs to be done is a quick review by competent governmental bodies to verify the legality of that self-declaration.”Tupy Mỹky, an Indigenous teacher, said: “There is much talk about conservation and people concerned about climate change. But in practice, we don’t see any kind of concrete action. We Indigenous people are fighting alone.”This story was produced with the support of the Pulitzer Center’s Rainforest Investigations Network. | Agriculture |
How can we feed the world sustainably? Right now, 325 million people are acutely hungry. 35 million Americans don’t know where their next meal will come from. The world’s food systems are uneven, fragile, and only becoming more fragile with the climate crisis.“When we talk about from farm-to-fork, we need to transform the food system in a way that, yes, it supports our environment, yes, it supports our health, but also that it provides the economic return to all of the stakeholders across the food system,” says Ertharin Cousin. Cousin is the CEO and managing director of Food Systems for the Future, a nutrition impact investment fund she founded. She has worked on resolving global food insecurity and hunger for two decades.She spoke at RE:WIRED Green on Wednesday about her work, the need for more innovation, and the opportunity to lift up historically marginalized food entrepreneurs. She also announced a new coalition of investment entities resolving to minimize global hunger through technological innovation. The newly launched Food, Nutrition and Health Investor Coalition (FNHIC) will be led by S2G Ventures, FSF, and other partners. They plan to distribute $2.5 billion in new private investment over the next three years.“We need to bring all of government together to ensure that we’re addressing access to more nutritious food by all Americans,” she said. “More importantly, we need to bring all of society together to address these issues.”Cousin was joined in the session by other experts inspiring action on food insecurity: Doria Robinson, executive director of Urban Tilth, who spoke about community-based agriculture; Kayla Abe, cofounder of a climate-change-fighting restaurant and natural wine bar in San Francisco called Shuggie’s Trash Pie + Natural Wine; Isha Datar, executive director of cell-based foods nonprofit New Harvest; Beth Zotter, cofounder and CEO of Umaro Foods, which uses offshore seaweed farms to cultivate bacon; and Magi Richani, founder and CEO of plant-based dairy firm Nobell Foods.Together, each painted a picture of the future of food that prioritized accessibility, innovation, and collaboration.Each year, natural disasters and human conflicts threaten people with food insecurity and hunger. “People will say, ‘These are all natural disasters, we had these occurrences long before we were addressing a climate crisis,’” Cousin said. “But the reality is: They’re more erratic, the challenges are coming much more frequently, and impacting more of our food system, more people in their lives because of the climate crisis.”Our food systems themselves also play a role—contributing about 25 percent of all greenhouse gases. And this feedback loop between climate change and food systems has motivated companies to cultivate food more sustainably, and without relying on livestock. Abe explained that for her part, eaters won’t find prime cuts of meat at her restaurant, and that the only meat products she uses are off-cuts like livers, gizzards, and chicken feet: things normally cast off from meat packing and production. Shuggies, her restaurant, uses upcycled ingredients, byproducts, and offcuts to minimize food waste and educate people about the link between climate and food.Kayla Abe speaks onstage during RE:WIRED Green 2022.
Photograph: Kimberly White/Getty ImagesThroughout the session, the speakers emphasized that technological innovation will be a catalyst for reducing global hunger—things like cultivating meat and dairy from cells, rather than farms. “I think that the shift away from animals toward cells for food is actually an inevitability. I think it’s the next level of domestication after plants and animals,” New Harvest’s Datar said in a panel moderated by WIRED editor Sandra Upson. “It’s just a matter of when.”And it’s about more than just meat: Cheese production is an enormous source of greenhouse gases, just behind beef. “Most people don’t realize that, and our consumption of cheese keeps going up,” said Richani, from Nobell.The perennial challenge is to mimic nature accurately. “You want your cheese to melt and stretch on your pizza,” said Richani. Nobell’s technology, she explained, creates the same dairy proteins that a cow makes, but with plants. And it melts.“When we talk about protein, we’re actually also talking about nitrogen,” said Zotter. Oceans are the planet’s nitrogen supercenter, and seaweed can efficiently tap into those stores of nitrogen to build protein sustainably.Robinson’s organization, Urban Tilth, prioritizes training local residents in Richmond, California, to cultivate agriculture for themselves and their community. She explained how Urban Tilth grew from a community garden designed to bring sustainable, healthy food to the tables of her community, to a partnership with local farms and families to make sure that, as she put it, people’s “plates changed.” Instead of simply picking a few fresh vegetables here or there, she wanted to transform the diets of the people in marginalized communities like hers.She went on to explain how Urban Tilth supports over 500 families a week with its CSA program, where many members pay more to make sure that food boxes full of fresh food land in the hands of people who otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford it.In the future, cellular agriculture may also become more democratized. Datar likens her vision to the brewing and home-brew industry. “That’s what I’d love cell-ag to be, a world where we could all culture our own cells for meat, or milk, or egg production,” Datar said. “You just buy from a store and grow it yourself.”Another barrier in cellular agriculture, Datar noted, is an ingrained reluctance to collaborate between the hundred-plus companies in early stages. “I think the companies are stuck in a prisoner’s dilemma,” she said. They all know that collaboration and data-sharing benefits all, “but it’s a question of who’s going to be first.”Cousin also emphasized the importance of joint action, applauding the Biden administration for what she described as a rare focus on global hunger. “This is the first time we’ve ever had a president stand up before the American people and commit to prioritizing ending hunger,” she said, noting that the last White House conference on hunger-related issues was during the Nixon administration in 1969. “The presidents and members of Congress have not wanted to use their political capital to talk about hunger—because it’s hard.”Cousin’s new investment coalition against hunger, FNHIC, plans to fund innovation, finance building stores in historic food deserts, and back Black and brown entrepreneurs who have solid plans for addressing hunger but lack the resources to scale. “That's the kind of whole of society action that we need,” Cousin said. | Agriculture |
A farmer tends to his rice field in the village of Yangchao in Liping County, Guizhou province, China, June 11, 2021. Picture taken June 11, 2021. REUTERS/Thomas PeterRegister now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comSummaryHeat, floods damage in key parts of China, PakistanPakistan could lose a tenth of rice output to floodsBangladesh buys more rice to fill domestic shortfallComfortable global inventories after years of bumper harvestsSINGAPORE, Sept 6 (Reuters) - Abundant rice supplies in key exporters may largely offset an expected drop in output after floods in Pakistan and severe heatwave in China damaged crops, capping any gains in prices from steady Asian demand.Pakistan, the world's fourth-largest rice exporter, suffered extensive damage to agriculture, including rice, as floods ravaged large swathes of its farmland, while extremely high temperatures in parts of China at the end of August have taken a toll on rice output in the world's biggest importer of the staple.However, global rice stockpiles are pretty comfortable and an improving Indian crop outlook should quell any supply concerns and limit any price increases from recent strong demand that has emerged from Bangladesh, said a Singapore-based trader at one of the world's top rice trading companies.Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comPakistan is forecast to have lost around 10% of its 2022 estimated rice production of around 8.7 million tonnes, while China has suffered some damage, although the extent of crop losses is not clear, traders said.Food prices have soared in markets across Pakistan as devastating rains ruin crops and disrupt supplies, an early sign of how the worst floods in decades are creating food shortages at a time of financial crisis."Pakistan's rice output has been really good over recent seasons," Peter Clubb, a market analyst at the International Grains Council said. "While any large production loss is obviously bad, that improvement in production over recent seasons gives a bit of leeway."China's Agriculture Minister Tang Renjian expressed concern that high temperatures and drought have hit rice production in the eastern provinces of Jiangsu and Anhui. read more "It is too early to say exactly how poor yields (in China) may be," Clubb said. "A general point, stocks in China are still very ample."MONSOON BOOSTS INDIAN CROP PROSPECTSMonsoon rains, which were delayed in parts of India's northern and eastern rice producing regions, have improved over the last couple of weeks, boosting crop prospects in the world's largest rice supplier, traders said.India had earlier been examining a need to restrict exports of 100% broken rice mainly used for feed purposes. read more But an improvement in rainfall over Indian rice growing areas has ended any discussion of government restrictions on exports, said a second trader in Singapore who sells Indian rice to buyers in Asia and Africa.The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization's world price index fell for a fifth month in August, after hitting a record in March after Russia invaded Ukraine, as a resumption of grain exports from Ukrainian ports contributed to improved supply prospects. read more However, strong demand from Bangladesh has underpinned rice prices in recent weeks.Bangladesh plans to import around 1.2 million tonnes of rice over the next few months to shore up reserves and cool high domestic prices.A senior Bangladeshi food ministry official said the country is buying 530,000 tonnes of rice from India, Vietnam and Myanmar under government-to-government deals and is in talks with major producers India, Vietnam and Thailand.Indian rice prices last week climbed to their highest in more than a year at around $383 per tonne , although the market is well below the 2021 high of $405 and 2020 peak of $427.50.Thailand and Vietnam, the world's second- and third-largest rice exporters respectively, have agreed to cooperate on raising prices, a move aimed at increasing leverage in the global market and boosting farmers' incomes.Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comReporting by Naveen Thukral; additional reporting by Nigel Hunt in London and Ruma Paul in Dhaka; Editing by Christian SchmollingerOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. | Agriculture |
MoneyWatch November 16, 2022 / 5:44 PM / MoneyWatch For the first time, the Food and Drug Administration is giving the green light to meat grown in a laboratory. The agency said in a notice on Wednesday that a "cultivated chicken" product made by Upside Foods is safe to eat.The FDA "evaluated the information submitted to the agency and has no further questions at this time about the firm's safety conclusion," the agency stated. "This is a watershed moment in the history of food," Uma Valeti, CEO and founder of the Berkeley, California-based company, said in a statement. "U.S. consumers will soon have the chance to eat delicious meat that's grown directly from animal cells." The cells from a single chicken allow for the cultivation of the same amount of poultry that now comes from hundreds of thousands of farmed birds, according to his company. Although the agency found Upside Foods' chicken safe to eat, the product is not approved to be sold. Upside's remaining hurdles before it can take its product to the market involve the U.S. Department of Agriculture and its Food Safety and Inspection Service. "As this product comes closer to entering the U.S. market, we are closely coordinating with USDA-FSIS to ensure it is properly regulated and labeled," the FDA said. Noodle bowl with Upside Chicken. Upside Foods Valeti, a cardiologist, started Upside in 2015 after coming up with the idea for what's now called "cultivated" meat while working at the Mayo Clinic growing human heart cells in a lab, he recently told NPR. Scientists can take cells from an animal with a needle biopsy, feed them nutrients to proliferate and produce meat, he reasoned. Once given regulatory approval to sell its cultivated products, including a chicken fillet, Upside's production facility in Emeryville, California, will be able to produce more than 50,000 pounds a year, according to the company.Scientists say roughly a third of all human-produced greenhouse gases stem from food production, especially cattle. Proponents of lab-grown meat say it would help cut back on methane emissions and help combat global warming. Thanks for reading CBS NEWS. Create your free account or log in for more features. Please enter email address to continue Please enter valid email address to continue | Agriculture |
By Alan Gange - Professor of Microbial Ecology, Royal HollowayTwo plants of the same species grow side by side. One is attacked by insects, one not. On an individual plant, some leaves get eaten, some not. This doesn’t happen at random, but is caused by the fungi that live within the leaves and roots of the plant. Imagine you are holding a shoot of the dahlia plant, pictured below. How many species do you have in your hand? The answer is most certainly not one, but probably somewhere between 20 and 30. This is because every plant has fungi and bacteria that live on its surface (called epiphytes) and within its tissues (called endophytes).If the stem is still attached to its roots then the number of species would easily double. The roots contain lots of endophytes and a separate group of fungi, called mycorrhizas. These fungi grow into plant roots and form a symbiotic relationship in which the fungus donates nutrients (principally phosphate and nitrate) to the plant, in return for a supply of carbon.There has been a recent surge of interest in these fungi, as their presence can affect the growth of insects that attack plants. Research at Royal Holloway has shown that mycorrhizal fungi reduce the growth of many insects, by increasing the plant’s chemical defences. Our most recent work shows that endophyte fungi, the ones that live within plant tissue, can also cause plants to produce novel chemicals. So both endophytes and mycorrhizas can be thought of as plant bodyguards, where both partners benefit from the association. The fungi gain refuge and resources, while the plant gains a natural pest protection system. The challenge is to exploit this natural system in agriculture and horticulture. However, these sorts of fungi are rare in crop plants thanks to years of fungicides, fertilisers and plant breeding, and modern crops have far fewer natural fungal partners than their counterparts in the wildPlants can choose their fungal partnersIn a wildflower meadow, many plants grow in close proximity but these plants can have entirely different fungal bodyguards. Although the plants grow in the same conditions, with the same spores floating around, they appear to select which fungi colonise their tissues.Perhaps more intriguing is that different fungi exert different effects on insects, a phenomenon called “ecological specificity”. In nature, plants seem to select the fungi that will provide them with maximum benefit. If we’re to use this in agriculture, the challenge is to find the “right” combinations of fungi that will provide crops with protection against pests and diseases.There is a separate group of fungi, called entomopathogens, that kill insects. These fungi can also live within plant tissues, meaning that if an insect eats an infected leaf, it ingests a killer fungus. There is evidence that plants particularly allow these most beneficial of bodyguards to colonise their tissues extensively – more so than other tissue-dwelling fungi.The fungal internetThe chemicals produced by all of these fungi travel throughout the plant. Some fungi in the root can change the host plant’s chemistry to keep leaf-feeding insects largely at bay, which may well be one reason why cultivating a rich soil full of useful microbes can lead to reduced pest problems above ground.Other mycorrhiza (root) fungi can change the chemical makeup of a plant’s leaves, and we have found that these chemicals can attract parasitoid insects to give another level of defence – they can reduce insect growth by making leaves less edible, while simultaneously helping the plant to call parasitic insects that attack the herbivores.Perhaps even more exciting is the discovery that networks of fungi in the soil can link many plants together. The mushrooms you see above ground are simply the fruiting bodies of a larger organism below the surface, composed of thread-like material called mycelium. | Agriculture |
Record-high temperatures and historic drought are forcing ranchers in some states to sell off their cattle in huge quantities, to an extent that is raising fears about the long-term health of the industry. The sell-off has centered mostly in the South, where ranchers have been seen lining up at livestock auctions in droves. In North Texas, would-be sellers have roughly “quadrupled” compared to typical auctions, Jack Robinson, an 83-year-old auctioneer at Emory Livestock Auction, told Bloomberg. RUSSIA ANNOUNCES MORE GAS CUTS TO EUROPE, THREATENING WINTER SUPPLY “I’ve been in the business 60 years, and I’ve never seen lines that long,” Robinson said. Ranchers, he added, are in “panic mode.” The vast majority of the pasture and range land in Oklahoma and Texas is now considered to be in “poor” or “very poor” condition, according to the Department of Agriculture. Triple-digit temperatures and drought conditions have forced farmers in parts of the southwestern United States to shell out for supplemental feed and fertilizer, the costs of which are soaring, or sell their inventory. Corn is at its highest price in a decade, commodities data show, while prices for hay, often used as a supplemental feed, were 56% higher in April compared to the same point last year, according to a June report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. And though the cattle prices have increased since last year, up 15% compared to 2021, according to USDA data, many farmers are still struggling to break even. And that could be a problem. The U.S. cattle herd has shrunk to its lowest point since 2016, according to USDA data, down for its third consecutive year. Those low numbers, coupled with liquidation levels, could negatively affect calf numbers for the next two to three years. “We have a huge amount of drought liquidation going on,” David Anderson, a livestock marketing specialist at Texas A&M University, told the Texas Farm Bureau Radio Network, adding that he expects a 4% decline in the nation’s cow herd next year. CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER North Texas cattle rancher Jarrod Montford told a local NBC News affiliate that U.S. livestock farmers make up “1.6%, 1.7% of the population [that] feeds the rest.” “It’s not how bad are we at the end of the day,” he said. “It’s the fact that if we don’t survive, our nation fails.” | Agriculture |
SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt, Nov 11 (Reuters) - An initiative led by the United States and the United Arab Emirates to help agriculture adapt to climate change and reduce emissions through innovation has doubled investment commitments to $8 billion and extended its reach, it said on Friday.The Agriculture Innovation Mission for Climate (AIM for Climate) was launched one year ago and seeks to accelerate innovation in "climate smart" agriculture globally up to 2025, as the world races to contain global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius.At the COP27 climate change talks in Sharm el-Sheikh it announced commitments for $7 billion of investments from 42 governments, and $1 billion in innovation initiatives aimed at small-holder farmers in developing economies, new technologies, agro-ecological research and methane reduction.Farming is on the frontline of extreme weather but is also a major contributor to global emissions that cause warming.AIM will help farmers deal with challenges that have become more apparent this year, said U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Thomas Vilsack: productivity losses linked to climate change, and higher input costs resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine."I think there's an opportunity here for us - for the United States in particular - but for large scale agriculture, to help inform smallholders about the knowledge and information we're getting about more efficient use, more precise use of fertilizer and other inputs which can lower costs for farmers and also without jeopardizing productivity," Vilsack told Reuters in a call.Agriculture could get to net zero "a bit faster than maybe some of the other industries that are commonly discussed when we talk about climate," he said."I think there's just tremendous carbon sequestration capacity, there's tremendous opportunities to reduce methane, there's tremendous opportunities to convert agricultural waste into a variety of products that would significantly reduce the greenhouse gas footprint of agricultural production."Vilsack said the UAE, which imports about 80% of its food and will host the COP28 climate talks in 2023, wanted to help shore up production in food exporting countries as well as boosting self-reliance through innovation.Reporting by Aidan Lewis; Editing by Frank Jack DanielOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. | Agriculture |
NEW DELHI/MUMBAI, Nov 11 (Reuters) - Indian farmers have planted wheat on 4.5 million hectares since Oct. 1, when the current sowing season began, up 9.7% from a year ago, the latest data from the farm ministry showed on Friday.The Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers' Welfare will keep updating the provisional crop sowing figures as it gathers more information from state governments.In India, wheat is mainly produced in the northern states of Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and the central state of Madhya Pradesh.The planting figures are also subject to revision depending on weather conditions.Late rains in October and November raised soil moisture levels and helped farmers bring in more area under wheat, the main winter crop, growers said.India grows only one wheat crop in a year, with planting in October and November, and harvests from March.India, the world's second-biggest wheat producer, was forced to ban exports of the staple in May this year, after a sudden rise in temperatures in March cut crop yields.Despite the ban, wheat prices have soared to a record high, prompting the government to weigh measures such as the release of state reserves into the open market while axing the 40% tax on imports to cool prices.Sowing of rapeseed, the main winter-planted oilseed reached 5.5 million hectares, up from 4.8 million hectares a year ago, according to the farm ministry.Higher rapeseed output will help India, the world's biggest cooking oil importer, to cut expensive purchases of edible oils from Malaysia, Indonesia, Brazil, Argentina, Russia and Ukraine.In the fiscal year to March 31, 2022, New Delhi spent a record $18.99 billion to import vegetable oils, prompting Prime Minister Narendra Modi to voice concerns about India's rising vegetable oil import bill.As part of efforts to reduce India's dependence on edible oil imports, New Delhi has granted environmental clearance for indigenously developed genetically modified mustard seeds, part of the rapeseed family.Reporting by Mayank Bhardwaj and Rajendra Jadhav; Editing by Andrea RicciOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. | Agriculture |
Officials in Cameroon are urging people to eat local foods instead of imports, following protests over shortages and price spikes caused in part by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. President Paul Biya last week ordered ministers to explain to the public that Russia’s Black Sea blockade, not local taxes, has caused a nearly 60% increase in prices for fertilizer and imported foods. Hundreds of people, a majority of them women, listened to explanations offered by government officials dispatched to the Mfoundi market in the capital Yaounde. Harouna Nyandji Mgbatou, the top official in Yaounde’s first district, called on the public to consume locally grown food, which he sai was cheaper than imported food. Asta Koumam, a 30-year old medical laboratory technician, was among those listening. She said that the price of a liter of imported vegetable oil has increased from less than two dollars to about three and a half. She said she and her children have decided to measure vegetable oil in a spoon no matter the quantity of food they are cooking because they cannot cope with food price hikes. Territorial administration minister Paul Atanga Nji outlined the scope of the problem.
Nji said a 50-kilogram bag of imported rice that sold at $25 in February now sells at $55. He said the same quantity of rice grown in Cameroon has seen a 5% price increase to $25 because the price of fertilizer imported from Ukraine and Russia has also increased from $30 to more than $70. Cameroon's trade ministry reports that the central African country imported more than 850,000 tons of cereals from Russia and Ukraine in 2020. In contrast, the Cameroon Importers Union said less than 45,000 tons have been imported since January of this year. Last week, five government officials, including the ministers of agriculture, trade, finance and mines, held a press conference to explain the consequences of Russia's war in Ukraine.
The press conference, ordered by President Biya, was to help quell protests against price hikes in several towns and villages across Cameroon.
Rene Emmanuel Sadi, spokesperson for Cameroon’s government, said that Yaounde has provisionally suspended the export of cereal crops, palm oil and other staple foods to neighboring countries to make sure that there is enough food for its own population. He said the government has also removed or suspended import duties and taxes on rice, fish, palm oil and building material to protect consumers from skyrocketing prices.
Julienne Gregoire Onguene Ateba, an economist and international transport and logistic specialist at Cameroon’s seaport in Douala, said that the current situation could have been avoided with more foresight. He said if Cameroon’s government had invested in local production, especially of food as economists suggested to cushion the effects of COVID-19, the population should have been spared the price spikes and food scarcity that has resulted from Russia's war in Ukraine. In July, Cameroon's government called for emergency food support for more than two million people facing hunger. Authorities said destitute civilians threatened by food insecurity along the northern borders with Chad and Nigeria are finding it especially hard to cope with the rising prices. | Agriculture |
Stalks of wheat are seen in a wheat field during the International Wheat Harvest Festival in Opalyi, eastern Hungary July 13, 2013. REUTERS/Laszlo BaloghRegister now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comBUDAPEST, July 29 (Reuters) - Hungary has harvested 3.9 million tonnes of autumn wheat and 1.4 million tonnes of barley as the harvest season ended earlier than usual due to this year's heat and drought, the Ministry of Agriculture said in a statement on Friday.The ministry said crop yields lagged previous years' averages due to a severe drought, adding that the country's maize and sunflower crop was also "at serious risk".The ministry estimates that farmers are going to report drought damage on up to one million hectares.Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comThe government was setting up a task force "in order to tackle the consequences of the historic drought," the statement said.The total amount of wheat harvested in Hungary was about 25% less than the average yield in the past five years, the ministry said. Last year the country harvested 5.3 million tonnes of wheat, data from the Central Statistical Office (KSH) showed.This year's barley yields also lagged behind the 1.7 million tonnes harvested in 2021.Hungary harvested 450,000 tonnes of rapeseed, the ministry said, also well below about 722,000 tonnes last year.The damage to the grains crop comes at a time when the country is struggling with food inflation running at 22% in annul terms in June.Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comReporting by Krisztina Than and Anita Komuves; editing by Jason NeelyOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. | Agriculture |
British lamb has now been exported to the USA for the first time in over 20 years. The United States Department for Agriculture (USDA) agreed to open the market for British lamb last year, and following the necessary inspections, the first consignment was flown to the USA this week containing lamb produced by meat processors Dunbia from its site in Carmarthenshire, Wales. Industry estimates the US-market will be worth £37 million in the first five years of trade, opening up access for British farmers to a market of over 300 million American consumers to enjoy the United Kingdom’s world-renowned lamb, part of the government’s work to boost exports and grow our economy. The deal agreed last year comes alongside the wider efforts across government to drive growth and open up new opportunities for the British food and farming sector, in turn boosting jobs, skills and productivity across the country. This includes capitalising on new trade freedoms outside the EU through export opportunities, ensuring that premium products are not just enjoyed at home but championed around the world. Environment Secretary Ranil Jayawardena said: Tucking into roast lamb for Sunday lunch is quintessentially British – and now millions of American families will now be able to enjoy our top-quality lamb too. The opportunity for growth for British food is enormous – bringing jobs, skills and prosperity across the nation. With our mission to unlock growth, we will continue to secure more opportunities for our farmers and food producers to benefit from new markets. Trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch said: Seeing our world-class lamb back on American menus is fantastic news for our farmers. Now they can sell to a consumer market of over 300 million people, which support jobs and growth in a vital British industry. It also shows our two nations working together to remove barriers and boost trade, building on recent resolutions on steel tariffs, and whisky exports. Dr Richard Irvine, UK Deputy Chief Veterinary Officer, said: This represents a major achievement for the UK lamb industry. We are proud of our food safety and the quality of food we are able to produce. Gaining access for the export of British lamb to the USA represents another success for British industry, in addition to the existing agreements enabling beef and pork exports from the UK to the USA. AHDB International Market Development Director Dr Phil Hadley said: We are delighted to see this first order of UK lamb heading to the US, following years of negotiations and hard work by AHDB, UK government and the wider industry to get our lamb back on American plates after an absence of more than 20 years. We hope this order will be the first of many, allowing millions of US consumers to enjoy our world-renowned lamb, while bringing a major boost to UK sheep producers and exporters, who have another valuable market in which to sell their products. This announcement follows a string of export successes in the last two years including the first export of beef to the USA in decades and the first ever export of British pork to Chile. NFU President Minette Batters said: It is great news that British farmers producing top quality, sustainable, high-welfare lamb once again have access to the US market, something we’ve been working hard to achieve for over two decades. Expanding into markets such as these will be crucial to maintain the profitability of farm businesses. Earlier this year I set out our ambition to grow our agri-foods exports by 30% by 2030 and become the number one supplier of choice both at home and abroad. It’s vital we seize opportunities such as these so British food producers can export more Great British food overseas in the years ahead. Phil Stocker Chief Executive of the National Sheep Association said: This is fantastic news for the British sheep industry and it comes after many years of hard work, by Government and their departments, by AHDB and devolved nations levy bodies, by NSA, and by the industry operators who have made it happen. The success of the British sheep industry is underpinned by market opportunities and access to the US will offer just that, building on what is already a healthy demand for our high quality British lamb and sheepmeat here and overseas. The Small Ruminant Rule that banned British and EU lamb imports for over 20 years was rescinded by the US Government in January of this year. | Agriculture |
SummaryCompaniesRussia rejoins Black Sea grain corridor pact in U-turnHad pulled out after alleged Ukraine attack on its fleetSays it has now received guarantees from UkraineAnnounced guarantees go no further than original dealDeal vital to easing world food crisisANKARA/KYIV, Nov 2 (Reuters) - Russia said on Wednesday it would resume its participation in a deal freeing up grain exports from war-torn Ukraine, reversing a move that world leaders had said threatened to exacerbate global hunger.Moscow announced the sudden reversal after Turkey and the United Nations helped keep Ukrainian grain flowing for several days without a Russian role in inspections.The Russian defence ministry justified the change by saying it had received guarantees from Kyiv not to use the Black Sea grain corridor for military operations against Russia. Kyiv did not immediately comment on that, but has denied in the past using the agreed shipping corridor as cover for attacks."The Russian Federation considers that the guarantees received at the moment appear sufficient, and resumes the implementation of the agreement," a defence ministry statement said.The grain deal, originally reached three months ago, had alleviated a global food crisis by lifting a de facto Russian blockade on Ukraine, one of the world's biggest grain suppliers. The prospect that it could fall apart this week had revived fears of global hunger and pushed up prices.Eight months into Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Ukrainian counterattacks have wrested back territory in the east and south, and Moscow has sought to slow Kyiv's momentum with stepped up missile and drone strikes targeting its energy grid.On Wednesday, authorities in the Kyiv region began emergency shutdowns of the power generating system after a spike in consumption, the regional administration said.In a statement, it said the move was necessary to "avoid major accidents with power equipment", after Russian drone and missile attacks that have badly damaged the grid in and around the capital.GRAIN FLOW 'WILL CONTINUE'Russia suspended its involvement in the grain deal on Saturday, saying it could not guarantee safety for civilian ships crossing the Black Sea after an attack on its fleet. Ukraine and Western countries called that a false pretext for "blackmail", using threats to the global food supply.But Russia's suspension failed to stop shipments, which resumed on Monday without Russian participation, in a programme that was brokered by Turkey and the United Nations. Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu had told his Turkish counterpart the deal would resume.The prices of wheat, soybeans, corn and rapeseed fell sharply on global markets after the announcement, which allayed concerns about the growing unaffordability of food.Insurance companies had paused issuing new contracts, raising the prospect that shipments could stop within days, industry sources said. But Lloyds of London insurer Ascot told Reuters after Wednesday's resumption announcement that it had resumed writing cover for new shipments.FUTURE STILL IN DOUBT"This is clearly a positive development for grain users and consumers which will please the food industry and provide some reassurances as prices should ease," said Mark Lynch, partner at Oghma Partners, a finance advisory firm for consumer industries.[1/7] Commercial vessels including vessels which are part of Black Sea grain deal wait to pass the Bosphorus strait off the shores of Yenikapi during a misty morning in Istanbul, Turkey, October 31, 2022. REUTERS/Umit Bektas "We do however envisage that some risk premium is likely to be sustained due to the fragile nature of the agreement and the ongoing war in Ukraine," Lynch said.Andrey Sizov, head of Russia-focused Sovecon agriculture consultancy, said Moscow's decision was "quite an unexpected turnaround" but the deal remained shaky given uncertainty about whether it would be extended past its Nov. 19 expiry."...The discussion around this topic will apparently continue," Sizov said.A European diplomat briefed on the grain talks told Reuters that Russian President Vladimir Putin was likely to use the need for an extension as a way to gain leverage and dominate the Nov. 13-16 G20 summit in Indonesia.Putin said on Wednesday that Russia reserved the right to withdraw from the grain pact if Ukraine violated its guarantees. But, in a nod to Turkey's influence, as well as what he called its "neutrality" in Russia's conflict with Ukraine, Putin said that if Moscow did pull out it would not impede grain supplies from Ukraine to Turkey.A senior Ukrainian official who declined to be identified told Reuters that Moscow's decision was mainly the result of Turkish pressure on Russia.Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said Moscow had miscalculated. "When you want to play blackmail, it is important not to outplay yourself," he said.The United Nations said Secretary-General Antonio Guterres "warmly welcomes" the deal and would continue working towards its renewal.FOOD SHORTAGESThe Russian blockade of Ukrainian exports through the Black Sea since its invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24 has worsened food shortages and a cost of living crisis in many countries.Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy credited Turkey and the United Nations for making it possible for ships to continue moving out of Ukrainian ports with cargoes."But a reliable and long-term defence is needed for the grain corridor," Zelenskiy said in a video address on Tuesday night. "At issue here clearly are the lives of tens of millions of people."The grains deal aimed to help avert famine in poorer countries by injecting more wheat, sunflower oil and fertilizer into world markets.Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlu Cavusoglu said earlier Russia was concerned about its fertilizer and grain exports, echoing Russian officials in saying ships carrying them could not dock even though the exports were not included in Western sanctions.There was no mention of any concessions on those issues in the Russian statement on the resumption, but the U.N. statement said Guterres would work to get those obstacles removed.Additional reporting by Jonathan Spicer and Ezgi Erkoyun in Ankara, other Reuters bureaux; writing by Philippa Fletcher and Mark Heinrich; editing by Angus MacSwan, William Maclean and Alex RichardsonOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. | Agriculture |
The development of high-yielding perennial rice means up to eight harvests from a single planting, significantly lowering labor and cost for smallholder farmers while simultaneously improving soil quality. Researchers from the University of Illinois, Yunnan Academy of Agricultural Sciences, the International Rice Research Institute, Yunnan University, the University of Queensland, and the Land Institute contributed to the development and deployment of perennial rice. Credit: Shilai Zhang, Yunnan University After more than 9,000 years in cultivation, annual paddy rice is now available as a long-lived perennial. The advancement means farmers can plant just once and reap up to eight harvests without sacrificing yield, an important step change relative to "ratooning," or cutting back annual rice to obtain a second, weaker harvest. A new report in Nature Sustainability chronicles agronomic, economic, and environmental outcomes of perennial rice cultivation across China's Yunnan Province. Already, the retooled crop is changing the lives of more than 55,752 smallholder farmers in southern China and Uganda.
"Farmers are adopting the new perennial rice because it's economically advantageous for them to do so. Farmers in China, like everywhere else, are getting older. Everyone's going to the cities; young people are moving away. Planting rice is very labor intensive and costs a lot of money. By not having to plant twice a year, they save a lot of labor and time," says Erik Sacks, professor in the Department of Crop Sciences at the University of Illinois and co-author on the report.
Sacks, along with senior author Fengyi Hu and Dayun Tao, began working to develop perennial rice in 1999 in a collaboration between the Yunnan Academy of Agricultural Sciences and the International Rice Research Institute. In subsequent years, the project grew to include the University of Illinois, Yunnan University, and the University of Queensland. Another partner, The Land Institute, provided perennial grain breeding and agroecology expertise, along with seed funding to ensure continuity of the project.
The researchers developed perennial rice through hybridization, crossing an Asian domesticated annual rice with a wild perennial rice from Africa. Taking advantage of modern genetic tools to fast-track the process, the team identified a promising hybrid in 2007, planted large-scale field experiments in 2016, and released the first commercial perennial rice variety, PR23, in 2018.
The international research team spent five years studying perennial rice performance alongside annual rice on farms throughout Yunnan Province. With few exceptions, perennial rice yield [6.8 megagrams per hectare] was equivalent to annual rice [6.7 megagrams per hectare] over the first four years. Yield began to drop off in the fifth year due to various factors, leading the researchers to recommend re-sowing perennial rice after four years. But because they didn't have to plant each season, farmers growing perennial rice put in almost 60% less labor and spent nearly half on seed, fertilizer, and other inputs.
"The reduction in labor, often done by women and children, can be accomplished without substitution by fossil fuel–based equipment, an important consideration as society aims to improve livelihoods while reducing greenhouse gas emissions associated with agricultural production," Sacks says.
The economic benefits of perennial rice varied across study locations, but profits ranged from 17% to 161% above annual rice. Even in sites and years when perennial rice suffered temporary yield dips due to pests, farmers still achieved a greater economic return than by growing the annual crop.
"That first season, when they planted the annual and the perennial rice side by side, everything was the same, essentially. Yield is the same, costs are the same, there's no advantage," Sacks says. "But the second crop and every subsequent crop comes at a huge discount, because you don't have to buy seeds, you don't have to buy as much fertilizer, you don't need as much water, and you don't need to transplant that rice. It's a big advantage."
Avoiding twice-yearly tillage, perennial rice cultivation also provides significant environmental benefits. The research team documented higher soil organic carbon and nitrogen stored in soils under perennial rice. Additional soil quality parameters improved, as well.
"Modern high-yielding annual crops typically require complete removal of existing vegetation to establish and often demand major inputs of energy, pesticides, and fertilizers. This combination of repeated soil disturbance and high inputs can disrupt essential ecosystem services in unsustainable ways, especially for marginal lands," says Hu, professor and dean in the School of Agriculture at Yunnan University. "Perennial rice not only benefits farmers by improving labor efficiency and soil quality, but it also helps replenish ecological systems required to maintain productivity over the long term."
Another piece of the study assessed the low-temperature tolerance of perennial rice, with the goal of predicting its optimal growing zone around the world. Although significant exposure to cold limited regrowth, the research team predicts the crop could work in a broad range of frost-free locations.
Although they've already conducted on-farm testing and released three perennial rice varieties as commercial products in China and one in Uganda, the researchers aren't done refining the crop. They plan to use the same modern genetic tools to quickly introduce desirable traits such as aroma, disease resistance, and drought tolerance into the new crop, potentially expanding its reach across the globe.
"While early findings on the environmental benefits of perennial rice are impressive and promising, more research and funding are needed to understand the full scope of perennial rice's potential," says Tim Crews, Chief Scientist at The Land Institute and study co-author. "Questions about carbon sequestration and persistence and greenhouse gas balances in perennial paddy rice systems remain. Researchers must also make progress on perennializing upland rice, which could curb highly unsustainable soil erosion on farmlands across Southeast Asia. As the work of Dr. Hu's group at Yunnan University progresses, The Land Institute and an ever-growing network of collaborators will continue to support these research and scaling efforts for perennial rice globally."
Sacks adds, "I think now, with perennial rice in farmers' fields, we have turned a corner. We have been feeding humanity by growing these grains as annuals since the dawn of agriculture, but it wasn't necessarily the better way. Now we can consciously choose to make a better crop, and a better, more sustainable agriculture. We can fix the errors of history."
The article, "Sustained productivity and agronomic potential of perennial rice," is published in Nature Sustainability. More information: Jun Lyu, Sustained productivity and agronomic potential of perennial rice, Nature Sustainability (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41893-022-00997-3. www.nature.com/articles/s41893-022-00997-3 Citation: Farmers in China and Uganda move to high-yielding, cost-saving perennial rice (2022, November 7) retrieved 13 November 2022 from https://phys.org/news/2022-11-farmers-china-uganda-high-yielding-cost-saving.html This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only. | Agriculture |
New Zealand’s government on Tuesday proposed taxing farm animals’ greenhouse gas emissions as part of its efforts to reduce the pollution that is causing climate change.The tax would be the world’s first on animal emissions, including those from burps and urination, which contribute to rising global temperatures. The plan, according to the government, would be economically beneficial because global consumers are becoming more eco-conscious, and the revenues generated by the tax would go to research and technology for capturing animal emissions, and to incentive payments for farmers.“New Zealand’s farmers are set to be the first in the world to reduce agricultural emissions, positioning our biggest export market for the competitive advantage that brings in a world increasingly discerning about the provenance of their food,” New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said.New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern with Agriculture Minister Damien O'Connor. (Lynn Grieveson/Getty Images)As a byproduct of their digestion, livestock such as cows and sheep release methane — a greenhouse gas that causes 80 times as much warming as carbon dioxide in its first 20 years in the atmosphere. That includes methane in flatulence and manure, but the single biggest source of methane from animals is burps. Globally, methane accounts for 20% of greenhouse gas emissions, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Livestock accounts for 14.5% of total global emissions, according to the United Nations.A largely rural, agricultural country, New Zealand has 5 million people and roughly 10 million cattle and 26 million sheep. According to government data from 2019, 37% of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions were from methane, and 88.4% of its methane emissions came from livestock. About three-quarters comes from cows, with the rest coming from sheep.The New Zealand government has committed to reaching zero net emissions by 2050, including a reduction of farm animals’ methane emissions by 10% by 2030 and 47% by 2050.Those emissions could potentially be reduced by capturing methane in burp-catching cow masks or other new technologies.Cows wait to be milked on a dairy farm in New Zealand's Waikato region. (William West/AFP via Getty Images)When the government first floated the idea of a burp tax in June, New Zealand’s agricultural lobby was supportive. "We've been working with the government and other organizations on this for years to get an approach that won't shut down farming in New Zealand, so we've signed off on a lot of stuff we're happy with,” Andrew Hoggard, the national president of Federated Farmers of New Zealand, told the BBC at the time.But the proposal put forth on Tuesday was greeted with skepticism from industry groups, which said the tax would cripple the business of farmers and ranchers, even though the price has not yet been set. Hoggard said his group has found the government unresponsive to its concerns, and he warned that the measure would “rip the guts out of small-town New Zealand.”New Zealand Agriculture Minister Damien O’Connor countered that reducing climate change is also important to protecting farmers’ future livelihood.“Farmers are already experiencing the impact of climate change with more regular drought and flooding,” O’Connor said. “Taking the lead on agricultural emissions is both good for the environment and our economy.” | Agriculture |
Getty Images Rows of crops stand amid ongoing drought on August 26, 2022 near Bakersfield, California. California is experiencing a third consecutive year of drought in the West. According to the U.S. Drought Monitor, more than 97 percent of the state of California’s land area is in at least severe drought status. As California’s drought stretches into a third straight year, the state’s agriculture industry is incurring billions in related losses, a new study has found. The report estimates direct impacts on farm activity of $1.2 billion this year — up from $810 million in 2021. But the effects of the drought in 2022 extended far beyond that $1.2 billion sum, according to the report, released by the University of California, Merced’s Water Systems Management Lab. Impacts on food processing industries that depend on farm products were about $845 million in 2022 — up from $590 million last year. “California is no stranger to drought, but this current drought has hit really hard in some of the typically water-rich parts of the state that are essential for the broader state water supply,” co-author John Abatzoglou, a professor of climatology at UC Merced, said in a statement. Altogether, the combined direct and indirect consequences of the drought have reached about $2 billion in value-added losses this year alone, the researchers found. These losses amount to a 5.9 percent reduction when compared to those of 2019 and also resulted in 19,420 job cuts, according to the study. In addition to suffering the impacts of the drought, California’s agricultural economy has also suffered from supply chain disruptions, including the ability to ship crops out of state, the authors explained. Such delays could result in increased inventory and influence some of California’s specialty crop prices, according to the study. While acknowledging such negative effects of the drought on agriculture, the researchers found that things could have been worse. Drought impact mitigation techniques — such as land idling and increased groundwater pumping and water trading — reduced potential economic losses, according to lead author Josué Medellín-Azuara, an associate professor of environmental engineering at UC Merced. Meanwhile, some parts of California were hit much harder than others. “The Sacramento Valley and its communities have been ground zero during this drought,” Alvar Escriva-Bou, a senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, said in a statement. Statewide idled land in 2022 grew by 750,000 acres in comparison to 2019 — with more than half of these farms located in the Sacramento area, according to the study. Given that the region is typically much wetter, Escriva-Bou recommended increased investments in basin recharge and pumping infrastructure to bolster the region’s drought resilience. “We need to more fully invest in building climate resilience in our rural, agriculture dependent communities as they are on the front lines of climate impacts to their economic base,” added co-author Joshua Viers, a UC Merced associate dean for research. “We can only expect prolonged dry periods briefly interrupted by pronounced wet ones — which will further stress access to clean drinking water and steady employment, among many challenges,” Viers said. | Agriculture |
BEIRUT, LebanonThe European Union on Tuesday launched two new initiatives worth 25 million euros ($27 million) to support vulnerable people in cash-strapped Lebanon and to fight food insecurity.“These initiatives are a response to the negative impact of Russia's war against Ukraine on the European Union's neighboring countries,” the EU Delegation to Lebanon said in a statement.“The funds available for Lebanon will provide immediate assistance for 7,245 impoverished Lebanese families (41,287 individuals) enrolled in the National Poverty Targeting Programme (NPTP),” it added.The EU delegation said the bloc wants to help strengthening Lebanese agricultural and agri-food systems.“This will help Lebanon diversify its food production and move away from dependency on crops/cereals imports,” it said, adding that the project will be implemented in partnership with the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and World Food Programme (WFP).Since 2019, Lebanon has been plagued by a crippling economic crisis that, according to the World Bank, is one of the worst the world has seen in modern times.*Ikram Imane Kouachi contributed to this report Anadolu Agency website contains only a portion of the news stories offered to subscribers in the AA News Broadcasting System (HAS), and in summarized form. Please contact us for subscription options. | Agriculture |
SALINAS – Strawberries continue to be king, maintaining the top crop spot of Monterey County commodities in 2021 for the second consecutive year, with an increase of 4.9% for a value of just over $968 million, Monterey County Agricultural Commissioner Henry Gonzales announced at a press briefing Tuesday.
The 2021 Monterey County Crop and Livestock Report, titled Salad Bowl of the World, was released to the public and reports a gross production value of $4.1 billion in agricultural commodities grown in Monterey County, reflecting an increase of 4.8% from 2020.
As in other economic engines for the county such as the tourism industry, the agriculture sector is still trying to shake off the effects of COVID-19.
“In my opinion, it’s rebounded approximately where we would expect. Probably a little less because I think many of us expected COVID-19 to be gone,” said Gonzales. “That has not happened so I think that has hampered, to some degree, the rebound … I think there would have been more, I expected more, but we’re close, and I really think we need to be rid of the pandemic and we’ll be able to be closer to the $4.5 billion that we were not that long ago before COVID.” In 2019, the county’s agricultural commodities gross production value was roughly $4.4 billion. It fell 11.3% in 2020 to $3.9 billion, the year COVID-19 hit and wildfires ravaged the county.
Rounding out the top five crops in the county for 2021 is leaf lettuce in the number two position with a value of roughly $742 million, an increase of 4.1%, head lettuce in the third spot at about $452 million, an increase of 5.4%, broccoli moving up to fourth place despite a 9.4% decrease with a value of $309 million.
Jumping from the 12th position last year to the fifth spot this year was wine grapes valued at $219 million, an increase of 106.2% over last year.
“We’re a lot happier than we were last year at this time,” said Monterey County Vintners and Growers Association Executive Director Kim Stemler. “The primary reason we had a lot of trouble during 2020 was that there was a fire during harvest. Grapes get smoke taint, which means you won’t see a lot of red 2020s.”
Stemler pointed out that even compared with 2019, which wasn’t a fire year for the Monterey County ag industry, 2021 wine grape value increased about 17.5%. But in that time there has been a decrease in acreage. She explained that vines are being pulled mainly due to age, or the infection of grapevine leafroll virus transmitted by mealybugs in vineyards with zero tolerance.
Wine sales increased 30% during COVID-19 when many people stayed home but no one knows what the market will look like post-COVID. Since costs of production are rising, there is uncertainty for wine grape growers, some of which are letting their land lie fallow or putting in other crops, she said.
But Stemler said the increase in value with less acreage in production is because growers have increased efficiencies in grapevine production, leaning heavily on modern technologies. The county’s wine grape producers are in a good position to bring most of the acreage taken out of production, she said.
Even with strawberries riding high, California Strawberry Commission spokesman David Nevarez said that growing the prized berry is very labor-intensive and with the cost of labor and transportation increasing, even though its value is increasing, that doesn’t mean strawberry growers are earning more money.
Likewise, Aaron Johnson, founder of Coastal Growers Association, a coalition of cannabis growers, processors, manufacturers, distributors and dispensaries, said the 2021 Monterey County Crop and Livestock Report indicates a partial story of success and is a “snapshot of what could have been” for the sector he represents.
The cannabis market has declined precipitously going from $750 to $1,000 per pound to $250 to $350 per pound since the end of last year, he said.
The total production and value of cannabis cultivation during 2021 was calculated at $618 million the crop report states, increasing $134 million or 27.69% from the previous year. The report says that’s a result of greater production of flower and nursery products as well as good pricing for Monterey County cannabis during the first half of the year. The value is summarized and averaged as a gross production value. Capital expenditures, labor, profits, fees, taxes, and other overhead costs are not reflected in the total and do not represent the net profit of the industry or any individual cultivator.
But in 2021, the cannabis market crashed statewide due to an imbalance between supply and demand, and legal retail outlets. Prices for Monterey County mixed-light cannabis flowers declined 68% from their spring highs and indoor prices fell 56% by the end of the year, according to the report.
Johnson said the cannabis growers have asked the Monterey County Board of Supervisors for immediate relief, seeking a freeze on taxes for a year while the market settles.
Even with swings in crop values, the Crop and Livestock Report points to the diversification of what is grown in Monterey County as key to the Monterey County agricultural industry’s resilience and economic strength, fortifying its moniker as the “Salad Bowl of the World.”
According to the Crop Report, that diversification lessened the impact of recent wildfires and the COVID-19 pandemic. Economic diversification is likened to an insurance policy against risks. According to two studies, Monterey County’s agricultural industry index of diversification looking at the number of different commodities produced and their relative abundance, places it quite high compared to other California counties. It indicates that Monterey County agricultural production is both diverse and well-distributed across categories.
Visit www.co.monterey.ca.us/government/departments-a-h/agricultural-commissioner to view the 2021 Monterey County Crop and Livestock Report. | Agriculture |
Europe’s summer of drought has been impossible to ignore. Rivers dried up, exposing the skeletons of warships and ancient buildings. Images captured by satellite show swathes of the continent’s normally verdant fields turned to parched dust bowls.The hot, dry conditions have also wreaked havoc on Europe’s agriculture. Most of the continent’s water-starved fields will produce lower than expected yields this summer. For some crops the difference is stark: Soybean yields are 15 percent below their five-year average while sunflower yields are 12 percent down. With agricultural supply chains already stretched because of the war in Ukraine, the vulnerabilities in Europe’s food system are looking extremely exposed.In response, some European politicians are starting to rethink the European Union’s long-standing opposition to genetically modified (GMO) and gene-edited crops. In July, an Italian member of the European Parliament called for a loosening of the rules that restrict crop varieties created using new gene-editing techniques like CRISPR from being grown and sold within the EU. “New agricultural biotechnology can provide experimentation for more drought- and pest-resistant plants,” member Antonio Tajani said in a meeting at the European Parliament. Other Italian politicians have joined him in calling for similar changes to gene-editing regulations. In northern Italy, the drought is so severe that rice fields are drying up and farmers are facing much lower harvests than normal.If European droughts are here to stay, farmers might need new crop varieties that can withstand long, dry summers. Until recently, scientists who wanted to create more drought-resistant crops would have two main options: conventional breeding, or genetic modification. Genetically modified crops are made by inserting genetic material from another organism into the DNA of a plant—usually a gene that makes the crop resistant to insects or herbicides. The EU’s strict rules on GMOs mean that only two such crops have ever been approved there, and only one—a bug-resistant corn—is grown within EU borders. In the United States, by contrast, nearly 90 percent of soybean and corn fields are GMO. Gene editing is a separate and more recent technique, and involves directly editing the genome of an organism rather than inserting genes from a different species. It was expected to avoid GMO regulations, but in 2018 the European Court of Justice ruled that gene-edited crops should be subject to the same regulations as GMOs.Now there are signs that the EU’s position might be about to change. The European Commission is responsible for creating new legislation in the EU, and in April 2021 published a study outlining its desire to loosen regulations on gene-edited crops. “The commission realized that the European Court of Justice decision was not science-based. It was legally based but it wasn’t science-based,” says Cathie Martin, a professor of plant science at the John Innes Centre in the UK. The European Commission’s study concluded that the EU’s existing GMO rules aren’t suitable for regulating crops made using gene editing. It also said that gene-edited crops could help the EU meet its goals for sustainability and food security.A change in policy could also have an impact on the EU’s agricultural emissions. Agriculture is responsible for around 10 percent of the EU’s emissions, but one study from the US-based think tank the Breakthrough Institute found that the EU’s adoption of GMO crops such as those grown in the US could lead to a reduction in emissions equivalent to 7.5 percent of the total agricultural emissions of Europe. This mainly comes from the fact that GMO crops tend to have higher yields than conventional varieties. Most of those emissions reductions would come from land outside the EU that didn’t need to be converted to agriculture, explains Emma Kovak, lead author of the study. “Because crop yields in the EU are higher than the global average, further increasing crop yields in the EU allows production expansion elsewhere in the world to slow,” she explains.There are some big caveats, however. Firstly, even if the European Commission does get its way, new regulations will apply only to gene-edited crops and not the kind of GMOs widely grown in the US. Secondly, two of the most widely grown crops in the EU are wheat and barley, and there aren’t gene-edited versions of those crops that are ready to be put straight in the ground.In other words, any emissions reductions from a change in gene-editing regulations wouldn’t come quickly. But more drought-tolerant crops might not be too far away. Kovak points out that drought-tolerant wheat has already been approved in Argentina, although that too is a GMO crop. If the EU and its 450 million inhabitants do become a new market for gene-edited crops, however, that might be an incentive for agricultural firms to produce new drought-resistant varieties of European staples.If gene-edited crops do become deregulated in the EU, then it’s likely that the first to come to market will be fruits and vegetables rather than big commodity crops, as many of these already have GMO versions and manufacturers might be unwilling to create new gene-edited varieties for just the European market. Big agricultural companies have tended to avoid modifying lower-value foods such as fruit and vegetables because of the large costs associated with developing new GMO varieties—but gene editing is much cheaper. In the US, a CRISPR-edited mushroom was the first gene-edited food to be approved for sale. In the UK, Martin is doing her first field trials on tomatoes that have been gene edited to contain a precursor to vitamin D. These trials were possible only because the country recently eased regulations around field trials of gene-edited crops, as part of a post-Brexit breakaway from EU-era regulations.Legislation to deregulate gene-edited crops in the EU may have a much tougher path ahead. The European Commission’s study has been staunchly opposed by groups such as Greenpeace and Slow Food, an organization that promotes local and traditional cooking within the EU. If a change in regulation is to pass, the commission will have to convince the European Council, and then legislation will be put to a vote in the European Parliament. In a bloc with such strong food traditions, it’s likely there will be a lot of resistance to new rules for gene-edited crops.But Petra Jorasch, a spokesperson for Euroseeds, a group representing European seed companies, says that gene-editing technology could actually help preserve local varieties. Gene editing might mean that the Riesling grape could be made to be resistant to a certain fungi, for example, while still retaining all the other qualities of a Riesling. “If you could use those technologies to improve the fungi resistance in a wine, you would have the same crop with this added resistance and less fungicide use,” she says.Kovak says that the best way to convince voters and legislators might be to emphasize that increasing crop yields in the EU would make it easier for the region to become more food secure and thus less vulnerable to fluctuations in food prices. And because gene editing is cheaper, consumers might also have more direct experience with edited crops in the form of nutritionally enhanced fruits and vegetables, like Martin’s tomatoes. “It opens the door to more improvements of produce,” Kovak says. | Agriculture |
Upside Meats CEO, Uma Valeti. Upside Meats is one of the biggest companies in the cultivated meats space, having raised hundreds of millions of dollars to continue research and development. Brian L. Frank for NPR hide caption toggle caption Brian L. Frank for NPR Upside Meats CEO, Uma Valeti. Upside Meats is one of the biggest companies in the cultivated meats space, having raised hundreds of millions of dollars to continue research and development. Brian L. Frank for NPR Imagine a way to produce meat without slaughtering animals. Instead of raising livestock on farms, Uma Valeti, a cardiologist, and co-founder of Upside Foods, dreamt of a way to "grow" meat in a production facility, by culturing animal cells. The concept for what's now called "cultivated" meat came to Valeti when he was working with heart attack patients at the Mayo Clinic more than 15 years ago, growing human heart cells in a lab. It should be possible to grow meat with similar science, he realized. Scientists could extract cells from an animal via a needle biopsy, place them in tanks, feed them the nutrients they need to proliferate, including fats, sugar, amino acids and vitamins, and end up with meat. It has taken years of experimentation by a crew of biologists, biochemists and engineers to turn that concept into a product ready to eat. Now the company is awaiting a greenlight from the Food and Drug Administration to begin selling its first cultivated meat products, including a chicken fillet. After four years of talks with regulators at the FDA, Valeti anticipates this could happen "in the very near future." When it does, Upside's production facility in Emeryville, Calif., will be able to produce over 50,000 pounds of cultivated meat products per year. "People said it was science fiction," Valeti told me as we toured the 70,000-square-foot facility. "This is real." We suited up for the tour in gowns, goggles and hair nets to maintain food safety protocols and walked past shiny, brewery-style, stainless steel tanks reaching from floor to ceiling. The lobby at Upside Foods is a dining area where one can see meat being produced through windows in a wall. Brian L. Frank for NPR hide caption toggle caption Brian L. Frank for NPR The lobby at Upside Foods is a dining area where one can see meat being produced through windows in a wall. Brian L. Frank for NPR But these tanks – called cultivators in this industry – "brew" meat, not beer. We saw the cell bank where the animal cell samples are stored, the pipes that pump nutrients into the tanks, and finally the raw meat as it emerged from the production facility. The process had a futuristic vibe but by the end of the tour, it felt somehow ordinary to me — like a kind of hydroponic gardening. The facility's glass walls look out into a busy upscale neighborhood, filled with restaurants, apartments and offices. Valeti says the glass walls are intentional – to signal transparency. "To create a paradigm change, people should be able to walk through and see and believe it," he says. Upside Foods could have lots of competition once cultivated meats enter the market. More than 80 companies are staking a future in the space. For instance, Good Meat, part of Eat Just, Inc., will serve its cultivated chicken at the COP-27 climate conference this week, after debuting its product in Singapore. Also, Sci-Fi Foods, founded by self-proclaimed "burger-obsessed food lovers" aims to blend cultivated beef with a plant-based recipe to produce a hybrid burger that, they say, will be better for the planet. The cultivation room at Upside Foods. David Kay hide caption toggle caption David Kay The cultivation room at Upside Foods. David Kay The acceleration in investment comes as more consumers connect the dots between what they eat and the environment. An estimated one third of all human-induced greenhouse gas emissions come from food production and scientists warn it's nearly impossible to meet climate goals without changing agriculture. Scientists say beef has an especially large environmental impact because it requires a lot of land to graze animals and is a leading source of methane emissions. By comparison, it takes much less land and grain to raise chickens. However, concentrated poultry operations are linked to water pollution. Furthermore, concentrated animal feeding operations are a risk factor for the emergence of diseases that spread between animals and people, as a UN report from 2020, Preventing the Next Pandemic, warned. A move from medicine to meat Valeti's leap from cardiology to food innovation was inspired by a belief that there was a better way to bring meat to the table. He recalls working in a campus dining hall in medical school. He was sent to a slaughterhouse where he saw hundreds of chickens hanging on a production line. "They were literally moving past at blazing speed, they'd be upside down with blood everywhere," Valeti recalls. "That was an image that just stayed in my head." He became a vegetarian, but he knew many people are resolute carnivores. Despite calls from climate change scientists to eat less meat, the globe is demanding more of it. Americans now eat more than 220 pounds of meat per person, per year, compared to 193 pounds a year in the early 1980s. After his aha moment in the cardiology lab, Valeti became convinced he could develop a viable technique for cultivating meat from animal cells. "Once I got that idea into my head it was nearly impossible to get out," Valeti recalls. Upside Foods CEO Uma Valeti prepares to sample a recently cooked chicken breast. Brian L. Frank for NPR hide caption toggle caption Brian L. Frank for NPR Upside Foods CEO Uma Valeti prepares to sample a recently cooked chicken breast. Brian L. Frank for NPR He began raising money and started Upside (formerly called Memphis Meats) in 2015. At the time his two children were young, and his wife, also a doctor, was supportive of the decision despite the risks involved in a start-up. He's won over plenty of investors along the way, including Bill Gates and venture capitalist John Doerr, and the company is now valued at more than a billion dollars. Some of the largest companies involved in traditional meat production, including Tyson and Cargill have also invested. Though the idea of meat grown in tanks elicits an "ick" response from many people, the emerging industry sees market potential. According to consumer research, 88% of Gen Z consumers in the U.S. say they'd be somewhat open to trying cultivated meat, compared with about 72% of baby boomers. "We feel super bullish on the prospects for plant-based meat as well as cultivated meat," says Bruce Friedrich of the Good Food Institute which tracks investment trends and lobbies for alternative proteins. Climate conscious consumers would be likely early adopters, Friedrich says, but for the market to really take off the products need to taste great and be cost competitive, he says. "Until they get there, they're going to stay niche," Friedrich predicts. "Price and taste are why people make their food decisions." When I asked Valeti about price parity with conventional meat he said the goal is to be price-competitive. "It will take time to build," Valeti acknowledged. As for taste, he says his team is ready to wow consumers. Chicken breast is prepared at Upside Foods.Upside Meats is one of the biggest companies in the cultivated meats space, having raised upwards of a $ billion to continue research and development. Brian L. Frank for NPR hide caption toggle caption Brian L. Frank for NPR Chicken breast is prepared at Upside Foods.Upside Meats is one of the biggest companies in the cultivated meats space, having raised upwards of a $ billion to continue research and development. Brian L. Frank for NPR A visit to the test kitchen During our visit, we stopped in the company's state-of-the-art test kitchen for taste of Upside Foods' chicken. I was asked to sign a waiver before tasting it, because it's not yet legal to sell cell-cultured meat in the U.S. I was served a piece of their chicken, pan-fried in a white wine butter sauce. My first reaction: "It's delicious." (Isn't everything in wine-butter sauce?) And the texture was chewy, closely replicating the texture of chicken breast (minus bones, and tough bits or grizzle.) "It tastes like chicken," I said, to which Valeti quickly replied, "It is chicken!" It took Valeti and his team years to develop the technology behind these tasty bites. A key challenge was creating the feed for the cells. Cells need a mix of proteins, carbohydrates and fats (just as animals do) but, designing the exact formulation was part alchemy, and a lot of trial and error. The feed needed to maximize growth, but also produce a good taste, texture and nutritional value. He quickly realized no single scientist had the skills to figure this out alone. A muscle biologist can focus on growth, but he brought in nutritional biochemists and engineers to tackle the competing challenges linked to taste and growth. "We had to develop a multidisciplinary team of scientists," Valeti says. Federal agencies are currently considering whether to allow cultivated meat producers to sell their meats. The FDA and the U.S. Department of Agriculture are working together on a regulatory framework "to help move these innovative products along into the U.S. market, as long as we're making sure that everything can be done safely and with appropriate labeling," Susan Mayne, Director of the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition at the FDA told NPR. The FDA says it will review each company's submission separately and can't predict when or if any will be completed. "We encourage firms to have these conversations with us often and early in their product development phase," an FDA spokesperson wrote in an email. A recent executive order from the Biden administration, which calls for advancing innovative solutions in climate change and food security, including "cultivating alternative food sources," was viewed by many in the nascent cultivated food industry as a sign of increased momentum toward approval. The USDA is currently developing labeling requirements. One of Upside Foods' many competitors, Good Meat will serve its cultivated chicken at the COP-27 climate conference this week, after debuting its product in Singapore. Good Meat, one of the bigger companies in the cultivated meats space. Brian L. Frank for NPR hide caption toggle caption Brian L. Frank for NPR One of Upside Foods' many competitors, Good Meat will serve its cultivated chicken at the COP-27 climate conference this week, after debuting its product in Singapore. Good Meat, one of the bigger companies in the cultivated meats space. Brian L. Frank for NPR Debates over health and environmental impact There are debates about whether cultivated meat is healthy — or potentially healthier than conventional meat. "It's a very nuanced question without a very simple answer," explains Dana Hunnes, a registered dietitian at UCLA Medical Center. Opinions tend to reflect the range of views about meat in general. Hunnes says cultivated meat may not appeal to vegans or vegetarians. She points to the healthfulness of plant-based diets, which is the diet she follows, and says some people don't want to eat meat, no matter how it's produced. Also, the cultivated meat industry has relied on fetal bovine serum from cows as a growth medium for the cells, though Upside Foods has developed an animal component-free alternative. But most Americans are meat-eaters, and dieticians say meat is a good source of protein and important micronutrients including B vitamins. Part of the intrigue of cultivated meat is that it can be altered for improved nutrition. For instance, if cells were fed omega-3 fatty acids during the growing process, then, in theory, these heart-healthy fats could be absorbed into the meat. "It is possible to create a so-called healthier version of the meat," Hunnes says, though much of this has not yet been explored since the industry is so new. Scientists at Good Meat work on cell cultures which will be used for the company's cultivated meats. Brian L. Frank for NPR hide caption toggle caption Brian L. Frank for NPR Scientists at Good Meat work on cell cultures which will be used for the company's cultivated meats. Brian L. Frank for NPR From a public health perspective, a potential advantage of cultivated meat is the fact that without live animals to catch and spread disease, no antibiotics are needed in production facilities and there's decreased likelihood of foodborne illness from intestinal pathogens. For instance, salmonella, a bacteria that lives in animal intestines and is shed through their feces, would not be present in a cultivated meat production facility. "From a food safety standpoint, it probably has a one up," on the traditional meat industry, Hunnes says. Because this is a new industry, there are potential unknowns. Some scientists say it's possible that unforeseen biological mechanisms could occur, such as cells multiplying in unpredictable ways. There's a continued need for research as the industry heads towards commercialization. The first cultivated meat products were produced from cells biopsied directly from live animals. But this process isn't efficient. Over the last few years, start-ups have worked to identify "immortalized" cell lines, that "can be grown almost indefinitely without having to go back to the animal," explains David Kaplan, professor of biomedical engineering of Tufts University. His lab received a $10 million grant from USDA to help develop the cultured meat industry. "We need more and more," immortalized cell lines, Kaplan says, as the industry looks to expand to different types of meat, poultry and fish. Another unknown is the exact climate impact of cultivated meat. Researchers at the University of Oxford modeled the potential climate change impact of cattle compared to cultivated meat. One advantage of cultivated meat is that it will not produce methane emissions, which is a potent greenhouse gas produced by cattle. But the cultivated meat industry will contribute to CO2 emissions, given its production facilities will use electricity. The researchers conclude that the relative impact will be determined by whether – or how quickly — the energy used to power the cultivated meat production facilities comes from clean-energy, or decarbonized energy. Upside Meats CEO, Uma Valeti. Brian L. Frank for NPR hide caption toggle caption Brian L. Frank for NPR Culinary future For Valeti, the potential benefits of cultivated meat are too important not to try to overcome the obstacles. He sees a future with a better alternative to the current system of producing meat, and he's determined to create it. Valeti says, ultimately, as a doctor he might have been able to help a few thousand patients during his career. But, by taking the leap to cultivated meat, with its potential promise to overhaul meat production, he believes he can have a larger impact. "This could literally affect billions of human lives and save potentially trillions of animal lives," Valeti says. While awaiting regulatory approval, he's moving forward to bring the product to people's plates. He has signed a partnership with Dominique Crenn, the co-owner and chef of the three-Michelin-starred restaurant Atelier Crenn in San Francisco, who's agreed to provide culinary consulting and recipe development, and once approved for marked, to serve Upside's cultivated chicken at her restaurant. | Agriculture |
The beef industry has a bone to pick with Google.
The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association wants the tech giant to rein in a planned feature that would automatically display the emission intensity of certain ingredients when its users search for recipes. The trade group argues such emission metrics don’t fully capture the environmental benefits of beef.
But agriculture experts say the association’s complaints are a bunch of bull. “What they’re doing is confusing consumers,” said Danielle Nierenberg, the president of the sustainable agriculture advocacy group Food Tank, referring to the association. “They’re a huge lobby group that is paid by their members to support beef, no matter what the truth is.”
At issue is a planned search feature that would compare the “average greenhouse gas impact” of potential ingredients, based on the United Nations’ emissions data. It’s part of a broader suite of sustainability efforts Google has undertaken in recent years, such as a new Google Maps feature that highlights the most fuel-efficient route and an overhaul of its office food program to reduce meat consumption. In a blog post last month, Hema Budaraju, the director of Google Search, said the ingredient emissions feature would soon be available to all English-speaking users. She included a sample search for a panang curry recipe, which included an information box showing that beef has the highest emissions per pound of around a dozen potential ingredients. “Small changes can add up to a big impact,” she said in the post. “The future of our planet — and everyone on it — deserves nothing less.”
Then on Tuesday, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association denounced Google’s planned search feature.
“Google is using its billions of dollars of resources to target cattle producers and ignore the science that demonstrates beef’s sustainability and value to the environment,” Don Schiefelbein, the association’s president, said in a press release. “Cattle production protects green space, upcycles grass and forages, and provides consumers with a lean protein source packed with essential nutrients. Google should seriously reconsider this feature.”
Google didn’t respond to a request for comment on the association’s criticism.
Sustainable agriculture experts, though, welcomed the tech giant’s efforts to inform consumers about the emissions associated with their food choices.
“Foregrounding the environmental impact of various everyday commodities as people are Googling them strikes me as on balance a good idea,” said Jan Dutkiewicz, a visiting fellow in the Animal Law and Policy Program at Harvard Law School.
“This is not an anti-beef search function,” he said. “I see no reason why people shouldn’t have access to quick comparative information on the impact of the foods they’re using.”
While Nierenberg noted that systemic changes are needed to make major reductions in agriculture emissions, “I always think more information is a good thing,” she said. | Agriculture |
Cattle on a feedlot in Nebraska.Photo: Nati Harnik (AP)The world’s largest meat and dairy companies are responsible for more than 10% of all global methane emissions from livestock, with some singular companies emitting as much or more methane than many individual countries, including Russia, Germany, and Australia, a new report finds. The report, released this week from the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy and the Changing Markets Foundation, does a lot of math on food giants like JBS, Tyson, Nestle, and Danone, finding that just 15 meat and dairy companies are responsible for 3.4% of global methane emissions from human activity.OffEnglishOverall, the report finds, these companies are emitting 734 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent each year—higher than the annual emissions of Germany—while their methane footprint from agriculture is around 80% of the European Union’s entire methane footprint.“Agricultural emissions are quite concentrated within a handful of huge meat and dairy corporations who are responsible for a big chunk of this problem through their globalized supply chains,” Nusa Urbancic, the Campaigns Director for the Changing Markets Foundation, told Earther in an email. “This study shows that methane emissions from industrialized animal agriculture should be high on the governments’ priority list.”Methane stays in the atmosphere for a much shorter time than carbon dioxide, but it’s more intense while it’s up there, making it an increasingly worrisome factor in the world’s runaway warming. Cows are a particularly problematic source of methane emissions due to the process of enteric fermentation—their digestive mechanics that result in some heavily greenhouse gas-laden burps. Thanks in part to the explosion of animal agriculture in recent decades, cattle farming is now responsible for 9% of total global methane emissions. In recent years, global leaders have increasingly stressed the need to get methane emissions under control, and quickly, in order to get overall warming down.To put together the report, researchers used data on milk intake from 10 of the world’s top dairy companies and slaughter numbers—the number of animals killed per year—from some of the world’s top meat distributors. The authors then used regional meat production estimates, regional average greenhouse gas emissions intensity data, and milk production estimates from a UN agricultural assessment model to calculate the methane emissions of each company.G/O Media may get a commissionAn ultra-smart air monitoror Black Friday, uHoo is $140 off its original price, plus you’ll get one year of uHoo’s Premium plan, with customized alerts about air quality.A lot of these numbers are hard to find, and much of the research relied on self-reported data from the companies themselves. During the report’s research phase, the authors asked the 15 companies for regional breakdowns of milk or slaughter data; only four companies responded.“It is very challenging to get any data from these companies,” said Urbancic. “There is very little in the public domain, and especially for the meat companies we had to plough through all their annual, sustainability and investment reports to get any information on their operations.” Three of the five meat companies—including JBS and Tyson—did not publish their slaughter data, so to estimate the numbers of animals they process each year, the report uses slaughter processing rates, or the number of animals their facilities can slaughter, to estimate how many animals they’re killing per year.There’s a lot of ambiguity here, given how little data is publicly available—which in itself is a red flag that more transparency is needed to get a better grip of how much damage these companies are actually inflicting on the planet. The initial numbers provided by the report are still staggering. According to the report’s methodology, JBS, the largest meat producer in the world, has a methane footprint larger than those of Italy, Spain and the UK combined; Tyson Foods, meanwhile, has a methane footprint larger than Russia’s. (We reached out to several of the companies named in the report and will update this article if they respond.)There are lots of industries that need more regulation to curb their methane emissions (looking at you, oil and gas companies). But as this report highlights, industrial agriculture has a large part to play in our current methane problem. The industry is also building defenses to its methane emissions that policymakers should be aware of as they construct responses.“Given that we are in a climate emergency, which is already affecting farmers everywhere, governments must urgently act and put in place a comprehensive set of regulations, which should range from climate targets for the agricultural sector and reform of existing harmful agricultural subsidies.” said Urbancic. “However, it will be critical that the burden for emissions reduction rests on corporations that shape and drive the supply chain. Farmers within and outside these corporate supply chains must be supported to play a critical role in a sequenced, deliberate and just transition out of mass industrial livestock production towards agroecological systems that are healthy for the planet and people.” | Agriculture |
Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comIBADAN, Nigeria Aug 9 (Reuters) - Stacks of hairy yams line a market in Ibadan, where traders haggle over quality and price before loading them into cars for the last mile to Nigerian consumers. Nearby, a man navigates heavy traffic with a hand cart piled high with the tubers.Yams - pounded into paste, ground into flour, boiled or fried – provide sustenance and livelihoods across West Africa. But growing conditions across the "yam belt" from Guinea to Cameroon are deteriorating just as prices of other staples soar.Vendor Adewale Elekun said farmers in Nigeria are already finding life harder than in the past, when soil was good and the land fertile.Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com"Today the quality of the soil has faded," he said, amidst the bustle of the market.Elsewhere in Ibadan, a transit and tech startup hub 130 km (80 miles) northeast of Lagos, molecular geneticist Dr Ranjana Bhattacharjee says she hopes to change things for the better by helping to create hardier and more adaptable plants.Yam sellers load yam tubers into a wheelbarrow at Bodija market in Ibadan, Oyo, Nigeria August 2, 2022. REUTERS/Temilade AdelajaShe is working at the city's International Institute of Tropical Agriculture to complete whole-genome sequencing of around 1,000 yam samples – work she says paves the way for moves to ensure future crops are more adaptable to a changing climate."If you want to make an improvement in crops, then you have to do genome sequencing to understand the genes of your targeted traits like disease resistance (and) quality," Bhattacharjee said.The need to boost locally grown crops is particularly acute because of global food price rises since some major producing countries decided to export less food and Russia's invasion of Ukraine blocked that country's grain and sunflower seed exports.Yams, bigger than their unrelated north American namesake, symbolize prosperity, wealth and even fertility in West Africa.Sequencing their genomes could help West African farmers, who grow some 90% of all yams worldwide, improve their yield and keep it high, said Bhattacharjee, adding once the results are published, others will work on applying them."That will then ultimately lead to food security, not only in Nigeria but also in West Africa where the yam is being grown," she said.Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comReporting By Seun Sanni, writing by Libby George; editing by Philippa FletcherOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. | Agriculture |
(Bloomberg) -- Mexico introduced a temporary 50% tariff on exports of white corn used in basic food as it seeks to contain a spike in the price of tortillas, one of the country’s staples. The duty, which will be in place through June 30, seeks to guarantee that local production remains in the country and that white corn prices stabilize, according to the decree signed by President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and published Monday. Imports of the grain used for human consumption will be exempted of tariffs.White corn is a key source of calories in the diet of Mexican consumers, representing 89% of the country’s grain production, the decree said. On average, Mexicans consume more than 330 kilograms of white corn per person annually, it said. Mexico is struggling to contain a spike in food prices that led to inflation reaching 8.7% during the third quarter, the highest level in more than two decades. Last year, the Lopez Obrador administration reached an agreement with some of the country’s top businesses to contain the cost of basic goods by removing import barriers and red tape. Read More: Banxico Should Keep Peak Rate for Minimum Six Months, Heath SaysMexico exported about 241,000 tons of white corn in 2022, with an estimated value of $97 million, according to government data cited by Grupo Consultor de Mercados Agricolas, a research firm focused on the agriculture business. The vast majority of the grain produced in Mexico is used for local consumption, so the measure will have limited impact on shipments.The new tariff comes at a time Mexico and the US are fighting over the Latin American government’s proposal to ban imports of genetically-modified yellow corn for livestock feed by early next year, which Mexican politicians argue could be damaging to health. Mexico’s Finance Ministry and the US Trade Representative’s office did not respond to comment requests on the decision.Read More: AMLO Warns Spat With US Over GMO Corn Will Escalate Without Deal--With assistance from Eric Martin.(Update with data on corn exports and government comment in fifth and sixth paragraphs.)©2023 Bloomberg L.P. | Agriculture |
By Matt McGrathEnvironment correspondentImage source, Getty ImagesCarbon emissions in the Amazon region in 2019 and 2020 more than doubled compared to the average of the previous eight years, according to a new study.Deforestation for agriculture and fires were the main drivers of the increase, according to the authors. The scientists say that a "collapse" in law enforcement in recent years has encouraged forest clearing. The research findings have been submitted for publication but have yet to be independently reviewed. As home to the largest tropical forest on Earth, the Amazon plays a critical role in maintaining the Earth's climate by storing massive amounts of carbon in trees and soils.Image source, Getty ImagesImage caption, Fires in August in Brazil ere extremely active but researchers say that clearing for farming is having a bigger impactOver the last few decades the forest has been under growing pressure as land has been cleared in Brazil and neighbouring countries, primarily for farming. Last year researchers published data indicating that the eastern part of the forest was being cut down at such a rate that more carbon was being released than absorbed by the trees and vegetation. Now the same scientists believe that an explosion of forest clearing in the western part of the Amazon has also turned that region into a source. of carbon emissions Using small planes, the researchers have collected hundreds of air samples from different parts of the forest over the last ten years. Their new study shows that in 2019, carbon emissions increased by 89% compared to the annual average of emissions between 2010 and 2018. In 2020, the picture was even worse, with an increase of 122%. While fires played a role, the main factor was the removal of trees by land clearing, which increased by 75% in 2020. Image source, Getty ImagesImage caption, Deforestation is set to play a big role in Brazil's upcoming election with President Bolsonaro seeking another termThe researchers link this rise in deforestation to a rapid decline in prosecutions by law enforcement agencies, which saw fines for illegal forest clearances fall by 89% in 2020.The scientists say that this is down to the policies of President Jair Bolsonaro, who took office in 2019. He has cancelled fines and penalties related to deforestation, and pushed hard for the expansion of agriculture in Brazil. "We hypothesize that the consequences of the collapse in enforcement led to increases in deforestation, biomass burning and degradation producing net carbon losses and enhancing drying and warming of forest regions," the new study says. The researchers say that this rapid increase in emissions from the forest has also had an impact on the climate around the trees. "In consequence of this big deforestation, in the wet season of 2020 we saw a decline of 26% in rainfall during January, February and March, while the temperature has gone up by 0.6C," said lead author Dr Luciana Gatti, from Brazil's National Institute for Space Research (INPE)."The emissions come from deforestation and degradation and also from this climate change promoted by the human destruction of the forest. And this is a very alarming scenario," she told BBC News. Image source, Getty ImagesImage caption, Clearing land for soybeans has been a major factor in the loss of forestsEnvironmental campaigners say that this hands-off approach to prosecuting illegal deforestation has continued this year, with over 8,500 sq km lost between August 2021 and July 2022, an area larger than the US state of Delaware."The collapse in law enforcement in the Brazilian Amazon has allowed land grabbers and illegal loggers to continue unchecked with devastating consequences for people, wildlife and the planet," said Mike Barrett from WWF."The Amazon is getting dangerously close to a crucial tipping point which could see large areas transform from a resilient, moist rainforest into a dry, fire-ravaged, and irreversibly degraded state."The question of the future of the forest is an important issue in Brazil's presidential election taking place in early October with the incumbent, Jair Bolsonaro, being challenged by former president Luiz Inácio "Lula" da Silva.The outcome could have significant implications for the Amazon, as scientists like Dr Gatti fear it may be reaching a point where it would continually emit more carbon than it absorbs. She said that action by consumers and governments around the world was also critical to prevent this from happening. "We need to have an international commitment with countries in international commerce, that they don't buy the products that result in the destruction of nature," she said.Follow Matt on Twitter @mattmcgrathbbc. | Agriculture |
Tomatoes for processing damaged by heat and drought hang on vines in a field belonging to farmer Aaron Barcellos in Los Banos, Calif., in September. (Nathan Frandino/Reuters)Vegetable prices in the United States were up nearly 40% in November over the previous month, according to new figures from the Labor Department, and climate change is one of the reasons why.In California, an ongoing drought that studies have shown has been been exacerbated by climate change, has led to $3 billion worth of agriculture losses in a state that grows much of the nation's food. The megadrought, which covers much of the American West, has forced cuts in the amount of water that states like California and Arizona receive from the Colorado River.That has left tomatoes to wither on the vine, and lettuce to shrivel.“There’s just not enough water to grow everything that we normally grow,” Don Cameron, president of the State Board of Food and Agriculture, told the Times of San Diego.Thanks to a significantly diminished snowpack in 2022, following the driest January and February in recorded history in the state, California's Central Valley has also struggled to produce its usual output of fruits and vegetables.Making matters even worse, and more expensive for consumers, lettuce production in the Salinas Valley has fallen further, thanks to an outbreak of the impatiens necrotic spot virus, which spreads from plant to plant and can decimate entire greenhouses.“In October, most of the nation’s lettuce comes from the Salinas Valley, and they are having very low production because the virus affected their crop,” Bruce Babcock, an agricultural economist at the University of California Riverside, told NBC Bay Area. “A case of romaine is $75 now, and last January, it was $25, so that's almost a tripling of prices at the wholesale level.”Oranges lie on the ground in a grove in Arcadia, Fla., in October after Hurricane Ian. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)The long-term climate change trend in California, however, is causing the state's government to take action. In August, California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced an $8 billion plan aimed at increasing the state's water supply and "adapting to a hotter, drier future.""We are experiencing extreme, sustained drought conditions in California and across the American West caused by hotter, drier weather," a policy outline released by the governor's office stated. "Our warming climate means that a greater share of the rain and snow fall we receive will be absorbed by dry soils, consumed by thirsty plants, and evaporated into the air. This leaves less water to meet our needs."The negative farming impacts in California from climate change are much the same story in Arizona, which provides more than 9% of the country's leafy greens during the winter months, Bloomberg reported. The combination of the drought and Colorado River water cuts have severely affected the growing season, and more cuts are coming in the new year. In August, the federal government announced that water deliveries to Arizona would be reduced by another 20%, starting in January of next year."Prolonged drought is one of the most profound issues facing the U.S. today," Tommy Beaudreau, assistant secretary of the interior, said in announcing the cuts.In Florida, the top supplier of fruits and vegetables in the U.S. during autumn and winter, Hurricane Ian caused up to $1.9 billion in damages to the state's agricultural industry, hitting orange and tomato crops particularly hard.Studies have shown that Ian was wetter and more intense as a consequence of climate change. | Agriculture |
© Provided by The Canadian Press LUBBOCK, Texas (AP) — The cotton harvest is about to get underway in the Texas High Plains, the windswept region that grows most of the crop in the nation’s top cotton-producing state. But Barry Evans, like many others, has already walked away from more than 2,000 acres (809 hectares) of his bone-dry fields. “It just didn’t come up. We hardly had anything. It just wasn’t in the cards this year,” said Evans, a third-generation cotton grower. Extreme heat and a dearth of rainfall have severely damaged much of this year’s cotton harvest in the U.S., which produces about 35% of the world's crop. The U.S. Department of Agriculture forecast that more than 40% of what U.S. farmers planted in the spring would be abandoned because of drought. Nowhere is this more apparent than the flat, dry stretch of Texas extending some 250 miles (402 kilometers) from Lubbock to the tip of the Texas Panhandle bordering Oklahoma. Where waist-high cotton plants normally grow, the landscape is now defined by barren, brown fields. The USDA says Texas cotton farmers are likely to abandon nearly 70% of their spring planting. That's the worst harvest since 2009, according to the Texas Farm Bureau. The losses in cotton could cost the Texas High Plains $1.2 billion after farmers receive federal crop insurance payments, estimates Darren Hudson, director of the International Center for Agricultural Competitiveness at Texas Tech University. That leaves out others who depend on the crop, such as cotton gins and warehouses. "Any time you have a bad year in cotton, it has a role to play in the overall economy,” Hudson said. The region normally receives around 18 to 20 inches (46 to 51 centimeters) of rain per year, but saw less than 3 inches (7 centimeters) of rain from August 2021 through the summer, as nearly all of Texas baked under drought and blistering temperatures sapped the remaining moisture from the ground. Climate change is intensifying these effects. “Subsoil moisture and topsoil moisture was already low to start, and it just got worse and worse,” said Graham Soley, a USDA agricultural economist. In Texas, bad drought years are recalled with a certain familiarity. Evans and other cotton growers say the soil was so dry in April and May, when cotton's planted, that the harvest fared worse than in 2011, the last time a drought almost as severe enveloped the state. “If we don’t get any kind of winter moisture, it’s going to be really difficult next year,” he said, adding that there’s less groundwater available in the High Plains area than a decade ago. Much of the cotton grown in the region is rainfed, but some cotton farmers also use groundwater. Even those with irrigated fields are expecting low yields this year. Katie Lewis, a professor of soil chemistry and fertility at Texas A&M University in Lubbock, said extreme heat and dry events are growing more intense, but not necessarily more common. The region’s arid, sandy soils and high rates of moisture loss from evaporation and plants means rainfall can change soil conditions for farmers fairly quickly, Lewis said. So if this winter provides enough rainfall, next year’s harvest could look very different. “But the patterns of weather events have become so sporadic," she added, “that it’s hard to define normal.” Even if crop yields rebound, the region's overall recovery from economic losses could take a few years, particularly small towns that are especially dependent on cotton. “Consecutive bad years really damage the economies of the rural areas,” said Texas Tech's Hudson. While most farmers facing losses have already received federal crop insurance payments, such backstops don’t exist for the cotton gin operators who separate seeds from harvested bolls, warehouses that store cotton bales, mills that make cottonseed oil, or trucking companies that transport the crop. Todd Straley, who manages a cotton gin in Plainview, Texas, said his region has experienced five years of below-average harvests that have accelerated the closure and consolidation of nearby facilities. His gin normally produces around 100,000 bales each harvest; this year, he is expecting to process 12,000. As a result, Straley has no need to run the facility 24-hours-a-day as he normally would for the three months after the harvest. “We are looking at such a short crop,” Straley said, “I contracted my employees to dismantle different gins that went out of business.” While U.S. cotton farming is no longer labor intensive, cotton gins, warehouses and oil mills depend heavily on seasonal workers, usually migrant laborers. Straley said he’ll need around 18 full-time and seasonal workers, compared to 50 in years when farmers haven’t abandoned crops at such high levels. Farmers choose not to harvest when so little grows that it isn’t worth the cost. Larry Black, who manages a ginning co-operative in Roscoe, Texas, about 150 miles (241 kilometers) away, said his facility processes cotton from 100,00 acres (40,469 hectares) of nearby farmland. Last year, the facility processed 86,000 bales. This year, he is expecting around 4,000. “It’s tough on everybody when we don’t make a crop,” Black said. He estimates losses this year at the farmer-owned gin will amount to $1 million, but said profits from a strong harvest in 2021 would serve as a buffer. In the 1980s, around 500 cotton gins were operating in the state, according to Hudson. Last year, 185 were in business, the Texas Cotton Ginners Association said. The reduction is due in part to consolidation and changes in technology, Hudson said, “but some of that is also weather driven. Especially the smaller ones just can’t continue to stay open and operating.” Most cotton farmers in this part of Texas use cotton seed varieties modified to withstand drought, said Kody Bessent, chief executive of Plains Cotton Growers, representing growers in 42 Texas High Plains counties. Varieties are continuously developed and will be tweaked to generate high yields if dry conditions persist, he said. “Even though it’s drought resistant," Bessent added, ”we still have to have a little bit of help from Mother Nature." ___ Naishadham reported from Washington, D.C. ___ The Associated Press receives support from the Walton Family Foundation for coverage of water and environmental policy. The AP is solely responsible for all content. For all of AP’s environmental coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment Suman Naishadham And Eric Gay, The Associated Press | Agriculture |
Photo: Stephen Chernin (Getty Images)Vegetable prices in the U.S. are around 40% higher this year and experts are saying climate change has played a prominent role. Bloomberg is reporting that Arizona produces 90% of leafy greens in the U.S. from November through March each year, but crop production has been greatly affected this year by a drought forming from reduced water levels in the Colorado River.OffEnglishThe decreasing amount of snow and rain has dwindled in recent years, moving into its 23rd year of drought, causing the Colorado River to shrink, according to research by Nature Climate Change.The U.S. announced it plans to withhold about one-fifth of the water next year that’s given to Arizona’s farmers as climate change and the drought impact the Colorado River. Meanwhile, California is known as the top state in the U.S. for agriculture but has faced severe droughts this year, resulting in $3 billion worth of losses, and after Hurricane Ian and Hurricane Nicole made landfall in Florida, it cost the produce industry nearly $2 billion across the state.The loss in agriculture has prompted a rise in retail prices across the U.S., helping to drive inflation costs to the highest levels in 40 years. “There’s just not enough water to grow everything that we normally grow,” Don Cameron, president of the State Board of Food and Agriculture, told the Times of San Diego.G/O Media may get a commission40% OffSamsung 65-Inch 4K OLED Smart TVTV timeThis 4K OLED smart TV comes with Alexa built-in, can run Xbox Game Pass, has an incredible picture, and even has Dolby Atmos & Object Tracking Sound too. The cost of produce was up by 38.1% in November from the previous month, and the producer price index, which measures what companies are paid for their products, increased by 0.3% in November compared to the previous month, and increased 7.4% from a year ago, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.Scientists have warned against climate change for decades, saying increased global temperatures will bring about extreme and unusual weather changes. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported as of October of this year, there have been more than a dozen weather or climate disaster events, resulting in over $1 billion in losses in each instance. “Every year the farmers who feed our nation get smarter and more resilient, but it’s increasingly stressful to adapt to the extreme variability they face,” Erica Kistner-Thomas, with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture, told USA Today. She added, “One year they’ll have the best year ever and then the next year they’ll be hit with a major flooding event or drought.”Paul Mitchell, a professor of agriculture and applied economics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison told the outlet although “crops are more resilient to dry weather than they were 20 years ago,” as the events devastating crops become more frequent, crops won’t be able to adapt quickly enough.“U.S. agricultural productivity is rising, but it’s not becoming more resilient to extremes,” Mitchell said and questioned, “When bad years start to line up, are we doing things to prepare for the unusual as it becomes more usual?” | Agriculture |
Aleksandar Georgiev/Getty The coronavirus is a rapidly developing news story, so some of the content in this article might be out of date. Check out our most recent coverage of the coronavirus crisis, and subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily newsletter.At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, millions of Americans continued their jobs from the safety of home. But you can’t break down a chicken carcass or harvest a strawberry via Zoom. To keep slaughterhouses and farms humming, a portion of the workforce had to keep showing up, often toiling shoulder to shoulder. Generally speaking, their employers did not do a great job of shielding these “essential workers” from the harms of Covid.
A new study shines a bright light on just how bad things were for food workers in California, the state with the most food-production jobs and highest agricultural output. From April 2020 through December 2002, the report found, food-production facilities (think farms, meat-processing plants, produce packing houses) got cited for violations of Covid protocol more than all other industries combined—and at four times the rate of any single industry, including other high-risk ones like hospitals, nursing homes, and prisons.
“Decades-long systemic failures, entrenched food production cultures that sacrifice worker health and safety for profits, and industry-state compromises are all implicated in the disproportionate burdens of harm documented in this report,” authors Don Villarejo, Dvera Saxton, and Ildi Carlisle-Cummins of the California Institute for Rural Studies state.
Their eye-popping result came from crunching data from the California Division of Occupational Health and Safety (Cal/OSHA), the agency responsible for enforcing workplace safety laws in the state. The researchers looked at Cal/OSHA citations of employers for failing to follow COVID-19 regulations, which included requiring employers to provide face masks, enforce physical distancing, and notify public-health agencies of outbreaks in a timely manner.
Here’s a look at the results. Note that “public agencies” refers mostly to correctional facilities such as prisons and jails, Saxton says.
California Institute for Rural Studies
Getting dinged by Cal/OSHA so often did not make food-production workplaces safer than those of their peers, though. A 2021 University of California, San Francisco, study found that the state’s food and agriculture workers experienced a 39 percent jump in deaths during the pandemic’s first phase—significantly higher than their counterparts in any other industry. The Cal/OSHA numbers are just the latest way the Covid crisis has exposed the grim safety conditions faced by the workers who stock US grocery stores and restaurant larders. Within the pandemic’s first year, at least 44 percent of US meatpacking workers tested positive for Covid, and 269 died, a 2021 report from the US House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis concluded. It added: The meat industry “prioritized profits and production over worker safety, continuing to employ practices that led to crowded facilities in which the virus spread easily.”
As for fruit and vegetable harvesters, a 2021 Berkeley analysis found that farmworkers tested positive for Covid at four times the rate of their peers in other occupations in one of California’s most agriculture-intensive counties between June and November 2020.
The question now is whether all the revelations will make a difference going forward. Just as they did pre-pandemic, meatpacking workers endure repetitive-stress injuries at shockingly high rates; whereas farm workers, on top of chronic low pay and a long-brewing housing crisis, face the prospect of deadly heat stress from ever-rising temperatures due to climate change. The demographics of two workforces are similar: disprortionately people of color, many of whom are immigrants. In California, the Cal/OSHA researchers suggest, the state should create a new occupational health agency that will “prioritize the needs and concerns of BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, and people of color] and immigrant workers, with a special division dedicated to food production workers.” | Agriculture |
Yam sellers load yam tubers into a wheelbarrow at Bodija market in Ibadan, Oyo, Nigeria August 2, 2022. REUTERS/Temilade AdelajaRegister now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comIBADAN, Nigeria Aug 9 (Reuters) - Stacks of hairy yams line a market in Ibadan, where traders haggle over quality and price before loading them into cars for the last mile to Nigerian consumers. Nearby, a man navigates heavy traffic with a hand cart piled high with the tubers.Yams - pounded into paste, ground into flour, boiled or fried – provide sustenance and livelihoods across West Africa. But growing conditions across the "yam belt" from Guinea to Cameroon are deteriorating just as prices of other staples soar.Vendor Adewale Elekun said farmers in Nigeria are already finding life harder than in the past, when soil was good and the land fertile.Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com"Today the quality of the soil has faded," he said, amidst the bustle of the market.Elsewhere in Ibadan, a transit and tech startup hub 130 km (80 miles) northeast of Lagos, molecular geneticist Dr Ranjana Bhattacharjee says she hopes to change things for the better by helping to create hardier and more adaptable plants.She is working at the city's International Institute of Tropical Agriculture to complete whole-genome sequencing of around 1,000 yam samples – work she says paves the way for moves to ensure future crops are more adaptable to a changing climate."If you want to make an improvement in crops, then you have to do genome sequencing to understand the genes of your targeted traits like disease resistance (and) quality," Bhattacharjee said.The need to boost locally grown crops is particularly acute because of global food price rises since some major producing countries decided to export less food and Russia's invasion of Ukraine blocked that country's grain and sunflower seed exports.Yams, bigger than their unrelated north American namesake, symbolize prosperity, wealth and even fertility in West Africa.Sequencing their genomes could help West African farmers, who grow some 90% of all yams worldwide, improve their yield and keep it high, said Bhattacharjee, adding once the results are published, others will work on applying them."That will then ultimately lead to food security, not only in Nigeria but also in West Africa where the yam is being grown," she said.Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comReporting By Seun Sanni, writing by Libby George; editing by Philippa FletcherOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. | Agriculture |
The European Union on Tuesday agreed to a set of rules to make it illegal to trade certain commodities grown on deforested land in a bid to combat the climate crisis. The provisional deal is meant to force companies to prove their products aren't contributing to deforestation that end up contributing to greater carbon emissions. Under the new rules, companies will have to do strict due diligence when importing or exporting seven products, namely: palm oil, cattle, soy, coffee, cocoa, timber and rubber. The rules also include commodities derived from those products, so beef, furniture, chocolate are going to be monitored for adherence to new rules. The European Commission, which both draws up laws as well as makes sure they're enforced properly in the European Union, said in a statement that the commodities were chosen on the basis of a thorough impact assessment identifying them as the main driver of deforestation due to agricultural expansion. Palm oil: in high demand but unsustainableTo view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video A provisional deal yet to turn into law The deal was struck between the European Parliament and the European Council, and has to be approved by every European Union member state as well as the European Parliament before it can be enforced. "I hope that this innovative regulation will give impetus to the protection of forests around the globe and inspire other countries at the COP15," said Christophe Hansen, the European Parliament's lead negotiator. Hansen was referring to the United Nations' biodiversity conference that kicks off in Montreal, Canada, this week. The United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that some 420 million hectares (more than a billion acres) of land has been lost to deforestation over the last three decades. Environment charity group Greenpace hailed the draft law, calling it a "major breakthrough." How to stop deforestation in the Congo BasinTo view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video What happens once the law is enforced? Once the law is adopted and enforced, it will require companies to produce a due diligence statement proving their supplies are not contributing to deforestation of forests. Companies would also have to show that the rights of indigenous communities were respected during processes. Failure to comply could result in heavy fines, of up to 4% of a company's turnover in European Union country. rm/aw (Reuters, AFP) | Agriculture |
/ Live news Issued on: 19/09/2022 - 17:12Modified: 19/09/2022 - 17:10 Pedestrians walk past wheat ears art installation on the edge of the Red Square in central Moscow on August 27, 2022 Alexander NEMENOV AFP/File Paris (AFP) – Russia's invasion of Ukraine may cause long-term grain prices to rise seven percent, according to a study on Monday showing how expanded production elsewhere to compensate would lead to higher greenhouse gas emissions. Russia and Ukraine are global breadbaskets, together exporting about 28 percent of the world's wheat supply.Russia's blockade of Black Sea ports and sanctions on Moscow have caused short-term price surges and triggered fears of an acute hunger crisis. Researchers in the United States and Uruguay modelled the likely impact of the conflict on wheat and maize prices over the coming 12 months, looking at a variety of scenarios.One model found that if Russian grain exports were halved and Ukrainian exports significantly reduced during that time, maize would be 4.6 percent more expensive and wheat 7.2 percent more expensive -- even assuming that other exporters could step in and fill the shortfall. They said the price increase would persist as long as exports remained restricted.To close the supply gap, the study found that other major producers would need to expand their grain growing areas significantly. Were all grain exports from Ukraine to cease, Australia would need to expand its wheat area by 1 percent, China by 1.5 percent, the European Union by 1.9 percent and India by 1.2 percent, according to the model.This land-use change would lead to just over a billion tonnes of additional carbon dioxide equivalent added to the atmosphere, according to the study published in Nature Food. "The cropland expansion resulting from the war in Ukraine is occurring at the expense of more carbon emissions," said lead author Jerome Dumortier, a researcher at the O'Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs in Indianapolis, US.United Nations chief Antonio Guterres warned in July that Russia's invasion of Ukraine had combined with the lingering trade impacts of Covid-19 to create an "unprecedented global hunger crisis".Figures from the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization show food prices are currently more than 10 percent higher than they were a year ago. Although Moscow and Kyiv reached an agreement in July to resume some grain exports, there are fears that the conflict could lead to years of elevated food prices. Dumortier said that it was not currently clear whether other grain producers were able to meet global demand, meaning prices could rise even further than predicted in the models. "There are drought conditions in South America, Europe, and China, and export restrictions from various countries," he told AFP. "Given those hinderances to full adjustment, commodity prices may be higher than what is estimated in the paper." © 2022 AFP | Agriculture |
A combine harvester working in a wheat field.Getty Images This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Food companies and governments must come together immediately to change the world’s agricultural practices or risk “destroying the planet,” according to the sponsors of a report by some of the largest food and farming businesses released on Thursday.
The report, from a task force within the Sustainable Markets Initiative, a network of global CEOs focused on climate issues established by King Charles III, is being released days before the start of the UN’s Cop27 climate summit in Egypt.
Many of the world’s largest food and agricultural businesses have championed sustainable agricultural practices in recent years. Regenerative farming practices, which prioritize greenhouse gas reductions, soil health, and water conservation, now cover 15 percent of croplands.
But the pace of change has been “far too slow,” the report finds, and must triple by 2030 for the world to have any chance of keeping temperature rises under 1.5 C, a level that if breached, scientists argue, will unleash even more devastating climate change on the planet. The report is signed by Bayer, Mars, McCain Foods, McDonald’s, Mondēlez, Olam, PepsiCo, Waitrose, and others. They represent a potent political and corporate force, affecting the food supply chain around the world. They are also, according to critics, some of those most responsible for climate mismanagement, with one calling the report “smoke and mirrors” and unlikely to address the real crisis.
Food production is responsible for a third of all planet-heating gases emitted by human activity and a number of the signatories have been accused of environmental misdeeds and “greenwashing.” Activist Greta Thunberg is boycotting Cop this year, having called the global summit a PR stunt “for leaders and people in power to get attention.”
“We are at a critical tipping point where something must be done,” said task-force chair and outgoing Mars CEO, Grant Reid. “The interconnection between human health and planetary health is more evident than ever before.” Big food companies and agriculture must play a big part in changing that, said Reid. “It won’t be easy but we have got to make it work.”
Agriculture is the world’s largest industry. Pasture and cropland occupy around 50 percent of the planet’s habitable land and use about 70 percent of fresh water supplies. The climate crisis is challenging the industry across the world but the group’s call for change comes as the industry—which employs 1 billion people—is facing supply chain issues in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic and soaring inflation. It also comes amid mounting skepticism about promises to change from companies that have contributed to climate change.
These current issues must not detract from the need for change, the report argues. “With the inflationary environment and widespread supply chain disruption, it would be easy to reduce our focus on the longer-term challenge of scaling regenerative farming. But we believe it’s vital we maintain a sense of urgency. We must take action now to avoid more acute crises in the future,” its authors write.
Sunny George Verghese, chief executive of Olam, one of the world’s largest suppliers of cocoa beans, coffee, cotton, and rice, said: “We cannot continue to produce and consume food and feed and fiber in the way we are doing today unless we don’t mind destroying the planet.” “The only way out for us,” he said, “is how we transition to a more resilient food system that will allow us to meet the needs of a growing population without the resource intensity we have today.”
The report studied three food crops—potatoes, rice and wheat—and has made policy recommendations it will present at Cop27. The task force’s members are working to make the short-term economic case for change more attractive to farmers. “It’s just not compelling enough for the average farmer,” said Reid. More widely the report argues industry and government must also work harder to address the knowledge gap and make sure farmers are following best practices. Third, all parties involved in the agriculture industry—from farmers to food producers to government, banks, and insurers—need to align behind encouraging a shift to more sustainable practices.
“It involves change for all the players including the government, private, public companies, and others. No one player can do this on their own; this has to be a collaboration of the willing. What needs to happen now is action and delivery,” said Reid.
Over the next six months, the group will assess how its members can spread the task force’s work with the aim of establishing a common set of metrics for measuring environmental outcomes, establishing a credible system of payments for farmers for environmental outcomes, easing the cost of farmers transitioning to sustainable practices, ensuring government policy rewards farmers for greening their business, and encouraging the sourcing of crops from particular areas converting to regenerative farming.
Devlin Kuyek, a researcher at Grain, a nonprofit organization that works to support small farmers, said it was increasingly difficult for big agricultural and food companies to ignore climate change. “But I don’t think any of these companies—say a McDonald’s—has any commitment to curtail the sales of highly polluting products. I don’t think PepsiCo is going to say the world doesn’t need Pepsi.”
Kuyek pointed out that Yara, another signatory to the report, is the world’s largest supplier of nitrogen-based fertilizers, “which are responsible for one out of every 40 [metric tons] of greenhouse gas emitted annually.”
“It’s pretty disingenuous,” said Kuyek. “Small, local food systems still feed most of the people on the planet and the real threat is that the industrial system is expanding at the expense of the truly sustainable system. Corporations are creating a bit of smoke and mirrors here, suggesting they are part of the solution when inevitably they are part of the problem.”
Considering the controversial histories of some of the companies involved in the report, Verghese said he expected criticism and scrutiny. “All companies have to stand up to the scrutiny of being attacked if there is real greenwashing. There is no place to hide,” he said. “As far as Olam is concerned we are very clear on our targets, we have had the confidence to make these targets public. All of us have progressed along the sustainable journey. It is not that we have not made mistakes in the past but as we have become better at this we are willing to be subject to scrutiny.”
Both Reid and Verghese said the scale of the issues the world’s food supply is facing cannot be underplayed but that more governments and companies were becoming convinced of the need for urgent change. “I believe change can be made,” said Verghese. “I am optimistic. The fact that these kinds of coalitions are emerging is very positive. We are all otherwise very strong rivals and competitors. We hate each other’s guts, we don’t come together on anything unless there is a huge crisis. Everyone is recognizing there is a huge crisis. We need to come together.” | Agriculture |
The Hidden Kingdom of FungiKeith SeifertGreystone Books, $27.95 Take a walk through the woods after it rains, and you can catch a glimpse of the incredible diversity of fungi. You might spot the real-life version of the red-and-white “power-up” mushroom from the video game Super Mario Bros. or the aptly named dead man’s fingers, a blackened fungal growth that resembles a hand emerging from the grave. Perhaps you’ll notice a cluster of frilly pink shelves on a log or a striking purple mushroom that’s a doppelgänger for underwater coral. But for all that you can see, you’ve barely scratched the surface of the fungal world. Scientists estimate there are between 1.5 million and 15 million species of fungi but so far have discovered and named only 140,000 or so. Most of that identification was performed with microscopes, but over the last two decades, DNA sequencing has allowed researchers to distinguish large numbers of microfungi. It’s these rarely noticed and poorly understood fungi that mycologist Keith Seifert focuses on in his book The Hidden Kingdom of Fungi. Seifert has spent his career “obsessing over Latin names of fungi” but recognizes that taxonomy may not come easily to his readers. So he begins with a note on scientific names, explaining why they’re a “necessary evil” and providing a primer on the modern classification system, likening it to “a phone book for looking up the evolutionary address of a fungus.” Sign Up For the Latest from Science News Headlines and summaries of the latest Science News articles, delivered to your inbox From there, the book explores fungi’s evolutionary journey and the various symbiotic relationships they have with other organisms (SN: 2/23/15). These relationships have muddied scientists’ picture of ecology and evolution. In the traditional view of evolution proposed by Charles Darwin, competition is seen as the driving force of natural selection. But Darwin “underplayed the significance of cooperation in nature,” Seifert writes. Take the evolutionary success of lichens, a highly diverse group that has spread around the world. These complex organisms consist of an alga and fungus living together in a mutually beneficial relationship. Throughout the book, Seifert delves deeper into fungi’s complicated relationships with other organisms, covering the role fungi play in forest ecology, agriculture, fermentation, the built environment and even the human body. Here, there’s something for everyone. Nature lovers will enjoy learning about the “Wood Wide Web” (SN: 8/9/97), an underground network of mycorrhizal fungi that connect to tree roots, enabling trees to exchange water, nutrients and minerals. Gardeners and farmers can gain applicable knowledge about the fungi that can help or harm crops. Foodies will find themselves singing fungi’s praises after learning about the yeasts and molds that give us the “sacred fungal trilogy” of wine, cheese and chocolate. But many readers might cringe as Seifert takes them on a room-by-room tour of which fungal species lurk in a person’s house or shares how fungi can cause illness (SN: 11/29/21). As the book ends, Seifert focuses on how humans and fungi can build a better world together. Humans have already used fungi to create a range of products like penicillin, stone-washed denim and the meat substitute Quorn. Now, fungi are also helping with environmental cleanup and the creation of leather-like textiles and solid building materials. We’ve put only a few fungal species to work so far, but the possibilities are endless. Seifert paints a picture of what a healthier, more sustainable future could look like, with fungal foam beds and bioluminescent lamps. Such a future isn’t some far-off fantasy, he writes, at least from a technological standpoint. But there’s more than just technical know-how in creating a more sustainable and symbiotic world. We also must reconsider our attitude toward fungi, Seifert says. “If we are going to make peace with fungi, we need to be aware of their biodiversity and embrace their talents for biodegradation, symbiosis, and biochemistry that make them such significant players in the environment,” he writes. “Only then will we be able to work with them effectively for our own prosperity and health, while they also collaborate with us.” Buy The Hidden Kingdom of Fungi from Bookshop.org. Science News is a Bookshop.org affiliate and will earn a commission on purchases made from links in this article. | Agriculture |
The United Nations on Tuesday officially declared that the global population had reached 8 billion, highlighting massive growth in the last few decades and the decades to come, but also raising concerns about food scarcity and prices around the world.Every night around 828 million people go to bed hungry, according to the World Food Program (WFP), a United Nations organization focusing on providing food assistance globally.Since 2019, the number of people facing significant food insecurity has increased from 135 million to 345 million, according to WFP."We are on the way to a raging food catastrophe," U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres told world leaders at the G20 Summit in Bali, Indonesia, this week. "People in five separate places are facing famine."The global population has been growing slowly since the 1950s, falling under 1% in 2020.The latest projections by the U.N. show the global population may reach 8.5 billion in 2030 and 9.7 billion in 2050. It is projected to peak at around 10.4 billion during the 2080s and remain at that level until 2100.An aerial view shows overpopulated neighborhoods in the southwest of Caracas, Venezuela, Aug. 27., 2022.Yuri Cortez/AFP via Getty Images, FILEIndia will surpass China as the world's most populous country next year, according to the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division.The world produces enough food yearly, around 4 billion tons, to feed everyone, but around one-third of all food made, approximately 1.3 billion tons of fruit, vegetables, dairy and meat, goes to waste, according to the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization.According to the World Wildlife Fund, that's enough calories to feed every undernourished person.Experts said that other parts of the growing food insecurity problem are rising food prices and malnutrition, proving most detrimental to women and children."When you look at the food price crisis, it's particularly foods that are nutritious and are high in vitamins and minerals that these children need that are the most costly," Saskia Osendarp, executive director of the Micronutrient Forum and co-coordinator of Standing Together for Nutrition, a consortium of nutrition, economics, food and health system experts, told ABC News.Osendarp added that if women and children cannot afford or have access to healthier, vitamin-rich foods, they risk having micronutrient deficiencies.UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres holds a news conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, Nov. 17, 2022.Anadolu Agency via Getty ImagesWhen food prices increase, households switch to cheaper staple foods and processed foods instead of buying more nutritious -- and generally more expensive-- foods, such as fruits, vegetables, dairy, meat, decreasing the quality of their diets, Osendarp said in an April op-ed in Nature magazine.About one in two preschool-aged children and two in three women of reproductive age globally experience at least one micronutrient deficiency, according to a report from the Lancet Global Health.Malnutrition can also lead to significant health problems, particularly in children, who may develop cognitive and developmental issues, as well as how they perform in school, Osendarp said."We call this hidden hunger because you don't immediately notice it, but you do see it in individuals that lack these critical vitamins," she said. "It has devastating impacts on their survival, their immunity, their health, but also on their growth and overall development. The impacts will last for a long time."At the G20 Summit, Guterres told world leaders that if there isn't an organized action plan, then affordability issues this year will lead to food shortages in 2023.Local civilians queue for food distribution in Kherson City, Ukraine, Nov. 16th, 2022.Anadolu Agency via Getty ImagesA combine tractor harvests corn in Leland, Miss., Aug. 16, 2022.Bloomberg via Getty Images, FILERussia's invasion of Ukraine has also increased food prices, as both countries are important suppliers of wheat, barley, corn and sunflower oil.In May, Samantha Power, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, told ABC "This Week" anchor George Stephanopoulos that Russia's war in Ukraine had caused global food and fertilizer shortages, resulting in increased prices for consumers and farmers around the world."It is just another catastrophic effect of Putin's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine," Power said at the time.Over half of the projected global population growth up to 2050 will happen in eight countries: the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines and the United Republic of Tanzania.According to the U.N., food insecurity in sub-Saharan Africa is at 66.2%, the highest in the world.Over half of the world's undernourished live in Asia and more than one-third live in Africa, with the situation worsening because of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a U.N report.Last month at the Committee on World Food Security, WFP executive director David Beasley said the world is facing threats of mass starvation and that global leaders must act and provide humanitarian support.ABC News' Youri Benadjaoud, Julia Jacobo and Gabriel Pietrorazio contributed to this report. | Agriculture |
MONTREAL/OTTAWA, Aug 29 (Reuters) - A swath of Canada better known for maple syrup is being tested to mass produce berries normally grown in warmer locales, making it the unexpected beneficiary of extreme weather, local demand and rising costs in traditional growing areas like California.Driscoll's and grower-owned Naturipe Farms LLC, two of North America's largest fruit sellers, are both testing commercial production of berries in Ontario and Quebec, executives said.The efforts aim to see if Canada's most populous provinces can be cost-effective regions for larger-scale production of blackberries, raspberries and strawberries despite a colder climate that normally limits berries to a short summer season.Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comThe long-term initiative is being driven by strong demand for local berries - it is cheaper to grow and ship within Canada than to sell imported berries - and by water shortages and drought conditions in California and beyond."We have probably gone to most of the obvious places in the world. Now we are moving into more challenging territories," said Soren Bjorn, president of Driscoll's of the Americas, which sources most of its berries from Mexico and the United States.High fuel costs are also a reason "to grow products closer to where the end game is," or near consumers, said Brian Bocock, vice president of sales and product management at Naturipe Farms, which is testing blueberry and raspberry production in Quebec and Ontario.No one in traditional growing areas like California is panicking from the efforts to grow berries on a larger scale in Canada. The Canadian trials, for one, are still in their early stages, making it unclear whether Canada could become a more significant player in the berry market in the coming years.Even with a longer growing season and new varieties, it would be hard for Canada to compete with the likes of major berry-producing regions like California on volume."Here the strawberry season, and raspberries similarly - they're set up to be harvested day after day after day, week after week after week," said Daniel Sumner, director of the University of California Agricultural Issues Center, adding the bigger threat for the state is Mexico with its cheaper labor.Instead, the berry trials highlight the long-term challenges growers face as climate change reshapes global agriculture, affecting everything from grains to wine. Olive oil production in Italy, for example, was once the preserve of hot and arid areas but is now produced in northern regions like Val d'Aosta more famous for its ski resorts. read more "Climate change is disrupting agriculture and impacting their top lines and bottom lines," Himanshu Gupta, CEO of Climate AI, which works with Driscoll's and models the impact and risk posed by extreme weather on business metrics."Adaptation is going to drive winners. The ones who can adapt faster are the ones who are going to end up winning the market."SWEET NORTHGrowing strawberries, raspberries and blackberries in central Canada is not new, though the scale and growing season targeted by Driscoll's and Naturipe are. Instead, the country is more famous for blueberries, of which it is the world's second-largest producer behind the United States, thanks mainly to production in British Columbia's temperate Fraser Valley.A worker picks raspberries at Masse, a berry farm operation in Saint Paul d'Abbotsford near Granby, Quebec, Canada August 11, 2022. REUTERS/Christinne MuschiClimate change stands to affect how blueberries are grown as well - growers in Fraser Valley are now eyeing lands further north, some as far as the city of Prince George that is on the same parallel as cities like Dublin and Hamburg, Germany.Pria Uppal, director of sales at Fraser Valley Packers Inc, a large blueberry processor and packer, said some experienced growers are "preparing ahead of time" and looking to buy land in northern British Columbia.COMMERCIAL SCALEPrivately-held Driscoll's, which has annual revenues of more than $5 billion, is similarly preparing for the future by diversifying its berry supply sources."We are going through all our critical regions trying to figure out what's likely to happen 25 or 50 years from now and what are the implications of that," Bjorn said.At Masse Nursery southeast of Montreal, temporary workers from South America pick raspberries and blackberries to be sold under the Driscoll's brand - one of a handful of sites in Quebec and Ontario being tested for larger production.The nursery started growing berries for Driscoll's last year on a trial basis and expects to produce 80 to 100 tons of fruit from late June to September.High plastic tunnels protect the berries from rainfall and generate heat to extend the growing season by a few weeks, said Sebastien Dugre, a co-owner with spouse Justine Masse."Quebec is not a traditional place to grow blackberries and raspberries compared to other regions in the world," Dugre said."But I do feel with the infrastructure that's available now we can come up with a more steady way to produce on a commercial scale good-tasting raspberries for a longer season."As costs in traditional growing hubs rise due to volatile weather, the disparity with places like Quebec and Ontario decrease and make local production more viable, Bjorn said.In California, for example, the Public Policy Institute of California estimates $1.1 billion in revenue losses and increased pumping costs due to drought.And as growers in California spend more to protect their crops, places like Canada become more attractive."All of a sudden, Quebec isn’t so disadvantaged from a cost standpoint,” said Bjorn.Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comReporting By Allison Lampert in Montreal and Julie Gordon in Ottawa, editing by Deepa BabingtonOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. | Agriculture |
WASHINGTON, Dec 12 (Reuters) - The U.S. Department of Agriculture will distribute an additional $325 million in funding for projects tailored to smaller-scale farmers to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, taking its total annual investment in climate-friendly farming to more than $3 billion, the agency announced Monday.USDA's efforts are part of a broader Biden administration goal to cut U.S. emissions, targeting the approximately 10% generated from farming annually, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack told Reuters a key goal of the program is to enable more farmers to serve the growing consumer market for sustainably produced food."We want to encourage farmers and producers to accelerate use of these practices and we want the market to recognize and value (that) work," he said.The money will fund 71 projects, ranging from $250,000 to just under $5 million, which will aid small and historically underserved farmers in adopting and assessing lower-emission farming practices.The funded groups include Black farmer associations, Native American tribes and organizations that serve women, veteran and beginning farmers.Some projects will monitor and verify the benefits of climate-friendly farm practices like rotating crops, installing solar panels in farm fields and reducing fertilizer application. Others will provide technical assistance to help farmers adopt new practices and skills.The money will come from USDA's Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC), which is funded by the U.S. Treasury to support the farm economy. USDA also drew on CCC money for the $2.8 billion round of funding for 70 climate-friendly farm projects of $5 million to $100 million the agency announced in September.Republican U.S. Representative G.T. Thompson of Pennsylvania, incoming chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, has argued USDA's use of CCC money for the projects is outside of its authority and has said he will audit the program."I am sure there are worthy projects, but USDA is abusing the authorities of the (CCC) and this will be reviewed in the new year," Thompson said in an email.Vilsack told Reuters he was not concerned about a potential audit."We're helping to create a market opportunity for farmers, which is precisely what the CCC was designed to do," he said.Reporting by Leah Douglas in Washington; Editing by Josie Kao and Richard ChangOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.Leah DouglasThomson ReutersWashington-based award-winning journalist covering agriculture and energy including competition, regulation, federal agencies, corporate consolidation, environment and climate, racial discrimination and labour, previously at the Food and Environment Reporting Network. | Agriculture |
Grain is pictured during a Greenpeace protest against the production of biofuel from grain in front of the German Ministry of Transport in Berlin, Germany, June 1, 2022. REUTERS/Hannibal Hanschke/File PhotoRegister now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comSummaryGrains, vegetable oil could be diverted from fuel to foodFood security in focus at G7 summit in GermanyLONDON, June 23 (Reuters) - Officials from some G7 countries, including Germany and Britain, will push for temporary waivers on biofuels mandates to combat soaring food prices when leaders from the group of wealthy nations meet on Sunday, three people familiar with the matter told Reuters.The food crisis caused by the war in Ukraine has sparked a food versus biofuel debate, with some policymakers calling for an easing of mandates for blending biofuels into petrol and diesel to increase the supply of global grain and vegetable oil."We're quite keen to look at the issue of biofuel mandates to ensure that crops are prioritised for food consumption and not necessarily for use in fuels," a British government official told Reuters.Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comIt's not clear whether there's broad-based support to temporarily waive biofuel mandates across the G7 members which include Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Britain and the world's largest biofuel producer, the United States. Surging oil and gas prices have also increased the demand for energy sourced from crops."The issue of biofuel mandates is at a preliminary stage of discussion at the working level," said a spokesman for Canada's agriculture ministry.The group begin a three-day meeting in Bavaria, Germany, on Sunday and food security is expected to be on the agenda, after the presidency launched a Global Alliance for Food Security in May to tackle hunger.It is not clear whether Germany or Britain are considering waivers on biofuels mandates in their domestic market.Prices of crops used in biofuels have jumped this year, with wheat and corn up by around a quarter, while soybean oil is up by about a fifth.Grain and vegetable oil crops could be diverted from fuel use to help address the global food crisis, but many governments have laws requiring the production of biofuels, partly to help support local farmers and meet emissions reduction targets."These regulations really do need an off-ramp during times of high food prices," said Joe Glauber, senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute. A waiver on biofuel mandates could help bring down food prices although it might make fuel prices slightly higher in some countries, he added.Up to 40% of the U.S. corn crop is used for ethanol to blend with gasoline in cars, producing around 5% of the country's transport fuel, while 10% of European cereal production is used for fuel, according to the World Resources Institute. A waiver on biofuel mandates is not expected to have much impact on the U.S. industry as corn-based ethanol is more competitive than biofuel produced elsewhere in the world, but such a move would have a greater impact in Europe, said Glauber.ENVIRONMENTAL CREDENTIALSIn recent years environmental groups and governments have raised concerns over biofuels contributing to record rates of cropland expansion including via deforestation, questioning any environmental benefit. Most governments include biofuels in plans to reduce carbon emissions, however.In the EU, a proposed amendment to the Renewable Energy Directive – which sets out the bloc's green energy targets, reduces the use of crop-based biofuels, while phasing out some that are linked to deforestation such as palm and soy, will be considered by an industry committee next month. Germany's environment ministry has gone a step further, proposing to end all food crops use in biofuels by 2030.One of the points of tension in the debate in Germany is how the country will meet its emissions reduction plans without biofuels. "In the transport sector we would have to find solutions for how to compensate," said Bernt Farcke, director general for forests, sustainability, and renewable resources at Germany's agriculture ministry. Options include using hydrogen, increasing the take-up of electric vehicles, and introducing speed limits on highways, he added.Earlier this month 38 scientists wrote to the European parliament urging changes to the EU's plans to reduce carbon emissions as the current targets would encourage deforestation as more land would be used to meet the bloc's demand for agriculture products, including for bioenergy.Some research has shown that biofuels are likely a bigger contributor to global warming than conventional fuel. read more Biofuel producers and farmers are not expected to support a waiver on mandates.Britain's biofuel trade body, the Renewable Transport Fuel Association, said waiving biofuel mandates would be unhelpful as farmers would be left with low grade wheat that isn't fit for human consumption."It would push up costs for livestock farmers, as less of the high-protein animal feed by-product from bioethanol manufacture would be available," said Gaynor Hartnell, chief executive of the RTFA.Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comReporting by Sarah McFarlane
Additional reporting by Sarah Marsh; editing by David EvansOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. | Agriculture |
Greenwich, Connecticut CNN — Raina Singhvi Jain is allergic to honeybees. Just one sting on her foot once rendered her out of commission for weeks. However, that has not deterred the 20-year-old social entrepreneur from her mission to save these essential pollinators, which have been suffering from population decline for decades. About 75% of the world’s agricultural crops depend, at least partly, on pollinators like honeybees. Their collapse could have a huge impact on our entire ecosystem. “Bees are the reason we’re all here today,” Jain says. “They’re the fundamental basis of our agricultural system, our plants. They are the reason we have food.” Jain, the daughter of Indian immigrants who settled in Connecticut, first found out about colony loss when she visited an apiary in 2018 as a high school student. She saw piles of dead bees, which drove her to find out what was happening. What she discovered surprised her. “Honeybee declines are the result of the three P’s: parasites, pesticides and poor nutrition,” says Samuel Ramsey, a professor of entomology at University of Colorado Boulder’s BioFrontiers Institute. Out of the three Ps, by far the biggest contributor is parasites, according to Ramsey, and specifically a type of mite called Varroa destructor. It was first detected in the US in 1987 and can now be found in almost all hives across the country. In his research, Ramsey observed that the mites feed off the liver of the honeybees, which makes them more susceptible to the other Ps by impairing their immune system and ability to store nutrients. These parasites can also spread lethal viruses, impair flight, and can eventually lead to the collapse of an entire colony. With encouragement from her high school science teacher, during her junior year Jain started working on a solution to get rid of Varroa mite infestations. After a lot of trial and error, she came up with HiveGuard, a 3D-printed hive entranceway that is coated with a non-toxic, plant-based pesticide called thymol. “As bees pass through the entranceway, the thymol rubs off onto the body of the bee, where ultimately the concentration kills the varroa mites, but the honeybee is left unharmed,” Jain says. Since March 2021, about 2,000 beekeepers have been beta testing the device, and Jain plans on an official release later this year. The data she has collected so far shows that three weeks after installation there’s a 70% decline in varroa mite infestations, with no reported side effects. From science experiment to saving the bees 02:01 - Source: CNN Thymol, and other naturally occurring miticides like oxalic acid, formic acid and hops, are used in current treatments in the form of strips or trays that go inside the hive. Ramsey says there are also synthetic aides, which tend to be more effective, but can be more damaging to the environment. He commends Jain’s ingenuity in creating a device that maximally impacts the mites, yet protects the bees and the environment from side effects. Honeybees are among the most efficient pollinators on the planet. Their contribution is vital for over 130 types of fruits, vegetables and nuts — including almonds, cranberries, zucchini and avocados. So the next time you take a bite out of an apple, or a sip of coffee, it’s thanks to the bees, Jain says. But every year, according to Ramsey, between 33% and 51% of honeybees die across America. The USDA estimates that honeybees pollinate $15 billion worth of crops in the US alone every year. Many of these crops are pollinated by managed beekeeping services that are trucked throughout the country. As the bee populations have become more costly to protect, these services have become more expensive, with a cascade effect on consumer prices, Ramsey says. But the most dire consequence if honeybee populations continue to decrease, is the serious threat to both food quality and security, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization warns. HiveGuard is just one of the ways in which Jain is using entrepreneurial insight to support honeybees. In 2020, she founded the supplement company Queen Bee, which sells health drinks that incorporate bee products like honey and royal jelly. And for every bottle sold, a pollinator tree is planted through Trees for the Future, a non-profit working with farming families in sub-Saharan Africa. “My biggest hope for the environment is to restore it back to balance, and be in harmony with nature,” Jain says. She believes it is possible, but it will take a hivemind mentality to do so. “There’s a lot that humans can learn from as a societal structure, from honeybees themselves,” she adds. “The way that they’re able to collaborate, the way that they’re able to delegate, and how they sacrifice for the betterment of the colony.” | Agriculture |
Pete and Gerry's organic eggs are seen at a Safeway store in Wheaton, Maryland February 13, 2015. REUTERS/Gary Cameron/File PhotoRegister now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comWASHINGTON, Aug 9 (Reuters) - President Joe Biden's administration on Tuesday proposed a U.S. rule requiring farms to give egg-laying chickens access to the outdoors in order to earn the label "organic," closing loopholes but potentially giving companies up to 15 years to comply.The long-awaited proposal, published by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, would eliminate loopholes that have let some of the biggest egg producers claim the federally administered "organic" label by installing open-air porches on henhouses in lieu of providing access to pasture."Today marks the first significant movement on organic animal welfare in years," said Tom Chapman, CEO of the Organic Trade Association.Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comGiving chickens access to pasture rather than confining them to henhouses is considered more humane treatment.The USDA said the rule would better align the organic program with consumer expectations."This is about animal husbandry practices, animal welfare and leveling the playing field," USDA Under Secretary for Marketing and Regulatory Programs Jenny Moffitt said in an interview. "The goal of this is to have unambiguous standards."The rule now faces a 60-day public comment period before it can be implemented.Former President Barack Obama's administration in 2016 pursued a similar rule that went into effect in 2017. That rule was opposed by the largest U.S. organic egg producer, Michigan-based Herbruck's Poultry Ranch, and key farm-state Senator Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, and was withdrawn under Obama's successor Donald Trump later in 2017.The egg industry opposed the Obama-era rule, arguing it would raise the cost of eggs. Larry Sadler, vice president of animal welfare for egg industry trade group United Egg Producers, said the group did not yet have a position on the Biden administration's proposal.Stabenow, a Democrat who chairs the Senate Agriculture Committee, called the new rule important but said she would "continue to encourage the USDA to allow the necessary flexibility in production."The Obama-era rule had allowed for a five-year implementation period. The USDA now is seeking comment on whether companies should be given 15 years."A 15-year timeline is kicking the can too far down the road," said Erik Drake, CEO of New Hampshire-based organic egg company Pete and Gerry's that already allows its hens access to pasture.Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comReporting by Leah Douglas; Editing by Will DunhamOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.Leah DouglasThomson ReutersWashington-based award-winning journalist covering agriculture and energy including competition, regulation, federal agencies, corporate consolidation, environment and climate, racial discrimination and labour, previously at the Food and Environment Reporting Network. | Agriculture |
Insects can be turned into meat-like flavors, helping provide a more environmentally friendly alternative to traditional meat options, scientists have discovered.Mealworms, the larval form of the yellow mealworm beetle, have been cooked with sugar by researchers who found that the result is a meat-like flavoring that could one day be used on convenience food as a source of protein.While mealworms have until now mostly been used as snacks for pets or as bait while fishing, they have potential as a food source for humans to help get the recognizable flavors of meat without the harmful impacts upon the climate, as well as direct air and water pollution, of raising beef, pork and other animal-based foods.“Insects are a nutritious and healthy food source with high amounts of fatty acids, vitamins, minerals, fiber and high-quality protein, which is like that of meat,” says In Hee Cho, a researcher at Wonkwang University in South Korea who led the study.“Many consumers seriously like and need animal protein in our diet. However, traditional livestock farming produces more greenhouse gas emissions than cars do. On the other hand, insect farming requires just a fraction of the land, water and feed in comparison to traditional livestock farming.”Cho said that edible insects, such as mealworms and crickets, were “superfoods” that have long been enjoyed by communities in Asia, Africa and South America. However, people in Europe and North America are generally more squeamish about eating insects, despite recent forays by several restaurants and supermarkets into providing insect options for consumers.The use of mealworms as a meat-like flavoring may help bridge this gap, researchers hope. The new study, which will be presented to the American Chemical Society this week, found that the flavors were released when mealworms were heated with sugars, with the proteins and sugars interacting and caramelizing in a range of meat-like and savory flavors.Different cooking processes produced different results, the researchers found. Steamed mealworms give off a sort of sweetcorn-like aroma, while roasted and deep-fried versions have more of a similarity with shrimp. A panels of volunteers were used in sniff tests to ascertain the most meat-like favors of those concocted.The global production of food is responsible for about a third of all greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere, with the raising of animals for meat responsible for the majority of these emissions. Grazing and feeding livestock consumes about 80% of Earth’s farmland, with everything from cow burps to the mass deforestation of land to make way for pasture causing planet-heating emissions.Scientists say avoiding meat and diary products is the single biggest way to reduce your environmental impact upon the planet, although meat eating remains popular in the west and is now gaining traction among an emerging wealthy class in China and India.Insects, which can be raised in vast numbers in small spaces with a fraction of the pollution of traditional meat, have been cited by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization as a potentially valuable protein source to feed a growing global population that is expected to surpass 9 billion people by 2050. | Agriculture |
Italy is facing its worst drought in 70 years and the Italian Cabinet was forced to declare a state of emergency in five northern Italian regions until the end of this year. It also announced $39.5 million in emergency funds to assist those affected by the worsening drought. The heat and lack of rain being experienced, particularly in the Po Valley, are not only drying up the rivers but causing significant concern to the agriculture sector in what is normally one of the breadbaskets in the country. Meuccio Berselli is the secretary general for the district authority of the Po Valley.
He says, “It’s the perfect storm, less than 70 percent of snow in the winter, four months of lack of rain, temperatures 3-4 degrees higher than the seasonal average.” The Po River, Italy’s largest fresh water source, is vital for irrigation, just like other Italian waterways: the Arno, the Aniene and the Tiber, all of which have been suffering from much less water this summer, raising fears for crops in other areas as well. Water levels in lakes are also lower this year. Italy’s National Research Council says there has been half the amount of rain this year compared to the average in the last three decades and up to 60 percent less in northern regions. Coldiretti, Italy’s largest agriculture union, has warned that the drought is threatening 30-40 percent of the seasonal harvest and half the livestock farming in the Po Valley, a situation likely to spread to other areas. Climate change and food insecurity have been a growing concern globally and are constantly discussed at high-level international meetings. The war in Ukraine has also brought worries about new food shortages. On the sidelines of a recent ocean conference in Lisbon, Sophie Miller, an activist with the group Ocean Rebellion, said, "Climate change is going to get worse and there will be more wars and more conflicts.” In that scenario, the early drought this summer in Italy is an additional problem. Special measures have been adopted by different regions. They include shutting off ornamental water fountains and restricting water usage to only essential use of drinking water while outlawing its use for irrigation of football fields and golf courses and washing cars and streets. Civil protection chief Fabrizio Curcio said that it cannot be ruled out that in some areas rationing of water will also lead to a temporary closure, even during the daytime. He added that close attention is being paid to temperatures and changes in water levels. Authorities do not exclude that state of emergencies will also need to be declared for other regions in Italy and not only those in the north. | Agriculture |
Almost 20 years ago, hundreds of furious New Zealand farmers jumped into their tractors, farm bikes and trucks and ploughed up Wellington’s main street towards parliament to kick up a stink against the so-called “fart tax” – a levy on livestock methane gases, proposed by the then-Labour government to reduce emissions.A cow named Energy was led up the building’s granite steps and left an unwelcome mess in her wake. In doing so, she provided the opposition movement with a powerful, if indelicate, visual metaphor: rural New Zealand was ready for a mudslinging match with the capital. Just months later, the government abandoned the tax.Amid the country’s bold claims over tackling climate change – including declaring a climate emergency and passing multipartisan climate legislation – New Zealand’s progress towards bringing down its rocketing agricultural emissions (responsible for half the nation’s total) has been glacial.New Zealand National Party MP Shane Ardern is ordered to stop by security head Andrew Standish (right) as he drives a tractor up parliament steps during a protest by farmers in Wellington, New Zealand, in 2003. Photograph: Mark Mitchell/APThe Pacific nation is one of the world’s worst performers on emission increases, partly because powerful farming lobby groups have long stonewalled policy that puts a price on the climate cost of farming.But last month – 19 years after Energy’s memorable performance – the current Labour-government proposed a not-too-dissimilar plan to the ill-fated “fart tax”, with a crucial difference: it had been broadly created by farmers themselves.Dressed in a pair of clean gumboots and standing behind a podium of hay bales at a Wairarapa dairy farm, prime minister Jacinda Ardern announced what she called a “pragmatic” world-first scheme that will require farmers to pay for their agricultural greenhouse gas emissions in a “split-gas” approach – levies on the methane belched out by cows and nitrous oxide emitted mostly through livestock urine.On the eve of Cop26, New Zealand pledged to halve its emissions by 2030 as part of the Paris agreement to limit global warming to 1.5C. The target was criticised for focusing too heavily on offsetting carbon overseas and through forestry, rather than addressing the root causes such as agriculture. The country has also set a domestic target of a 2030 target of a 10% reduction below 2017 biogenic methane levels under its climate change law.On Saturday, the Cop27 climate conference will be focusing on agriculture, and New Zealand hopes their plan may provide a blueprint for other countries to follow. Ardern believes the latest emissions pricing plan will help New Zealand meet these goals. But the nation may be wary of the efficacy of such plans, given the country’s poor record in meeting targets so far.Cows in a paddock on a dairy farm near Cambridge in New Zealand’s Waikato region. Photograph: William West/AFP/Getty ImagesNo country has yet succeeded in implementing an agricultural emissions levy plan, and those that have tried are frequently met with industry opposition. In recent months, Dutch farmers have expressed fury at their government’s attempt to reduce nitrogen pollution.Domestically, there are rumblings of discontent over the announcement. But those working in agriculture and climate policy say the turnaround in the government/farmer relationship is nothing to be sniffed at.“As everyone knows, the farming lobby is one of the strongest,” says Dr Adrian Macey, an adjunct professor in climate change research at Victoria University of Wellington and senior associate at the Institute for Governance and Policy Studies. “When you look at the amount of foreign exchange that comes from the farming sector, you may understand why they are a powerful voice.”But there is growing division within the sector, he says – those who are “ready to be part of the solution”, and those who feel “very oppressed by not only climate change measures but all government regulation”.The emissions proposal, which is expected to be signed off by cabinet in early 2023, was formulated from a set of recommendations devised under a scheme called He Waka Eke Noa – a partnership between farming leaders, Māori and government.It was created in 2019 after calls from the farming sector which wanted to price greenhouse gas emissions at farm level, rather than being forced into the separate Emissions Trading Scheme, which they criticised as being a blunt tool to calculate agricultural emissions.The process has been “a good idea” and “the right sort of engagement with the sector”, Macey says, adding that the plan that farmers came up with was “acceptable enough” and useful because “it encouraged the sector to try work together, rather than pursue their own agendas.”The government has largely accepted the scheme’s proposals, which include reduced levies and generous incentive payouts, but rejected two major recommendations: that farmers set their own levy and that all on-farm planting leading to carbon sequestration be recognised in a bespoke scheme to offset levy costs.Additionally, due to the way emissions pricing will be calculated, beef and sheep farmers will feel the sting of a levy more acutely, which the plan suggests could lead to a 20% reduction in that type of farming, compared with roughly 5% in dairy – despite dairy being more profitable and contributing more emissions overall.Some farmers are not happy about the rejected recommendations. The plan would “rip the guts out of small town New Zealand”, says Andrew Hoggard, the Federated Farmers president. “[Farmers] will be selling up so fast you won’t even hear the dogs barking on the back of the ute as they drive off.”A farmer feeding calves on a dairy farm near Cambridge in New Zealand’s Waikato region. Photograph: William West/AFP/Getty ImagesMeanwhile, environmental groups such as Greenpeace are dismayed dairy is not being targeted more. “It’s greenwash,” says spokesperson Christine Rose. “The industry has still managed to secure a system that won’t properly regulate, price or cut methane emissions.” Greenpeace and other groups believe herd sizes must be dramatically reduced, the use of synthetic fertiliser slashed and a shift to plant-based regenerative organic farming prioritised.Creating policy that threatens a nation’s biggest economic sector while trying to meet international obligations on climate change can be a dilemma for political parties.“[New Zealand] is a little bit between a rock and a hard place,” says Robyn Dyne, a senior scientist at AgResearch, who specialises in sustainable production systems. “We know we’ve got to have a pathway forward, we know there’s not an appetite to keep kicking the can down the road, and yet we do need to have the industry on the journey.”But Dynes believes the proposal “seems sensible” and that the government has got the balance broadly right. “It’s evidence-based, it has recognised the essential need for a split-gas approach, and it has also taken a farm-level approach. I think that’s important as well, because our farmers will be motivated by being recognised for what they do.”Dynes believes the partnership between farmers and government has been genuine, but she stops short of predicting if the plan will get over the line.Macey, meanwhile, is more confident and believes partnership and consultation is the key to successful climate policymaking. “The stakes are quite high in this consultation,” he says. “If the points being made by the farming sector are reasonable, and the government is seen to reject them without good reasons, they risk fracturing that consensus.”Macey says the plan could pave the way for other countries to follow suit. “[New Zealand] is probably the first country to set a hard target on agricultural methane and the first country to put a levy on it,” he said. “We’re showing world leadership on what you can do with the sector – no one has gone there before us.” | Agriculture |
Even near some of the busiest cities in the United States, nearly 54 million people have a tough time accessing fresh and healthy food, according to the United States Department of Agriculture.One company based in a Denver suburb said they have a solution.Rusty Walker, pictured with ABC News' Ginger Zee, is the CEO of Farmbox Food in Sedalia, Colorado.ABCFarmbox Foods in Sedalia, Colorado, turns upcycled shipping containers into vertical hydroponic farms. The company claims the containers can create as much as two football fields worth of traditional agriculture. They grow more than 400-lbs of mushrooms a week.Rusty Walker, the CEO of Farmbox Foods, called his container boxes “modern farming spaceships.”“This is a 40 foot high cubed, insulated container that has been repurposed and then engineered to [with] three grow walls,” Walker told ABC News’ Ginger Zee. “[We can grow] right around two and a half acres to three acres of farmland in this container.”The United States Department of Agriculture defines “food deserts” as areas where people have limited access to a variety of healthy and affordable food. There are approximately 6,500 food deserts in the United States based on 2002 and 2006 census data on locations of supermarkets, supercents and large grocery stores.Natural Grocers in Lakewood, Colorado.ABCOften areas with a higher percentage of poverty and minority population are more likely to be food deserts, the USDA found in a 2012 study.Walker said his moveable, temperature-controlled, farmland can be shipped and used anywhere.“So we can be sitting or standing in this container here today and have a truck show up tomorrow and we can put it on a flatbed truck and ship it to Chicago in 48 hours later. Plug it in and it's growing,” said Walker.In the United States, more than 40% of the country's freshwater is used to irrigate crops. Agriculture alone makes up at least 11% of the greenhouse gas emission in the United States, according to the United States Environmental Protection Agency.Walker said that his system of farming only uses the freshwater equivalent of about two loads of laundry a day.“I think the biggest thing that we have going for us is we use 3 to 5 gallons of water a day. That’s it,” said Walker. “We find that our plants are growing 3 to 4 times faster than they would in an ordinary environment. So we like to say we’re farming without harming.”Michael Boardman is the owner of Natural Grocers in Lakewood, Colorado.ABCMichael Boardman is a natural grocer in Lakewood, Colorado. His grocery store uses a Farmbox Foods container and he said it gives them control over their produce supply chain.“We'll be harvesting, taking it directly into our store [and it’s ready] for our customers,” said Boardman, who added that the produce is fresher than traditional grocery supply chains. “[The produce is] much more nutrient dense because it hasn’t been sitting on a shelf in a warehouse. It hasn’t been shipped across the country.”Local grocers are not the only ones who have bought into Farmbox Foods. One of the company’s biggest clients is Centura Health, a local hospital system in Colorado Springs, Colorado.Patrick Gaughan, the senior vice president and chief values integration officer at Centura Health, said they’re growing fresh produce for their patients, associates and community members who come to the hospital.“As we grow and develop in the foods [we grow], then we're also giving this food to the communities through local food banks, farmer's markets, so that people can get access and the food will be available for them,” said Gaughan.Patrick Gaughan is the senior vice president and chief values integration officer at Centura Health in Colorado Springs, Colorado.ABCVertical farming, like Farmbox Foods, is often criticized due to the limited amount of foods that can be produced. But Farmbox Foods told ABC News that they are expanding quickly and have been testing carrots, potatoes and radishes.Gaughan said the ready access to fresh food will only make a stronger and healthier community - all year round.“We can tie food insecurity and poor nutrition to things like diabetes, heart disease, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, obesity, even mental health,” he said. “We can introduce people to a whole different way of getting their food, tasting their food, using their food in a culturally respective way, but also in a way that's affordable and available year round.” | Agriculture |
In the fall, rice fields in the Sacramento Valley usually shine golden brown as they await harvesting. This year, however, many fields were left covered with bare dirt. “It’s a disaster,” said rice farmer Don Bransford. “This has never happened. Never. And I’ve been farming since 1980.”Bransford typically farms about 1,800 acres of rice. But the drought was so severe this year that water deliveries to area farms were drastically cut. Bransford, board president of the Glenn-Colusa Irrigation District, didn’t plant a single acre. Many other farms went idle as well. Rice grower Don Bransford stands in an irrigated field near the city of Williams in the Sacramento Valley, in this 2013 photo.(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times) California has just gone through the state’s driest three-year period on record, and this year the drought has pushed the fallowing of farmland to a new high.In a new report on the drought’s economic effects, researchers estimated that California’s irrigated farmland shrank by 752,000 acres, or nearly 10%, in 2022 compared with 2019 — the year prior to the drought. That was up from an estimated 563,000 acres of fallowed farmland last year.Nearly all the farmland that was left unplanted and dry falls within the Central Valley, and a large portion of it in the valley’s northern half. The state’s main rice-growing regions in Sutter, Colusa and Glenn counties were hit particularly hard, the report said, with about 267,000 acres fallowed this year.“The severity of the ongoing drought has been unprecedented for the Sacramento Valley,” said Josué Medellín-Azuara, a water resources economist and associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at UC Merced. “It’s been more severe over the past year, and you have the cumulative effects of the previous dry years.”Medellín-Azuara and colleagues from UC Merced, UC Davis and the Public Policy Institute of California prepared the report for the California Department of Food and Agriculture. They estimated changes in the acreage of irrigated land by surveying irrigation districts, analyzing water data and reviewing satellite data. A lateral canal flows off the Glenn-Colusa Canal near the city of Williams in the Sacramento Valley, in this file photo. (Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times) They found that water deliveries in the Central Valley were cut by nearly 43% in both 2021 and 2022. Growers partially made up for those reductions by pumping more groundwater.Gross crop revenues fell $1.7 billion, or 4.6%, this year. Revenues of the state’s food processing and manufacturing industries declined nearly $3.5 billion, or 7.8%.An estimated 12,000 agricultural jobs were lost, representing a 2.8% decline.“Those farmworkers suffer the most during the droughts,” Medellín-Azuara said.The researchers said California lacks sufficient programs to assist laborers who lose farm jobs. They said it’s crucial “to identify and assist communities that rely on seasonal and permanent agricultural jobs that are vulnerable to drought.” Dry cracked earth reveals an empty irrigation ditch in a fallowed rice field in this 2021 file photo.(Max Whittaker/For The Times) The amount of farmland left dry this year surpassed the peak of fallowed land during California’s last drought from 2012 to 2016.Medellín-Azuara said the situation could have been worse this year if reservoirs that supply the San Joaquin Valley hadn’t risen somewhat with rains in late 2021, making more water deliveries possible.Still, the losses for agriculture were severe.“It’s a really remarkable hit,” said Daniel Sumner, a professor of agricultural economics at UC Davis. He said the effects on the farm economy in the Sacramento Valley, which typically has more water and fares better than the San Joaquin Valley, were especially pronounced, representing the biggest contraction he has seen in the region in decades.High milk prices helped mitigate the overall decline in farm revenues, Sumner said. And farmers made various adjustments to cope with reduced water supplies.“We cut back on cotton. We cut back on some other crops. And the fruits and vegetables that we’re most known for, we continue to produce most of them,” Sumner said. “California agriculture is incredibly resilient.”But pressure on agriculture is increasing as climate change unleashes more intense and longer-lasting droughts, as well as heat waves that can harm crop yields. Rice grower Kim Gallagher stands in a fallowed rice field in Knights Landing in 2021.(Max Whittaker/For The Times) During the past two years, growers have dramatically increased groundwater pumping in the Central Valley, including many areas where water levels are declining and a growing number of household wells have gone dry. The researchers estimated that farms have pumped 27% more groundwater this year than in 2019.Such heavy reliance on wells will face new limitations in the coming years. Local water agencies across the San Joaquin Valley are required to begin reining in overpumping under California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, which requires them to balance water use with available supplies by 2040. Researchers have projected that meeting the law’s sustainability rules will require that vast areas of farmland be taken out of production permanently.For now, farmers with wells have been able to rely on aquifers. But in areas where rice farms have long depended solely on flows from the Sacramento River, many growers have no wells. Without water flowing in canals, farmers were left without options.California harvested the state’s smallest rice crop since the severe drought of 1977-78, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.“We typically plant about 100,000 acres of rice in our district. And this year, we planted 1,000 acres,” said Thad Bettner, general manager of the Glenn-Colusa Irrigation District. “It’s just a massive, massive impact.” A shrinking Shasta Lake reveals a bare, brown shoreline in this September photo. (Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times) With the Sacramento River watershed parched and Shasta Lake at low levels, wildlife officials dedicated some water to try to help the spawning of endangered winter-run Chinook salmon, which contributed to the cuts in water deliveries to farms, Bettner said.“Unfortunately, those protections for winter-run didn’t help the fish,” Bettner said. “We’re seeing, basically, very few of them survive.”Now many rice farmers are feeling uneasy about what might happen if the drought persists next year, Bettner said. “We’re very concerned about how many small family farms that we have in our district continue to stay in business.”Bransford said he has crop insurance and can receive compensation for the rice he couldn’t plant. He has kept a couple of employees on his payroll. But much of the area’s farming economy has shriveled, leaving many laborers suffering.“It’s devastating,” Bransford said. “The greatest impacts are to the farmworkers.”“They’re an embedded, important part of our community,” he said. “And the problem we have as owners of farms is if these people leave, there’s no replacement.”California farms primarily produce short- and medium-grain Japonica rice, which is used for sushi and other dishes. The rice is sold domestically and also exported to Asia and other parts of the world.The area’s vast rice fields have long provided habitat for migrating birds, which over the last century have lost most of the natural wetlands where they once stopped to rest and feed.Usually, after growers harvest their crops, the fields are left with chopped-up rice straw and fallen kernels. The farmers will again send water flowing to fields, attracting geese, ducks and other birds, which arrive in large flocks to feed.With many fields now bone dry, Bransford and other farmers say they’re concerned about how the birds and other species will fare.The California Rice Commission said this year’s rice crop is estimated to be about half the size of a typical harvest. The organization said the drastic water cuts have also dried up what were once reliable habitats for more than 200 wildlife species, among them migrating ducks and geese, which typically depend on rice fields for a large portion of their food during the fall and winter.Tim Johnson, the commission’s president and CEO, said the lack of water now threatens millions of wetland-dependent birds, and could affect the migratory path along the Pacific Flyway. He said while the long-term environmental effects are unknown, rice farmers have been working with government agencies and conservation groups to provide as much habitat as possible and “assist in tracking the impacts this historic drought will have on waterbirds, with the goal of using that science to better help the Pacific Flyway in the years ahead.”On the west side of the Sacramento Valley, waterbirds typically move between wildlife refuges and rice fields. Because the local wildlife refuges had their water deliveries cut this year, Bransford said, the irrigation district sold the government additional water to help nourish the habitats. The sun sets over a flooded rice field in the Sacramento Valley. (Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times) With fewer rice fields to turn to, the birds will likely be concentrated where there is water, Bransford said. And such concentrations of birds can lead to outbreaks of avian botulism or other deadly illnesses. A wave of avian flu has already left millions of birds dead in parts of North America, and has been circulating in California.“Hopefully, it will not have an impact on the waterfowl. But there is potential for that,” Bransford said.Because migrating birds are also encountering parched landscapes elsewhere, he said, “it’s really going to be difficult on them.”While the dry fields show the drought’s immediate toll, farmers expect it could take a year to determine how severe the ecological ripple effects turn out to be. | Agriculture |
If crops could feel envy, it’d be for legumes. Bean plants have a superpower. Or more accurately, they share one. They’ve developed symbiotic relationships with bacteria that process atmospheric nitrogen into a form that’s usable for those plants—an essential element for building their tissues, photosynthesizing, and generally staying healthy. This is known as nitrogen fixation. If you look at a legume’s roots, you’ll see nodules that provide these nitrogen-fixing microbes with a home and food. Other crops—cereals like wheat, rice, and corn—don’t have such a deep symbiotic relationship, so farmers have to use large amounts of fertilizer to get the plants the nitrogen they need. This is very expensive. And fertilizer production is not great for the environment. It’s not easy to turn atmospheric nitrogen into a form of nitrogen that plants can absorb on their own. “It takes a lot of energy and really high pressures and high temperatures,” says University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign plant biologist Angela Kent. “Bacteria do this at ambient temperatures and pressures, so they’re pretty special. While energy has been cheap, it’s been easy for us to overuse nitrogen fertilizers.” Even worse, once it’s on fields, fertilizer spews nitrous oxide, which is 300 times as potent a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide. Runoff from fields also pollutes water bodies, leading to toxic algal blooms. This is a particularly bad problem in the Midwest, where fertilizer empties into the Mississippi River and flows into the Gulf of Mexico, fueling massive blooms every summer. When those algae die, they suck the oxygen out of the water, killing any sea creatures unfortunate enough to be in the area and creating a notorious aquatic dead zone that can grow to be the size of New Jersey. Climate change is only exacerbating the problem, since warmer waters hold less oxygen to begin with. Given all that nastiness, scientists have long been on a quest to reduce agriculture’s dependence on fertilizers by giving cereal crops their own nitrogen-fixing powers. And with the rise of gene-editing technology over the past few decades, that quest has been making progress. Last month, in the Plant Biotechnology Journal, researchers described a breakthrough with rice, engineering the plant to produce more compounds that encourage the growth of biofilms, which provide a cozy home for nitrogen-fixing bacteria, much like legumes provide nodules for their partner microbes. “People for the last 30, 40 years have been trying to make cereals behave like legumes,” says Eduardo Blumwald, a plant biologist at the University of California, Davis who coauthored the new paper. “Evolution in that sense is very cruel. You cannot do in the lab what took millions and millions of years.”So what’s with the evolutionary cruelty? Why can some plants—like, say aquatic ferns—fix nitrogen while others can’t? It’s not that other species don’t get nitrogen at all. Cereal grasses use nitrogen that’s already in the soil—it comes from animal manure, as well as all the life churning in the dirt. (Lots of different bacterial groups process atmospheric nitrogen, not just the legumes’ symbionts.)But the legumes’ bacteria grab abundant nitrogen straight from the air. “When you have these nodules and you have this symbiotic relationship, it’s a much more effective way of getting atmospheric nitrogen,” says Joshua Doby, an ecologist at the University of Florida. “Because otherwise you have to wait for the bacteria and for other processes in the soil to turn it into ammonium.” One theory is that the symbiotic nitrogen relationship started out long ago as a bacterial infection, and those ancestor plants derived a benefit that was carried through to future generations. Earlier this year, Doby published a study of plants throughout the United States, finding that there is a greater diversity of nitrogen-fixing species than other kinds in arid regions. That is true even if the soil isn’t nitrogen-poor. He theorizes that millions of years ago, when those areas were wetter, the plants evolved the ability to fix nitrogen, which also allowed them to grow thicker cuticles. This trait protected them against dryness when the region eventually became arid. They were pre-adapted, basically. Non-fixers, by contrast, were weeded out by rising aridity. Another theory is that legumes might be consummate nitrogen-fixers because something in their genome predisposes them to building nodules.But before you start feeling sorry for non-fixers, constructing nodules and hosting bacteria comes at a major cost. “It turns out that it's very energetically expensive to actually do this,” says Ryan Folk, a biodiversity scientist at Mississippi State University who coauthored the new paper with Doby. First, a legume has to build those nodules on its roots, then it has to provide sugars to the bacteria to keep them happy. “It’s something like 20 to 30 percent of the legumes’ photosynthetic output actually goes to the bacteria, so it’s an extraordinary price,” he says. So even though it’s less efficient for plants to get their organic nitrogen from bacteria already in the soil, it’s also less costly because symbiotic bacteria are super needy.What Blumwald and his colleagues have done with rice is sort of halfway between the strategies of legumes and non-fixing plants. They sifted through compounds that the plant produces, testing which ones induced the formation of a biofilm. “When bacteria form biofilms, it’s like a hippie commune—they are cozy, they are all together, they share things,” says Blumwald. A complex layer of polysaccharides, proteins, and lipids covers the biofilm, which is not permeable to oxygen. That’s important because oxygen interferes with the bacteria’s fixing of nitrogen from the air—in legumes, the nodules keep the oxygen out.The team landed on a biofilm-boosting compound called apigenin. They then used Crispr gene editing to silence the plant’s expression of an enzyme that breaks down this apigenin, allowing more of the compound to accumulate in the plant and extrude into the soil to create a biofilm. “Then the bacteria started fixing nitrogen from the air to produce ammonium that the plant can uptake,” says Blumwald. “The proportion of nitrogen-fixing versus the rest of the bacteria near the root increased.” Basically, the rice plant now had its own fertilizer factory, giving it the nitrogen-fixing power denied to it by evolution. This would seem to skirt a problem with previous attempts to get cereal crops to fix their own nitrogen, says Kent, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign plant biologist, who wasn’t involved in the research. People have tried to inoculate soils with nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the hope that the plants and microbes would form a partnership. But that’s been difficult, since the soil microbiome is a wildly complex ecosystem of competing bacteria. “One thing I really liked about this paper is that it’s looking to modify the plants to make them partner with the soil microbiome better,” says Kent. “It helps to recruit the desired kind of microbes and give them a competitive advantage.”Interestingly, scientists previously discovered a unique variety of corn in Mexico that fixes nitrogen in a similar way. The corn’s tube-shaped roots grow above ground, sheathing themselves in a bizarre mucilage—a whole lot of dripping goo. Like the biofilm around the rice roots, this mucilage houses nitrogen-fixing bacteria. The corn study authors think it would be possible to breed this trait into commercial varieties of corn.Blumwald, right, and postdoctoral researcher Akhilesh Yadav with their new rice.
Courtesy of UC DAVISAnother problem with previous attempts with inoculation, Kent says, has been that the introduced bacteria can’t provide all the nitrogen the plants needed. A farmer would still have to apply fertilizer—but the over-application of fertilizer can actually overload natural nitrogen-fixers in the soil, sending them into hibernation. The field goes numb, essentially, as the beneficial microbiome shorts out. A company called Pivot Bio is engineering nitrogen-fixing bacteria that don’t shut down in the presence of added nitrogen. “We break the genetic feedback loop that causes them to go into hibernation when fields get fertilized,” says Karsten Temme, the company’s CEO and cofounder.Today, they’re launching new products in which these microbes are applied directly to seeds of corn, wheat, and other cereals. (With earlier products, they instead sprayed the bacteria as a liquid during seed planting.) Currently, the microbes can’t supply all the nitrogen these cereals need, so farmers may still need to fertilize. But Temme says the company is improving the microbes’ efficiency. “What we see is there’s going to be a progression, where today we’re supplying a fraction of that nitrogen,” he says, “and over time, we begin to supply the majority and eventually the entirety of that nitrogen the crop needs.”An effective biological nitrogen fixation system for rice could be “a game changer in global agriculture,” says Pallavolu Maheswara Reddy, who studies nitrogen fixation in cereals at India’s Energy and Resources Institute. That’s because the human population is growing rapidly, demanding more food and fertilizer to feed it. “Since the advent of Green Revolution in the mid-1960s, the application of chemical nitrogen fertilizers boosted rice yields by 100 to 200 percent to match the demands of world population,” Reddy says. “In the next 30 years, we must produce nearly 50 percent more rice than what is currently produced to supplement the food requirements of an increasing human population.”But even if scientists can just reduce the amount of fertilizer needed for agriculture, the industry would be saving some of the energy it takes to manufacture the stuff while cutting both farmers’ costs and the runoff that makes it into waterways. That’ll be especially important in parts of the world where climate change is making downpours more powerful (a warmer atmosphere in general holds more water), which will wash more fertilizer off of fields. And just in case you’re worried about leagues of nitrogen-fixing plants spreading out of control thanks to their new superpower, Kent says there’s nothing to fear. “We don’t see legumes taking over the world,” says Kent. Nitrogen-fixing “is probably not the trait that a plant would need for becoming a super-plant.” | Agriculture |
Targets to clean up the majority of England’s rivers, lakes and coastal waters suffering from a cocktail of agricultural and sewage pollution have been pushed back from 2027 to 2063.Not one English waterway, including rivers, lakes, estuaries and coastal waters is in good ecological and chemical health at present, with pollution from water treatment plants and agriculture the key sources of the damage. The Environment Agency said on Thursday £5.3bn was being invested for the next five years to stop the further deterioration of waterways.But the summary documents within the plan reveal the target for all 3,651 water bodies to achieve good chemical and ecological status – a state in which they are as close to their natural state as possible – was now decades away in 2063.Until Brexit the UK government was signed up to the water framework directive, which required countries to make sure all their waters achieved “good” chemical and ecological status by 2027 at the latest. The UK government later reduced the target to 75% of waterways reaching the single test of good ecological status by 2027 at the latest. The target for the majority of waterways to achieve good status in both chemical and ecological tests has now been pushed back to 2063, according to the documents.By 2027, only 4% of waters are currently on track to be in good overall condition.The Wildlife Trusts said the new river basin management plans were the third instalment of proposals to restore nearly 5,000 rivers, lakes, estuaries and coastal waters across England. Both previous plans from 2009 and 2015 were supposed to oversee the recovery of a large proportion of these waters by 2015 and 2021 – but the targets were missed and pushed back.Ali Morse, water policy manager for the Wildlife Trusts, said this new target of 2063 meant rivers, lakes and coastal waters would not be healthy within the lifetimes of many people. “For too long we have allowed our rivers and lakes to become poisoned, decimating aquatic wildlife and habitats.“We need ambitious targets to repair the immense damage inflicted on our natural world. Instead, the government is comfortable with kicking action on rivers into the long grass. At this rate, a great deal of us will not see England’s rivers and lakes given a clean bill of health in our lifetimes – and that is nothing short of a tragedy.”The latest state of rivers and lakes released by the Environment Agency in 2020 shows that only 16% meet the criteria for good ecological status and no surface water bodies are deemed to meet the criteria for achieving good chemical status. Both criteria are required for a waterway to be deemed as in a good state - thus no river, lake or coastal water is judged to be in a good state at present.The Environment Agency said on Thursday the £5.3bn being invested in the river basement management plans into waterways over the next five years would help protect and enhance England’s waters, tackling the impacts of pollution and climate change. The plans are legally-binding and aimed at tackling the key threats to rivers and coastal waters which are water company pollution, agricultural pollution, climate change and population growth.But if no progress is made the EA said only 6% of rivers, lakes and coastal waters would be in a good ecological state by 2043.John Leyland, EA executive director said: “Whilst progress has been made to protect and enhance England’s waters, it is clear that considerable time and investment will still be needed if we are to see the further improvement in our water environment that we all want.”The £5.3bn action plan to 2027 was already funded, the EA said. It included £4.3bn of action by water companies and more than £500m to mitigate the impacts of agriculture on the water environment.The Wildlife Trusts said pressures from water demand and pollution were incessant; from record-breaking temperatures and low rainfall, to the overuse of storm overflows to release raw sewage into rivers, even at times of dry conditions. The latter, the trusts said, were a clear sign that investment in sewage infrastructure had not kept pace with what was needed.Morse said the reason for what was an extremely long road to recovery of river health outlined in the new plans was in the majority of cases, chemical pollution. Waterways are polluted by chemicals from landfill sites, urban runoff or agriculture, and when these chemicals have already reached the environment, there was very little that could be done to remove them, she said. | Agriculture |
Published November 3, 2022 11:48AM Updated 11:50AM Drought drives Mississippi River to historic low levels, impacting agricultural exports Drought has driven the Mississippi River to historic low levels, impacting the agricultural exports. The crisis has increased shipping prices, and that cost may fall on consumers and creating problems for barges. The mighty Mississippi River has been hitting historically low water levels, and you may feel the effects even if you don't live near the vital waterway. Deb Calhoun, the senior vice president of Waterways Council Inc., explained that the Mississippi and Ohio rivers are some key arteries of commerce for the U.S. regarding surface transportation and are vital to keeping American farmers moving. HOW TO WATCH FOX WEATHER "Now is the height of harvest," she said on FOX Weather Thursday morning. "So, moving all those agricultural products from Midwest farms and throughout the country to the Gulf (of Mexico) for export. Those global buyers are turning to the United States for those products, and they depend upon the most cost-effective way to move those bulk commodities, and that is by the inland waterway system." It has been a decade since water levels in the Mississippi River have reached levels as low as they are now. In fact, they're so low that saltwater from the Gulf of Mexico is rushing upstream to fill the gap. According to the Lower Mississippi River Forecast Center, water levels are at or below the low-water threshold along a nearly 400-mile stretch of the river from near where the Ohio River meets the Mississippi River south to near Vicksburg, Mississippi. DROUGHT-PARCHED WEST LOOKS TO MIGHTY MISSISSIPPI FOR SOLUTIONS TO WATER CRISIS Boats rest in mud at Riverside Park Marina in Martin Luther King Jr. Riverside Park along the Mississippi River on October 19, 2022 in Memphis, Tennessee. Lack of rain in the Ohio River Valley and along the Upper Mississippi has the Mississippi River south of the confluence of the Ohio River nearing record low levels which is wreaking havoc at marinas, and with barge traffic, driving up shipping prices and threatening crop exports and fertilizer shipments as the soybean and corn harvest gets into full swing. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images) "So, (the inland waterway system) is critically important for agriculture products, of course, also energy products to keep the lights and power on," Calhoun said. "It's important for our construction and building trades in terms of cement, moving steel and aggregate materials. We're also moving large cargoes on our inland system, such as wind turbine blades." But with the Mississippi River experiencing low water levels, some cargo ships are getting stranded. So, what's the alternative? "Well, unfortunately, we need mother nature to cooperate," Calhoun said, "We need her to dump about a month's worth of rain steadily over several days to make up for this deficit. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that maintains the inland waterways system has done a wonderful job of dredging." But dredging takes time, and that's causing a backup of vessels waiting to transport goods. And the extra time means it may hit many of us where it hurts – our wallets. "Those consumer impacts are to be seen," Calhoun said. "If we don't get rain and commerce should cease on our waterways – as I said, it's still moving slowly – you could see higher prices for electricity. You could see impacts at the grocery store in terms of higher meat costs, or for building and construction materials." Conditions likely won't improve in November NOAA's temperature outlook for November 2022. (FOX Weather) The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Climate Prediction Center released its outlook for November on Monday, and the outlook isn't ideal for people who are waiting patiently for cooler weather or more precipitation as we get closer to the holiday season. According to NOAA, above-average temperatures are expected for a majority of the U.S. this November. NOVEMBER PREDICTED TO SEE WARMER, DRIER CONDITIONS ACROSS MUCH OF THE COUNTRY And while it's predicted to be warmer than average in many areas, the warmest temperatures relative to average are expected from the mid-Mississippi and Ohio valleys into the Northeast and New England. NOAA's precipitation outlook for November 2022. (FOX Weather) A majority of the country is also currently experiencing abnormally dry as well as drought conditions, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. NOAA's November outlook shows that while some areas could see wetter-than-average conditions, it will likely remain drier across the country's eastern half. This is especially true in some areas along the Gulf Coast, like Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, stretching into the Tennessee Valley and parts of the mid-Atlantic. Get updates to this story on FOXWeather.com. | Agriculture |
Six-year-old Zuriel stood in the school lunch queue and looked at the vegetable noodles, steaming on the counter. “I don’t want to eat that,” he murmured. “There are things in it I’ve never tasted before.”Seven-year-old Ali, standing nearby, overheard. Bursting with pride and eager to reassure, he exclaimed: “But I cooked it this morning. The vegetables are really fun and exciting. It’s delicious.” He looked into Zuriel’s eyes. “Honestly.”Zuriel gazed at the older boy and turned back to the vegetable noodles. “Oh. OK. I’ll try it then,” he said and whispered, “Thank you.”Greenside primary school is an inner-city London state school whose alternative curriculum revolves entirely around food, weaving it into the curriculum across the arts, sciences and humanities. But they start with the basics, in their own vegetable garden, where the children grow, pick and cook their own, exclusively vegetarian, school lunches.The school also has a four by six metre field, where the children sow and harvest wheat to make their own bread. On Friday afternoons, the queue to buy freshly baked focaccia, sourdough loaves and warm cinnamon buns from the school’s micro-bakery snakes around the playground. A share is taken by the pupils to local food banks.“Food production is the human activity that has the single biggest impact on our planet so it’s vital children engage in and understand how food is grown and made,” said Karen Bastick-Styles, executive head at Greenside.“To save the planet, we need to work with the earth, which means we need to eat healthily, naturally and that our farming is environmentally friendly. Children can only grow into adults who support that, if they are educated about it,” she added.Ali, left, and Zuriel sample the squashes grown in the kitchen at Greenside primary school. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The GuardianGreenside is not alone in its focus on stretching the field-to-fork ethos to the classroom: Nicole Pisani, co-founder of Chefs in Schools, says that of the 58 schools working with the school food transformation charity, half joined in the last two years.“Education around food is one of the most important things we can invest in and it’s quite incredible what schools are doing now,” she said. “We have a broken food system but we can’t change what kids eat unless you educate them, and the dining hall is a classroom where children can be educated through being intrigued and excited.”Against a background of pupils being fed microwaved and cold meals by schools struggling with the cost of living crisis – and despite the chef and food rights campaigner Jamie Oliver saying there is a need “now more than ever” to expand the number of children eligible for free school meals – the government’s new food strategy offers just £250 for each English state school to teach healthy eating.Gemma Foxcroft, from Cracking Good Food which works with schools in the north-west of England, points to the fact that at least 64% of adults and 40% of children in the UK are overweight. “We see whole generations of families who don’t know how to cook and so whose children stand no chance unless they’re taught at school,” she said. “But we know we can inspire young minds if we’re given the chance – and that means the skills will be taken forward into the next generation.”It’s the squid and the vegetables that have most amazed and delighted pupils at Mandeville primary in east London. The squid because, well, it’s squid – and the vegetables because, as the headteacher, Louise Nichols, said: “Many of our families live on housing estates without any outside space, so they don’t see food being grown and have no idea how it happens or what healthy, natural food even is.“But how can they grow to be healthy adults unless they’ve learned what vegetables look like in a natural state and how to turn them into soup?” she asked. “They need to handle fresh, raw fish then learn how to love eating it. They need to know how to bake their own bread.”Schools going green Cae Tan CSA, a community-supported agriculture project on the Gower peninsula in Wales, teaches pupils from primary schools in areas of high deprivation how to grow vegetables. They winnow and grind the wheat to flour, then have a celebration day where they bake pizzas for the whole school in a wood-fired oven. Nightingale community academy in south London has an award-winning working farm that supplies meat to the Temper restaurant in Soho, London. Woodmansterne school in Lambeth teaches GCSE-level cookery to years 10 and 12 with the assistance of Leith’s cookery college. Totteridge academy’s collaboration with Grow Farm, on the school site, means children learn about topsoil, seasonality and harvesting food as part of their curriculum. Bealings primary school in Suffolk has on-site polytunnels, a pizza oven, and the children recently spent a day learning about regenerative farming in the fields behind the nearby Grange Farm shop. | Agriculture |
A farmer in Ethiopia cradles a handful of maslin, mixed grains including different varieties of wheat and barley, that are grown together. Courtesy of Alex Mcalvay This story was originally published by Atlas Obscura and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
When Zemede Asfaw was growing up on a farm in eastern Ethiopia, he soaked up plant lore and other traditional knowledge the way a tree takes in sunlight and converts it to energy. “I knew the crops, and the wild plants, and the fruits and other things,” says Zemede, who goes by his given name.
The practical methods he learned covered every aspect of farming: Instead of stone walls or wire fences, plant field edges with darker crops, so the bold colors of red sorghum, for example, create a clear border between the family’s plot and that of a neighbor. Leave a few wild olive or acacia trees in the fields to harvest sustainably, over time, for firewood, animal fodder, or building materials. And instead of sowing the seeds of a single grain in orderly rows, spread a mix of grains all over the field, “mimicking nature so crops have random distribution patterns, as in natural forests,” he says. Once harvested, these grain mixtures could be turned into many things: nutritious bread, a kind of roasted-grain trail mix called kolo, beer, and the potent clear spirit known as areki.
Now an ethnobotanist at Addis Ababa University, Zemede conducts field research in northern Ethiopia. The dominant grains grown there are different than in the region of his youth—his family grew sorghum and maize, while the northerners prefer barley and wheat, better suited to their mountainous highlands—but the principle is the same: “We’ll plant the things that go together and are compatible with each other,” Zemede says. “Our farmers are good at mirroring nature.”
Ethiopia is one of the few places in the world where farmers still grow maslins, the general term for different varieties and species of grain that are sown in the same field, or intercropped. Maslins sustained humans for millennia, possibly predating the rise of agriculture more than 10,000 years ago. These grain mixtures tend to be more resilient to pests and drought, and to lend more complex flavors to breads, beer, and booze. A handful of different wheat and barley varieties grown together in a single field in northern Ethiopia.
Courtesy of Alex Mcalvay
Worldwide, maslins fell out of favor long ago, replaced nearly everywhere by sprawling, single-grain monoculture—but a small and passionate group of scientists, including Zemede, is hoping to change that. A paper published October 13 in Agronomy for Sustainable Development makes the case for maslins to be revived by farmers around the world, for tastier bread, healthier crops, and more sustainable agriculture. The question is, why is it taking so long?
“We call it the Masluminati, a global conspiracy that no one is talking about,” jokes Alex McAlvay, lead author of the new paper and a botanist at the New York Botanical Garden’s Institute of Economic Botany. He’s kidding, of course, but while farmers and botanists the world over are familiar with companion planting and agroforestry (such as growing coffee in the shade of other trees), maslins, says McAlvay, have “flown under the radar for some reason.” He only learned of them when visiting Ethiopia on an unrelated project; overhearing farmers talk about planting teff, sorghum, and other grains together piqued his curiosity and, says McAlvay, “I went down the rabbit hole.”
The fact that maslins are grown today only in Ethiopia and pockets of Georgia, Eritrea, and a handful of other countries belies how widespread they once were. There is solid archaeological evidence that growing maslins goes back at least 3,000 years, and possibly much earlier. Wild wheats such as einkorn grow naturally beside wild varieties of oats, barley, and rye grasses, and may have been foraged before the advent of agriculture. But finding the first maslins is particularly tricky.
“Maslins are difficult to detect,” says Claire Malleson, an archaeobotanist at the American University of Beirut. Malleson was not involved in the new paper, but has studied intercropping in ancient Egypt. To find evidence of early maslins, Malleson and her peers sift through millennia-old middens—essentially garbage dumps—and whatever was left behind in hearths and granaries, where different grains may have been mixed together long after harvest, making it almost impossible to piece together how the crops were actually grown. An 1847 woodcut depicts the beehive-shaped granaries of Thebes in ancient Egypt. Sir John Gardner Wilkinson/Wikipedia Commons
“I think they were probably used all over the place, either specifically or because that’s just how things grow,” she says. “Obviously now in farming it’s all very carefully harvested, but in the past it was all scattered everywhere.”
While extensive archaeological documentation of maslins may be lacking, echoes of their global prevalence can be found in language. Nearly every farming region on the planet had its own lexicon for growing mixed grains, from weedy, almost indestructible ryes to millets, wheats, and barleys.
In Medieval England, farmers grew a mix of oats and barley that they called dredge, or dredge corn, to feed their livestock. In France, peasants ground the traditional maslin of wheat and rye into flour for pain de méteil, or bread of mixed grains, now considered a gourmet loaf. In many places, maslins were such a part of life that the local word for them became shorthand for anything that was a mixture. In Ukraine and neighboring countries, the historic word for maslins—surjik or surzhyk—now means any local dialect that mixes in Russian, Moldovan, or other surrounding languages. In Turkish, mahlut, once the word for mixed grains, now means impure, a hint about what led to the downfall of maslins.
Frits Heinrich, a food historian and archaeobotanist at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, says that starting in the early 18th century—and accelerating from the 19th century onward—a combination of technological innovations in crop production and processing, and the rise of scientific agriculture, including improved breeding, shoved maslins aside. The food industry, increasingly mechanized, preferred a uniform grain that would produce a uniform product, whether it was wheat for your bread or barley for your beer. Monocultures were both easier to harvest and process mechanically and less likely to vary in taste or how they performed. “Maslins, with the variability of their characteristics, were deemed less suitable,” said Heinrich via email.
The decline of maslins only gathered momentum from there. Twentieth-century innovations, such as the widespread availability of artificial nitrogen for fertilizer, led to exponential growth in single-grain crop yields. And so most of the world abandoned maslins. Ethiopia is one of the few places on Earth where farmers still grow maslins. Courtesy of Alex Mcalvay
Today, Ethiopian farmers are feeling the pressure to grow modern monoculture crops, thanks in part to a national push to become an agricultural powerhouse. “If you export grains, you want them to be uniform,” says McAlvay. “The global market wants a certain type of wheat for their Wonder Bread. A mixture of three varieties of wheat and four varieties of barley with some other things thrown in really doesn’t make the cut.”
Tesfanesh Feseha, a master’s student in botany who served as a field translator during McAlvay’s interviews with more than 100 farmers, says that, with the national embrace of monocultures, new farmers aren’t learning the art of cultivating grain mixtures. “Young farmers didn’t even know the mixtures we were looking for,” she says.
Zemede, who collaborates with McAlvay but was not directly involved in the new paper, remains optimistic. “[The push for] modernization is strong. It comes with technology and attractive things…but it could be temporary,” he says. From a farmer’s perspective, he understands the appeal of a lucrative offer to grow a specific grain, but believes that “the scientific community should offer better.”
To that end, through his research and countless conversations with farmers, Zemede is promoting the maslin tradition in his homeland. Together with McAlvay, and like-minded colleagues in Georgia and small, experimental farms in Poland, Finland, and elsewhere, he hopes to inspire wider appreciation of maslins, from the people sowing the fields to the urbanites purchasing an artisanal loaf of mixed-grain bread.
A maslin renaissance may be particularly helpful now, as farmers around the world struggle with soils degraded by modern monoculture, a growing population, and a changing climate. “Small grains are supposed to be hit really hard by climate change,” says McAlvay. Maslins, he adds, have “all kinds of advantages,” including a more reliable yield, a more complete nutritional profile, and the ability to grow in marginal soils and to survive drought. The grain mixes also appear to have natural resistance to pests, from insects to fungal diseases. While a pest adapted to attack one species of grain will have a field day, no pun intended, when set loose in a monoculture crop, it won’t be able to jump from plant to plant if the individual it attacks is surrounded by other kinds of grain, McAlvay explains.
The new paper from his team, focusing on multiple sites in Ethiopia, is the first comprehensive case study of growing maslins in the modern era—and other researchers are enthusiastic about it.
“I think this is an excellent paper,” said Heinrich, who was not involved in the research. He praises it for both pulling together previous research on maslins and showing their potential for meeting the challenge of feeding billions on a warming, less stable planet.
Malleson is similarly effusive. “I love this paper,” she says.
“This is about bringing power back to the farmers who understand the land and the farming and how to manage things,” says Malleson, who has family members in farming and feels close to the topic. “It brings the power back down to the ground level, literally.”
The new paper is just a first step toward nudging maslins back onto the world stage, and McAlvay and colleagues are already planning additional studies. Meanwhile, Zemede continues to encourage Ethiopian farmers to preserve the maslin tradition he learned as a boy, and hopes more people globally embrace these grain mixtures as our ancestors once did.
“In biology we say diversity must survive,” says Zemede. “If diversity is lost, then we will be lost.” | Agriculture |
In some ways, this year’s UN climate summit held in Egypt was all about food. In the context of crop failures and food insecurity, due to extreme weather and dwindling diversity, as well as rising food prices exacerbated by Russia’s war in Ukraine and the tight grip of corporate monopolies – Cop27 included the first ever day dedicated to food and climate. Scientists are clear that the interconnected climate, environmental and food crises require bold transformative action to drastically reduce greenhouse gases and improve resilience. Food systems produce a third of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. Cattle ranching is the main driver of Amazon rainforest loss, while industrialized food production is the biggest threat to 86% of the world’s species at risk of extinction.US food emissions from 1990 to 2019But at Cop27, as in the debate more broadly, corporate interests dominated. Campaigners and NGOs say the food industry’s fingerprints were all over the solutions being touted, including an array of technologies and incentives that they say will do little to cut Big Food’s huge climate footprint, reduce diet-related diseases or increase food security and climate resilience in the long term.“From treating cow burps to robotic weeders, none of the false solutions on offer at Cop27 come close to stopping the industrial food production from being an engine of planetary destruction,” said Raj Patel, food justice scholar and author of Stuffed and Starved. “Agribusiness and governments offered a series of patented patches designed not to transform the food system, but to keep it the same.”There’s a lot still to unpick from Cop27, but here are some of the food “solutions” that experts told the Guardian they are most alarmed about:1 The rise of ‘climate-smart agriculture’The phrase “climate smart” – the mother of all buzzwords – has made its way into climate plans and policymaking, adopted by corporations, governments and multilateral agencies, such as the World Bank and FAO.Billions of dollars are going into research on so-called climate-smart tech solutions such as robotics, AI, net zero dairy, cultivated meat and precision farming, including drones, GPS and drip-irrigation technologies. While proponents say these will increase productivity, help farmers adapt to the climate crisis, and cut emissions, critics say that the phrase “climate smart” has become an all encompassing cover for rebranding harmful farm practices.A key proponent of climate smart agriculture is the Agriculture Innovation Mission for Climate initiative (Aim4C), a joint initiative spearheaded by the US and the UAE, which has promised $4bn in agricultural innovation to reduce emissions. It is supported by 40 countries and some of the world’s largest food companies including PepsiCo, the meat giant JBS and CropLife, an association of agrochemical companies. More than two-thirds of its partners are in the US or Europe, according to a DeSmog analysis, with not a single group representing Indigenous communities listed among its knowledge partners.Aim4C has no clear plans to significantly slow or reduce activities such as industrial meat production and fertilizer use, which climate scientists say are fundamental to curbing global heating.“AIM’s agritech solutions are not a strategy for 21st-century ecological change that benefits all of humanity and the web of life. Rather, this is more business as usual” said a spokesperson for the International Coalition on Climate and Agriculture, an alliance of activists and civil leaders.2 Tech fixes for food’s giant methane problemMethane is a short-lived but powerful heat-trapping gas that accounts for about a third of the rise in global temperature since the pre-industrial era. Livestock – through cattle burps, manure and the cultivation of feed crops – is responsible for nearly a third of global anthropogenic methane emissions, which is why scientists are clear that reducing meat and dairy consumption in the global north is essential to curbing global heating to 1.5C.But the focus at Cop27 was not on changing human diets but rather cows’ diets – to make their burps less gassy.There was much excitement from JBS, Nestlé, the world’s largest food and drinks company, and the meat and dairy trade groups about the boom in methane-reducing feed additives made from ingredients such as seaweed, ozone, enzyme inhibitors, green tea and garlic.But the long-term risks and benefits of these emerging products remain unclear, and those currently on the market are only affordable to industrial cattle farmers and food companies that are invested in growing meat and dairy consumption, not reducing it.Sheep are fed seaweed extract to reduce their methane emissions in Ireland in August 2021. Photograph: Clodagh Kilcoyne/Reuters“At best, these technologies provide a cover for the large meat and dairy corporations to continue overproducing on polluting factory farms,” said Amanda Starbuck, research director at Food and Water Watch. 3 Increasing access to fossil fuel-based fertilizers as the answer to food insecurityThe global food system is a heavy user of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers, produced in an energy-intensive process reliant on fossil fuels. They are credited with helping to increase yields and reduce hunger, but their expansion has come at a huge cost to the environment, climate and human and animal health.Synthetic nitrogen fertilizers are responsible for 2% of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to a 2022 study, which found that reducing their use “offers large mitigation potential” in addition to other health, environmental and economic benefits.Yet curtailing synthetic fertilizers was not on the agenda at Cop27, rather the focus of industry reps and European and US officials was on fertilizer access and “efficiency” – helping farmers use increasingly costly nitrogen inputs in smarter ways.The US, EU, Norway, Germany and the Netherlands announced $109m of public funds (plus $26m in private investment) to expand fertilizer access and efficiency to combat food insecurity.An unmanned aerial vehicle spreads fertilizer over a tea farm at Kipkebe Tea Estate in Musereita, Kenya. Photograph: Patrick Meinhardt/AFP/Getty ImagesBut according to the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, Michael Fakhri: “Chemical fertilizers do not ensure food security. Their pervasive use sometimes increases crop production in the short term, but it creates a longer-term dependency on corporations and trade … the ultimate goal must be to wean them off this dependency as soon as possible.”Branding fertilizer efficiency as climate action is further evidence of the industry controlling the narrative, said Lili Fuhr, deputy director for climate and energy at the Centre for Environmental Integrity. “Synthetic fertilizers are just fossil fuels in another form. Fertilizer companies know they will soon be under scrutiny and are trying to divert attention from production to more efficient use by the farmers.”The fertilizer industry, which will benefit directly from the new taxpayer funded subsidies, is already booming: nine of the largest companies are expected to make $57bn profits in 2022 – up more than fourfold from 2020.4 Industrial agriculture as the only way to feed a growing populationThe industrial food sector pitches itself as the only way to feed a growing population. Yet small farmers (with less than two hectares) produce over a third of the world’s food – despite having access to only 12% of agricultural land. Much of the world’s population is either undernourished or overweight, suggesting that we are not producing or eating well.Still, the momentum and the money seem to be skewed in favor of industrial agriculture, allowing it to continue to grow and emit. Almost 90% of the $540bn in global food subsidies, which play a big role in deciding what food is produced and what we eat, have been deemed “harmful” to the planet – by damaging health, the climate and nature as well as excluding smallholder farmers.“Subsidies are a major change agent. They make it hard for farmers to make changes, and stop consumer driven market changes from naturally taking place. This is not a level playing field,” said Stephanie Haszczyn from the Farm Animal Investment Risk & Return (Fairr) initiative.Lower-impact forms of farming often receive little to no subsidy assistance. Proponents like La Via Campesina argue that agroecology – a form of farming steeped in Indigenous and ancestral knowledge that works with nature and local conditions to produce food sustainably, protecting biodiversity and soil quality – offers a viable greener, healthier and fairer alternative to big ag.But neither subsidies nor agroecology were on the agenda at Cop27. “It was very disturbing to see a large contingent of corporate lobbyists influencing the process while small-scale farmers have been shut out and drowned out,” said Million Belay, an Ipes-Food expert and general coordinator of the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa, a large grassroots movement. “Farmers demanded recognition for diverse, resilient farming, agroecology and climate finance, but they left with very little.” | Agriculture |
DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — There is only so much farmland in the United States, so when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last spring prompted worries that people would go hungry as wheat remained stuck in blockaded ports, there was little U.S. farmers could do to meet the new demand.But that may be changing.Earlier this summer, the U.S. Department of Agriculture instituted new policies to encourage American farmers to begin growing two crops on one piece of land, one after the other, a practice known as double-cropping. By changing insurance rules to lessen the risk of growing two crops, the USDA hopes to significantly increase the amount of wheat that U.S. farmers could grow every year, lessening the reliance on big wheat producers like Ukraine and Russia and eliminating bottlenecks.The idea is an intriguing development from the Ukraine war that hasn't received widespread attention. As fall approaches, it's unclear how many farmers will actually try the new system, but some who already grow two crops say it’s something farmers should consider.“I think it’s a great idea,” said Illinois farmer Jeff O’Connor, who has double-cropped for years and hosted President Joe Biden at an event in May to promote efforts to increase food production. “How successful it will be, I don’t know.”Even if the effort is only moderately successful, agriculture groups are hoping for new ways of meeting a growing global demand for food while generating more profit for farmers amid high fertilizer and fuel costs. As Andrew Larson with the Illinois Soybean Association put it, “It removes some of the hurdles and provides a lot more flexibility."In 2020, the U.S. exported wheat valued at $6.3 billion. The U.S. along with Russia, Australia and Canada usually lead the world in wheat exports, with Ukraine typically ranked fifth, though its shipments will drop this year due to the war.Double-cropping isn't new in parts of the South and southern Midwest, which have the key advantage of longer growing seasons. Those warmer temperatures let farmers squeeze in a fall planting of one crop — usually winter wheat — that is dormant over the winter and then grows and can be harvested in late spring, just as farmers plant a second crop — typically soybeans.The problem comes when cool weather delays the spring harvest of wheat, which in turn delays the planting of soybeans. And that’s where the USDA’s new effort could ease the risk of a costly planting backup.The USDA’s Risk Management Agency would streamline crop insurance approvals for farmers planting a second crop in more than 1,500 counties where double-cropping seems viable. The agency also would work with crop insurers and farm groups to promote a greater availability of coverage in other counties.In announcing its effort, the USDA said it was aiming to “stabilize food prices and feed Americans and the world amidst continuing challenges such as the COVID-19 pandemic, supply chain disruptions, and the invasion of Ukraine by Russia.”The USDA didn't mention climate change, but the agency and other experts have long said warming temperatures will spur farmers to rethink what they grow and how.The new program is focused more on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which is a leading supplier of wheat to people in Africa and the Middle East. After the invasion, wheat prices nearly doubled to over $12 a bushel, though since then prices have steadily dropped as supply concerns have eased, in part because of agreements that have allowed for the export of some Ukraine wheat.The USDA didn’t respond to a request for details about how many farmers the agency hopes will begin double-cropping or how much U.S production could increase.Farmers who double-crop often have smaller crops, but two smaller crops would still be significantly larger than an individual crop.A study published in August by the University of Illinois and Ohio State University found that was certainly the case this year, as high wheat prices resulted in double-cropped land in southern Illinois bringing a projected $251 per acre return for wheat and soybeans, which is $81 higher than a stand-alone soybean crop. The double-crop benefit was less dramatic in other parts of the state and could be less if wheat prices drop.Mark Lehenbauer, who raises livestock and grows row crops near Palmyra, Missouri, said he’s double-cropped for years and finds it reliably profitable. Still, he cautions that there is a years-long learning curve as farmers learn how to accomplish the task of planting one crop just as they need to harvest another.And Lehenbauer acknowledged that many farmers may simply be reluctant to take on the added risks or extra workload.“There are a lot of extra steps in there,” Lehenbauer said. “It adds some complexity.”Ultimately, the biggest factor behind whether farmers begin growing an extra crop of wheat is what price they can get for the crop, said Pat Westhoff, director of the Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute at the University of Missouri. Although prices have dropped from the peaks soon after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, they remain at the still profitable level of nearly $8 a bushel.“It really comes down to where wheat prices go in the future,” he said. “Even with the drop in prices we’ve seen, wheat prices are pretty high so there should be a little more incentive for wheat double cropping in this next year than there has been.”___Follow Scott McFetridge on Twitter: https://twitter.com/smcfetridge | Agriculture |
Slashing meat consumption to the equivalent of just two beef burgers per person a week will help avoid a climate crisis, a new report claims.The new State of Climate Action 2022 report, released on Wednesday, outlines how much work humanity has to do to achieve the aims of the Paris Agreement.Described as a 'to do list' for humankind, the report calls on meat-eating members of the public to do their bit to reduce global warming. Across high-consuming meat regions, daily meat consumption needs to decrease to 79 kilocalories per person by 2030 and to 60 kilocalories by 2050 – about the same as two beef burgers per week. But this is just one objective that will help achieve the aim of the Paris Agreement to limit the global temperature increase to 2.7°F (1.5°C). Others include expanding public transport six times faster, reducing the annual rate of deforestation 2.5 times faster, and phasing out coal as an electricity source six times faster, the report says. Consumption of meat should be cut to the equivalent of roughly two burgers per week across Europe, the Americas and Oceania to save the planet, the report says Across high-consuming regions (the Americas, Europe, and Oceania), daily per person ruminant meat consumption needs to decrease to 79 kilocalories by 2030 and to 60 kilocalories by 2050 STATE OF CLIMATE ACTION 2022: RECOMMENDATIONSBelow are recommendations of the new report, in order to keep the 2.7°F (1.5°C) Paris target in reach: - Lower per person consumption of ruminant meat to the equivalent of two burgers per week across Europe, the Americas and Oceania.- Phase out coal in electricity generation six times faster - equivalent to retiring 925 average-sized, coal-fired power plants each generating approximately 320 MW annually.- Expand public transportation systems like metros, light-rail trains, and bus rapid transit networks six times faster.- Lower the amount of carbon dioxide emitted per metric ton of cement produced over 10 times faster.- Reduce the annual rate of deforestation 2.5 times faster - equivalent to avoiding deforestation across an area roughly the size of all arable land in Switzerland each year. The new report is a joint effort between multiple climate organisations, including World Resources Institute, Climate Action Tracker and Bezos Earth Fund, a non-profit created by billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. 'This year, the world has seen the devastation wrought by just 1.1 degrees Celsius of warming,' said Ani Dasgupta, president and CEO of World Resources Institute. 'Every fraction of a degree matters in the fight to protect people and the planet. 'We are seeing important advances in the fight against climate change, but we are still not winning in any sector.'The State of Climate Action 2022 is an urgent wakeup call for decision-makers to commit to real transformation across every aspect of our economy.' According to the new 200-page report, shifting to healthier, more sustainable diets must occur five times faster than current rates. This can be done by reducing per capita consumption of ruminant meat to roughly two burgers per week across 'high-consuming meat regions' – defined as Americas, Europe, and Oceania, it says.Per capita consumption of beef, lamb, and goat meat across these high-consuming regions would simultaneously need to decline five times faster to realise 2030 targets. Meat-heavy diets are fuelled by intensive livestock farming, which destroys habitats and generates greenhouse gases. Animal agriculture contributes to global warming because of the methane, nitrous oxide and carbon emissions of livestock and their supply chains. The report made its findings by analysing recent progress made in accelerating climate action across sectors that collectively account for roughly 85 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, including food and agriculture.It then quantified the global gap in climate action by comparing current efforts to those required by 2030 and 2050 to limit warming to 2.7°F (1.5°C). Of the 40 indicators assessed, not a single one was found to be on track to achieve their 2030 targets. Meat-heavy diets are fuelled by intensive livestock farming, which destroys habitats and generates greenhouse gases (file photo) HOW DOES EATING MEAT AND DAIRY HURT THE PLANET? Eating meat, eggs and dairy products hurts the environment in a number of different ways.Cows, pigs and other farm animals release huge amounts of methane into the atmosphere. While there is less methane in the atmosphere than other greenhouse gases, it is around 25 times more effective than carbon dioxide at trapping heat.Raising livestock also means converting forests into agricultural land, meaning CO2-absorbing trees are being cut down, further adding to climate change. More trees are cut down to convert land for crop growing, as around a third of all grain produced in the world is used to feed animals raised for human consumption. Factory farms and crop growing also requires massive amounts of water, with 542 litres of water being used to produce just a single chicken breast.As well as this, the nitrogen-based fertiliser used on crops adds to nitrous oxide emissions. Nitrous oxide is around 300 times more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere. These fertilisers can also end up in rivers, further adding to pollution. Instead, six are 'off track', 21 are 'well off track' and five are totally heading in the 'wrong direction. Data was insufficient to evaluate the remaining eight. Those 'well off track' include ruminant meat consumption, crop yields, energy intensity of building operations and deforestation.Meanwhile, those going in the wrong direction are 'share of kilometres traveled by passenger cars', 'carbon intensity of global steel production' and loss of mangroves, a type of tropical tree. 'This report provides the most professional assessment to date of humanity’s progress on our climate "to do" list,' said Andrew Steer, president and CEO of Bezos Earth Fund, which was founded in 2020 with $10 billion from Bezos in grants over 10 years. 'Its findings should evoke two emotions – first, a sense of shame and anger that we are failing to live up to our commitments to act. 'Second, a sense of hope and possibility that real change is within grasp and can lead to a healthier economy, healthier citizens, and a healthier society.' Despite lagging progress overall, the report does point to some 'encouraging signs', such as the adoption of renewable power, like solar and wind.Recent years have witnessed 'record-breaking' growth in the uptake of these technologies. From 2019 to 2021, for example, solar generation grew by 47 per cent and wind by 31 per cent.The transition to electric vehicles (EVs) is also taking off, with EVs accounting for almost nine per cent of passenger car sales in 2021 – a doubling from the year before. However, there's still a rise in fossil gas power generation, despite the availability of low-cost and eco-friendly alternatives. Overall, significantly more action across all sectors is needed this decade to keep the Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting global warming to 2.7°F (1.5°C) within reach, the report says. The State of Climate Action 2022 report follows a new study published this week by the Lancet Countdown, a international research collaboration focused on climate. It found that public health is at 'the mercy of fossil fuels', and that the burning of fossil fuels degrades public health – and is even killing people. A new report from doctors and other health experts says the world's fossil fuel addiction is making the world sicker and is killing people. Pictured, a coal-fired power plant in Gelsenkirchen, Germany, October 22, 2022Extreme weather from climate change triggered hunger in nearly 100 million people and increased heat deaths by 68 per cent in vulnerable populations, it found. Worldwide the burning of coal, oil, natural gas and biomass forms air pollution that kills 1.2 million people a year, including 11,800 in the US.'Our health is at the mercy of fossil fuels,' said University College of London health and climate researcher Marina Romanello, executive director of the Lancet Countdown. 'We're seeing a persistent addiction to fossil fuels that is not only amplifying the health impacts of climate change, but which is also now at this point compounding with other concurrent crises that we´re globally facing.'[These include] the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, the cost-of-living crisis, energy crisis and food crisis that were triggered after the war in Ukraine.' THE PARIS AGREEMENT: A GLOBAL ACCORD TO LIMIT TEMPERATURE RISES THROUGH CARBON EMISSION REDUCTION TARGETSThe Paris Agreement, which was first signed in 2015, is an international agreement to control and limit climate change.It hopes to hold the increase in the global average temperature to below 2°C (3.6ºF) 'and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C (2.7°F)'.It seems the more ambitious goal of restricting global warming to 1.5°C (2.7°F) may be more important than ever, according to previous research which claims 25 per cent of the world could see a significant increase in drier conditions. The Paris Agreement on Climate Change has four main goals with regards to reducing emissions:1) A long-term goal of keeping the increase in global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels2) To aim to limit the increase to 1.5°C, since this would significantly reduce risks and the impacts of climate change3) Governments agreed on the need for global emissions to peak as soon as possible, recognising that this will take longer for developing countries4) To undertake rapid reductions thereafter in accordance with the best available scienceSource: European Commission | Agriculture |
iStock Organic crops grow in California. From devastating storms and flooding to record heat waves and droughts, farmers across the world — from Minnesota to Ecuador, from Niger to Kenya — are experiencing firsthand the threat of climate change. The world is also facing the worst food crisis in decades: over 20 million people are at the brink of famine and 345 million people are facing acute food insecurity. Global hunger and climate change are inextricably linked — they both demand an urgent reshaping of our food systems. As world leaders gather in Egypt this November for COP27, they have a unique opportunity to shift resources and goals toward truly transformative solutions. What is standing in the way? One major barrier is the lack of financing. A new report from the Global Alliance for the Future of Food finds that food production, processing, consumption and waste account for a third of all global greenhouse gas emissions, yet food systems receive just 3 percent of climate finance. This has to change. And that is why McKnight joined 13 other philanthropic funders to make our case to COP27 President Sameh that he use the summit to ensure food systems get the attention and funding they need. Over 70 percent of countries are missing specific details on food systems reform in their climate plans (known as Nationally Determined Contributions, or NDCs). All countries need to produce ambitious plans to improve their food systems, in ways that are rooted in the needs of local farmers and food networks — and high-emitting, high-income countries should provide the financial support to make it happen. A good example of integrating food systems measures into NDCs can be found in Kenya, where they clearly identify strategies and funding needs for their implementation. Kenya estimates its finance needs until 2030 are $60 billion, 13 percent of which will be funded by domestic resources. That means the remaining 87 percent will require international support. This includes mitigation measures like scaling up nature-based solutions and climate-smart agriculture, and adaptation approaches like building the resilience of agricultural systems through sustainable management of land, soil and water. Climate change is moving at a dramatic speed, and current food systems are both a driver and a casualty. At the same time, massive global eruptions of other sorts — war, political and economic upheaval, and the COVID pandemic — are also having devastating effects on food systems, highlighting the unsustainability and fragility of the current dominant approaches. This is a window of opportunity to change our relationship with food for the better, bringing benefits not just for the climate but also for biodiversity, health and food security. Governments must act quickly and systematically to make it easier for farmers to advance climate solutions on the ground, which will make their operations and their livelihoods more resilient while also creating healthy soil, clean water, nourishing food and thriving economies. Business also has a role to play in creating the enabling environment for agricultural climate solutions to become common practice. In the Midwest, for example, agriculture is the backbone of the rural economy; it is also home to many of the world’s leading corporate agribusinesses. These businesses have an opportunity to join forces with advocates — in part on the upcoming national farm bill — to ensure that farming is contributing to sustainable practices, not inhibiting them. What is done in the Midwest to help farmers adopt sustainable practices can help transform global food systems. And though we need major action from governments and business, it cannot be overstated how directly we rely on the wisdom, ingenuity and leadership of local farmers. When they have a say in the health of their food, water and resources, and share their knowledge, they too are a force for global change. Farmers create healthy, sustainable food systems that feed families and improve the livelihoods and resilience of entire communities in the face of climate change. Food is an undeniable human right. We see how fragile our global food systems are and how quickly external shocks can cause food prices to spike, and access to food to plummet. It’s crucial that leaders attending this year’s COP27 bring food systems into the spotlight and beyond — we cannot afford to ignore the climate and humanitarian implications. Tonya Allen is president of the McKnight Foundation. | Agriculture |
A push to restore rapidly degrading soil and bolster the nation’s food security is gaining traction — and it could affect how the U.S. produces food for the next half-decade and beyond. Advocates for the effort are ramping up pressure on lawmakers who are weighing whether to use next year’s farm bill, which will dictate agricultural policy through at least 2028, to boost incentives for farming practices that regenerate soil and reduce emissions or stick with the status quo. Family farmers, grassroots activists and well-known food companies are lobbying Congress to ensure that the bill provides funding and technical assistance to implement cover cropping, limited fertilizer use, composting, no-till farming and other sustainable practices. Advocates say that if Congress doesn’t take action to reverse soil erosion — the average U.S. farm loses 5.6 tons of topsoil per acre each year — yields will decrease and farmers will gradually lose viable farmland, a warning key lawmakers have taken notice of. “If we do not listen … about the urgency of regenerative farming and dealing with the source of our food, which is our soil, we will have a food shortage in this country,” Rep. David Scott (D-Ga.), chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, said at a hearing on the topic earlier this month. While it’s not a surprise Democrats are throwing their weight behind climate-conscious farm policy, advocates say many Republican lawmakers are also excited about the prospect of new farming strategies that could help bring profitability back to struggling farms. “The biggest momentum we see is when they hear from farmers about how regenerative agriculture really minimizes input costs, increases their resilience and makes it so yields don’t have so much variance year by year,” said Finian Makepeace, policy director of advocacy group Kiss the Ground. For many farmers, innovative new practices could help reduce their dependence on chemical fertilizers, which are in short supply amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The shortage often forces farmers to either pay exorbitant costs for fertilizer or make do with reduced yields. Rick Clark, an Indiana farmer and co-leader of the Regenerate America coalition, told the House panel that his farm saved nearly $2 million annually and is less vulnerable to drought and floods by implementing no-till and cover cropping. “Regenerative agriculture can be incorporated into any farming operation and be far better for your bottom line,” he said. Still, transitioning to regenerative farming is a complicated process that can take years, highlighting the need for robust technical assistance for thousands of farms that want to make the switch, advocates say. “Farmers know their farm best. They know their land, they know the market, but a lot of times they need help moving on to the next level, and they just can’t do it on their own,” said Cindy Clark, senior manager of regenerative agriculture policy at Ceres, a nonprofit that works with investors to make companies more sustainable. PepsiCo, Mars, Nestlé and other major food brands are meeting with members of the Senate Agriculture Committee this week to make their own push for regenerative agriculture measures. In order to reach their climate goals, the companies need their farm partners to reduce their emissions. And with better soil health, those farms would provide a more reliable stream of food that isn’t impacted as much by weather events or fertilizer shortages. The coalition is pushing lawmakers to ensure that the farm bill’s crop insurance program encourages farmers to adopt cover crops and other sustainable practices. “Improvements to federal crop insurance have been made over the years. Still, our current system continues to disincentivize farmers from adopting practices that would increase their climate resilience by improving soil health and sequestering carbon,” the companies wrote in a letter to lawmakers Tuesday. While increased technical assistance for regenerative agriculture is gaining real momentum with lawmakers, substantial changes to lucrative crop insurance programs are seen as a bigger lift. When Congress finalizes the farm bill next year, several soil regeneration projects could already be underway. Earlier this month, the Agriculture Department announced it would dole out $2.8 billion for 70 farm projects aimed at improving soil quality, sequestering carbon and implementing other “climate-smart” practices. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said that the department nearly tripled its original allocation due to a surge of proposals. The Inflation Reduction Act allocated nearly $20 billion to the Agriculture Department to boost climate-smart conservation programs. Advocates aim to ensure that the farm bill’s policy will unlock those funds to boost soil regeneration and other sustainability measures. Still, efforts to revamp the farm bill could face some challenges if Republicans take the House in November’s midterm elections, as they are widely expected to. Rep. Glenn Thompson (Pa.), the top Republican on the House Agriculture Committee, has expressed real interest in regenerative agriculture but is also wary of major changes to farm policy. “As we begin the farm bill process, we cannot let the promises of organic agriculture, which are many, or climate policy to cause us to lose sight of the many other benefits our current food system provides under the broad goals of farm conservation,” Thompson said during the recent hearing. | Agriculture |
[1/3] Encarnación Torres, 66, harvests corn near the village of San Nicholas de los Ranchos in the state of Puebla, Mexico January 17, 2007. REUTERS/Imelda Medina (MEXICO)/File PhotoMEXICO CITY, Nov 9 (Reuters) - A broad coalition of Mexican lawmakers is pushing to ban nearly 200 chemicals used in pesticides, saying they endanger human health, and the plan has alarmed farmers who say the move could devastate the country's food production.There is a growing movement in Mexico against the use of pesticides and genetically modified crops, but some in the government have said the latest proposal goes too far, too fast.Mexico has already started phasing out the herbicide glyphosate, found in Roundup, in a presidential decree that seeks to ban genetically modified corn in 2024.In the coming days, Senate committees are expected to weigh support for the plan to phase out in 2024 183 different chemicals contained in pesticides commonly used in agriculture, gardening and in homes. If approved, it would move to a vote in the Senate and then the lower house.The plan enjoys backing from senators from Lopez Obrador's MORENA party, the opposition, the Senate's health commission president and Mexico's Deputy Agriculture Secretary Victor Suarez.The proposed bill pushes alternatives like bioinputs, products made from plant or microorganism extracts, to replace the need for pesticides.The bill lists some chemicals already banned widely, like DDT, but also includes insecticides Deltamethrin and Clothianidin used to treat crops and found in some Raid products.S.C. Johnson, the maker of Raid, did not respond to a request for comment.Supporters say the proposal puts Mexico at the heart of a global movement to restrict dangerous pesticides. Critics warn it would go well beyond steps taken in other countries seen as tough on pesticides such as in Europe, banning chemicals allowed in those places."There will be those who do not agree... But most of us are supporting our president's project and we are going to win the vote," MORENA Senator Ana Lilia Rivera Rivera, one of the lawmakers behind the initiative, told Reuters.Asked about the proposal during a regular news conference on Wednesday, Lopez Obrador said it was important to put health first. He gave no further details.Mexico's top farm lobby, the CNA, which represents more than 2 million producers, issued a statement last week blasting the bill as "ideological" and warning it could have devastating effects for farmers and consumers.Mexico's Union of Manufacturers and Formulators of Agrochemicals (UMFFAAC), which represents about 35% of the crop protection market, said the ban would eliminate 60% of the pesticides currently registered in Mexico. The group's president, Luis Eduardo Gonzalez Cepeda, predicted a ripple effect in which lower pest control would reduce Mexican profits and increase reliance on foreign imports."The farmer would no longer be profitable and stop producing," Gonzalez told Reuters.Deputy Agriculture Secretary Suarez, a vocal critic of agrochemicals, said the initiative enables Mexico to apply the so-called precautionary principle, a "safety first" approach."When the industry says, 'give me the scientific evidence that they do harm.' No, you give me the scientific evidence that they don't do harm. The proof is on you, not me," Suarez said in an interview with Reuters in October.But Suarez's boss, Agriculture Minister Victor Villalobos, warned the Senate last month that banning pesticides quickly could lead to food insecurity and higher prices, angering some close to the president who thought he was defying Lopez Obrador's decree.If approved, the pesticide ban could have implications for Mexico's trade partners, including the United States, according to Sharon Bomer Lauritsen, a former U.S. government official involved in agriculture trade negotiations.Mexico could be required to do its own studies on pesticides it wants to ban that already have international guidelines."A trade conflict could arise if Mexico has not done the required risk assessment, and there is an impact on trade," she said.(This story has been refiled to fix garble in final paragraph)Reporting by Cassandra Garrison; editing by Stephen Eisenhammer and David GregorioOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.Cassandra GarrisonThomson ReutersMexico-based reporter focusing on climate change and companies with an emphasis on telecoms. Previously based in Santiago de Chile and Buenos Aires covering the Argentine debt crisis, the tussle for influence between the United States and China in Latin America and the coronavirus pandemic. | Agriculture |
U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack speaks during a video conference with farmers, ranchers and meat processors held by U.S. President Joe Biden from an auditorium on the White House campus in Washington, U.S. January 3, 2022. REUTERS/Jonathan ErnstRegister now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comWASHINGTON, Sept 14 (Reuters) - The U.S. Department of Agriculture will invest nearly $3 billion in projects to reduce climate-harming emissions from farming and forestry, tripling the funding it had initially envisioned for the program, the agency announced on Wednesday.The investment is part of a broader effort by the administration of President Joe Biden to decarbonize the U.S. economy within decades and make the United States a leader in the fight against global climate change.Farming generates nearly 10% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, according to Environmental Protection Agency data.Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com"This will allow the U.S. agriculture and forest industry to take a leadership role internationally," said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack on a call with reporters on Tuesday. "This is a really big day for American agriculture."The program will fund 70 projects across 50 states and Puerto Rico that would encourage farmers to cut emissions in various ways. This would include planting cover crops to enhance soil health and absorb carbon, improving manure management to cut methane emissions, and collecting data on environmentally friendly beef and bison grazing practices.USDA first announced in February that it would spend $1 billion on the effort, which it dubbed the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities program. read more But after receiving 1,050 applications requesting more than $20 billion in funding - far more than the agency anticipated - it turned to the Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) for more money, Vilsack said.The CCC is a pool of funds provided by the U.S. Treasury to support the farm economy.The projects announced on Wednesday will receive $2.8 billion and range in size from $5 million to $100 million. The private sector has pledged an additional $1.4 billion for the projects, Vilsack said.The agency said it will announce a second round of funding later this year for additional climate-related projects.Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comReporting by Leah Douglas in Washington
Editing by Matthew LewisOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.Leah DouglasThomson ReutersWashington-based award-winning journalist covering agriculture and energy including competition, regulation, federal agencies, corporate consolidation, environment and climate, racial discrimination and labour, previously at the Food and Environment Reporting Network. | Agriculture |
Ukraine, Russia, Turkey and the UN secretary general, António Guterres, are to sign a deal on Friday to resume Ukraine’s Black Sea grain exports, the Turkish president’s office has said.Russia and Ukraine are both major global wheat suppliers, but Moscow’s invasion of its neighbour has sent prices soaring and stoked an international food crisis. Kyiv’s exports have stalled with dozens of ships stranded and about 20m tonnes of grain stuck in silos at the port of Odesa.On Thursday night, the office of the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, said a general agreement was reached on a UN-led plan during talks in Istanbul last week and that it would now be put in writing by the parties. Details of the agreement were not immediately known. It is due to be signed on Friday at the Dolmabahce Palace offices at 1330GMT, Erdoğan’s office said.Before last week’s talks, diplomats said details of the plan included Ukrainian vessels guiding grain ships in and out through mined port waters; Russia agreeing to a truce while shipments move; and Turkey – supported by the United Nations – inspecting ships to allay Russian fears of weapons smuggling.The UN and Turkey have been working for two months to broker what Guterres called a “package” deal – to resume Ukraine’s Black Sea grain exports and facilitate Russian grain and fertiliser shipments. The US state department said on Thursday night it welcomed the deal “in principle” and was focused on holding Russia accountable for implementing the deal.Ukraine could restart exports quickly, its deputy agriculture minister Taras Vysotskiy said earlier on Thursday.“The majority of the [Odesa port] infrastructure … remains, so it is a question of several weeks in the event there are proper security guarantees,” he told Ukrainian television.Moscow has denied responsibility for worsening the food crisis, blaming instead western sanctions for slowing its own food and fertiliser exports and Ukraine for mining its Black Sea ports.A day after the Istanbul talks last week, the US sought to facilitate Russian food and fertiliser exports by reassuring banks, shipping and insurance companies that such transactions would not breach Washington’s sanctions on Moscow over its invasion of Ukraine. | Agriculture |
Friday is market day at Goliati in the Thyolo district of southern Malawi, and usually the stalls are bustling.The area is known for its fruit and vegetables such as tomatoes and cabbages and people make the one-hour journey to the town from Blantyre, the country’s commercial capital, to buy in bulk from Goliati farmers in order to resell in their shops and roadside stalls. However, things have been hard for everyone over the past few months.Grace Manda, 35, would normally be rushed off her feet, but on this Friday she sits chatting with a friend as would-be customers walk on by.Manda, a single mother with two children at secondary school, owns half an acre of land and was able to build a small two-bedroom house from her tomato sales. She was getting by until earlier this year.“Things are not all right now; everything has gone up,” she says. “The prices of fertilisers and herbicides have gone up, and when we come here to sell, very few vendors are coming to buy.”With less fertiliser, her yield from the poor soil she has tilled year after year has significantly reduced in 2022, almost by a quarter.Severe deforestation in the country has over the years degraded the land. Like Manda, most smallholder farmers can only cultivate the same piece of land and so fertiliser had become necessary to replace lost nutrients. But now that is not so easy.Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has affected the availability and affordability of fertiliser, of which both countries are major producers. Prewar, 50kg of fertiliser was 22,042 Malawian kwacha (about £19). In April it rose to 49,000 kwacha; this month, the price reached 65,000 kwacha. For those who can, it’s back to almost-forgotten traditional methods. Manda has started looking for manure, even investing in a few chickens and goats to produce it. Some farmers are using neem leaves and the tuberous shrub locally known as mphanjovu (Neorautanenia mitis), as natural pesticides. Meanwhile, Goodfellow Phiri’s Lilongwe business is thriving. He is receiving more orders for his “bionitrate fertiliser” – which he makes by collecting urine from local people – than ever. Phiri says not only is his product more affordable but it is more beneficial than chemical fertilisers.“Bionitrate is good for vegetative and fruiting crops such as maize, rice, wheat, vegetables, lawns, flowers, and sorghum or millet, and when applied, it is also substrate for maggot farming,” he says. “This year the demand for this fertiliser has grown by 75%.”On the wider scale, however, Malawi is reeling. The economy is predominantly agriculture-based, with farming accounting for 30% of GDP and generating more than 80% of export earnings.Malawi devalued the kwacha by 25% in May to stabilise dwindling foreign currency reserves and return to a market-determined exchange rate regime.However, inflation soon soared; cooking oil doubled in cost, and petrol and diesel prices have been increased at least twice this year.Market day at Goliati. Photograph: Charles Pensulo/The GuardianIn Blantyre, Zione Chapweteka, a 25-year-old tomato vendor, says soaring prices from the farmers mean she is making a loss for the first time in years.“We buy at higher prices from farmers and when we come here we’re making losses,” she says. “At first, a dish of tomato was at 13,000 kwacha; now we buy it at 28,000. People don’t have money, so it is a difficult situation for everyone.” Frighton Njolomole, the president of the Farmers’ Union of Malawi, says the prices make the cost-of-living issues during Covid seem “mild”. With planting season approaching, he fears things will worsen.“The farmers with large-scale farms to the medium scale, they always do mechanisation, like hiring tractors to work, so those are equally affected because fuel has gone just too high,” he says.“Even when a farmer foots all these costs, the prices are not going to be the same, and if they raise the price unnecessarily, who is going to buy? I don’t think most of our farmers will survive. If things do not change, survival is going to be a big thing.”He is in favour of a return to traditional practices to plug the gap. “We need to experiment with indigenous methods as well,” Njolomole says. “If they work and help the farmers to maximise their outputs while reducing the cost of production, let farmers use them, as long as they work.”William Biliati selling sweet potatoes at Blantyre’s Limbe market. Photograph: Courtesy of William BiliatiBut nature’s ingredients are not available to help everyone in a country where many survive through entrepreneurship. Margaret Mhango, 43, is a soap-maker in the capital, Lilongwe. Since she first started manufacturing in 2020, the price of her ingredients, palm oil and caustic soda, have tripled and quadrupled. The price of her soap has to go up.“Demand has grown, but I can’t sustain it at the current cost of production,” she says. “Most people are now asking to acquire the product on loan, which is risky. I am worried about the village shop owners who used to buy from me and resell in their villages.”However, the jump in prices has helped more than just sales of urine – cheaper foodstuffs like potatoes and cassava have risen in popularity. William Biliati, who sells cassava in Blantyre’s Limbe markethas had to raise prices, but business has been growing.“At first I could only manage to sell half a bag of potatoes per day, but now I can sell two. Most of the customers are now coming to us since they can’t afford bread,” he says. | Agriculture |
SummaryPepsiCo last year pledged to “spread regenerative farming” across 7 million acres by the end of the decade, and to sustainably source 100% of its key ingredients and crops by the same dateIn the first 12 months of the new strategy, however, it inched a mere 345,000 acres towards its goalThis month PepsiCo announced a strategic commercial partnership with ADM to expand regenerative farming across their shared North American supply chainsSeptember 21 - PepsiCo is known for many things: soda pop, Super Bowl ads, its decades-long rivalry with The Coca-Cola Company, to name but a few. Now the $235 billion food brand has a challenge of a different order of magnitude on its hands.In an eye-raising move, the U.S. food and beverage giant last year pledged to “spread regenerative farming” across 7 million acres by the end of the decade, equal to its entire agricultural footprint, and to sustainably source 100% of its key ingredients and crops by the same date.The PepsiCo Positive (or “pep+”) strategy is central to Pepsi’s climate strategy. One of the first companies to set a science-based target in 2016, Pepsi joined the United Nations Business Ambition for 1.5C campaign in 2021, adopting a 2030 deadline to reduce its absolute Scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 75% and scope 3 GHG emissions by 40%.Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comTasked with delivering on this commitment in eight short years is Jim Andrews, former head of strategy at the company and, since September 2020, its chief sustainability officer.“This is not a CSR (corporate social responsibility) programme,” states Andrews, a former management consultant (he was with Boston Consulting group for 24 years). “It's a fundamental, centre-of-the-plate business transformation of what we're doing.”PepsiCo’s sodas may be household names, but it derives over half (55%) of its revenues from its extensive portfolio of food brands (think: Frito-Lay, Walkers, Doritos, Cheetos and Quaker Oats, among others), sourcing 25 ingredients from 60 countries.A regenerative approach to farming promises to bake greater resilience into PepsiCo’s food business, but only if delivered at massive scale. Whether that is possible is far from certain. In the first 12 months of the new strategy, it inched a mere 345,000 acres towards its goal.PepsiCo's CSO Jim Andrews, second from right, taking part in a panel at COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland, in November 2021. WBCSD/Handout via ReutersSo, is Andrews worried that the company remains 95% shy of its target? It would seem not. Progress was always going to be slow initially, he says: “The agricultural community is really just starting to scratch the surface of this (but) it is an area that’s going to very clearly ramp up over time.”To accelerate this ramping-up process, the company has established a network of 72 “demonstration farms” around the world. The basic concept is simple: local farmers visit to see first-hand how regenerative farming works, get inspired, and duly go home and do the same.Of course, in practice, switching away from intensive, fossil-fuel-dependent farming is more complex. That is one of the reasons why PepsiCo also provides direct farmer training through a network of alliances with expert partners.Andrews cites one such programme for female farmers in India. Delivered in partnership with U.S. development agency USAID, the course offers agroeconomic skills that are “really micro, really practical” but promise a “big impact”.The approach is working, he insists. Farmers participating in PepsiCo’s various projects in India saw an average yield improvement of almost 7%, for instance, coupled with an increase in farmer income of $55 per acre.This uptick in incomes is crucial. Farmers, as Andrews readily concedes, are “risk averse”. As a profession schooled over generations, change comes hard. Change with no obvious economic logic is harder still.“Farmers are business people, right? This is how they earn a living. And if it doesn't work for them, there's not going to be adoption, they're not going to change.”PepsiCo is also working to sweeten the pill, therefore, helping farmers with loans and grants to cover some of the upfront costs involved in transitioning to a regenerative approach.Does such help go far enough? After all, PepsiCo cannot inoculate its supply chain against climate and biodiversity shocks. As long as the global farming industry is pumping out emissions and dowsing its crops in chemicals, it will remain exposed.A cover crop of tiller radishes is seen in a corn field in Butler County, Nebraska, U.S. Lukas Fricke/Handout via REUTERSPepsiCo is not blind to this fact, Andrews insists. Hence, its enthusiasm to work through partnerships with other actors in the global food chain wherever possible, ideally at a landscape level.He points to PepsiCo’s decision to join the efforts of Anglo-Dutch consumer goods company Unilever to de-risk the shift to regenerative farming by farmers in Iowa, in partnership with Practical Farmers of Iowa, Cargill and ADM. The group have so far been able to support over 600 farmers in the planting of cover crops on around 250,000 acres across the state. read moreSuch cooperation is “unusual”, according to the business-led sustainable agriculture advocate, Field to Market. “While the companies may compete for retail shelf space in certain product categories, their relationships have transformed into pre-competitive collaboration.”This month PepsiCo announced a strategic commercial partnership with ADM to expand regenerative farming across their shared North American supply chains, aiming to reach 2 million acres by 2030.Similarly, PepsiCo is looking to support the acceleration of climate-smart startups. Illustrative here are its close partnerships with tech innovators such as UK-based waste-to-fertiliser specialist CCm and Israel-headquartered irrigation innovator N-Drip.If PepsiCo’s commitments on regenerative agriculture are going to fly, however, it will take more than supply-side initiatives. Consumers have to want what it is proposing to sell, especially if, down the track, it might come with a price premium attached.Andrews agrees, repeating his point about the pep+ programme being “a business strategy that has sustainability at its centre”, and not the other way around.That said, he remains tight-lipped about how PepsiCo might use its marketing budget (which, at an estimated $3.5 billion, is one of the largest in the world) to support its regenerative switch.Frito-Lay’s introduction of a QR code on its Lay’s crisps packaging in a few pilot markets offers an indication of the potential direction of travel. Consumers can access the code for details of where and how the product’s ingredients are made, Andrews explains.The move marks a response to consumers’ growing sense of feeling “disconnected” from their food, he adds: “This is an attempt to really link it very directly, while at the same time letting consumers know how their choices are making an impact.”However, he is cautious about following the lead of some other sustainable agriculture initiatives and promote an on-pack labelling system specifically for regenerative farming.“Certifications are a step in the right direction … but they often stop short of really ensuring that there's been a delivery of measurable outcomes,” he says.Certifying bodies may well debate that point, but Andrews’ focus on outcomes can brook no argument. If PepsiCo really does manage to reach its goal of spreading regenerative farming practices to 7 million farmers in its supply chain, another stellar association, besides the Super Bowl, will be justifiably added to its name.Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comOpinions expressed are those of the author. They do not reflect the views of Reuters News, which, under the Trust Principles, is committed to integrity, independence, and freedom from bias. Ethical Corporation Magazine, a part of Reuters Professional, is owned by Thomson Reuters and operates independently of Reuters News.Oliver BalchOliver Balch is an independent journalist and writer, specialising on business’s role in society. He has been a regular contributor to The Ethical Corporation since 2004. He also writes for a range of UK and international media. Oliver holds a PhD in Anthropology / Latin American Studies from Cambridge University. | Agriculture |
By Georgina RannardBBC News Climate & ScienceImage source, Getty ImagesFruit and vegetables on the shelves will be smaller and look different as the summer's hot and dry weather hits crops, experts say.Potatoes, onions, carrots, apples and Brussels sprouts are likely to be worst-affected.Many areas of the UK have seen very low rainfall in 2022, and parts of England are in drought.The National Farmers Union (NFU) wants supermarkets to accept more "wonky" produce and be flexible with growers.Scientists say that heatwaves and drought will increase with climate change and that we must adapt to how this affects agriculture and our food.In Essex, farmer Sarah Green's fields are dusty and the grass crunches beneath her feet.Her crops are "alive, but not growing or thriving". The hot summer sun made her sweetcorn delicious, but smaller than usual and she's had to lower her prices. Other crops still in the ground, like cauliflower, Brussels sprouts and broccoli, are stunted.Image source, Sarah GreenImage caption, Sarah Green has already seen her summer produce grow smallerAnd in Herefordshire, farmer Ben Andrews said his "nice green" cabbage and kale were fine until a few days ago. Now they've turned pale blue, he says. They feel leathery and tough, no longer crisp and lush.These crops are still in the fields but soon they'll be what we buy in supermarkets.It's too early to know how much UK produce will die due to drought, but "crop quality" will certainly be hit, Jerry Knox, professor of agricultural water management at Cranfield University, told BBC News.More potatoes will be smaller, with lower quality skin and even some defects, he adds.Vegetables this autumn and winter "may not look normal, but will taste the same", Tom Bradshaw, vice-president of the NFU, says."Consumers have been conditioned to believe that a potato looks a certain way," Mr Bradshaw says. To reduce the risk of even more price rises during a cost of living crisis, "we need to be more relaxed about appearance", he adds.A representative for the British Retail Consortium (BRC) told BBC News that supermarkets already accepted odd-shaped vegetables."Retailers understand weather conditions have been a challenge and have taken steps to support their farmers. This includes expanding ranges of odd-size/shape fruit and veg when needed," says Hannah Dougherty, Food Policy Advisor at the BRC.In Essex, rain is all Sarah Green and her family talk about. This year they're measured 107mm of rainfall. Their annual average is 525mm. Image source, Sarah GreenImage caption, Rain could help these cauliflowers recover but they will be smallerThis dryness means vegetables in the ground can't get the moisture they need to keep growing, so they grow slower and don't become full-size. Lack of water can make the skin tougher, or cause defects as the crop is stressed.Potatoes are very vulnerable to drought in the UK where half the national crop is fed by rain, Prof Jerry Knox explains. Harvesting the potatoes will be a challenge because it's likely to be difficult to get the harvester into the hard ground, Sarah Green explains. It might form big clods that damage the crop or cut it into pieces.Carrots, parsnips, onions will be affected in a similar way to potatoes, Prof Knox says.By this point in the summer the "damage is done", he says, and even significant rainfall isn't enough to fix the stressed potatoes.Farmers are also worried about brassicas like cauliflowers and broccoli planted in autumn. In many areas it's feared the soil is too hard to dig and seeds won't survive in parched ground.The last time the UK had a drought was in 2018, but rains came just in time to save most crops. But this year the Met Office is forecasting several months of dry, warm weather.Farmers could choose to sacrifice some crops, in order to fully water others, Prof Knox says. Gathering enough water over the autumn and winter will also be crucial to stop the effects of drought spreading into 2023.But in the long-term scientists warn that parts of England, particularly the south-east, will become much drier due to climate change. Farmers do adapt and some have changed the crops they grow, but the unpredictability of UK weather makes that risky.Alastair Chisholm of the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management says that in the long-term, adjustments to farming techniques like regenerative farming that helps soil store water, as well as investment in storage for winter rains, can be solutions. | Agriculture |
This story originally appeared on Mother Jones and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (IRA) contains a multitude of provisions. It’s the “biggest climate bill that any country has ever passed,” gushed Democratic senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii, lauding the bill’s $369 billion investment in clean energy. The act includes language that could reduce prescription-drug costs for as many as 48 million Americans. It narrows (with notable exceptions) the ability of some of the nation’s most profitable companies to avoid taxes—though hedge fund and private equity barons get to keep their lucrative carried interest loophole. And to the chagrin of environmentalists, it offers a raft of goodies for the fossil fuel industry, wrung out of negotiations by Democratic senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who moonlights as a coal baron. (As a result, the bill “recognizes that natural gas and oil are an important part of the energy transition, and they’re going to be here for decades,” ConocoPhillips CEO Ryan Lance noted approvingly.)But this sprawling new legislation also affects food and agriculture—which is my beat. So here’s my summary of the good, the bad, and the ugly of the act’s food-related provisions. The GoodThe legislation, as it stands, injects $20 billion over 10 years into existing conservation programs administered by the Department of Agriculture. The biggest winner is the Conservation Stewardship Program, which helps farmers defray costs for implementing practices like cover crops to keep soil and fertilizer in place over the winter, buffer strips that prevent severe soil erosion from storms, and hedgerows as habitat for wild bees and other beneficial insects. For years, demand from farmers for CSP grants has overwhelmed the congressional funding available for it. Over the next four years, the IRA will add $3.5 billion annually to the CRP’s current $1.8 billion budget—a massive expansion.The $20 billion ag-conservation outlay is a “big investment, the largest since the Dust Bowl of the 1930s,” Karen Perry Stillerman, deputy director in the Food and Environment Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, wrote in a blog post. “And it’s climate-focused at a time when climate impacts on the nation’s farms and communities—from drought in California and its Central Valley to the horrific flooding in Kentucky—are becoming dire.” Thanks to a last-minute push by Democratic senators Cory Booker of New Jersey and Raphael Warnock of Georgia, the bill also contains $3.1 billion in relief for farmers whose “agricultural operations are at financial risk” because of USDA-backed loans, and $2.2 billion in financial assistance for farmers who can show they’ve “experienced discrimination” in accessing USDA agricultural lending programs. These provisions are a response to the long history of racism at the USDA, which has driven a massive loss of land among Black farmers over the past century. In the 2021 American Rescue Plan, Congress addressed this long-simmering injustice by allotting $4 billion to erase the debt of thousands of farmers of color with outstanding USDA-backed loans.A barrage of lawsuits from right-wing groups charged that the program represented unconstitutional “discriminatory racial preferences” by singling out Black farmers. Several federal judges agreed, and the USDA froze the payments last June. The IRA’s removal of specific racial framing for the aid will make it less vulnerable to such challenges. Black farmers are “going to have to do some paperwork to document the discrimination that occurred, but we can work through that,” Lloyd Wright, a retired farmer and former director of the USDA’s Office of Civil Rights, told Civil Eats’ Lisa Held. “I think it’s really going to help the Black community.” “I am excited that the Inflation Reduction Act clarifies and reappropriates this funding from the American Rescue Plan,” Senator Booker told Mother Jones. “By giving USDA the authority to modify debt for distressed borrowers, we will keep family farmers around the country on their farms. For those farmers, particularly Black farmers, who have suffered USDA discrimination, this legislation sets in motion a process to right those wrongs.” The BadAs I wrote in my book Perilous Bounty, climate change is ravaging America’s Midwest, one of the world’s most productive farming regions. The Corn Belt, as it’s known, is dominated by just two crops, corn and soybeans, which are both harvested in the fall, leaving the ground bare until the spring planting. This leaves the soil vulnerable to fierce storms, ramped up by warming temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico, that pummel the region during the off-season, washing enormous amounts of precious topsoil into streams, and polluting the water with agrochemicals.Soil erosion in the Midwest, as I discovered in the course of my research, is occurring at about 16 times the natural rate of replenishment. A 2021 study from the University of Massachusetts found that fully one-third of the region has already surrendered its entire layer of prime topsoil, endangering the Corn Belt’s future as a farming powerhouse. The IRA doubles down on a policy that helps maintain the region’s soil-eating corn-soy duopoly. That would be the government’s long-standing support for ethanol, which consumes about a third of the corn crop, thanks to federal mandates. Most auto fuel in the United States is 90 percent gasoline and 10 percent corn ethanol. The new bill delivers $500 million to help gas stations retrofit pumps to take fuel containing 15 percent ethanol—enabling a huge expansion. The American Coalition for Ethanol trade group hailed the bill for its “significant provisions recognizing the role farmers and ethanol producers can play in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.” But many scientists have a different perspective. In a peer-reviewed 2022 paper, a group of researchers at American land-grant universities found that the government ethanol mandate has pushed farmers to plant more corn and use more water-fouling and greenhouse-gas-spewing fertilizer. Overall, they found, the push to use more ethanol likely increased greenhouse gas emissions. The bill also boosts the ethanol industry’s fortunes by upping a tax credit known as 45Q—which is paid to operations that sequester carbon dioxide in the ground—from $50 per ton of CO2 to $85 per ton. As Clive Thompson pointed out in a Mother Jones cover story last year, federally subsidized carbon capture risks morphing into just another taxpayer gift to incumbent dirty industries—like oil, natural gas, coal, and ethanol. The fatter 45Q tax break bolsters prospects for a set of projects that are now brewing in the Corn Belt and backed by the private equity, agribusiness, and oil industries, which want to grab carbon from corn ethanol production, send it through thousands of miles of pipelines, and store it underground. As I noted earlier this year, the barons behind the ethanol-carbon pipelines are pushing them through despite growing public opposition—and those pipelines are likely to further enshrine destructive farming practices while doing little to impede climate change. The UglyAn earlier version of the IRA, the Build Back Better Act, passed the House last year before stalling in the Senate. The legislation included funding for programs that “address a long-standing problem that the Covid-19 pandemic exposed and exacerbated: Some children face periods of food hardship, which is disproportionately experienced by Black and Latino children, and can have lasting impacts on children’s health and learning,” according to a report by Zoë Neuberger, an analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. That version of BBB would have dramatically expanded a program that helps public school cafeterias provide lunches free for all students—the current system stigmatizes low-income kids who qualify for no- and reduced-cost meals and leads to mortifying incidents involving unpaid debts and “lunch shaming.” Universal free meals, as I noted in this 2019 piece, give cafeterias more money to work with, allowing them to improve the quality of the food they serve. The bill also would have provided kids who receive free or reduced-price meals during the school year with grocery benefits to reduce their higher levels of food hardship during the summer. The phase-out of pandemic relief and soaring prices for key grocery items has put pressure on the budgets of vulnerable families, yet the IRA contains none of the above anti-hunger measures. It’s a classic penny-wise, dollar-foolish move, given increasing evidence that serving high-quality free school meals boosts academic performance and reduces behavioral problems. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the BBB’s expansion of free school lunches would have cost about $656 million annually. That’s about half of what Senator Kyrsten Sinema, Democrat of Arizon, cost the Treasury by forcing Senate negotiators to fully retain the carried-interest rule. Nixing this pointless perk for the super-wealthy would have brought in $14 billion over 10 years—money that will now remain in the hands of wealthy Wall Streeters, instead of making sure that kids in one of the world’s wealthiest nations aren’t going hungry. | Agriculture |
Image source, Erin HaleImage caption, Wu Cheng-wan, here with his wife Liu Ming-yu, says that the farmers had difficulty selling their cropFruit farmer Wu Cheng-wan says the ban from China came at exactly the wrong time."This year I was very cautious," he says. "I was especially afraid because the lack of rain and drought disrupted growth, and then political circumstances led China to cut off orders, so we can't sell our pomelos."A pomelo is large citrus fruit that is similar to a grapefruit, but with a sweeter flavour.Back in early September the orchards around the small town of Ruisui on Taiwan's east coast were laden with the fruit. The pomelos were due to be picked ahead of the Mid-Autumn Festival, which was celebrated in Taiwan and on mainland China this year on 10 September. This is a harvest festival slightly analogous to US Thanksgiving, and the fruit is traditionally eaten as part of the celebrations.Yet this year Mr Wu, one of the local farmers, says that many of his neighbours gave up trying to sell their crop after a sharp drop in prices.Image source, Erin HaleImage caption, Pomelos are eaten in Taiwan and on mainland China during the Mid-Autumn FestivalThis came after the Chinese government in Beijing announced in August that it would be banning imports of Taiwanese pomelos, a move widely seen as a way to punish Taiwan for receiving a visit that month from leading US politician Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives.The background to this is that, while self-ruled Taiwan sees itself as distinct from the Chinese mainland, with its own democratically-elected government, Beijing sees the island as a breakaway province that will eventually be under its control.Farmers in Ruisui usually export 70% of their pomelos to mainland China, so Mr Wu says the ban will make it difficult for everyone to cover costs such as fertilizer and labour."The month before the Mid-Autumn Festival, the market was already saturated, so when it was our turn to harvest pomelos in Ruisui it was too late as the price had already dropped," he adds."This year's Chinese market ban came quickly, so it was too late to find a new market, and too late to react."While Alicia Garcia Herrero, chief economist for Asia Pacific at investment bank Natixis, says that China's ban on Taiwanese pomelos is not a "big issue" for Taiwan, it has to be seen in the context of it being just one of many prohibitions that Beijing put in place last month.Image source, Getty ImagesImage caption, Nancy Pelosi, pictured here with with Taiwan's President Tsai Ing-wen, visited Taiwan at the end of AugustIn total, China blocked imports of more than 2,000 different Taiwanese food stuffs, from fish and seaweed, to cooking oils, cakes and other fruits. This followed after previous bans of Taiwanese pineapples, and both wax and sugar apples (tropical fruits that don't look or taste like apples). Taken all together, it highlights the potentially precarious nature of Taiwan's economic relationship with the mainland.Global TradeIn the opposite direction, 22% of Taiwan's imports come from China, with only 10% from the US.Much of Taiwan's trade with China is concentrated around Taiwan's electronics and semiconductor industry, which is deeply intertwined with China's tech industry, but DBS Bank economist Ma Tieying says farmers and food companies are particularly exposed to import bans.This is because unlike Taiwan's tech exports, they are easy to ban without it having any impact on China's own manufacturing. Separately, China has since 2019 banned people from going to Taiwan on holiday.Image source, Getty ImagesImage caption, In the tech sector the economies of Taiwan and China are often intertwined, such as this Taiwanese-owned circuit board manufacturing factory on the mainland"Going forward, whether Beijing will roll out more restriction measures need to be closely watched," says Ms Ma."There is the risk for Beijing to expand import bans to some low-end Taiwanese manufacturing goods such as footwear and wood. In these sectors, Taiwan has high reliance on China for export sales, while China has low reliance on Taiwan for import supply."Christina Lai, a junior research fellow at the Institute of Political Science at Academia Sinica, Taiwan's top research institution, says that Taiwanese farmers are looking for new buyers in Japan, Australia and the Middle East, but that this will take time."It is unclear how long China's ban on tropical fruits and tourists will last, but Taiwan's diversification strategies for its agricultural industry will certainly continue," says Ms Lai. "It might take several years for Taiwan's farmers to make needed structural adjustments and sector reforms." She adds that It might be time for Taiwan's wider business community to also diversify beyond China. Meanwhile, other analysts have started to worry that China might try to blockade Taiwan in the future, as relations between the two sides fall to some of their lowest points in 25 years.Image source, Erin HaleImage caption, Mr Wu, pictured here driving his truck, hopes to find new export marketsBack on Taiwan's rural east coast, many of these concerns seem far away, trumped by the present. At Mr Wu's farm, workers still had to harvest his pomelo trees. Even with prices collapsing, the fruit still had to be picked because if it are left to rot they will damage the surrounding soil and bring pests. Mr Wu and his wife hope Taiwan can find new export markets, but also new uses for pomelo, which is still considered a "seasonal fruit". He also wants subsidies from the government to not just help buyers but also go directly to farmers like himself. "The government has been saying that this country is built on agriculture, but farmers are quickly being crushed to death," he says. | Agriculture |
The European Union on Tuesday agreed to a set of rules to make it illegal to sell certain commodities grown on deforested land in a bid to combat the climate crisis. The provisional deal is meant to force companies to prove their products aren't contributing to deforestation that end up contributing to greater carbon emissions. Under the new rules, companies will have to do strict due diligence when importing or exporting seven products, namely: palm oil, cattle, soy, coffee, cocoa, timber and rubber. The rules also include commodities derived from those products, so beef, furniture, chocolate are going to be monitored for adherence to new rules. The European Commission, which both draws up laws as well as makes sure they're enforced properly in the European Union, said in a statement that the commodities were chosen on the basis of a thorough impact assessment identifying them as the main driver of deforestation due to agricultural expansion. Palm oil: in high demand but unsustainableTo view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video A provisional deal yet to turn into law The deal was struck between the European Parliament and the European Council, and has to be approved by every European Union member state as well as the European Parliament before it can be enforced. "I hope that this innovative regulation will give impetus to the protection of forests around the globe and inspire other countries at the COP15," said Christophe Hansen, the European Parliament's lead negotiator. Hansen was referring to the United Nations' biodiversity conference that kicks off in Montreal, Canada, this week. The United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that some 420 million hectares (more than a billion acres) of land has been lost to deforestation over the last three decades. Environment charity group Greenpace hailed the draft law, calling it a "major breakthrough." How to stop deforestation in the Congo BasinTo view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video What happens once the law is enforced? Once the law is adopted and enforced, it will require companies to produce a due diligence statement proving their supplies are not contributing to deforestation of forests. Companies would also have to show that the rights of indigenous communities were respected during processes. Failure to comply could result in heavy fines, of up to 4% of a company's turnover in European Union country. rm/aw (Reuters, AFP) | Agriculture |
Scientists have discovered that the pace of groundwater depletion in California’s Central Valley has accelerated dramatically during the drought as heavy agricultural pumping has drawn down aquifer levels to new lows and now threatens to devastate the underground water reserves.The research shows that chronic declines in groundwater levels, which have plagued the Central Valley for decades, have worsened significantly in recent years, with particularly rapid declines occurring since 2019.“We have a full-on crisis,” said Jay Famiglietti, a hydrology professor and executive director of the University of Saskatchewan’s Global Institute for Water Security. “California’s groundwater, and groundwater across the southwestern U.S., is disappearing much faster than most people realize.”Famiglietti and other scientists found in their study, which was published this month in the journal Nature Communications, that since 2019, the rate of groundwater depletion has been 31% greater than during the last two droughts. They also found that groundwater losses in the Central Valley since 2003 have totaled about 36 million acre-feet, or about 1.3 times the full water-storing capacity of Lake Mead near Las Vegas, the country’s largest reservoir.“The trajectory we’re on right now is one for 100% disappearance,” Famiglietti said. “This is the water for the future generations. And it’s disappearing.” California’s historic Sustainable Groundwater Management Act was passed in 2014 with the intent of curbing overpumping and stabilizing aquifer levels. But the law, known as SGMA, gives many local agencies until 2040 to achieve sustainability goals. Famiglietti said the findings indicate that timeline may be far too long, pointing to a need to speed up implementation of regulation under the law. The current pace of groundwater losses is now nearly five times faster than the long-term average since the 1960s.“We are seeing what appears to be a rush to pump as much groundwater as possible before new restrictions take hold,” Famiglietti said. “My fear is that by the time SGMA is fully implemented, it will be too late. There will be nothing left to manage.”The rush on groundwater comes amid the driest three-year period ever recorded in California, as well as a larger megadrought worsened by global warming that has blanketed the American Southwest for 23 years.During drought, when less water is available from rivers and canals, agriculture in the Central Valley typically depends on groundwater for two-thirds or more of its water supplies.The research included analyzing nearly two decades of data from two NASA satellite missions, the latest of which is called GRACE Follow-On. The pair of satellites, which launched into orbit in 2018, track changes in Earth’s gravity field to measure shifts in the total amounts of water, above and below ground.The scientists examined other data on soil moisture, surface water and snowpack to estimate groundwater losses, and compared their findings with estimates from a computer model developed by the U.S. Geological Survey. They compared the current drought, from September 2019 through December 2021, with earlier largely dry periods from 2006-2011 and 2011-2017.Data for the last two decades reveal successive drops in average water levels in a stairstep-like pattern, with brief wet periods that only temporarily slowed the declines.“The water stress level in California is getting higher,” said Pang-Wei Liu, a NASA scientist and the study’s lead author. “The groundwater depletion rate is getting faster, especially in these five, 10 years.”The Central Valley is one of the world’s major farming regions, producing almonds, pistachios, grapes, walnuts, tangerines, rice and other crops, as well as cattle and dairy products.The quickening pace of groundwater declines has coincided with shifts in crops. The state’s harvested acreage of almond orchards, according to federal data, has grown from 760,000 acres in 2011 to 1.3 million acres in 2021. Farmers have also planted more pistachio orchards.Famiglietti said he thinks the recent acceleration in water-level declines is probably driven, at least in part, by farmers planting lucrative orchard crops and drilling deeper wells “before the hammer comes down” with restrictions under the groundwater law. Since SGMA was passed, thousands of new agricultural wells have been drilled in the valley.The push to drill more irrigation wells and rely more heavily on groundwater has caused problems for shallower domestic wells. This year, more than 1,400 dry wells have been reported to the state, the highest number since officials began tracking reports of dry wells in 2013.The research shows it’s vital that California keep moving forward with implementation of the law, which requires local agencies to develop groundwater plans and make progress toward their goals, said Felicia Marcus, a researcher at Stanford University who previously led the State Water Resources Control Board. She said the study is a “bright reminder of the fact that we need to act, and that we need to have a framework that enables people to act.”Curbing overuse will be crucial, she said, as climate change brings more frequent and more intense dry spells.“With SGMA, we have hope of a future in which people’s kids and grandkids can farm and live in the Central Valley,” Marcus said. “The framework and regulation will be essential.”In the meantime, people in the Central Valley’s rural communities continue to suffer the consequences as more wells sputter and dry up. Many residents who are living with dry taps have been relying on bottled water, household tanks and truck-delivered water while they wait for solutions.The draining of the aquifer is causing portions of the valley floor to sink. As falling water levels leave underground spaces in layers of gravel, sand and clay, the ground collapses and permanently reduces the aquifer’s water-storing capacity. In parts of the valley, the land has been sinking about 1 foot each year, a problem that has damaged canals and wells.The researchers found that the losses of groundwater far exceed reductions in surface water, snow and soil moisture.“California has been losing water, and groundwater is the reason,” Famiglietti said. “It’s really the tragedy of the commons.”The scientists analyzed trends in three areas of the Central Valley — the Sacramento, San Joaquin and Tulare basins — and found that the northern Sacramento basin, which has previously fared better than the southern areas, is also undergoing groundwater depletion.“The vast majority of California’s water is groundwater. The fact that it is disappearing at rates that are nearly five times faster than historical rates is the equivalent of unconstrained withdrawals from a bank account,” Famiglietti said. That water savings account, he said, is vital for getting through droughts and is a critical resource for California’s future. He said slowing the pace of withdrawals will be essential to sustain groundwater for future generations. Famiglietti, the lead researcher on the study, was formerly senior water scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In past research, he and other scientists have used NASA satellite measurements to assess how rapidly groundwater is being extracted in California and across the Colorado River Basin. He has studied groundwater depletion in food-growing regions around the world, from South Asia to the Middle East to the Ogallala Aquifer beneath the Great Plains.In January, he will start a new job as a professor at Arizona State University.In many parts of the U.S. and other countries, groundwater remains poorly managed or entirely unmanaged. As wells continue to draw down water levels, the declines in water levels remain largely unseen and underappreciated. Using satellite measurements to track groundwater, Famiglietti and other researchers have found widespread and worsening problems of depletion in many of the world’s major food-producing regions.Famiglietti said a guiding purpose of the research is to “to make the invisible visible.”The data reveal a dire picture, he said, in California and throughout the Southwest.“The pace and scale of its disappearance vastly exceed what can be replaced by any management scheme,” Famiglietti said. “If that groundwater disappears, so too does the food production. That means less produce, food shortages, higher food prices.”He said many more people are also at risk of losing access to drinking water as falling water levels continue to leave more wells dry.California’s groundwater law promises to eventually impose restrictions on agricultural water use in the Central Valley as local agencies move toward implementing their groundwater sustainability plans. For now, pumping has yet to fall under restrictions in most areas.Under the law, sustainable groundwater management is defined as managing water supplies in a way that can be maintained without “causing undesirable results,” such as chronic declines in groundwater levels. Researchers have said that addressing the groundwater deficit could require taking large portions of farmland out of production.Famiglietti said he thinks California has a historic opportunity to begin to manage and preserve groundwater in the Central Valley before it’s gone.“It’s disappearing quickly,” he said. “This could be our last shot in California to get it right. And so we need to make sure it works.” | Agriculture |
Mealworms.Imago/ZUMA This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Insects can be turned into meat-like flavors, helping provide a more environmentally friendly alternative to traditional meat options, scientists have discovered.
Mealworms, the larval form of the yellow mealworm beetle, have been cooked with sugar by researchers who found that the result is a meat-like flavoring that could one day be used on convenience food as a source of protein.
While mealworms have until now mostly been used as snacks for pets or as bait while fishing, they have potential as a food source for humans to help get the recognizable flavors of meat without the harmful impacts upon the climate, as well as direct air and water pollution, of raising beef, pork and other animal-based foods. “Insects are a nutritious and healthy food source with high amounts of fatty acids, vitamins, minerals, fiber and high-quality protein, which is like that of meat,” says In Hee Cho, a researcher at Wonkwang University in South Korea who led the study.
“Many consumers seriously like and need animal protein in our diet. However, traditional livestock farming produces more greenhouse gas emissions than cars do. On the other hand, insect farming requires just a fraction of the land, water and feed in comparison to traditional livestock farming.”
Cho said that edible insects, such as mealworms and crickets, were “superfoods” that have long been enjoyed by communities in Asia, Africa and South America. However, people in Europe and North America are generally more squeamish about eating insects, despite recent forays by several restaurants and supermarkets into providing insect options for consumers.
The use of mealworms as a meat-like flavoring may help bridge this gap, researchers hope. The new study, which will be presented to the American Chemical Society this week, found that the flavors were released when mealworms were heated with sugars, with the proteins and sugars interacting and caramelizing in a range of meat-like and savory flavors.
Different cooking processes produced different results, the researchers found. Steamed mealworms give off a sort of sweetcorn-like aroma, while roasted and deep-fried versions have more of a similarity with shrimp. A panels of volunteers were used in sniff tests to ascertain the most meat-like favors of those concocted.
The global production of food is responsible for about a third of all greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere, with the raising of animals for meat responsible for the majority of these emissions. Grazing and feeding livestock consumes about 80 percent of Earth’s farmland, with everything from cow burps to the mass deforestation of land to make way for pasture causing planet-heating emissions.
Scientists say avoiding meat and diary products is the single biggest way to reduce your environmental impact upon the planet, although meat eating remains popular in the west and is now gaining traction among an emerging wealthy class in China and India.
Insects, which can be raised in vast numbers in small spaces with a fraction of the pollution of traditional meat, have been cited by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization as a potentially valuable protein source to feed a growing global population that is expected to surpass 9 billion people by 2050. | Agriculture |
As countries around the world wrestle with shortages of imported fertiliser as a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Peru has turned to a tried and tested alternative: bird poo.In the 19th century, fortunes were made and lost on guano, the potent excrement of fish-eating seabirds which was harvested by enslaved people from Africa and indentured Indigenous and Chinese labourers.It is a superb organic fertiliser containing an exceptionally high content of nitrogen, phosphate and potassium – all key nutrients essential for plant growth. Guano became such a valuable commodity that Chile fought a war against Peru and Bolivia over its supply in the 1880s.Now, Peru’s government has launched the aptly named naval vessel Pelicano to transport the pungent cargo from coastal islands and peninsulas to the mainland where prices of imported fertilisers have tripled or quadrupled in price.Sold at a subsidized price of 50 Peruvian soles (£11.6) for a 50kg sack, guano has been snapped up by farmers who cannot afford the rising prices of chemical fertilisers. “The guano from the islands is good fertiliser and the price is reasonable,” said Segundo Cruz, a farmer in Mala, an agricultural town about 80km south of Lima. But he was concerned that crops take longer to ripen with guano than with the chemical alternative.“Due to the increase in fertiliser prices, people are no longer sowing the same amount as before, they are planting just a third of the crop, not as much as before,” he told the Guardian. “It won’t be enough to supply the markets, and prices are going to go up even more.” Moreover, there is not enough guano to make up for the shortfall for Peru’s 2.4 million small- and medium-scale farmers, of whom around half used imported urea and other fertilisers, according to the agriculture ministry.“Guano is a very good fertiliser but there’s a natural limit to its supply,” said Eduardo Zegarra, an expert in rural development and a senior researcher at Grade, a thinktank. “Around 30-40,000 tonnes are extracted [annually], at best 5-10% of the national fertiliser demand which is very, very limited.”A report by the UN’s food and agriculture organisation has warned that a “perfect storm” of post-pandemic poverty, global inflation and the climate crisis has doubled food insecurity in Peru, affecting more than half, or 50.3%, of the 33 million population.The price of a 50kg sack of urea has tripled, from about $20 to $65, as imports have fallen by 58% compared with the average of the last seven years, according to agriculture ministry figures.While Peru’s fertiliser shortage is part of a global problem, local factors – and the erratic leadership of president Pedro Castillo – have only made things worse. Turnover in Peru’s cabinet has reached an all-time high with close to 70 ministers appointed in little more than a year, an average of about one every week. Castillo, a former rural school teacher, is the first sitting president to be criminally investigated for alleged money laundering and belonging to a criminal organisation, along with members of his family and inner circle.But the son of poor peasant farmers continues, for now, to enjoy support in the rural areas most affected by the fertiliser price increases.“This issue is an achilles heel for the Castillo government,” said Zegarra. “The social base which still views the president with sympathy, or at least with identification, is precisely where this very serious fertiliser crisis is brewing.“If the government does not manage to solve this problem quickly, I believe that the effect on this social base will be very hard.” | Agriculture |
Scientists believe that global wheat production could be doubled by accessing into the crop's "untapped genetic potential".By using modern techniques such as speed breeding and gene editing, the international team behind the new research say that it would be possible to cultivate new varieties of wheat tailored to each region that they're grown in.
Depending on their genes, different varieties of wheat capture water, sunlight and nutrients in different ways. The scientists propose that with an optimal genome wheat crops would be able to deliver a higher yield of grain per acre.Read more: Billions of pounds of Ukrainian wheat cannot be exported amid food crisis in developing countriesThe study, led by the UK's Rothamsted Research, used existing data on how different genes contribute to individual plant traits "such as size, shape, metabolism and growth". They ran millions of simulations to effectively design the perfect wheat plants suited to their local environments. Comparing these to locally adapted cultivars, they found in all cases that current wheat varieties were underperforming for grain yield.
Read more: Ukraine war - 'Humanitarian disasters' if wheat exports are stopped, says OECD More from Science & Tech 'Downblousing' and pornographic deepfakes should be made illegal, the government is told Meta claims breakthrough in 'superpower' AI translation as it interprets more than 200 languages Amazon being investigated in UK for practices which may give customers 'worse deal' Dr Mikhail Semenov, one of the study's leads, said: "Current wheat cultivars are, on average, only at the half-way point with respect to the yields they could produce given the mismatches between their genetics and local wheat growing conditions."Global wheat production could be doubled by the genetic improvement of local wheat cultivars - without increasing global wheat area," he added.Fellow study lead Dr Nimai Senapati said that improving this "genetic yield gap" would both help feed the world's growing population and reduce the pressure to convert wild habitats to farmland.Humans have farmed wheat for millennia and the impact on our species has been enormous - agriculture is often described as the first revolutionary step in human civilisation as it led to settlements and evolved social structures.Today wheat is the most widely grown crop in the world and second only to rice in terms of human consumption, with global harvests in the region of 750 million tons. Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player Ukraine war disrupt wheat exports The new study published in the journal Nature Food looks at 53 wheat growing regions across 33 countries, covering all of the global wheat growing environments.The team first calculated the potential yield from 28 commonly grown wheat varieties at each of these sites, assuming the best cultivation conditions were in place for each one.The harvests this delivered varied enormously, with less than four tons per hectare in Australia and Kazakhstan, with 14 tons per hectare in New Zealand.But these were improved by replacing the local cultivars with the idealised varieties of wheat favouring particular traits, such as "tolerance and response to drought and heat stresses, the size and orientation of the light-capturing upper leaves, and the timing of key life cycle events".According to the study, by optimising these key traits, the global average genetic yield gap could be closed by 51% - meaning global wheat production could be doubled."Not unsurprisingly, the countries with the lowest current yields could gain the most from closing their genetic yield gaps," said Dr Senapati."That said, even improvements in those countries with a medium genetic yield gap of 40 to 50%, but with a large proportion of global wheat harvest area - such as the leading producers India, Russia, China, USA, Canada, and Pakistan - would have a substantial effect on global wheat production due to the larger wheat cultivation areas involved."According to the researchers, before this study it was not known how large the genetic yield gaps were at a country and global level.They say this concept of a genetic yield gap contrasts with the existing and more traditional view of a yield gap which compares harvests to how they could have performed under optimal management "as a result of factors such as pest or diseases, lack of nutrients, or sowing or harvesting at the wrong time"."Our analysis suggests that such genetic yield gaps due to sub-optimal genetic adaptation could, in relative terms, be as large as the traditional yield gap due to imperfect crop and soil management," said Dr Semenov."Wheat was first domesticated about 11,000 years ago, but despite this – and not to mention the sequencing of its entire genome in 2018 – the crop is still some way from being at its 'genetic best'," he added. | Agriculture |
The farm was using waste on fields used to grow produce sold directly to consumers and local groceries, state officials said. Oct. 5, 2022, 10:42 PM UTCThe owner of a Michigan farm said Wednesday that the dumping of untreated human waste on his land was an “honest mistake” after state officials issued a warning that his produce may have been contaminated. Andy Stutzman, the owner of Kuntry Gardens in Homer, south of Lansing, told NBC affiliate WDIV of Detroit that the waste was not used as fertilizer. He said it came from an outhouse and was contained to a 5-by-5-foot section of land.The farm plans to halt all farming and selling for the rest of the year, and soil will be tested before next year, Stutzman told the station.Kuntry Gardens, center, in Homer, Mich.Google Earth“We are all about food safety, but this is just something that happened, and it was an oversight,” he told WDIV.The state Department of Agriculture and Rural Development warned people Monday to stay away from the farm's produce because of potential contamination.During a routine inspection, agency staff members found that the farm was using waste on fields used to grow produce sold directly to consumers and local grocery stores, the department said.Shops in at least 20 locations from Ann Arbor to Traverse City have bought from Kuntry Gardens, the department said.No illnesses had been reported; the department urged people experiencing symptoms of foodborne illness to seek medical help.Untreated waste can cause hepatitis A, E. coli infections, rotavirus and other illnesses, the department said.The department said using untreated waste to grow food is a violation of state and federal law. It wasn't immediately clear whether the farm will face criminal or other penalties.Tim Stelloh is a breaking news reporter for NBC News Digital. | Agriculture |
NEW DELHI, Dec 8 (Reuters) - India said on Thursday it was important for it to adopt farming technologies like genetically modified (GM) crops to ensure food security and cut a reliance on imports, as it tries to boost the output of edible oils for its huge population.The environment ministry in October granted environmental clearance for indigenously developed GM mustard seeds, potentially paving the way for a commercial release of the country's first food crop in about two years.Cotton is the only GM crop now allowed for cultivation in India.More than 60% of India's total edible oil demand is met through imports from countries such as Indonesia and Malaysia, as well as the Black Sea region."Strengthening of plant breeding programmes including the use of new genetic technologies such as GE technology is important for meeting emerging challenges in Indian agriculture and ensuring food security while reducing foreign dependency," minister of state in the environment ministry, Ashwini Kumar Choubey, told parliament, referring to genetically engineered, which is another term for GM.India spent a record $19 billion importing vegetable oils last fiscal year that ended on March 31. Russia's invasion of Ukraine also disrupted imports and raised prices, before supplies improved.Activists have said GM mustard would require widespread use of herbicides and pose a threat to honey bees. India's Supreme Court is hearing a challenge to the decision to allow an environmental release of mustard hybrid "DMH-11" for seed production and other tests before commercial release.Choubey said the environmental release would help scientists study any effect of GM mustard on bees and other pollinators.India, set to overtake China next year as the world's most populous country, in 2010 blocked the release of a genetically modified version of eggplant following opposition from environmentalists and some farmers.Scientists say India's growing population and shrinking cultivable land mean it needs to adopt more efficient ways of farming to feed its nearly 1.4 billion people.Reporting by Krishna N. Das; Editing by Robert BirselOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. | Agriculture |
Thousands of farmers in the Netherlands protesting proposed emissions reduction rules targeting their fertilizer and livestock were joined this weekend by groups in Germany, Italy, Spain, and Poland amid fears that the so-called “anti-farming” policies could soon spread to their countries as well. Similar rules have caused unrest in other countries, notably Sri Lanka, which was forced to repeal its ban on all chemical fertilizers after less than a year and now faces massive political upheaval. PROTESTING DUTCH FARMERS REJECT GOVERNMENT'S TERMS FOR DIALOGUE Farming is a critical sector of the Dutch economy. Despite being just slightly larger than the state of Maryland, the Netherlands is the world’s second-largest exporter of agricultural goods, behind only the United States, and its exports in that sector totaled roughly 105 billion euros last year alone. Farm and agriculture groups in the country have slammed the Dutch government’s plans as “unrealistic" — noting that the country is home to nearly 54,000 agricultural businesses. "This is not going to work," LTO Nederland Chairman Sjaak van der Tak, whose organization represents 35,000 farmers, said in response to the new targets. Others fear a reduction in the Dutch agriculture sector will result in higher-cost, less-efficient production in other parts of the world. “I think there are a lot of, sort of delusional ideas among environmental advocates, environmental NGOs, and academics that get picked up in places like Europe by policymakers, who then try to sort of impose [them] onto farmers and other folks who have to actually live under these policies,” Ted Nordhaus, the executive director of the Breakthrough Institute, a global research center, said in an interview. “And the reaction we're seeing [from the protesters] is pretty representative of the degree to which these ideas are pretty out of touch with the basic, biochemical economic realities of the global agriculture system.” And since the Dutch are widely considered to be among the most environmentally efficient livestock producers, Nordhaus said, the new reduction targets are likely to redistribute production — outsourcing it to other countries that require more land, and likely, produce higher nitrogen pollution overall. “Global agriculture, in some sense, is zero-sum,” Nordhaus said. "So, if productivity and yields go down in the Netherlands, it means that the demand gets taken up somewhere else." The wave of Dutch demonstrations is a response to proposed climate change policies introduced last month by the Dutch parliament, which seek to curb farmers’ use of fertilizer and reduce the amount of livestock they can own in an effort to reduce their emissions of nitrogen oxide and ammonia dramatically by the year 2030. Since those emissions are produced by livestock, the Dutch plans call for a 30% reduction in livestock, an amount lawmakers say is necessary to meet the country’s climate goals. The Netherlands is facing heightened pressure to comply with the EU’s Nitrate Directive, which seeks to regulate nitrate pollution within the bloc and protect against harmful emissions in so-called "red zones," the protected network of endangered species habitats that stretches across the EU. The Netherlands is the EU’s largest emitter of nitrogen oxide and ammonia and was ordered by the European Court of Justice in 2018 to address the problem. In May 2019, the Council of State court ruled that the Netherlands's plan to reduce excess nitrogen was “in breach of EU law” and characterized its calculation of the way nitrogen was being released as “questionable.” But in some areas, the government's cuts could reach as high as 70% — which Dutch farmers argue would force many to either scale back production massively or shut down their operations completely. The proposed regulations have been met with disdain by farmers in the country, touching off protests in major cities, where crowds have often grown into the tens of thousands. Last week, some 40,000 farmers massed in tractors and trucks in Gaarkeuken, a key agricultural center in the north, to block all ship traffic at the Princess Margriet Canal. Others used tractors to halt activity at various supermarket distribution centers in the area and to gather outside the country's parliament building while lawmakers voted on the regulations. Under the new emissions regulations, regional authorities will have a 12-month period to draft proposals to meet these new targets. But critics fear that by moving too quickly, the Netherlands could risk making some of the same mistakes as Sri Lanka, whose abrupt pivot to organic farming last April went catastrophically wrong — sending domestic production plummeting, inflation soaring, and reversing the country’s long-fought economic gains. Sri Lanka’s experiment was widely considered to be a massive failure, and within eight months, the policy had been almost completely lifted. LTO Nederland said in a statement that the new policy has delivered "setback after setback" for farmers. CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER "Loss of derogation is a black scenario for circular agriculture,” the group said. “It means that a smaller part of the total required soil fertilization may come from fertile animal manure and, therefore, greater dependence on artificial fertilizer and thus gas. This will cost approximately 10,000 to 20,000 euros extra for farmers without improving the environment.” In announcing the tougher emissions regulations last month, Dutch officials said they will bring “clarity” to their farmers as to “whether and how they can continue their businesses.” Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte “sees three options for farmers: become [more] sustainable, relocate or stop,” he added. | Agriculture |
Cultivated meat has been approved in the United States for the first time. The decision by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) means that a company called Upside Foods will soon be able to sell chicken made from real animal cells grown in bioreactors instead of requiring the slaughter of live animals.Approval from the FDA has long been seen as the next major milestone for the cultivated meat industry. In the past few years, startups in the space have built small-scale production facilities and raised billions of dollars in venture capital funding, but haven’t been able to sell their products to the public. Up until now, the small number of people invited to try cultivated meat have had to sign waivers acknowledging that the products are still experimental.There are just two smaller regulatory steps remaining until cultivated meat can be made available to the public. Upside’s production facilities still require a grant of inspection from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the food itself will need a mark of inspection before it can enter the US market. These two steps are likely to be completed much more quickly than the long FDA premarket consultation process that resulted in the approval.“It’s the moment we’ve been working toward for the past, almost seven years now,” says Uma Valeti, Upside’s CEO. “Opening up the US market is what every company in the world is trying to do.”Different startups are focusing on a range of cultivated meats, including beef, chicken, salmon, and tuna. This announcement applies only to Upside Foods and its cultured chicken, although it’s likely that other approvals will follow soon. The products have been approved through an FDA process called Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS). Through this process, food manufacturers provide the FDA with details of their production process and the product it creates, and once the FDA is satisfied that the process is safe, it then issues a “no further questions” letter.The FDA decision means that cultivated meat products may soon be available to the public to try, although it’s likely that tastings will be limited to a very small number of exclusive restaurants. Michelin-starred chef Dominique Crenn has already announced that she will serve Upside Foods’ cultivated chicken at her restaurant Atelier Crenn in San Francisco.Valeti says that he wants the public to have their first taste of Upside chicken through selected restaurants before they can buy and cook it at home. “We would want to bring this to people through chefs in the initial stage,” says Valeti. “Getting chefs excited about this is a really big deal for us. We want to work with the best partners who know how to cook well, and also give us feedback on what we could do better.”Atelier Crenn won’t be the first restaurant to serve cultivated meat, however. In December 2020, Singaporean regulators gave the green light to cultivated chicken from the San Francisco–based startup Eat Just. The chicken nuggets were sold at a members-only restaurant called 1880 and later made available for delivery.Cultivated meat is different from plant-based meats because it contains real animal cells and is—theoretically—indistinguishable from real meat itself. Cells are initially isolated from an animal and developed into cell lines that are then frozen. Small samples from these cell lines can then be transferred to bioreactors—usually large steel tanks—where the cells are fed growth media containing the nutrients that cells need to divide. Once the cells have grown and differentiated into the correct kind of tissue, they can be harvested and used in cultivated meat products.But growing cells in this way is still extremely expensive. Startups keep the exact cost of growing their cells tightly under wraps, but it’s likely that pure cultivated meat will still be several times the cost of conventional meat. Some projections for future facilities suggest that even large facilities will produce meat at a cost of $17 per pound—which would translate into much higher prices in restaurants and grocery stores. Because of this price premium, it’s likely that the first cultivated meat products released to the public will be a blend of animal cells and plant-based meat.The FDA approval doesn’t mean that cultivated meat will be widely available in the near future. Current production facilities are very small, and many in the industry have serious reservations about lab-grown meat’s ability to eventually put a dent in global meat consumption. “The next phase for us and the industry is demonstrating scalability,” says Valeti, likening the cultivated meat industry today to the electric car industry’s infancy. “Our industry is similar in that it’ll take five, 10, 15 years to scale up and for most people to access it in many parts of the world. But it is the future.”Update 11-16-2022 2:35 pm ET: This story was updated to add comments from Upside’s CEO and additional details about the FDA approval process. | Agriculture |
The decision by a high court judge to dismiss a libel claim brought against the Observer and Guardian journalist Carole Cadwalladr by the multimillionaire Brexit backer Arron Banks is a timely shot in the arm for public interest journalism.Concerns have long been mounting that the legal landscape in England and Wales places excessive restrictions on reporting, with London – where the high court is situated – often described as the libel capital of the world.Fighting a case all the way to trial can involve oppressive costs, much worse if you are the losing party, but potentially significant even if you win since not all of the costs are reimbursed in the latter case. In this case, if Cadwalladr had lost, she faced being liable for Banks’s costs, estimated at between £750,000 and £1m, together with any resulting damages.The claimant-friendly environment has been highlighted this year in the context of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with the focus on Slapps – strategic lawsuits against public participation – where the wealthy (in Russia’s case, oligarchs) exploit lengthy and expensive legal procedures to silence journalists and others.A recent report by the Coalition Against Slapps in Europe found more Slapps were brought in the UK than anywhere else in Europe between 2010 and 2021.While defamation laws have long been a source of angst to editors, reporters and publishers, developments in other areas have made their jobs even tougher.In February, in a landmark privacy case, the supreme court ruled against Bloomberg News in a decision that made it harder for media outlets to publish information about individuals subject to criminal investigations.The UK’s highest court ruled that an article by Bloomberg naming a US business executive at a large public company who was facing a criminal inquiry by a British regulator constituted misuse of his personal information as he had not been arrested or charged with any offence in relation to the corruption inquiry.The court ruled that the right to privacy of the businessman – known in the legal proceedings as ZXC – trumped Bloomberg’s right to freedom of expression.It reinforced the high court’s decision to award Cliff Richard substantial damages in 2018, after the BBC revealed he was the subject of a police investigation into alleged historical sexual offences (later dismissed as false), in a case that first changed the way the media could report on police investigations where no charges had been brought.If Banks had won, it would have been another blow to news organisations across the country.The decision has caused confusion in some quarters given that Cadwalladr’s words, as interpreted by the judge, were untrue.But, crucially, section 4 of the Defamation Act 2013 is designed precisely to allow for inaccuracies when investigating matters of great import.It states: “It is a defence to an action for defamation for the defendant to show that (a) the statement complained of was, or formed part of, a statement on a matter of public interest; and (b) the defendant reasonably believed that publishing the statement complained of was in the public interest.”The judge, Mrs Justice Steyn, said that this “reflects the appreciation that a journalist is not required to guarantee the accuracy of her facts”.It was not disputed that the publications complained of by Banks were on matters of public interest – Cadwalladr’s barrister, Gavin Millar QC, said her journalism “raised issues going to the heart of the integrity of British democracy”. Steyn said the journalist had reasonable grounds for her belief, particularly given that, at the time it was expressed, the Electoral Commission and National Crime Agency were investigating Banks’s donations to Leave.EU.Sign up to First Edition, our free daily newsletter – every weekday morning at 7am BSTFor her efforts, Cadwalladr suffered abuse, much of it misogynistic in nature, including, Millar told the court, from Banks: “The claimant frequently attacked the defendant on social media, subjecting her to misogynistic threats/abuse including tweeting (a) a video which appeared to condone violence against her and (b) suggesting that in Russia she would not be so ‘lippy’, ie, would not engage in her investigative journalism if she were in Russia.” The video was later deleted and, in court, Banks said it was an attempt at humour. He faced accusations from free speech and press freedom campaigners, as well as Cadwalladr herself, that the case brought against her was a Slapp, particularly in light of his wealth and the fact that he sued her personally, rather than the Ted organisation, which provided the platform for her comments.Steyn rejected this characterisation, saying: “In circumstances where Ms Cadwalladr has no defence of truth, and her defence of public interest has succeeded only in part, it is neither fair nor apt to describe this as a Slapp suit.”Nevertheless, in finding that Cadwalladr was able to rely on section 4 of the Defamation Act, Steyn not only put an end – subject to appeal – to three years of uncertainty for the defendant, but provided a boost to a media industry which, when it comes to court cases, has had little to cheer about in recent times. | Civil Rights Activism |
This week marks the 40th anniversary of a court case that affected thousands of schoolchildren. Yet it's one that most Americans likely don't know about. In the 1970s, a group of Texas parents who lacked legal immigration status risked deportation to fight for their children’s right to attend public school. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which on June 15, 1982, ruled in favor of the parents and their children.Plyler v. Doe ensured that children living in the U.S. without legal immigration documentation could access a basic education and lead more productive lives. It also paved the way for young immigrants to become active in efforts to demand legal pathways for children who have spent most of their lives in the U.S., such as the DREAM Act and the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA.Alfredo Lopez was in elementary school in Tyler, Texas, in 1977, when his parents came to pick him up at school earlier than usual. “All I can remember is that we were sent home one day,” he told American Public Media in 2017. “And they said we couldn’t come back to school.”In 1975, Texas had passed a statute allowing local school districts to deny enrollment to children who were not legally admitted to the country. Two years later, the Tyler Independent School District decided that it would charge annual tuition for undocumented students like Lopez. At $1,000 per student, this was far beyond the reach of undocumented families.'Heavy weight on my shoulders'Backed by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), four families agreed to sue the Tyler school district, then headed by Superintendent James Plyler. While a judge allowed the families to present their case under the pseudonym of “Doe,” the parents were required to testify in open court. This was risky; on the day that they testified, the Lopez family drove to court with their car packed with their possessions, because they were afraid that they might be deported on the spot.“When these families came forward to challenge the law, there was a real danger that people could find out their identities and harass them,” said Peter Roos, former national director of education litigation for MALDEF. To avoid media attention, the judge scheduled the parents’ testimony at the unheard-of hour of 6 a.m. In 1978, the federal district judge found that Texas’ law was unconstitutional, and this ruling was upheld by an appeals court in 1980.By 1981, Peter Roos was part of the team that argued the Plyler case before the Supreme Court. “The pressure was tremendous,” he recalled. “I was confident in our case, but there was a sense that if we lost, other states would pass laws like Texas. So the outcome could affect millions of kids, and that was a heavy weight on my shoulders.”The high court sided (5-4) with the Mexican American families in June 1982. “By denying these children a basic education, we deny them the ability to live within the structure of our civic institutions,” Justice William Brennan wrote in the majority opinion, “and foreclose any realistic possibility that they will contribute in even the smallest way to the progress of our nation.”The court found that undocumented children were entitled to Equal Protection under the Fourteenth Amendment, so Texas could not deny them access to K-12 public education.'A firm foundation'Ironically, even the losing party in this landmark decision came to believe that the case was decided correctly. In 2007, former Tyler school district superintendent James Plyler told Education Week, “I’m glad we lost the Hispanic (court case), so that those kids could get educated.” By then, his son had married a woman of Mexican descent, and Plyler himself had Latino grandchildren.The late legal scholar Michael Olivas, who wrote a book about the Plyler case, considered it the pre-eminent decision in immigration law. “This case is the high-water mark for immigrant rights,” Olivas said in 2017. “It was courageous and strategic. Winning is one thing, but it’s not static. It has to be fought for, it has to be defended, re-conceptualized and re-applied.”Other legal experts and educators say that the Plyler case remains important and relevant today.“Plyler set a firm foundation, a baseline, of rights protections for undocumented young people,” said Roberto G. Gonzales, professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. "Its significance, in part, is that it allows undocumented children from Day One to be integrated into the legal framework of this country. They not only get an education, but they learn the culture and values of this country and are integrated into the fabric of their communities.”In 2019, the Migration Policy Institute estimated that there were 133,000 undocumented children (ages 3-17) in Texas. Nationwide, the Pew Center has reported that there are roughly 675,000 undocumented children. Yet the Plyler case has limitations, Gonzales noted. Because the decision applied only to students up through the 12th grade, undocumented youth face an uncertain future after that. “As these kids get older, they come in close contact with the limits of their sense of belonging.” Undocumented youth in some states do not qualify for in-state college tuition, for example. In some states, they can get drivers’ licenses; in others, they cannot. According to Thomas A. Saenz, president and general counsel of MALDEF, the Plyler decision is “well-established law.” That has not stopped some states from attempting to enact measures limiting undocumented children’s access to education. In 1994 California voters passed Proposition 187, which would have denied nearly all state services to those who lack legal immigration status, and in 2011, Alabama passed HB 56, which would have permitted officials to check the immigration status of students. Key provisions of these two measures were later struck down by the courts.More recently, in May of this year, Texas Governor Greg Abbott said that he would like to re-visit the Plyler case by potentially launching a challenge to it.MALDEF’s Saenz said that any such effort would be unlikely to succeed. He pointed out that Plyler (unlike Roe v. Wade) has been incorporated into a federal statute.“Abbott’s comments really amount to a dog-whistle to his base during his re-election campaign. Children engender great sympathy with the public; even Trump had to stop separating families because of the outrage it generated," said Saenz. "I do not think the governor really wants all these kids out of schools, it is simply bad politics, and bad policy.”Sonia Hernandez, associate professor of history at Texas A&M University said it’s important to view the Plyler case within a broader historical context. “To be honest, not many of my students have heard of it. If a student does not take Mexican American studies or an ethnic studies program, they will probably not get this taught to them — which speaks to the urgency of why we should continue to approach history in a very inclusive way.”There is a rich history of Mexican American activism centered around education that is still relatively unknown outside academia, Hernandez said. “Not knowing about cases like Plyler is a reflection of how limited our public school curriculums are.” “The legacy and future of Plyer should concern us all,” Hernandez added. “The right to a basic education is a fundamental part of democracy.”Follow NBC Latino on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. | Civil Rights Activism |
Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at a memorial service for Ruth Whitfield, a victim of the Buffalo supermarket shooting, at Mt. Olive Baptist Church, Saturday, May 28, 2022, in Buffalo, N.Y. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky) Vice President Harris is slated to meet with privacy, constitutional law, and technology experts to discuss what is at stake if the landmark Roe v. Wade abortion ruling is overturned by the Supreme Court. A White House official said the discussion on Tuesday will focus on real-world implications should the landmark ruling be overturned, touching on topics such as privacy, contraception, and in vitro fertilization. Participants in the latest meeting include the New York University (NYU) School of Law professors Peggy Cooper Davis and Melissa Murray, Harvard Law School professor Glenn Cohen, UC Irvine School of Law professor Michele Bratcher Goodwin, University of Michigan Law School professor Leah Litman. The Brennan Center for Justice and Ms. Magazine’s Jennifer Weiss-Wolf will also participate in the meeting with Harris. “The Vice President has spent her career fighting for women, and as Vice President, she has continued to be a forceful advocate of protecting women’s reproductive rights, and the right to privacy,” the White House said in a statement. “Over the last several weeks, the Vice President has convened faith leaders and health care providers to hear about what their communities are experiencing and to discuss how to chart the path forward.” “Tomorrow’s engagement is a continuation of the Vice President’s work convening a broad coalition to protect the health, safety, and wellbeing of women,” the statement added. The White House has been quietly preparing for a Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade, a consequential decision expected to come this month that will create immediate pressure to respond following the leak of a draft opinion in early May that showed a majority of justices had voted in favor of banning abortion on the federal level. Harris has slammed the possibility of overturning the landmark ruling, adding that women’s rights are at stake. “Roe v. Wade in its power has protected a woman’s right, her right to make decisions about her own body for nearly half a century,” Harris said during a speech last month. “If the court overturns Roe v. Wade, it will be a direct assault on freedom, on the fundamental right to self-determination to which all Americans are entitled.” | Civil Rights Activism |
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. (AP) — A new Florida law prohibiting abortion after 15 weeks with some exceptions violates religious freedom rights of Jews in addition to the state constitution's privacy protections, a synagogue claims in a lawsuit.The lawsuit filed by the Congregation L'Dor Va-Dor of Boynton Beach contends the law that takes effect July 1 violates Jewish teachings, which state abortion “is required if necessary to protect the health, mental or physical well-being of the woman” and for other reasons.“As such, the act prohibits Jewish women from practicing their faith free of government intrusion and this violates their privacy rights and religious freedom,” says the lawsuit, filed Friday in Leon County Circuit Court.The lawsuit adds that people who “do not share the religious views reflected in the act will suffer" and that it “threatens the Jewish people by imposing the laws of other religions upon Jews.”The lawsuit is the second challenge to the 15-week abortion ban enacted earlier this year by the Legislature and signed into law by Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Planned Parenthood and other reproductive health providers also sued earlier this month to block the law from taking effect.In a previous statement, DeSantis' office said it “is confident that this law will ultimately withstand all legal challenges.”The two lawsuits are likely to be consolidated into a single case. A hearing on a proposed injunction to block the Florida abortion law is likely in the next two weeks.The law mirrors a similar measure passed in Mississippi that is now before the U.S. Supreme Court, which may use it to overturn the Roe v. Wade abortion decision based on a leaked draft opinion. A final ruling on Roe is expected by the end of June.In Florida, Rabbi Barry Silver of Congregation L'Dor Va-Dor — the name means “Generation to Generation"— said it practices “cosmic Judaism,” which he defines on the synagogue's website as “the Judaism of tomorrow today” that respects science, tradition and spirituality.Silver is an attorney, social activist and former Democratic state legislator who styles himself as a “Rabbi-rouser” on his own website. In an interview Tuesday, Silver said when separation of religion and government crumbles, religious minorities such as Jews often suffer.“Every time that wall starts to crack, bad things start to happen,” he said, noting that DeSantis signed the law at an evangelical Christian church.The new Florida abortion law, contains exceptions if the abortion is necessary to save a mother’s life, prevent serious injury or if the fetus has a fatal abnormality. It does not allow for exemptions in cases where pregnancies were caused by rape, incest or human trafficking.Under current law, Florida allows abortions up to 24 weeks.No faith is monolithic on the abortion issue. Yet many followers of faiths that do not prohibit abortion are aghast that a view held by a minority of Americans could supersede their individual rights and religious beliefs such as the position of Judaism as outlined in the lawsuit.“This ruling would be outlawing abortion in cases when our religion would permit us,” said Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, scholar in residence at the National Council of Jewish Women, “and it is basing its concepts of when life begins on someone else’s philosophy or theology.” | Civil Rights Activism |
This week marks the 40th anniversary of a court case that affected thousands of schoolchildren. Yet it's one that most Americans likely don't know about.In the 1970s, a group of Texas parents who lacked legal immigration status risked deportation to fight for their children’s right to attend public school. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which on June 15, 1982, ruled in favor of the parents and their children.Plyler v. Doe ensured that children living in the U.S. without legal immigration documentation could access a basic education and lead more productive lives. It also paved the way for young immigrants to become active in efforts to demand legal pathways for children who have spent most of their lives in the U.S., such as the DREAM Act and the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA.Alfredo Lopez was in elementary school in Tyler, Texas, in 1977, when his parents came to pick him up at school earlier than usual. “All I can remember is that we were sent home one day,” he told American Public Media in 2017. “And they said we couldn’t come back to school.”In 1975, Texas had passed a statute allowing local school districts to deny enrollment to children who were not legally admitted to the country. Two years later, the Tyler Independent School District decided that it would charge annual tuition for undocumented students like Lopez. At $1,000 per student, this was far beyond the reach of undocumented families.'Heavy weight on my shoulders'Backed by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), four families agreed to sue the Tyler school district, then headed by Superintendent James Plyler. While a judge allowed the families to present their case under the pseudonym of “Doe,” the parents were required to testify in open court. This was risky; on the day that they testified, the Lopez family drove to court with their car packed with their possessions, because they were afraid that they might be deported on the spot.“When these families came forward to challenge the law, there was a real danger that people could find out their identities and harass them,” said Peter Roos, former national director of education litigation for MALDEF. To avoid media attention, the judge scheduled the parents’ testimony at the unheard-of hour of 6 a.m.In 1978, the federal district judge found that Texas’ law was unconstitutional, and this ruling was upheld by an appeals court in 1980.By 1981, Peter Roos was part of the team that argued the Plyler case before the Supreme Court. “The pressure was tremendous,” he recalled. “I was confident in our case, but there was a sense that if we lost, other states would pass laws like Texas. So the outcome could affect millions of kids, and that was a heavy weight on my shoulders.”The high court sided (5-4) with the Mexican American families in June 1982. “By denying these children a basic education, we deny them the ability to live within the structure of our civic institutions,” Justice William Brennan wrote in the majority opinion, “and foreclose any realistic possibility that they will contribute in even the smallest way to the progress of our nation.”The court found that undocumented children were entitled to Equal Protection under the Fourteenth Amendment, so Texas could not deny them access to K-12 public education.'A firm foundation'Ironically, even the losing party in this landmark decision came to believe that the case was decided correctly. In 2007, former Tyler school district superintendent James Plyler told Education Week, “I’m glad we lost the Hispanic (court case), so that those kids could get educated.” By then, his son had married a woman of Mexican descent, and Plyler himself had Latino grandchildren.The late legal scholar Michael Olivas, who wrote a book about the Plyler case, considered it the pre-eminent decision in immigration law. “This case is the high-water mark for immigrant rights,” Olivas said in 2017. “It was courageous and strategic. Winning is one thing, but it’s not static. It has to be fought for, it has to be defended, re-conceptualized and re-applied.”Other legal experts and educators say that the Plyler case remains important and relevant today.“Plyler set a firm foundation, a baseline, of rights protections for undocumented young people,” said Roberto G. Gonzales, professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. "Its significance, in part, is that it allows undocumented children from Day One to be integrated into the legal framework of this country. They not only get an education, but they learn the culture and values of this country and are integrated into the fabric of their communities.”In 2019, the Migration Policy Institute estimated that there were 133,000 undocumented children (ages 3-17) in Texas. Nationwide, the Pew Center has reported that there are roughly 675,000 undocumented children.Yet the Plyler case has limitations, Gonzales noted. Because the decision applied only to students up through the 12th grade, undocumented youth face an uncertain future after that. “As these kids get older, they come in close contact with the limits of their sense of belonging.” Undocumented youth in some states do not qualify for in-state college tuition, for example. In some states, they can get drivers’ licenses; in others, they cannot.According to Thomas A. Saenz, president and general counsel of MALDEF, the Plyler decision is “well-established law.”That has not stopped some states from attempting to enact measures limiting undocumented children’s access to education. In 1994 California voters passed Proposition 187, which would have denied nearly all state services to those who lack legal immigration status, and in 2011, Alabama passed HB 56, which would have permitted officials to check the immigration status of students. Key provisions of these two measures were later struck down by the courts.More recently, in May of this year, Texas Governor Greg Abbott said that he would like to re-visit the Plyler case by potentially launching a challenge to it.MALDEF’s Saenz said that any such effort would be unlikely to succeed. He pointed out that Plyler (unlike Roe v. Wade) has been incorporated into a federal statute.“Abbott’s comments really amount to a dog-whistle to his base during his re-election campaign. Children engender great sympathy with the public; even Trump had to stop separating families because of the outrage it generated," said Saenz. "I do not think the governor really wants all these kids out of schools, it is simply bad politics, and bad policy.”Sonia Hernandez, associate professor of history at Texas A&M University said it’s important to view the Plyler case within a broader historical context. “To be honest, not many of my students have heard of it. If a student does not take Mexican American studies or an ethnic studies program, they will probably not get this taught to them — which speaks to the urgency of why we should continue to approach history in a very inclusive way.”There is a rich history of Mexican American activism centered around education that is still relatively unknown outside academia, Hernandez said. “Not knowing about cases like Plyler is a reflection of how limited our public school curriculums are.”“The legacy and future of Plyer should concern us all,” Hernandez added. “The right to a basic education is a fundamental part of democracy.”Follow NBC Latino on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. | Civil Rights Activism |
Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comJune 14 (Reuters) - A North Carolina charter school's requirement that girls wear skirts based on the view that they are "fragile vessels" deserving of "gentle" treatment by boys is unconstitutional, a federal appeals court ruled on Tuesday.The Richmond, Virginia-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on a 10-6 vote sided with three female students who argued Charter Day School's requirement amounted to sex-based discrimination rooted in gender stereotypes that violated their equal protection rights.The Brunswick County school emphasizes "traditional values" and implemented a dress code that its founder, businessman Baker Mitchell, said in an email and testimony would "preserve chivalry" and ensure girls are treated "courteously and more gently than boys."Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comThe state-chartered school argued the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution's 14th Amendment did not apply to it because it was a private entity, not a "state actor."But U.S. Circuit Judge Barbara Milano Keenan said it was one since North Carolina delegated to it its duty to provide free, universal education to students. A contrary ruling would mean North Carolina could ignore "blatant" discrimination, she said."Courts may not subjugate the constitutional rights of these public-school children to the facade of school choice," wrote Keenan, who was joined by her fellow Democratic appointees.The court also revived a claim brought under Title IX, a federal law that prohibits sex discrimination in federally-funded education.Galen Sherwin, the students' lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union, said the ruling "should put charter schools across the country on notice."The school's lawyer did not respond to requests for comment.The six dissenting votes were all from Republican-appointed judges, including U.S. Circuit Judge A. Marvin Quattlebaum Jr, who said the decision would stifle "innovative alternatives to traditional public education."U.S. Circuit Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson called the ruling a "shame" and the school's "chivalric approach should neither be legally banished from the educational system, nor should it be legally imposed."(This story corrects judge's name to J. Harvie Wilkinson in last paragraph.)Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comReporting by Nate Raymond in Boston, Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Aurora EllisOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.Nate RaymondThomson ReutersNate Raymond reports on the federal judiciary and litigation. He can be reached at nate.raymond@thomsonreuters.com. | Civil Rights Activism |
Associated Press
RICHMOND, Va. — A North Carolina charter school violated female students’ constitutional rights by requiring them to wear skirts, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday.
A majority of the full U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals found that the dress code at Charter Day School in Leland violated female students’ equal protection rights, siding with parents who had argued that their daughters were put at a disadvantage by the requirement.
Public schools have long been banned from enacting such mandates, but the court’s majority concluded that public charter schools, since they receive public funds, are also “state actors” and are therefore subject to the Constitution’s equal protection clause. The court also ordered further hearings should be held by a lower federal court on claims that the policy violated the federal Title IX anti-discrimination law.
Tuesday’s ruling came after an en banc hearing before a full 16 judges of the 4th Circuit. It overturns a previous decision by a three-judge panel of the same court that had found the public charter school wasn’t subject to the equal protection clause because it didn’t meet all criteria to be considered a state actor.
The plaintiffs, who were represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, hailed the decision.
“I’m glad the girls at Charter Day School will now be able to learn, move, and play on equal terms as the boys in school,” Bonnie Peltier, a plaintiff whose daughter attended the school, said in a statement. “In 2022, girls shouldn’t have to decide between wearing something that makes them uncomfortable or missing classroom instruction time.”
Galen Sherwin, senior staff attorney with the ACLU Women’s Rights Project, said in a statement that the ruling could have an impact beyond North Carolina. “Today’s decision is a victory for North Carolina’s students attending public charter schools, and should put charter schools across the country on notice that they must follow the same rules as traditional public schools when it comes to guaranteeing students’ equal educational opportunities,” Sherwin said.
The students who challenged the policy were in grades kindergarten through eighth. They argued that they were receiving unequal treatment to male students, noting that the dress code limited their ability to participate in recess and made them uncomfortable in some situations such as emergency drills in which they had to crawl on the floor.
In considering the “state actor” question, the court’s majority opinion, written by Senior Circuit Judge Barbara Milano Keenan, noted that the charter school receives funding from the state, is subject to state educational requirements and is referred to as a “public school” in state statutes. Thus, Keenan wrote that “the state has delegated to charter school operators like CDS part of the state’s constitutional duty” to provide free education.
Charter Day School had argued that it was merely a private entity fulfilling a contract with the state.
School founder Baker Mitchell had argued that the dress code was intended to promote “chivalry” by the male students and respect for the female students, court documents said. Mitchell, according to the ruling, described chivalry as “a code of conduct where women are treated, they’re regarded as a fragile vessel that men are supposed to take care of and honor.” He said that the requirement was also intended to ensure that girls are treated “courteously and more gently than boys,” according to court documents.
Keenan wrote that the school’s rationale was based on an impermissible gender stereotype.
The school “has imposed the skirts requirement with the express purpose of telegraphing to children that girls are ‘fragile,’ require protection by boys, and warrant different treatment than male students, stereotypes with potentially devastating consequences for young girls,” she wrote.
Aaron Streett, an attorney representing Charter Day School, issued a statement saying that the legal team disagrees with the majority opinion and noted issues raised in a dissent. He said that the school is evaluating next steps in the legal case.
“As the six dissenting judges powerfully explain, the majority opinion contradicts Supreme Court precedent on state action, splits with every other circuit to consider the issue, and limits the ability of parents to choose the best education for their children,” the statement said. | Civil Rights Activism |
RICHMOND, Va. — A North Carolina charter school violated female students’ constitutional rights by requiring them to wear skirts, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday.A majority of the full U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals found that the dress code at Charter Day School in Leland violated female students’ equal protection rights, siding with parents who had argued that their daughters were put at a disadvantage by the requirement.Public schools have long been banned from enacting such mandates, but the court’s majority concluded that public charter schools, since they receive public funds, are also “state actors” and are therefore subject to the Constitution’s equal protection clause.The court also ordered further hearings should be held by a lower federal court on claims that the policy violated the federal Title IX anti-discrimination law.Tuesday’s ruling came after an en banc hearing before 16 judges of the 4th Circuit. It overturns a previous decision by a three-judge panel of the same court that had found the public charter school wasn’t subject to the equal protection clause because it didn’t meet all criteria to be considered a state actor.The plaintiffs, who were represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, hailed the decision.“I’m glad the girls at Charter Day School will now be able to learn, move, and play on equal terms as the boys in school,” Bonnie Peltier, a plaintiff whose daughter attended the school, said in a statement. “In 2022, girls shouldn’t have to decide between wearing something that makes them uncomfortable or missing classroom instruction time.”Galen Sherwin, senior staff attorney with the ACLU Women’s Rights Project, said in a statement that the ruling could have an impact beyond North Carolina.“Today’s decision is a victory for North Carolina’s students attending public charter schools, and should put charter schools across the country on notice that they must follow the same rules as traditional public schools when it comes to guaranteeing students’ equal educational opportunities,” Sherwin said.The students who challenged the policy were in grades kindergarten through eighth. They argued that they were receiving unequal treatment to male students, noting that the dress code limited their ability to participate in recess and made them uncomfortable in some situations such as emergency drills in which they had to crawl on the floor.In considering the “state actor” question, the court’s majority opinion, written by Senior Circuit Judge Barbara Milano Keenan, noted that the charter school receives funding from the state, is subject to state educational requirements and is referred to as a “public school” in state statutes. Thus, Keenan wrote that “the state has delegated to charter school operators like CDS part of the state’s constitutional duty” to provide free education.Charter Day School had argued that it was merely a private entity fulfilling a contract with the state.School founder Baker Mitchell had argued that the dress code was intended to promote “chivalry” by the male students and respect for the female students, court documents said. Mitchell, according to the ruling, described chivalry as “a code of conduct where women are treated, they’re regarded as a fragile vessel that men are supposed to take care of and honor.” He said that the requirement was also intended to ensure that girls are treated “courteously and more gently than boys,” according to court documents.Keenan wrote that the school’s rationale was based on an impermissible gender stereotype.The school “has imposed the skirts requirement with the express purpose of telegraphing to children that girls are ‘fragile,’ require protection by boys, and warrant different treatment than male students, stereotypes with potentially devastating consequences for young girls,” she wrote.Aaron Streett, an attorney representing Charter Day School, issued a statement saying that the legal team disagrees with the majority opinion and noted issues raised in a dissent. He said that the school is evaluating next steps in the legal case.“As the six dissenting judges powerfully explain, the majority opinion contradicts Supreme Court precedent on state action, splits with every other circuit to consider the issue, and limits the ability of parents to choose the best education for their children,” the statement said. | Civil Rights Activism |
U.S. June 15, 2022 / 9:02 AM / AP A North Carolina charter school violated female students' constitutional rights by requiring them to wear skirts, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday.A majority of the full U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals found that the dress code at Charter Day School in Leland violated female students' equal protection rights, siding with parents who had argued that their daughters were put at a disadvantage by the requirement.Public schools have long been banned from enacting such mandates, but the court's majority concluded that public charter schools, since they receive public funds, are also "state actors" and are therefore subject to the Constitution's equal protection clause. Charter Day School in Leland, North Carolina. Facebook/Charter Day School The court also ordered further hearings should be held by a lower federal court on claims that the policy violated the federal Title IX anti-discrimination law. Tuesday's ruling came after an en banc hearing before 16 judges of the 4th Circuit. It overturns a previous decision by a three-judge panel of the same court that had found the public charter school wasn't subject to the equal protection clause because it didn't meet all criteria to be considered a state actor.The plaintiffs, who were represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, hailed the decision. "I'm glad the girls at Charter Day School will now be able to learn, move, and play on equal terms as the boys in school," Bonnie Peltier, a plaintiff whose daughter attended the school, said in a statement. "In 2022, girls shouldn't have to decide between wearing something that makes them uncomfortable or missing classroom instruction time."Galen Sherwin, senior staff attorney with the ACLU Women's Rights Project, said in a statement that the ruling could have an impact beyond North Carolina."Today's decision is a victory for North Carolina's students attending public charter schools, and should put charter schools across the country on notice that they must follow the same rules as traditional public schools when it comes to guaranteeing students' equal educational opportunities," Sherwin said. Dress codes that enforce different rules based on students’ sex reinforce outdated, sexist conventions.These discriminatory gender stereotypes are harmful and have no place in our schools.— ACLU (@ACLU) June 14, 2022 The students who challenged the policy were in grades kindergarten through eighth. They argued that they were receiving unequal treatment to male students, noting that the dress code limited their ability to participate in recess and made them uncomfortable in some situations such as emergency drills in which they had to crawl on the floor. In considering the "state actor" question, the court's majority opinion, written by Senior Circuit Judge Barbara Milano Keenan, noted that the charter school receives funding from the state, is subject to state educational requirements and is referred to as a "public school" in state statutes. Thus, Keenan wrote that "the state has delegated to charter school operators like CDS part of the state's constitutional duty" to provide free education.Charter Day School had argued that it was merely a private entity fulfilling a contract with the state.School founder Baker Mitchell had argued that the dress code was intended to promote "chivalry" by the male students and respect for the female students, court documents said. Mitchell, according to the ruling, described chivalry as "a code of conduct where women are treated, they're regarded as a fragile vessel that men are supposed to take care of and honor." He said that the requirement was also intended to ensure that girls are treated "courteously and more gently than boys," according to court documents.Keenan wrote that the school's rationale was based on an impermissible gender stereotype.The school "has imposed the skirts requirement with the express purpose of telegraphing to children that girls are 'fragile,' require protection by boys, and warrant different treatment than male students, stereotypes with potentially devastating consequences for young girls," she wrote.Aaron Streett, an attorney representing Charter Day School, issued a statement saying that the legal team disagrees with the majority opinion and noted issues raised in a dissent. He said that the school is evaluating next steps in the legal case."As the six dissenting judges powerfully explain, the majority opinion contradicts Supreme Court precedent on state action, splits with every other circuit to consider the issue, and limits the ability of parents to choose the best education for their children," the statement said. In: North Carolina Thanks for reading CBS NEWS. Create your free account or log in for more features. Please enter email address to continue Please enter valid email address to continue | Civil Rights Activism |
In a lawsuit, a former Fox News anchor says her news director denied her the top anchor slot because she is Asian American. Megan Murphy, who was known on air as Megan Dillard.Megan Dillard / via InstagramJune 15, 2022, 4:54 PM UTCA former news anchor at a Kansas City TV station has filed a lawsuit accusing her old boss of denying her a promotion based on her race. Lawyers for Megan Murphy, who was known on air as Megan Dillard, say in the suit that when she expressed interest in the anchor position in January 2020, the news director at the time, Sean McNamara, laughed and said, “You know you’re the wrong minority.”McNamara is not directly named as a defendant. The complaint says WDAF-TV, a Fox News affiliate, engaged in a “pattern and practice of expressly considering race when making hiring and promotional decisions regarding on-air positions at Fox 4.” Lawyers for Nexstar, the station's parent company and the largest TV station owner in the U.S. with nearly 200 stations, denied that any discrimination occurred in a response to Murphy’s complaint filed in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Missouri last week. Murphy worked as a weekend anchor and reporter at WDAF-TV for nearly seven years before deciding not to renew her contract when it expired in October 2020 as a result of the incident, according to the suit. Over the course of three years, she had filled in several times as an evening anchor for Dhomonique Ricks, referred to in the suit as “D.R." When Ricks left the station in January 2020, the evening anchor slot opened up and Murphy expressed interest in the position to McNamara. In court documents, Murphy’s lawyers also say other employees told Murphy that McNamara had complained about too many Asian women applying for the position, which Nexstar’s lawyers also deny. Murphy’s lawyers declined to comment.Lawyers for Nexstar also declined to comment, citing company policy not to comment on personnel matters or pending litigation. Nexstar’s chief communications officer also declined to comment beyond court filings. McNamara did not respond to NBC News’ request for comment. Murphy’s lawyers say in the lawsuit that Murphy was the station's “only Asian on-air employee” when the lead evening anchor job opened up. Preliminary findings released in May from an upcoming report by the Asian American Journalists Association found that the majority of the biggest local TV stations in the U.S. do not proportionately represent the Asian American and Pacific Islander populations of their communities. A quarter of the stations in the country’s top 20 markets have no Asian American and Pacific Islander representation in front of the camera, according to the findings. Only four — in Cleveland, Denver, Miami and Phoenix — have “on-air staff comparable with their local AAPI population.” Philadelphia, Detroit and Orlando rank the lowest. A scheduling conference in Murphy’s case is set for Aug. 25. | Civil Rights Activism |
I am wearing pants. getty The U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals just determined that North Carolina's Charter Day School violated the rights of female students by requiring them to wear skirts. That's a big deal, and there are other large issues at play here. The background This is a school whose mission involves communicating through the arts and sciences. Charter Day School is part of the network of charters operated by Roger Bacon Academy, one of the charters that focuses on a "classical curriculum" in a "safe, morally strong environment," which meant, apparently, no pants-wearing girls in their school (It also supposedly means things like sentence diagramming in Kindergarten and Latin in 4th grade, but then, its founder is an electrical engineer, not an educator.) RBA is owned and operated by Baker Mitchell, Jr., one of the titans of charter profiteering. Back in 2014, Marian Wang profiled the "politically-connected businessman who celebrates the power of the free market," and how he perfected the business of starting nonprofit charter schools and then having those schools lease their buildings, equipment, programs, etc. from for-profit companies owned and operated by Baker Mitchell, Jr. That's where the Roger Bacon Academy, a for-profit charter management company comes in. Some parents took CDS to court over the dress code. In 2019, a federal judge passed down the ruling that any public school in the country would have expected— a dress code requiring skirts for girls is unconstitutional. The school quietly retired the item in the dress code. But then in 2021, the Court of Appeals reversed that lower ruling, 2-1, based on the idea that a charter school is not a state actor and there for not required to follow state rules. It also gave the plaintiffs the option of seeing if the policy could be challenged under Title IX. So now...
That 2021 ruling was just the three-judge panel. Tuesday's ruling came after an en banc hearing before the full 16 court. And the full group of judges threw out the panel's decision. Galen Sherwin, the senior staff attorney at the ACLU Women's Rights Project, shared some of the details on Twitter. The defendants trotted out a "parade of horribles," which the court rejected. This ruling will not somehow stifle innovation. It will not threaten HBCUs. Sherwin added that the skirt rule violates equal protection because it's based on the old notion that "girls are fragile and require protection by boys." Judge Wilkinson, who was part of the three-judge panel in the previous decision, lamented the end of the "age of chivalry." The majority noted that such an age was also the age "when men could assault their spouses" and that chivalry "may not have been a bed of roses for those forced to lie in it."
Sherwin reports that the court rejects the notion that the dress code was okay because it was oppressive to both genders. Discriminating against both men and women, the court notes, "does not eliminate liability, but doubles it."
And Sherwin passes on a great note from Judge Keenan (the 1 on the original ruling) who separately wrote against the argument that the code wasn't harming girls because they still got good grades. “We cannot excuse discrimination because its victims are resilient enough to persist in the face of such unequal treatment." "Nevertheless she persisted" apparently does not excuse whatever she must persist in the face of. Kudos also to Judge Wynn who, Sherwin reports, "says the dissent's comparing school choice to ordering steak or salmon at a restaurant 'leaves a bad taste in the mouth. Subjecting girls to gender discrimination that causes lasting psychological damage is not the same thing as ordering fish.'"
So what does it all mean
The ruling drives a stake through the heart of dress codes in charter schools. And it takes the extra step of asserting that Title IX covers dress code issues, even if the words "dress code" appear nowhere within it. The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools applauded the ruling:
The importance of this case could not be overstated, as it was the first time a federal appellate court considered whether public charter school students deserve the same constitutional civil rights protections as district public school students. The en banc court clearly and unequivocally affirmed that charter schools are public schools and, accordingly, must be bound by the US Constitution. Moreover, public charter school students have the same constitutional and civil rights as their district public school peers.
Sherwin tweeted what in this ruling gives it such far-reaching effects for education policy:
The court rightly recognizes that ruling otherwise would leave states free to establish parallel, privately operated public school systems in a constitution-free zone, free to implement race segregation, religious discrimination, etc.
That question of whether or not charter schools are actually public schools, subject to the same rules, has long been at the heart of debate over charters. The modern charter movement has often argued that should have freedom from the rules that public schools are held to. During this case, Aaron Streett, representing Charter Day School argued that the school is not a state actor, and that status "provides leeway for policies that some might deem discriminatory, but that's the spirit of individual liberty."
In fact, the Supreme Court has ruled in favor of allowing the state to spend tax dollars on discriminatory education, and it remains to be seen if they will rule further in that direction. This case may well not be done. Streett has said that the school is evaluating next steps; it's worth noting that Streett is an attorney with Baker Botts, a multinational law firm (where both Amy Coney Barrett and Ted Cruz once worked), and that he's the chair of their Supreme Court and Constitutional Law Group. Streett says that the majority opinion "contradicts Supreme Court precedent on state action...and limits the ability of parents to choose the best education for their children."
But until the next ruling on this case, charter schools in the 4th Circuit must follow the same laws as public schools, and those laws say that female school students may not be subjected to policies based in outmoded and archaic notions about female gender roles. | Civil Rights Activism |