Many labels that guarantee humane treatment of farm animals (e.g., “humanely raised”), do anything but and are largely meaningless. Only recently did the USDA announce that it might regulate some of these labels after a push from advocates (we aren’t holding our breath). If this is the case of animal welfare labeling, consumers are right to be concerned that it is likely true of “green” labeling as well, particularly for the dairy industry, which is one of the most environmentally intensive industries on Earth. 

Farm Forward recently published a major investigative report detailing systematic animal suffering and consumer fraud at Alexandre Family Farm—a leading large-scale organic dairy company with “well over 9,000 head of cattle,” according to co-owner Blake Alexandre—whose products are covered in certification labels. The details of this investigation and the facts about large-scale dairy production should call into question the idea that the industry can be compatible with a more sustainable and humane food system. 

Farm Forward’s investigation and deceptive labeling

One of the key findings of Farm Forward’s investigation into Alexandre was this: Certifications such as Regenerative Organic Certified and Certified Humane were, sadly, insufficient to stop widespread abuse of cows and apparent environmental violations of land and water. This means that the primary function of labels—to give consumers assurances that a given product meets their values—frequently fails. In other words, humane labels aren’t there to help the consumer find better products. They’re tools for the meat and dairy industry to market their products. It’s unlikely, for example, that when a consumer sees one of these labels on Alexandre milk products in a Whole Foods Market, they imagine a field of dead cows being used as compost, or decaying cow corpses dangling into waterways, likely violating state water quality laws. Yet that’s exactly what Farm Forward’s investigation found. 

And then there’s the halo effect. Other companies that use Alexandre as a supplier, whether for ice cream, cheese, or even toddler formula, have used marketing based off of Alexandre’s humanewashing and greenwashing, and reaped the benefits. For a long time, Alexandre—and companies that have Alexandre as a supplier—have touted the Regenerative Organic Certified (ROC) label, a certification with genuinely high standards for cow treatment. However, Farm Forward learned from its investigation that only a relatively small number of Alexandre cows (fewer than 300 of the more than 5,000 to 9,000 cows raised by Alexandre, or roughly three to six percent) actually qualify under the label. Yet, companies bathe in the good image of Alexandre all the same, touting Alexandre’s ROC certification whether or not the actual milk used in their products came from ROC cows (as of writing, Alexandre’s ROC certification was suspended after a February 2024 audit, pending conclusion of the investigation).

The Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) Green Guides require that marketers “ensure that all reasonable interpretations of their claims are truthful, not misleading, and supported by a reasonable basis” and that environmental marketing claims “not overstate, directly or by implication, an environmental attribute or benefit.” The FTC itself states that “…sometimes what companies think their green claims mean and what consumers really understand are two different things.” A consumer buying milk adorned with labels such as ROC and “Certified Humane” ought to have confidence that those products were actually made from properly treated cows by a company following environmental guidelines and ordinances, and free from the systematic abuse documented in the investigation. 

Large-scale dairy is incompatible with net zero

In order to understand deceptive labeling, however, we have to go back to the beginning: Why do massive dairy companies feel a need to plaster their products with misleading labels that may violate FTC guidelines? There’s a simple answer: They know the reputation of industrial dairy is faltering and are desperate to remedy the problem with claims that their industry can both expand and save us from climate disaster. And if the recent industrial dairy ad campaigns are any indication, it would seem that they are quite desperate. 

On an ultra-small scale, a sincere commitment to regenerative agriculture is compatible with reducing many of the harms of industrial animal agriculture, including harms to the climate. However, Alexandre and so many other companies that want to rehabilitate dairy farms are not small-scale; they may have thousands of animals under their care. And recent research into the ability of large-scale “regenerative” cow operations to offset as much greenhouse gas emissions as they produce is quite clear: It won’t work. The authors conclude that soil-based carbon sequestration “has a limited role to mitigate climate warming caused by the ruminant sector.” According to the study, offsetting the methane associated with global ruminant farming annually—a massive 135 gigatons—with soil-based sequestration is biophysically impossible. 

And yet, for decades, the broader dairy industry has been pushing smaller farmers out of business, the very farm operations that can represent a legitimate attempt at a regenerative system. 

Playing dairy roulette 

Farm Forward’s investigation didn’t just reveal that one particular company eschewed these standards, but also that the entire dairy system is flawed. Several certifications failed to see animal abuse happening right under their noses. USDA Organic requires that producers that treat an organic cow with antibiotics must remove that cow from the organic program. In doing so, the USDA inadvertently creates a financial disincentive for producers to treat suffering cows with the proper care, since non-organic milk and meat is sold at a far lower price point (see the report’s appendix); and many companies have benefited from the halo effect of Alexandre’s deceptions. What makes this all especially sad is that there are labels—Regenerative Organic Certified and Animal Welfare Approved among them—that genuinely have high standards relative to many other labeling schemes on the market. They can represent a small piece of the path toward a more sustainable and humane food system. But in the context of dairy production, the findings of the investigation have led Farm Forward to think that guaranteeing proper care of thousands of dairy cows just isn’t possible, given the unique challenges of dairy at scale and given the bad incentives. 

Alexandre’s failures are just one example of the dairy industry failing to live up to its promises. It tells us it can save the planet while treating cows humanely, while raking in unprecedented profits with its mega-dairies. How many more instances of animal abuse and climate devastation do we need to see before we stop believing that the industry that creates these harms also somehow holds the key to fixing them?

When a consumer buys milk from the grocery store—milk that they cannot guarantee came from an ultra small-scale operation with high standards of care—they are playing a game of dairy roulette. And in a world of such extreme levels of consumer deception, it becomes an easy choice to try oat milk. 

Farm Forward is a team of strategists, campaigners, and thought leaders guiding the movement to change the way our world eats and farms. Its mission is to change the way our world eats and farms end factory farming by changing farming, changing policy, and changing the stories we tell about animal agriculture. Learn more at https://www.farmforward.com/

The post Opinion: Farm Forward’s Investigation Into Alexandre Farms and the Greenwashing of Large-scale Dairy appeared first on Modern Farmer.

I’ve worked with birds in many different settings, which allowed me access to many different species. For the exotic birds, it ranged from rescued wild-caught African Greys who wanted nothing to do with me to aviaries full of friendly budgies and cockatiels clamoring for a little one-on-one affection. For domestic birds, such as poultry, I worked with total “mutt” chickens to Bourbon Red Turkeys to the coveted Ayam Cemani, a breed of chicken that is fully jet-black, inside and out. (No, I didn’t crack any open to check.) Aside from my own pet birds, I worked on a farm where I raised chickens, ducks, and turkeys, and I volunteered for years at an avian sanctuary primarily for exotic birds like parrots. Some of the exotics I’d worked with were abused, while some were treated like royalty. With the domestics, there was one sad consistency—nobody seemed willing to care about the birds as individuals, and some barely saw them as living creatures whatsoever.

Birds are some of our most underappreciated species. Despite America’s love for birding and bird feeding (it’s estimated that the US alone had over $3 million in sales of bird food and supplies through 2023), we often underestimate their importance both to humanity and to the natural world. In the wild, birds are often keystone species (animals that have a disproportionately large impact on their surrounding environments). By spreading seeds, controlling insect populations and providing prey for larger birds and mammals, birds contribute to their ecosystems. In addition, their sensitive nature means that decreases in bird populations can often be a warning sign for impending danger to other species.

Sometimes, it seems problems the agricultural industry faces could have been avoided by simply looking ahead. Bird flu is one such circumstance that has many gritting their teeth—especially the researchers who sounded the alarm in 2022, when the same strain of bird flu that devastated farmers in 2015 re-emerged. Now, in 2024, we’re still deep in the throes of a bird flu pandemic (so far, mostly contained to animals)—and we have no signs that infections will slow. From January 2022 to June 2024, the USDA found 96.5 million infected birds—and there’s more to come. With so many years of research, loss of animals and stress to the public, one might expect that we would be closer to solving the bird flu crisis, but we’re lagging on actionable answers.

A problem of our own making

Sadly, as it stands today, bird flu isn’t being handled humanely, which should be our bare minimum for epidemics like this. A common method is ventilation shutdown, which is exactly what it sounds like. The ventilation of an enclosure is shut off until the birds die “naturally.” Ventilation shutdown plus (VSD+) is a method where ventilation shutdown is combined with additional heat or gas in attempts to make the process more efficient; there’s no doubt that the birds subjected to this method still suffer excruciatingly. 

According to Ben Williamson, director of Compassion in World Farming, the leading methods of euthanasia for infected birds is “ventilation shutdown, which involves killing birds by an excruciating combination of asphyxiation and heatstroke, is inhumane, contrary to WOAH (World Organisation for Animal Health) standards and should be banned.”

According to the Animal Welfare Institute, about 77 percent of birds infected with bird flu, or 44.9 million birds, were killed via ventilation shutdown from February 2022 to March 2023. In these situations, the WOAH recommends the use of inert gasses, such as nitrogen or carbon dioxide, to be pumped into enclosures, which is a more humane method of slaughter. 

AWI’s analysis of USDA records indicates that operations with large flocks (at least 100,000 birds) were much more likely to employ VSD+ as a mass-killing method. Even with the widespread use of VSD+ in such situations, however, the USDA’s depopulation timeline was not met in a majority of cases. Of the 37 large flock depopulation events that involved VSD+ during a 16-month timespan between 2022 and 2023, nearly two-thirds took at least three days to complete. That’s far from a humane end for birds who were already potentially infected and suffering. In the most extreme cases, in which at least one million birds were involved, depopulation took more than two weeks. 

The USDA has requested that organizations only deploy VSD+ as a last-resort method of culling—and yet, in cases of such large populations of birds, humane options are rarely efficient, and so they are ignored. In addition, turning the ventilation off within a farm is essentially a free method of euthanasia, even if it’s slow and painful. More humane methods are associated with costs for which farms might not want to foot the bill. Chickens are already one of the least protected species when it comes to slaughter. They are exempt from the Humane Methods Of Slaughter Act, largely due to industry lobbying, and are instead given a provision in the 2005 Treatment of Live Poultry Before Slaughter notice by the USDA that they should be handled and slaughtered in a way that “is consistent with good commercial practices.” What this means, however, is not clearly defined. 

No easy way forward

Despite factory farms supplying the majority of the world’s poultry supply, growing concerns are also mounting over their inability to efficiently manage or stop the spread of disease. As of 2017, the most recent year for which data is available, there were 164,099 registered poultry farms in the US, and the majority of them are factory farms.  According to analysis by the Sentience Institute, 99.9 percent of America’s broiler chickens live on factory farms, only slightly higher than 99.8 percent of America’s turkeys. 

“Factory farms create the ideal conditions for the spread of the disease, as they give viruses a constant supply of genetically similar hosts in close proximity to each other—allowing infections to spread rapidly—and for highly harmful new strains to emerge,” says Williamson. “Most worrying of all, keeping large numbers of immune-suppressed birds in close proximity also increases the risk of viruses mutating, perhaps with the risk of evolving into new more pathogenic strains, which can then multiply and spread.” Not only are factory farms a breeding ground for diseases, but stress suppresses the immune system in poultry, and there’s data showing that poultry in factory farms are indeed stressed. Many environmental factors that we’d find unpleasant—heat, crowding, light, noise—all negatively impact chickens, too.  

“When a farm has hundreds of thousands of birds per shed (or tens of thousands of birds per shed in some cage-free systems), rapid disease spread is unavoidable. What’s more, on a policy level, the government and farms are not treating these outbreaks as something that can be mitigated within a farm—if disease is detected, the entire flock is killed,” says karol orzechowski, from Faunalytics, an organization that collects data and research to improve animal welfare. “In this framework, mitigating disease within a farm becomes a moot point.” While there is no cure for HPAI in chickens, there’s no efficient way to test large flocks, meaning uninfected birds are culled along with their infected shedmates. 

There’s no easy answer here. There are plenty of expedient ways to cull chickens without prolonged suffering—cervical dislocation by hand, throat slitting, individualized gassing—that produce much less suffering. But these methods take additional time and money, leading many corporations to opt for the easier method, regardless of  the torment the animals endure.

The Better Chicken Initiative, headed by Compassion in World Farming USA, is a program intended to improve the lives of chickens in factory farms, as well as breed healthier chickens that produce better-quality meat for consumers. Launched in 2014, the organization estimates that with corporate partnerships through the program, the conditions and lives for over 100 million chickens have been improved. Meanwhile, some farms are taking matters into their own hands, such as Kipster, a Dutch egg farm (that has just opened its first US location), prioritizing humane conditions and carbon-neutral farming. 

Whether or not we’re ready to accept it, there’s probably one answer that’s far more humane than any proposed alternatives to bird flu—restructuring not only how factory farms operate but how we treat farmed poultry. Until we have conditions for farmed birds that don’t actively promote the spread of illness, we’ll have to keep fighting. We may not see immediate solutions to the bird flu crisis, but strengthening our animal welfare practices now will help animals and consumers for generations to come.

The post Opinion: Bird Flu is a Problem. The Way We Deal With it is Cruel appeared first on Modern Farmer.

In the US, an estimated 77 million tons of food are wasted annually, even as one in eight American families struggles with hunger. Growing all that food that no one eats wastes financial and natural resources, while also contributing to climate change. Food is the number one item we throw into landfills, where it drives almost 60 percent of their methane emissions.

But there is an easy way to cut down a large portion of that food waste: Change the “best by” labeling system. According to new research by MITRE and Gallup, there are more than 50 different date label phrases in most grocery stores today—“sell by,” “use by,” “best if used by,” “enjoy by,” and so forth—leaving consumers confused about whether these terms refer to freshness, safety or other issues. As a result, one third of all consumers “often or always” throw away food that has passed its date label. The end result is that households and food businesses throw away perfectly wholesome food (6.5 million tons annually in the US, which is nearly 10 percent of all US food waste) and spend an average $1,500 a year per household on food that they then toss in the trash. 

The US has set a goal to halve its food waste by 2030. To accelerate progress, the Zero Food Waste Coalition (a group of nonprofits, major food businesses and communities) has come together to help advance two commonsense pieces of bipartisan legislation: the Food Date Labeling Act (FDLA) and the NO TIME TO Waste Act. Congress should pass both these acts in the upcoming Farm Bill.

The FDLA aims to establish a consistent, easy-to-understand food date labeling system, at no cost to the government. The FDLA would streamline food labeling into two simple categories: “Best If Used By” to communicate peak food quality and “Use By” to indicate the end of a product’s estimated shelf life. Most importantly, the act would launch an education campaign to help consumers understand the difference between these categories.

Simplified date labels are one of the most cost-effective strategies to reduce food waste across the supply chain—with the majority of the benefits going to consumers. The FDLA would also make more food available for donation by clarifying that food can still be donated after a quality date (which 20 states prohibit or restrict today). More than 23 industry leaders, such as Walmart and Unilever, have signed on in support of the FDLA.

In addition to the FDLA, the NO TIME TO Waste Act would establish an Office of Food Loss and Waste at the US Department of Agriculture. This office would spearhead a whole-of-government approach to reducing food waste, strengthen food waste research, create consumer awareness campaigns and support public-private partnerships and local food recovery efforts. 

These two pieces of legislation are a no-brainer for Congress to pass. Tackling food waste is good for consumers, businesses and the environment. Meeting our national goal of reducing food loss and waste by 50 percent would deliver a $73-billion annual net financial benefit (again, in large part to consumers), reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 75 million metric tons and create 51,000 jobs over 10 years. The 2024 Farm Bill is a golden opportunity to make meaningful progress in our fight against food waste, help families stretch their limited food dollars and transition to a more efficient and sustainable food system. 

Pete Pearson is senior director of food waste with World Wildlife Fund in Washington, D.C.

The Zero Food Waste Coalition aims to inform and influence policy at the local, state and federal levels and share policy updates and opportunities with partners and stakeholders around the country to bring consumers, businesses and government together to make food loss and waste history. The Coalition was launched by NRDC, WWF, ReFE, and FLPC in April 2023, formalizing a partnership that began in January 2020.

The post Opinion: Congress Should Standardize Food Labels in Farm Bill to Curb Food Waste appeared first on Modern Farmer.

There’s no doubt that industrial animal agriculture carries a laundry list of sins; greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity loss, deforestation, water pollution and labor rights abuses are just a few examples. But there’s also evidence that some regenerative grazing practices can enhance biodiversity, improve soil health and—possibly—sequester carbon. Not only that, but animal husbandry also has significant cultural value and eating animal products can have health benefits.

For some people, eschewing meat—or even all animal products—entirely is the only reasonable course of action. But for those who don’t want to go so far, “less” and “better” can seem like a pragmatic solution: There’s no need to cut out meat altogether; just cut down. Choose quality over quantity. Dig a little deeper, however, and things once again get very confusing. How much less is less? And how do we determine which meat is better?

Are chicken and pork the most climate-friendly options? Is it better for the planet to eat locally or organically? What’s the impact on my physical health of choosing one meat—or one meat alternative—over another? To be able to weigh up all these questions and accurately calculate which kind of meat and how much is “OK” for us to eat, the average consumer would need far more information, time and energy than anyone typically has at the grocery store. It can feel like we’re doomed to fail before we’ve even made a start.

Here’s the thing: There is no right answer when it comes to meat. And that’s OK. 

These questions and warring data points spurred us to make Less and Better?, our new podcast series from Farmerama Radio. Exasperated and concerned by the lack of nuance around this pressing issue, we wanted to try a different approach—one that attempts to illuminate the values and priorities that underlie even the most allegedly scientifically motivated positions.

For many people, the answer is simple: Just go vegan, or at least vegetarian. Studies show that diets without animal products have one-fourth the climate impact of meat-filled diets—from using less water and land and producing fewer carbon emissions. Rather than wrestling with the “best” meat to eat, many choose to forgo it altogether. 

But not everyone can do that. Meat holds cultural significance for many, and it can have nutritional benefits. There’s also a difference between heavily processed meat products and unprocessed meat, both in their effects on the body and the climate. So, for folks unable or unwilling to give up meat entirely, eating better-quality meat, and less of it, is the best approach. But even then, there are questions. The “right” answers to questions of how much less or what is better depend not only on a dizzying array of complex data but fundamentally hinge on which outcomes you believe are worth pursuing. Some argue that intensive factory farms produce fewer greenhouse gas emissions, in general, than extensive, pasture-fed systems. Others disagree strongly with this, but say, for the sake of argument, we accept this as true. At first, it seems simple: “Better” meat is factory-farmed meat. Now we just need to figure out how much “less” we should eat.

But what if we think the most important issues are biodiversity loss and ecosystem health? Or water pollution? Or workers’ rights? Or animal welfare? We address each of these issues in our series, and each of them points to a potentially different answer. On that last point, for example, animal welfare scientist Professor Françoise Wemelsfelder argues that recognizing farm animals as sentient beings “probably means that large industrial farming systems are not morally feasible.”

Wrestling with these concepts and questions is a valuable and valid exercise; it’s commendable to make decisions about your consumption and purchases that reflect your morals and values. But, like comparing apples with oranges, trying to find the perfect answer is an impossible task. It could even have negative mental health outcomes. Research in the field of consumer behavior has shown that we can experience negative emotions when trying to make choices that force us to make “emotionally laden trade-offs.” And, higher levels of eco-anxiety are reported among folks with more environmental awareness. 

What “less” and “better” means for you also depends on what interests, values and biases underlie your particular vision of what the world could, and should, look like. Efforts to boil less and better down to simplistic questions of CO2 emissions per livestock unit or the relative technical merits of soil carbon sequestration versus cellular agriculture ignore political questions. Questions such as who benefits? Who holds the power? Who has access to “better” meat? And what kind of future are we building?

Ultimately, we don’t think it’s possible to provide a simple, silver-bullet answer to the question of what constitutes “less” and “better” meat. But we also think that’s kind of the whole point. When it comes to less and better meat, we think the real question we need to ask is better for whom and for what?

Listen to the podcast series Less and Better? by Farmerama Radio here. 

The post Opinion: There’s No Right Way to Eat Meat appeared first on Modern Farmer.

The researcher and passionate urban gardener in me couldn’t resist digging in deeper and working to illuminate a fuller “truth” around this recent result. Spoiler alert: Avoid carbon tunnel vision, as focusing on a single emissions metric misses the many other benefits that can get us out of the crisis we’re in. 

Back up a step: What is urban agriculture? Urban ag is any kind of food production space within a city, inclusive of commercial farms that grow and sell directly to consumers, non-profit farms that serve a broader mission, community gardens, school gardens and even vacant lots turned into thriving personal gardens or homesteads. 

Better yet, why do some researchers, farmers and activists prefer the term “urban agroecology?” From 2017 to 2019, my research team helped to define and elevate “urban agroecology” in the US as a better way of acknowledging the multifunctional benefits of urban green spaces. These farms and gardens are not “just” growing food, they are also building community, performing environmental services (think stormwater mitigation and reducing urban heat island effect), providing habitat for biodiversity and educating urban residents. It’s often one of the only ways kids and adults alike can interact with nature, see where their food comes from and witness the magic of a seed sprouting. Urban growing spaces are also often led by women and BIPOC farmers (more than 60 percent in my investigation of the East Bay in California’s Bay Area), serving as important grounds for empowerment, culturally relevant food production and healing of racialized patterns of agricultural work. 

So, I had alarm bells going off when reading about this new study. The research from the University of Michigan-led study seems to show that fruit and vegetables grown in urban ag have a carbon footprint six times larger than that of “conventionally grown” food (meaning, on rural farmland). 

The choice to compare greenhouse gas intensity of soil-based urban agriculture systems with conventional farming systems brings up an inherently unfair comparison. When looking at conventional, large-scale farming systems, which are largely monocultures designed to maximize yield per acre via application of fossil-fuel based fertilizers, pesticides and other chemicals, we already have a large body of evidence that these are carbon-intensive production systems with a host of other detrimental environmental impacts (land, air and water pollution, soil degradation and erosion, habitat and biodiversity loss across billions of acres of “conventional farmland” globally). 

However, when you divide a large number (i.e., carbon emissions) by another large number (yield per acre), you get a small number of carbon emissions associated with each serving of lettuce, for example. When looking at urban community and school farms and gardens, we often see highly diversified plots that are more sparsely planted, with some weedy edges. They’re not exactly “yield-maximizing” practices on display. So, when you divide a relatively small number of carbon emissions, which the researchers in the study attributed to things such as garden infrastructure (raised beds, paved paths, tool sheds and others)—so, indirect emissions—and divide it by another very small number (yield per acre), you end up with a relatively larger number than your conventional allegory “lettuce serving.” The math here doesn’t point the finger towards the system that really needs changing in carbon and climate terms. 

This study disregards the far more pressing issue of the sheer quantity of emissions that come from conventional farming. Additionally, the conversations only circled back towards the end to include or acknowledge the many climate “benefits” of having spaces where city dwellers can connect with their food system and with nature in the city. These less quantifiable benefits are primary, not secondary; they are essential to bring into collective societal focus, rather than obscure behind a conclusion that sets up a feeling of confusion or uncertainty about whether urban ag is or is not a “climate solution.” Urban farms, especially when well managed and resourced with consistent staffing and city support, are critical pieces of the climate solutions puzzle. 

It brings me back to this unsettled feeling that the study is asking the wrong research question, if the conclusions and headlines point us towards some course of action around “fixing” urban farms so they can have a lower carbon footprint, while saying nothing about the carbon-intensive conventional farming system that urgently needs to change to address the overlapping climate and public health crisis. To quote one of the leaders of my urban ag research project, Dr. Timothy Bowles, a professor of Agroecology at U.C. Berkeley: 

“This is an issue with metrics… in this case, using efficiency as the metric (i.e., amount of food produced per unit of GHG emission). Efficiency metrics can be problematic for a number of reasons, and a number of studies have demonstrated more ‘efficient’ food production from conventional systems compared to various alternatives from a strictly GHG standpoint, largely due to higher yields, even if total emissions are high. In general, we need multifunctional perspectives for a more holistic systems comparison.” 

To be sure, we need conventional farming systems right now that create efficiency and economies of scale to grow and distribute large volumes of food to feed a growing population. There is no switching to diversified farming and regenerative agriculture overnight, just like there is no transition to purely solar and wind power for our electricity system without proper planning for this change. I’m not saying we can feed the entire city from the products of urban farms (although there have been researchers before me who modeled that this is theoretically possible, within a 50-mile radius, of a US midwestern city). What we need is for the conventional food system to change dramatically: to reduce reliance on fossil-fuel-based inputs, be more adaptive to climate extremes, adopt climate-friendly practices such as cover cropping and compost application, and in doing all this become a better source of healthy food. 

I’m also all for improving urban farms, increasing recycling of materials and waste streams in cities and resourcing them to be viable sites of food production, as the study authors point out as action items. I just find the impetus for doing so to be limited if we’re primarily talking about reducing the carbon footprint of these sites. Urban farms are capable of teaching the principles of photosynthesis, soil health and carbon sequestration even if they are not sequestering carbon in large quantities. And this knowledge is powerful. 

Where do we go from here as researchers, as eaters and producers of food? The food system of today is in crisis. It has prioritized cost and yield over all else. The result? It doesn’t work for farmers, it does not produce nutritious, healthy food for people and it is a disaster environmentally. However, the future of food can be diversified, abundant and rooted in soil health practices, fostering social equity and farmer well-being. I see that shift happening already on farms both urban and rural, big and small. It takes education, both farmer to farmer and farmer to consumer, as well as policy change to support the shifts already in motion. By reconnecting with food, with ecology, with living soil, we connect to climate solutions and help to reverse the damages of climate change.

Laney Siegner is founder and Co-director of Climate Farm School, with a Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley Energy and Resources Group. 

The post Opinion: To Make a Real Impact on Climate Change, We Must Move Beyond the Carbon Footprint appeared first on Modern Farmer.

The farm bill is a critical bipartisan package of legislation that renews every five years, and it expired on September 30, 2023. To avert a government shutdown, the Senate passed an extension bill to keep the essential programs running through the end of September 2024. This tightrope omnibus bill funds the SNAP program, farmer subsidies and USDA loan programs and grants. Eaters and farmers alike depend on this bill to get food on the table.

As a farmer’s daughter and farm advocate, I know that the farm bill has one of the greatest impacts on what you eat, how that food was grown and the ability of beginning farmers to find land in the first place. Many of my friends are farmers and I’ve seen them struggle against countless barriers, especially when it comes to accessing or purchasing land. In a recent National Young Farmers Coalition survey, 59 percent of young farmers named finding affordable land to buy as “very or extremely challenging.” 

I’ve come to understand that despite where a farmer lives or what they grow, the lack of affordable land to farm is the number one reason farmers are leaving agriculture, the top challenge for current farmers and the primary barrier preventing aspiring farmers from getting started. The next farm bill can fix this.

Oregon agriculture is a part of my identity. I grow small-scale herbs, seeds and nursery starts in my backyard garden and work in the nonprofit agriculture world. My Land Advocacy Fellowship with the National Young Farmer Coalition empowered me to share my experience of growing up on the family farm with my senators and representatives offices on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. 

In June 2023, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced the awardees of the $300-million Increasing Land, Capital, and Market Access Program, which included 50 community-based projects for underserved farmers, ranchers and forest landowners. Three projects were funded here in Oregon, led by the Black Oregon Land Trust, Indian Land Tenure Foundation program and Community Development Corporation of Oregon. This program resulted in federal dollars going out the door, directly benefiting community-led land access solutions. It was also a one-time funding opportunity that I believe should be made permanent. 

Following the creation of that one-time program, the bipartisan Increasing Land Access, Securities, and Opportunities Act (LASO) was introduced in both the House and the Senate. The LASO Act would expand on the promise of the Increasing Land, Capital, and Market Access Program. If enacted, this bill would authorize $100 million in annual funding for community-led land access solutions through the next farm bill. This would be a significant victory for young farmers, ranchers and everyone who has been fighting to win federal funding to address issues of equitable land access.

Flying to Washington, D.C with farmer Michelle Week of Good Rain Farm really impacted me. Hearing her experience of feeding more than 150 families in her Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) subscription yet still unable to afford to purchase farmland as an Indigenous woman in the Portland Metro area is alarming. 

Across the country, farmland is being lost to development at a rate of more than 2,000 acres per day. Over the next 20 years, nearly half of US farmland is expected to change hands. Additionally, Black farmers across the United States have lost 90 percent of their historic farmland due to systemic racism and discriminatory lending. Today, according to the most recently available statistics, 95 percent of farmers are white in the United States and 96 percent of land owners are white. For these reasons and more, I advocate for federal reparations in the form of land access through the LASO bill.

We all eat and, in order to eat, we all need farmers. I hope you’ll consider getting in contact with your members of Congress today and urge them to support farmers by asking them to include the Increasing Land Access, Security, and Opportunities Act (H.R.3955, S.2340) in the next farm bill. With the current farm bill temporarily extended, it’s a pivotal moment to uplift critical policy changes like the LASO Act and invest in the health and well-being of our communities, our food system and the future we all deserve.

Carly Boyer (she/they) is a fourth-generation land manager, stewarding 140 acres in Polk County, OR. She works for Oregon Climate and Agriculture Network, an agricultural non-profit focused on Soil health. She is a board member for Rogue Farm Corps, a beginning farmer program and a Land Advocacy Fellow with the National Young Farmers Coalition advocating for the One Million Acres for the Future Farm Bill campaign in Washington, D.C.

The post Opinion: Farmers Are Dropping Out Because They Can’t Access Land. Here’s How the Next Farm Bill Could Stop the Bleeding. appeared first on Modern Farmer.

French farmers, for instance, managed to persuade their nation’s leaders to ban food imports treated with the insecticide thiacloprid, dedicate €150 million (US$163 million) annually to support livestock producers and provide European-wide definitions for what constitutes lab-grown meat. German farmers also saw movement in their favor from their lawmakers on fuel subsidies. When protests reached Brussels—where the European Parliament was in session—European Union policy makers announced plans to cushion the blow from Ukraine grain imports and address bureaucratic red tape. 

Thus far, the protests offer some takeaways for American food and farm activists. 

Specifically, not only can public disruption trigger real change, but there is room to push back against the disastrous free trade policies that have wreaked havoc on farm economies on both sides of the Atlantic. Reducing tariffs and weakening price support policies to align with World Trade Organization (WTO) policy prescriptions, as well as those found in other free trade deals, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), has made food producers increasingly subject to price volatility. Such regional and international free trade policies took policy-making power away from national governments, transfering that power to unelected bureaucrats who thought food should be treated like any other commodity. 

US farmers and their allies should pay attention, think how to make protest part of our ongoing Farm Bill debate and take some power back when it comes to making policy.

In Europe, the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP)—similar to the Farm Bill in the United States—governs most facets of the continent’s agricultural system, including financial assistance, environmental policy and the regulation of exports and imports. Beginning in 1962 with France, Germany, Luxembourg, Belgium, Italy and the Netherlands, the arrangement has grown along with the European Union to cover all of the organization’s 27 member states.

CAP policies began to change in the 1990s to promote “efficiency.” Several policies were eliminated, including export subsidies, production quotas in dairy and price supports that were coupled to farmer income. While US President Ronald Reagan railed against “government cheese” to point out the assumed wasteful nature of US agricultural policy in the 1980s, in Europe, “wine lakes” and “butter mountains” were made into campaign slogans to cut public assistance for farmers. 

And cuts took place: From 1980 to 2021, the total EU budget dedicated to agriculture went to below 25 percent from more than 60 percent. 

The drop in production is coupled with declining rates of farmers themselves. In France, there were 389,000 farmers in 2020—almost 800,000 fewer than in 1980. Poland has lost 13% of its producers since 2010. Overall, throughout Europe from 2005 to 2020, the continent has seen 37 percent of its farms go out of business. During that same time, production has grown, as only farms of more than 200 hectares (approximately 400 acres) have increased in number. 

Matters are much the same in the US. According to the recently released 2022 Census of Agriculture, the largest four percent of US farms (2,000 or more acres) control 61 percent of all farmland. In 1987, that figure was 15 percent. Similarly, in 2015, 51 percent of the value of US farm production came from farms with at least $1 million in sales, compared to 31 percent in 1991. From 1997 to 2022, more than 340,000 farms, or 15 percent of operations, went out of business.

In Europe, the ever-dwindling financial support for farmers is made contingent on meeting various environmental and labor standards. Put simply, for assistance, farmers must do more to receive less. Aiding, not curtailing ongoing consolidation, 20 percent of Europe’s farmers—particularly large-scale operators in terms of land and production—receive 80 percent of all payments. 

Adding insult to injury, EU authorities allowed the import of cheap Ukrainian grain to assist that country in its ongoing war with Russia. This, as supply chain disruptions from that conflict drove up the prices that European farmers pay for inputs such as gas and fertilizer. EU policymakers also are negotiating a contentious free trade deal with the South American regional trade bloc, Mercosul, which would invite agricultural export giants Argentina and Brazil to potentially undercut European producers. 

US farmers suffer in a similar policy environment as their European counterparts. The 1996 Farm Bill made periodic, ad hoc direct payments the primary way the US government provided financial assistance for producers. Gone, but years later reintroduced in a significantly weakened form, were non-recourse loans that assured farmers a decent income if market prices dipped below a certain threshold. With such loans, decent incomes can be guaranteed without forcing farmers to increase production potentially in environmentally harmful ways as governments purchase products off the market to stock reserves. 

To take on the harmful cuts that free trade policy promotion made a reality in the farm policy, US farmers and their allies could find inspiration from what is taking place in Europe, perhaps going to DC to make their voices heard. 

In fact, US farmers in the past did so. When free trade was in its infancy back in 1979, thousands of farmers drove their tractors to DC to demand policy changes to address rising foreclosures and increases in input costs. These actions inspired the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC) to bring activists together in DC last year but mainly to make climate policy part of the Farm Bill. 

Now, with the Farm Bill debate continuing at least through September of this year, pricing policy reforms could take center stage. Some farm groups, such as the National Family Farm Coalition (NFFC) with its dozens of member organizations, have made pricing policy reform central to their Farm Bill platform. In demanding parity pricing, policy instruments such as non-recourse loans could be improved to assure farmers decent prices and dissuade them from increasing production to make ends meet. Addressing concentration is also part of the NFFC’s demands, with particular attention to an increased role for the government to finance land access programs and enforce antitrust laws.

Do such proposals challenge free trade? Yes, they do. And as European farmers have shown, protest can yield results. By adding some popular mobilization into the mix of our ongoing Farm Bill debate, maybe with the occasional rotten egg or manure load, farmers and their allies could push our lawmakers to make real changes for the benefit of our food and farm system. Let’s not just stand by as the people who grow our food endure yet more financial hardship.

Anthony Pahnke is the vice-president of the Family Farm Defenders and an associate professor of international relations at San Francisco State University; anthonypahnke@sfsu.edu. 

The post Opinion: European Farmers Are Standing Up to Free Trade—Will US Farmers? appeared first on Modern Farmer.

There were times during this voyage that it seemed humanity was driving down an alley toward a brick wall, fast. Catastrophe loomed everywhere I looked: in the dust bowls on the once-fertile plains of central Turkey, in the vanishing lakes of Mexico City, in the fetid cesspools outside the factory farms of North Carolina, in the disease-ravaged olive trees of Puglia, in the rapid wiping away of diverse food webs in every biome. The demographers’ scenario, where we’ll have to produce 50 percent more food by midcentury to feed a population of ten billion or face famine, sometimes seemed like the only possible outcome.

For the time being, our cunning plan seems to be to wait until the last second and hope an airbag will deploy to cushion us from the final impact. In modern times, there’s a long tradition of techno-optimists or cornucopians–science writer Charles C. Mann calls them “wizards”–telling us that technology will come to our rescue. In the 1930s, Winston Churchill predicted in the pages of a Canadian magazine that future famines would be averted by raising edible bacteria in underground cellars using artificial radiation. Others saw yeast factories and transcontinental algae pipelines nourishing the domed metropolises of the 21st century. 

According to the techno-optimists, hacking photosynthesis by genetically modifying rubisco, the enzyme found in all plants that turn sunlight and carbon dioxide into starches, proteins, and other nutrients will allow us to radically increase rice yields in Asia. Growing perennial grasses, rather than annuals like wheat, will permit us to mow the cereals we eat rather than cutting them down whole, thus keeping root systems intact and putting an end to soil degradation. Using robots to milk cows and drones for the precision irrigation of crops will save labor costs and conserve water. And growing meat in the lab, from cultured stem cells in bioreactors will eliminate the need for raising livestock, and all the environmental havoc that goes with it.

A closer look, though, shows that most of these techno fixes have serious downsides. Perennial wheat, marketed as Kernza, doesn’t have enough gluten to make bread or pasta; robot-milking systems don’t allow for pasture feeding, requiring cows to remain in barns year-round for the system to be profitable. Venture capitalists have poured $3 billion into the lab-grown meat industry, yet the resulting products have to be bulked up with plant protein, and are still far from palatable. As for Churchill’s plan to raise bacteria in caves, it’s back in the form of journalist George Monbiot’s plan for curing “agricultural sprawl” and feeding the billions: calories will once again be plucked out of the air, as Scandinavian labs use electricity and “precision fermentation” to transform bacteria into gray protein pancakes.

My response to the techno-optimists and wizards who tell us that we should all subsist on a diet of bacteria, yeast, cultured meat, or algae is: you go first. And by that I don’t mean take the first bite. (As an adventurous eater. I’ll try anything once.) I mean, show me that you can survive and thrive on that diet for five, ten, or 20 years. Then I might consider joining you.

I’ve noticed something about “scientifically improved” foods. To put it bluntly: nobody wants to eat that shit. The first approved transgenic vegetable, the slow-ripening rot-resistant Flavr Savr tomato, engineered with genes from a bacterial parasite, was a commercial flop, losing millions for the company that developed it. Golden rice, engineered to contain higher levels of beta-carotene, and the Arctic Apple, designed not to brown when cut, have also failed to attract farmers and consumers. 

It turns out that what people do want to eat when they’re given any kind of choice, and are able to afford it, is non-GM food. The market for organic food, which has more than doubled in a decade, accounted for $58 billion in sales in 2021 in the United States alone.

If we’re really serious about forestalling famine, we need to stop feeding so much grain to livestock, and save the wheat, corn, and rice we grow for human consumption. Edible insects are already being used to feed poultry and farmed fish, but they could also be included in the feed of cattle and pigs. The black soldier fly is an efficient, fast growing converter of organic waste into protein for animal feed. I interviewed Kieran Olivaraes Whitaker, the founder of the British company Entocycle, who has succeeded in raising millions of flies in a tiny rented space in the center of London. The entirely automated operation used the waste from breweries to feed the bugs; the black soldier flies can be used to boost the protein content in feed for cattle, poultry, pigs, and farmed fish. This approach makes a lot more sense to me than hoping humans will suddenly acquire a taste for bug-burgers. 

But raising insects for feed is a patch, not a solution. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations has made it clear that for the time being, food producers pump out enough calories to feed everybody on Earth. It’s equally clear that the billions of inhabitants of the “Global South” aren’t the problem. It’s the people in the world’s rich nations, as well as the growing middle classes in Asia, Latin America, and Africa, who consume diets high in processed foods and grain-fed meat and dairy that keep us hurtling toward that brick wall. 

In the final months of writing this book, I was lucky enough to spend a few weeks surrounded by wheat fields. I was staying in the foothills of the Jura Mountains, in the canton of Vaud, a part of Switzerland that prides itself on sustainable organic agriculture. Many of the farms were centuries old. The entire landscape seemed devoted to turning the richness of the soil into fantastically delicious foods. I witnessed the age-old transhumance, in which Simmental, Jersey, and Charolais cows were transported to summer pastures in alpine meadows more than 4,000 feet in altitude, where they fed on wild flowers and lush grass to produce the exquisite Gruyère, Tomme, and Vacherin cheeses sold in village fromageries. 

I’d arrived in mid-May, just as the reddish-orange poppies were blooming. On daily bike rides, I got to see the spring wheat planted in fields all around me mature from a lustrous green to a sharkskin amber. I recalled the criticism leveled against wheat: that it’s one of humanity’s most egregious examples of a monocrop. But in the Vaud, the fields were relatively small, a few dozen acres at most, and people were careful to plant fruit and nut-bearing trees alongside the edges. A local initiative had dotted jachères, richly diverse plots of native grasses and wildflowers that encouraged birds to nest and insects to gather pollen, in random spots among the wheat fields. 

Being in Switzerland was a reminder that agriculture need not be the problem. Done properly, it was the solution to our diversity and sustainability crisis. There was a world of other great practices out there, sometimes referred to as regenerative farming, biointensive agriculture, agroforestry, or permaculture, like the mixed mountain farming champion Sepp Holzer, an Austrian advocate of farming on marginal land.

Even if we aren’t in a position to grow our own food, there are straightforward ways we can all become responsible eaters. The  poet and essayist Wendell Berry laid out seven principles in his influential 1989 essay “The Pleasures of Eating.” Prepare your own food; learn where the food you buy comes from; deal directly, whenever possible, with local farmers, gardeners and orchardists. In self-defense, teach yourself about the economy and technology of food production and how industry adds to and alters food. Learn what is involved in the best farming, as well as in the life histories of food species. First and foremost, participate in food production, even if that means nothing more than growing herbs or tomatoes on a kitchen windowsill.

In Switzerland, I remembered the wheat fields I’ve known on the Canadian Prairies and the Great Plains, which can cover 30,000 acres, so vast that walking from one edge to the other can take three hours. Planted with dwarf hybrid varieties, sprayed with pesticides, and shocked dead with glyphosate for easier harvesting by combines, this was the kind of landscapes the critics of industrial agriculture decry: one devoid of diversity, dead except for the one plant species that happens to be valued by modern humans: wheat. It was a stark contrast to the Swiss countryside, where agriculture was practiced in a way that kept the soil healthy, and the land and air alive with animal, plant, and insect life.

If humans are defined as the species that adapts to new environments, we’ve fulfilled our destiny to the extent that we now find ourselves adapted to impoverished environments entirely of our own making. The monocultures of wheat, rice, corn, and soybeans that feed us depend for their success on the elimination of biodiversity. But diversity is what confers resiliency, and by simplifying natural habitats to serve the needs of industrial agriculture, we’ve left ourselves open to pandemics, supply-chain-disrupting wars, droughts, floods, and new crop and livestock diseases. Our determination to feed everyone on the planet cheaply has already resulted in malnourishment for the masses. If we don’t change our ways, it could soon lead to hunger for all.

Taras Grescoe is a Montreal-based journalist and author. He is the author of Straphanger, Bottomfeeder, and The Devil’s Picnic. He writes about the history of food on lostsupper.blog. 

The post Opinion: To Find the Future of Food, We Need to Look to the Past appeared first on Modern Farmer.

But a closer look at our food system reveals many challenges. Its foundation relies on resource-intensive commodity crop production, which needs the majority of fertile lands to feed animals kept in confined spaces. It is heavily dependent on government subsidies, with large-scale farms scooping up more than 90 percent of subsidies, despite making up only three percent of the farms in the country. Our food system depends on cheap labor that consists predominantly of migrant workers, of which half are estimated to be undocumented. The societal cost, meaning the hidden costs associated with poor labor conditions such as child labor or unlivable wages, of our food supply chains is estimated at around $100 billion. 

More than 70 percent of North America’s biodiversity-rich prairies have been replaced with wheat, soy, corn, alfalfa and canola, primarily used as livestock feed and biofuel. These crops are also the largest consumer of increasingly scarce river water in the Western United States. Agricultural run-off, including soil erosion, nutrient loss from fertilizers and animal manure, bacteria from animal manure and pesticides are the largest stressors to water quality of America’s streams and rivers. It’s estimated that the unaccounted cost of the food system on the environment and biodiversity is nearly $900 billion per year. 

The efforts to truly create sustainable food systems do not go far enough. While they may be well intentioned, government grants and corporate projects aimed at “regenerative” and “climate-smart” agriculture are just tweaks to the system, not reforms to the status quo. Right now, the government needs to agree on priorities for the new Farm Bill. The current bill will expire in September, and we need new legislation that can address the real structural and societal issues in our food supply. 

 We need a radical change in the design of our food system. Following are five steps that can get us there: 

Prioritize food for people instead of animals and fuel 

One out of three calories in the US is wasted. We need to reduce food loss and waste, and repurpose it to feed people. Whatever food waste is left can then be repurposed to feed animals. Fertile agricultural soils should be used to grow diverse, nutritious crops for humans. Leave livestock and bison to graze marginal soils and native grasslands and upcycle food waste and byproducts into animal feed. This reorientation can produce around 10 to 20 grams of protein per person per day, or almost half of the recommended daily need. The farm animals that remain should be treated with respect and be given the best life possible. 

 Prioritize ecological efficiency, not economic efficiency 

The ecological boundaries of natural resources, including soils, should dictate what’s grown, as well as where and how. Considerations such as organic matter and nutritional needs of the soil, local water availability, weather patterns, climate and local biodiversity should direct a farmer’s decisions around what to plant. We need to choose plants that support soil health and local biodiversity and are adaptable to the changing context of climate change—while also being nutritious for people. This will allow us to reduce our dependence on chemical inputs significantly.  

Currently, the Farm Bill works to maximize income from commodity crops and livestock production, with the goal of maximizing economic efficiency. This has led to crop insurance programs and a host of other safety nets, which aim to protect producers from market instability and variations in yields and production. The majority of the financial incentives are for feed and biofuel crops; these programs do not incentivize farmers to prioritize native plants or ecologically beneficial crops or nutritious crops to nourish people, as they can get paid even if crops fail. The Farm Bill needs to take an ecological approach to subsidies and incentives, rather than squeezing economic returns out of a system without considering the long-term impacts.  

Foster local and regionally diverse food networks  

Give farmers access to markets, processing infrastructure, knowledge and grants, whether they be small, young, ethnically diverse or new. Market structures and business models should support fair income and wages for farmers and workers. Existing farmers need support in the transition to a balanced and ethical food system. The Farm Bill should prioritize these farmers when developing grants and subsidies to both attract and retain a diverse workforce.  

Support healthy food for all people 

Food needs to be healthy, nutritious and support dietary guidelines. It should prevent disease, not cause it. Food companies and retail need to offer and incentivize the purchase of healthy, sustainably grown foods. More than 70 percent of packaged foods marketed by leading food companies in the US include unhealthy levels of sugars, fats and salts. Government should shift focus from livestock feed and help producers transition to healthier offerings for human consumers. The Farm Bill is an opportunity to incentivize producers to move towards better, more sustainable offerings. 

There is also an opportunity to expand SNAP and other food assistance programs within the Farm Bill. Programs within SNAP, like the Thrifty Food Plan, help people eat nutritionally balanced meals on a budget. Ensuring these programs are adequately funded and adjusted appropriately around times of inflation would go a long way to helping millions of Americans eat healthier. 

Ensure resources to future-proof food systems    

Re-routing the food system requires significant investments. Governments, banks, universities, food companies, NGOs and think tanks need to shift their focus from improving the economic efficiency of the animal-dominated farm system towards improving systems that embrace a nature-positive production of diverse nutritious foods for people. Funding should be allocated to research, grants, and private- and public-sector initiatives that help to rethink our current system. Rather than offering up small tweaks and changes, such as reducing enteric methane emissions from large herds or precision supply of chemical fertilizer to a corn plant, why not allocate that money to regeneratively grow food that nurtures our soils and people? 

A Farm Bill fit for the future 

We need a sense of urgency from everyone involved to make this happen. It will take funding, which can be reallocated within the Farm Bill to support this shift. Saying it’s too expensive cannot be an argument for inaction if it means we keep producing outside the ecological carrying capacity of our planet and sacrifice the futures of generations to come. Securing a long-term Farm Bill in 2024 that centers around these five steps is our opportunity to reform the system sustainably.   

Sandra Vijn leads Kipster’s recent egg farm start in the United States. For more than two decades, she worked to advance corporate sustainability and sustainable food systems at the Global Reporting Initiative, Dubai Chamber of Commerce’s Centre for Responsible Business, Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy and WWF.  

The post Opinion: Why the Farm Bill Isn’t Prioritizing the Right Things appeared first on Modern Farmer.

This breakneck pace is great news for the nation’s mission to transition to more clean energy generation, especially as precipitous cost curves make it increasingly affordable to decarbonize. But the reliance on utility-scale solar, which requires hundreds to even thousands of acres of land for panel installations, has sparked questions regarding the magnitude of land use requirements. In addition to concerns about impacts on food production and sensitive ecosystems, some critics argue that converting thousands of acres of agricultural land to utility-scale solar arrays would compromise the character of rural regions. 

Community solar, in contrast, operates at a small enough scale that it can occupy land within rural communities, such as commercial rooftops and brownfield sites, that might otherwise go unused—thus preserving the bucolic nature of agricultural regions. Plus, it enables households and business owners within rural areas, farmers and non-farmers alike, to benefit from renewable energy.

Community solar: the Goldilocks of renewables

Historically, would-be solar energy supporters have faced a binary between utility-scale solar, where large projects of typically five or more megawatts (MW) deliver electricity directly to a utility’s electric grid, and rooftop photovoltaics, where individual households or businesses generate up to one MW of solar energy through leased or purchased panels.

Between these two extremes sits community solar, a rapidly expanding midpoint promoted by recent legislation across many US states. Usually generating up to five MW of energy, community solar projects are small facilities, occupying up to 25 to 35 (and often more like five to 10) acres. Each megawatt powers the equivalent of 164 homes.

Anyone living in the utility territory who pays an electric bill—from rural farms to urban apartments to businesses of all sizes, houses of worship and nonprofits—can subscribe to the community solar farm and receive a discount off their electricity bill, typically between five and 20 percent depending on the state.

 Instead of one solar array built on the rooftop of a single-family home, community solar provides an option for entire communities to share in the benefits of locally generated clean energy together. And unlike utility-scale solar, where ratepayers finance large solar projects via new line items on their utility bills but do not necessarily see the savings, community solar subscribers directly benefit from solar savings—similar to how a home-owned array benefits an individual household. In addition, a community solar subscription provides flexibility: no sign-up fees, no cancellation penalties and the ability for a subscription to follow the user’s utility account to a new home if they move. 

Perhaps the best thing about community solar is its effectiveness as a tangible option for people to participate in and take advantage of our country’s transition to renewable energy. More than a third of American households rent their homes, and for those who are homeowners, many lack the right sunny conditions on their property or simply can’t afford the long-term investment in solar panels. Community solar bridges the gap between utility scale and rooftop solar projects, keeping more money in people’s hands.

The clean energy cover crop

Importantly for farmers and other rural residents, community solar helps rural areas meet their energy goals without an outsized impact on local landscapes. Community solar fits neatly into the nooks and crannies of a community and doesn’t require the large acreage of a utility-scale array installation. 

You can think of community solar as a multi-benefit “cover crop” for land that might otherwise go unused. Just as a farmer might grow alfalfa as a cover crop on a fallow field, communities can install solar on a school’s rooftop, a parking lot, a brownfield site too expensive to remediate or on agrivoltaic-compatible land such as cranberry bogs or sheep pastures. And just as alfalfa fixes nitrogen, builds soil, fights erosion and feeds livestock, community solar lowers energy costs, can make the local electric grid more reliable and brings money and jobs through labor and income, such as farmland leases, to the area.

With community solar, farmers save on their energy bills, property owners earn monthly rent for hosting panels, school children experience field trips to learn about solar generation and the municipality progresses towards its clean energy goals. Community solar is the third alternative that helps agricultural communities make efficient use of their land without sacrificing the farms or natural features that make the area special.

Sunlight isn’t red or blue, it’s ultraviolet

Growth in community solar ties into clean energy’s larger shift from politically divisive, abstract discussions about climate change to more nonpartisan, financial pragmatism. Recent meteorological events, such as the Canadian wildfire smoke, the Midwestern polar vortex and San Diego’s flooding, have spurred more conversations around the need to prepare for extreme weather, no matter what causes it. Given the energy transition’s potential to boost climate resilience, people are also discussing the role of renewables, such as solar and wind, within our nation’s generation stacks. This shift from political to financial perspectives makes clean energy a frequently purple endeavor, supported by the fact that both red and blue states are looking for ways to open or expand community solar as an option.

How does community solar fit farmers’ needs? Because of their large energy consumption at a more expensive residential rate, energy costs for farmers are often disproportionately higher in their operating expenses compared to other business types. Consequently, representatives from rural and agricultural areas are often community solar’s biggest supporters. Farmers looking to boost their resilience to extreme weather events by building a financial cushion can look to utility savings or solar leases as a significant benefit.

People interested in community solar can do a quick search online to see what kind of subscriptions are available in their area. As of December 2022, community solar projects are located in 43 states, plus Washington, D.C. To lease some of their land, people could contact community solar developers about opportunities to host solar projects. Other ways to take action include writing to elected officials to express support for the introduction or expansion of community solar programs, depending on the state’s current legislation, and spreading the word about community solar’s potential to neighbors and peers.

Whatever kind of community you find yourself in, community solar is or may soon be a neighbor—and a good neighbor, too.

Bruce Stewart is ⁠President and CEO of Perch Energy, a Boston-based company focused on accelerating access to community solar nationwide. Bruce has 30+ years of experience leading both energy and technology companies, serving as president of Direct Energy Home, co-president of Centrica US Holdings, and executive positions at GE Current and Constellation Energy. He is committed to Perch’s mission of making cleaner energy options more accessible for all.

The post Opinion: With Community Solar, It’s Not Renewable Energy vs. Rural Character appeared first on Modern Farmer.