Calvin Head

Farmer and Director of Milestone Cooperative Association

I’m participating in a regenerative agriculture initiative with several other farmers and youth and have served as director of Milestone Cooperative Association for about 12 years. I’m also a community organizer with emphasis on economic and community development. And, historically, I’ve been in this civil rights work almost all of my adult life and most of my young life.

One of the primary purposes of our organization right now is to offset these health issues by growing quality food, which is really not accessible here for most people. We’re helping people to understand what it is to eat healthy because a lot of people don’t really know, believe it or not. We’re also just trying to enhance the quality of life for low-income individuals and limited-resource farms.

I think the Farm Bill was written with us in mind in terms of how it’s presented to Congress, but when it comes to actual distribution and allocation, I think that the rules of the game change somehow. Historically, every time we get inside the process and we get to understand and master that process, they change the rules right away. They know who gets what. It’s the same people in the same places for the most part. They’re all well connected with who they want to help. I will just say the educational piece around the Farm Bill needs to be improved. Instead of just announcing it, let people really, really know what’s in it and how to take advantage of it—especially rural people and people of color.

We have many priorities for the Farm Bill, but where our community is really, really getting left behind is with broadband access. Having access to it where we are is really difficult. Our service providers are price gouging and taking as much advantage of us as they can because they know we have few alternatives. 

Right now, we’re limited to one small hotspot at our farm store for internet access. And everything is set up online, even our surveillance system. So, we can’t run the cash register, the gas pump, the surveillance system and the credit card machine at the same time. We’re limited and that hotspot can only go so far. So, we have to rob Peter to pay Paul. Broadband is so important in everyone’s everyday life. You’re almost third world without it. When we first got certified with the USDA Food Safety Program for our vegetable initiative, there was so much stuff that you had to go online and do.

It needs to be made mandatory that some of the resources from the Farm Bill reach us. Do you know what it would mean to have access to a new tractor to do some of the work we need done in these fields? One day your tractor is working and the next day you’re just hoping it makes it through that day. Or just being able to have some upfront money would be helpful. Most of the time, we’ve invested out of our own pockets. We’ve taken on all the risk and then we’re one flood away from bankruptcy. Getting support from the Farm Bill could give us the same flexibility that big farmers have when there’s a disaster. And you wouldn’t have to spend your life’s savings just to try to get a crop in the ground. It would have a tremendous impact. I have never as a farmer operated in the black.

There’s money allotted just for farmers in the Farm Bill and we just want our fair share. At least, before I leave this earth, I would like to see it. I would just like to see a level playing field just for once. All we want is the opportunity to work hard. Nobody is asking for a handout, just some flexibility.

The post Faces of the Farm Bill: Calvin Head appeared first on Modern Farmer.

She had never thought of herself as an organizer or an environmentalist. She ran a restaurant. She published a cookbook. She was a mom to five kids. Of all the hats she wore, organizer wasn’t one of them.

“I had no idea about any of this stuff,” says Dougherty. “Literally zero—less than zero probably. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing.”

Dougherty is definitely not unique in this respect. It is very hard for most people to know what to do to organize against the threats presented by factory farming in their community. While reporting our story about some of the communities that have resisted or are currently resisting factory farms, including Dougherty’s, we came across a lot of great advice from people who themselves have been in this position. Whether you’re organizing in response to a particular factory farm site or advocating for systemic change, learning from the experiences of others can be a great place to start, so we’ve compiled some of those insights for you here. 

Align yourself with a supporting organization

Food & Water Watch addresses factory farming on a big-picture scale. Michaelyn Mankel of Food & Water Watch Iowa says connecting with others is valuable at that broader scope, too.

“If you’re really serious about getting involved in this work, the most important thing I think there is to do is to find your people.”

Jennifer Breon of Food & Water Watch Iowa echoes this point.

“I think collective action is key, whether it’s Food & Water Watch or any other environmental organization that’s working on factory farm issues, or environmental issues around agriculture, where you can have a sphere of influence. Don’t just do this on your own.” 

When Barb Kalbach became aware of a hog CAFO being planned for just up the road from her in 2002, she called on the help of Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement. After successfully resisting the CAFO, she now works with Iowa CCI. According to Kalbach, aligning yourself with an organization can help you with strategy you might miss on your own. “It’s just those little things…that you and I wouldn’t think of, and that an organization that’s worked and helps people like that, they do think of that.”

Resources

Food & Water Watch has chapters across the US and organizes at a national level as well.

Iowa CCI provides assistance on a variety of social and environmental issues in Iowa.

Socially Responsible Agriculture Project (SRAP) has a Help Hotline for communities struggling against factory farming.

Environmental organizations can also be good to reach out to, especially ones that participate in water monitoring such as the Waterkeeper Alliance.

Communication is key

Dougherty, now senior regional representative with SRAP, recommends creating opportunities for community members to talk and be heard. Listening is key early on:

“Just literally holding space for folks and listening to them talk through the incredulousness of what they’re confronting…Tell me what’s going on, how is this impacting you? Are other people concerned? For me, at least the first couple of meetings are not spent devising a plan of attack; the first couple are completely based in, ‘Tell me more,’ as opposed to, ‘Let me tell you something.’”

Communication isn’t just important at the beginning. Emily Tucker of Food & Water Watch New Mexico recommends talking to others about what you’ve observed.

“Talk to your neighbors about it. Alone, we can’t get much done. But I think that the more folks work together and just say, Hey, I’ve noticed this, have you noticed this? I think that’s really important. Even if you don’t have a background in organizing, that is a wonderful place to start—just talking to your neighbor about the issue.”

Resources

Join Food & Water Watch’s Food Action Team as a volunteer to begin connecting with others in your community.

Get the word out

It’s important to make communication as easy as possible, and have streamlined ways of disseminating information. For ongoing battles, having a means of central communication is essential, says Starla Tillinghast of Oregon. 

“Kendra immediately got up a website full of information about it. And then people got signed up to be on email notification. And I think [the] number one most important thing is central communication because then that way we can be updated with anything coming up.”

Besides websites and listservs, other common ways to share information include Facebook groups and lawn signs. Bringing information to already established groups such as faith groups, schools, and community centers can also be helpful. 

Use public information and learn the laws

The industry isn’t going to publicize their plans, so seeking out information that is in the public domain but not advertised is a skill worth learning. These may include site plans, permit applications, and more. 

However, the process for getting access to public records looks different everywhere, says Kendra Kimbirauskas of State Innovation Exchange (SiX). Figuring out the unique process for making these requests in your area is a good early step.

“For somebody who’s kind of in the position that we were in, it’s really important to figure out who the public records officer or steward is, figure out what the process is, and then follow the process. And there’s going to be probably different processes for the different bodies of government that you’re talking to. We were interested in the state and the county, slightly different processes, but we had to understand what those processes were before we could get the records.”

It’s also okay to look at what other communities have done that could be a model for your community. When Farmers Against Foster Farms wanted to increase its  “setback” distance—the required distance between CAFOs and property lines— in Linn County, Oregon,  Tillinghast began looking at other agricultural states to see what their required setbacks were. Other states had much greater setbacks, and Tillinghast thought that this information could help Oregon follow suit.

“I went and looked up setbacks all across the nation, and I wrote that out in a table,” says Tillinghast. “I brought it to the planner, and I brought it to the county commissioners.”

Resources

SRAP has compiled the relevant laws concerning industrial livestock operations in each state. Find yours here.

Here’s a tutorial on how to make a Freedom of Information Act request.

Google “How to make a public records request in (county, city, or state name)” for more information.

Find out if your county has “local control”

It’s much harder to resist the effects of CAFOs once they are already built. Ideally, people would be able to know where CAFOs are going to go so they could prepare. Unfortunately, this is hard to do.

“It’s really tough to figure out where a CAFO will go next; they are pretty opaque when it comes to their next steps,” says Dougherty “From what I’ve seen, they like to come in under the radar and try to get the process started with little to no public knowledge. They seem to prefer communities with as  [few] regulations as possible.”

There are a few things that industry will look for when siting a CAFO, and perhaps the biggest one will be the ability to operate without being heavily regulated. One thing you can do today is find out if your state has “local control,” the ability to make certain decisions about agriculture at the county level instead of at the state level.

“Generally, CAFOs go where they can have a cluster, be within a certain distance to a processor, have access to transportation infrastructure, and feel that the local community doesn’t have the political power to prevent them from coming in. So, places are targeted where there [is] no local control—often, communities of color, often, communities with high unemployment rates so that they can sell the false narrative of job creation. Usually, the best way for communities to find out is through the community rumor mill. Sadly, a lot of times, communities don’t find out until the wheels are greased and the operations are being built,” says Kimbirauskas. 

Resources

Learn more about SB85, the recent law that gave Oregon local control here.

Think big picture, too

A lot of the work for a more sustainable food system is being done at the policy level. It’s important to go beyond individual site fights, because industry will always be looking for the next place to land. Alexa Moore of Food & Water Watch New Mexico points to the Farm Bill as a good example of legislation with a broad impact.

“There’s different levels of stuff—there’s your local level, there’s your state level, and then there’s your national level. We’re doing work on a fair Farm Bill. And so, that’s something that whether you’re in New Mexico, or Oregon, or Iowa, or Maryland, or South Carolina, or any of these states, this is going to impact you. And so, I think that’s something that whether you’re in a small community or in a very urban area, as a large farmer or small farmer or what have you, you can always connect through this larger issue that impacts everyone such as the Farm Bill.”

In your everyday life, you can support the kind of farmers you want to see, says Kimbirauskas. But beyond market-based solutions, she also encourages people to engage with legislators.

“Every single person in this country is represented by [legislators]. If you care about this issue, if you haven’t talked to them about this issue, they’re not inaccessible, typically. It’s pretty easy to connect with your state elected officials and let them know that this is something that you care about.”

Don’t think about these issues as siloed, says Rania Masri, PhD, co-director of North Carolina Environmental Justice Network.

“My advice that I have for people organizing is to make those links and not to organize in silos, not to just think about one aspect, but to make those links and then to connect them to state policies and federal policies. Have the courage to demand not a token seat at the table, but a completely different kind of table.”

Resources

The Farm System Reform Act would place an immediate moratorium on new factory farms. You can contact your legislators through Food & Water Watch about these issues here.

The House of Representatives’ Farm Bill draft has included language from the EATS Act. If included, this could take away states’ power to make decisions about the conditions of industrial animal agriculture locally. Learn more and take action here.

Avoid polarizing media narratives

Industrial farming can be an emotional topic for people involved. And according to Mankel, sharing stories with the media can be a powerful way to get the word out to others in the community.

“For the average person reading this, the best tool and the best place that you can put your focus on, at least to begin with, I think is the media…Look at local media and how you can get word out to the public and how you can get coverage on what’s going on and look to other organizations that you think might have a stake in this issue.”

Tucker advises people to tell their stories without contributing to polarizing anti-agriculture media narratives.

“I think that it’s really important to differentiate between small- and family-scale farmers and industrialized agriculture. And that’s something that can be kind of a struggle sometimes, and it can very, very easily get folks who farm small scale to be like, Well, why is this group organizing against me? And so, I think the narrative there is one that’s particularly important to challenge and say that, we want a food system that works for small farmers, and that works for consumers and works for the environment. And we think that we can do it. But that is a pretty difficult narrative to challenge in the media at times.”

Kimbirauskas of Oregon seconds the importance of this.

“A lot of times, we sort of get into these mindsets of them versus us. A lot of times, that kind of plays out as urban versus rural, and animal rights activists versus farmers. And that’s how the narrative is developed. That’s a losing battle for anyone who doesn’t like factory farms. And so, really striving to think about finding places of commonality, and not villainizing all farmers…I think our community saw this—when there’s a way for independent farmers to come together with advocates, and work together against factory farms, that is a winning strategy.”

Resources

You can contact us at Modern Farmer at contact@modfarm.com

Reach out to your local newspapers for coverage—most accept tips from the public. Try calling or emailing a reporter directly. You can usually find this contact information on the publication’s online masthead. If someone in your community is a writer, you can submit a letter to the editor—consult your newspaper’s pitch page for specific directions.

Take care of yourself, too

Organizing is hard work, and both site battles and systemic change can be long fights. Leslie Martinez, community engagement specialist for the Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability says that this kind of work can be hard on the mental health of organizers.

“Take care of yourself, because this is a movement. This is going to take time. It’s going to be hard. There’s going to be a lot more battles. And I’d also encourage people to remember that being selfless is not a sustainable way of doing this work.”

Martinez draws power from working closely with the community.

“I can use what I know to push back. I find strength in that.”

The post Advice From Those Organizing Against Factory Farms appeared first on Modern Farmer.

As a small farmer who formerly worked with communities to resist large corporate farms, she knew a lot about how industrial chicken operations could affect a community. She knew about the putrid smell of animal waste, she knew it wasn’t safe to drink the local water. But, in April of 2023, as she visited a midwestern farmer whose home was surrounded by dozens of industrial chicken barns producing millions of chickens, it was the sight of the trucks hurtling down the narrow roads, one after the other, that was particularly jarring. 

“If you can picture a dusty dirt road with semis barreling down, the amount of dust and dirt and God knows whatever else that comes off these trucks would literally blow into the front yard,” says Kimbirauskas. “Thinking about putting your clothes on the line, or having your windows open, that’s no longer an option because of these trucks.”

Carrying feed, new birds, and finished flocks, these trucks served as a near-constant reminder of the other things these operations bring with them—smells that make it hard to stand outside, air pollution you can feel burning your throat, not being able to trust the water coming out of your tap—the list goes on.

Just three years earlier, Kimbirauskas had gotten wind that Foster Farms was planning to move into her own home of Linn County, Oregon and decided to fight back. After a bit of digging, what she found was staggering: Foster Farms was planning three sites in the county to build concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), which would collectively raise 13 million chickens per year. This visit provided Kimbirauskas with a glimpse into what she was fighting against in her own home community. 

“For me that was such an affirmation that [our] community is 100 percent going to be the target of chicken expansion,” says Kimbirauskas. “It really made me dig in and stand in my own power and agency of knowing that this is not something that would be good and beneficial for Linn County.”

CAFOs are defined by the EPA as intensive feeding operations where many animals are confined and fed for at least 45 days per year—though this is just a minimum—and where the waste from those animals poses a pollution threat to surface water. 

There are small, medium and large CAFOs, with the largest of these—housing thousands to tens of thousands of animals—embodying the truest definition of a “factory farm.” Many of the issues can be boiled down to the sheer concentration of manure they produce.

A mega-dairy CAFO can produce as much waste as a city; but whereas a city will have an advanced sewage system, CAFOs aren’t required to manage their waste in the same way.

As of 2022, there were more than 21,000 large CAFOs in the US. One estimate, informed by USDA data, suggests that 99 percent of livestock grown in the US is raised in a CAFO. Some states have particularly dense concentrations, such as Iowa, North Carolina, and Nebraska. This industry presents itself as a way to produce a lot of food while keeping costs down. But any cost saved by the consumer is a cost borne by the CAFOs’ neighboring communities, the environment, local economies, and even the contracted farmers themselves. 

Large CAFOs cause myriad problems that are currently being experienced by communities across the country. These issues include environmental pollution, drinking water poisoning, air pollution, and plummeting property values. In drought-ridden states such as New Mexico, CAFOs add insult to injury by contaminating the water and using more water than the dwindling aquifers can handle. In Winona County, Minnesota, more than 1,300 people can’t drink their water because of nitrate pollution.

There have been many instances of serious illnesses believed to be linked to living close to CAFOs, such as cancer and miscarriages, and respiratory issues such as asthma and sleep apnea are prolific in CAFO-adjacent communities. In North Carolina, living near a large CAFO has been associated with increased blood pressure. In Iowa, a study found that children raised on swine farms had increased odds of developing asthma.

Large CAFOs are often built in communities of color. This frequency with which polluting industries are built in these communities is evidence of ongoing environmental injustice. 

While the industry often associates itself with the picturesque image of American farming, the fact is that industrial agriculture has created the immense consolidation of US farms, driving farmers all over the country out of business. CAFOs are often built in clusters near each other—when a CAFO is built, more will likely follow.

The factory farm industry is expanding all the time, but communities across the country have become advocates to stop this expansion—both at individual sites, and on a systemic level—in the hopes that, one day, no one has to pay the price of factory farming. 

Foster Farms is coming to town

Linn County is tucked into the western part of Oregon and home to many family-run farms. But, in 2020, Foster Farms arrived in the county, planning to build CAFOs holding tens of thousands of birds at a time. Foster Farms is a poultry company that sells chicken and chicken products in chain grocery stores across the country. 

In Linn County, there was no public announcement of Foster Farms’ arrival.

“One of the stories that we hear time and again is people didn’t realize or don’t realize what’s going on until it’s too late,” says Kimbirauskas. “That is a tactic of the industry because nobody wants to live next to one of these things. So, they’re going to be trying to get in as quietly as possible.”

It started in 2020, when a woman working at a local feed store noticed a customer come in with Foster Farms company branding on his coat. He was a land scout, and he was in the area to try and determine suitable land for chicken operations.

She asked him some specific questions about the locations they were considering. One, she learned, was right next to her house. The land scout told her they planned to put up a buffer between the site and one of the bigger houses in the area, so they wouldn’t get complaints. But, she knew, there was also a smaller house on that road—her house. Would that house get a buffer?

Well, he told her, they don’t have enough money to do anything about it. 

Foster Farms’ behavior aligns with larger trends—data shows that CAFOs are disproportionately built in low-income areas.

After this upsetting conversation, the woman reached out to Kimbirauskas. Kimbirauskas is a bit of an anomaly when it comes to fighting CAFOs, because she’s seen similar situations play out all over the country. Growing up in Michigan, the rapid consolidation of dairy farms due to industrialized agriculture led her family to the very difficult decision to sell their dairy. Today, Kimbirauskas is the Senior Director of Agriculture and Food Systems at the State Innovation Exchange (SiX). Before that, as chief executive officer of the Socially Responsible Agriculture Project (SRAP), she had worked with communities across the country who were dealing with health and environmental issues as a result of living next to CAFOs. 

Kimbirauskas and other concerned members of the community found that there was no information available at the state level about what was going on, so the first thing Kimbirauskas began doing was submitting public records requests.

“Through those public records requests, we found that there was not two but three sites that were being proposed, which would have totaled roughly 13 million chickens within a 10-mile radius, and that was per year,” says Kimbirauskas. 

Something had to be done.

Site fights

The battle against factory farms happens at multiple scales. Some of the big-picture advocacy happens at the state and federal level, where advocates are trying to make systemic changes. Other battles happen directly over individual proposed or existing CAFOs—these are known as “site fights.” 

Site fights aren’t easy to win. But it is possible. Barb Kalbach, president of the board of Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement (CCI), has experienced it firsthand. In 2002, Kalbach lived on a small farm in Adair County, Iowa—a rural community that today has a population of less than 8,000. She heard through the grapevine that just 1,970 feet up the road from her property, a massive hog CAFO was being proposed. She called a realtor she knew who lived nearby who confirmed it. The operation would consist of 10 buildings holding 7,200 sows, producing 10 million gallons of liquid manure every year. Kalbach’s farm had always been surrounded by other farms. But no regular farm produces that much manure.

Kalbach called the Iowa CCI, which had been fighting social justice issues affecting Iowans since the 1970s.

“I called the office. That was on a Friday, and they sent out on Sunday an organizer. And in that two-day period, I called all the neighbors, anybody I can think of in our community that probably wouldn’t like it very well, this confinement, and we all met over at our little local country church.”

When organizing against a CAFO, simply not wanting one near you isn’t a good enough reason to keep one out. CCI didn’t do the work for them, says Kalbach, but advised them on things they could do, such as looking for evidence in their plans that the facility wouldn’t be able to meet the environmental regulation requirements. Proof of this kind is easier said than found.

Kalbach and her neighbors went to commissioner meetings, did research, wrote letters to the editor of the local newspaper, created petitions and sought signatures. The actual turning point came to Kalbach as a phone call in the early hours of the day.

“At four o’clock in the morning, one of the guys called me and he said, ‘I’ve got a great idea,’” says Kalbach. To get permitted, this operation would have to create a manure management plan for the 10 million gallons of liquid manure per year. “The guy that called me said, ‘let’s get all the farmers within a 10-mile radius to sign a document that states they will not accept the manure.’” 

The idea was to show the Environmental Protection Commission (EPC) that all of the manure would have to be transported at least 10 miles before anything could be done with it. The CAFO would not be able to claim that nearby farms were going to use the manure as fertilizer.

The CAFO was permitted anyway. The community appealed this decision, and during this period, they brought forth everything they had—including the list of neighboring farmers who agreed to reject the CAFO’s manure. And they succeeded. In the end, the vote went in favor of the community.

“[The EPC) voted finally and we won five to four,” says Kalbach. “He was smacked down and we did not have a factory farm built by us.”

Site fight victories show what’s possible. But when denied a site, industry begins looking elsewhere. The danger is that the next community may not be as successful in resisting. And that’s why many advocates are also looking for systemic change. 

“Site fights, especially here in the state of Iowa, are never going to be adequate…We need to upend the system of prioritizing CAFOs over everything else,” says Michaelyn Mankel of Food & Water Watch Iowa.

Iowa is densely populated with CAFOs. In the last 25 years, the number of waterways in Iowa that are polluted has increased significantly. Iowa Public Radio reports that Iowa has the second-highest rate of new cancers in the country, and it leads the nation in the highest rate of new cancers. Kalbach says she believes these are connected. 

Iowa is known for its sheer density of swine CAFOs, producing one out of every three hogs raised for consumption. As a result, Iowa has to deal with more hog waste than any other state in the country. The impact is felt in both rural and urban communities.

“I think it’s a little easier in urban centers, like Iowa City and Des Moines, to feel like things are a little more normal, and that the scale of the problem isn’t quite what it is,” says Mankel. “But driving through rural Iowa, and visiting small towns, it’s really destroyed so much of our state.”

There has been a campaign for a moratorium on new or expanding CAFOs in the Iowa state legislature since 2017. It has not been passed.

Despite the lack of success in Iowa, moratoria movements are one way that some other states and counties have prevented new CAFOs being built or expanded. At a federal level, Senator Cory Booker’s Farm System Reform Act could make moratoria a reality across the country. While site fights are important, they are not always successful. In states such as Iowa, which is densely saturated with CAFOs, only systemic change will move the needle. 

“I think those folks, who are the [majority] of Iowans who are not farmers, are starting to understand why they should care about this,” says Jennifer Breon of Food & Water Watch Iowa.

Consolidation and systemic advocacy

Being near a megadairy CAFO is a visceral experience. In Clovis, New Mexico, organizer for Food & Water Watch Alexa Moore said the smell was like that of a normal farm cranked up to 10 times the potency. That smell, caused by the high concentration of manure, is more than just a bad scent; these fumes carry ammonia and hydrogen sulfide, which cause respiratory issues. Just walking through the parking lot of a Walmart, Moore’s throat was burning.

Moore’s stop in Roswell was part of a roadshow to three towns with a heavy factory farming presence: Clovis, Roswell, and Las Cruces. At each of these communities, Moore and fellow organizer Emily Tucker hosted a showing of the film “Right to Harm,” a documentary that demonstrates some of the ways communities are resisting factory farming across the country. This roadshow aimed to build awareness of the issue, and foster conversation around some of the systemic changes that need to be made, and talk about the situations in the surrounding area. Some of these locations are also near airforce and military bases, which have caused pollution as well. They found some residents knew there was water pollution, but they didn’t realize how much of it was due to the large CAFOs.

“A lot of people just assumed that all of the water contamination was from those military bases,” says Moore. 

Along the way, they were cautioned by locals not to drink the water. At a taproom in Roswell, Tucker asked the server for a glass of water. 

“I’ll just get you a bottle,” the server replied. 

In a state that experienced a decades-long drought, New Mexico doesn’t have much water to spare. But here, factory farms use an estimated 32 million gallons of water every day. This puts a particular squeeze on smaller farmers, who simply can’t farm without water.

“What we are seeing is a lot of our smaller farmers aren’t able to continue to dig wells. So, we’re seeing aquifer levels drop, their wells are going dry, and the small farmers aren’t able to compete with these big corporations who can keep drilling and keep drilling,” says Moore.

Moore’s own family feels the strain directly. “My cousin is a farmer. He lives down in Alamogordo. He’s a small family farmer, been in the family for five generations,” says Moore. “And just this year, they lost their well water and so he can no longer farm, which is a huge part of his income.”

Large-scale dairies also outcompete more sustainable operations on price, driving them out of business. In the past 20 years, New Mexico has lost half of its small-scale dairies. In this context, a small dairy is less than 500 cows. Large dairies can have tens of thousands of cows.

Consolidation isn’t just a symptom of the factory farm problem, says Sean Carroll, policy and organizing director for the Land Stewardship Project in Minnesota. It’s the root of it.

“Our system is so consolidated,” says Carroll. “But that’s a system that we created through choices made by policymakers. We can make different policy decisions that actually create a system that is better for farmers [and] better for rural communities.” 

A member organization of the HEAL Food Alliance, the Land Stewardship Project has had about 40 successful oppositions against CAFOs in just as many years. But it also engages in policy work at the state and federal level. Real change can be affected through a balance of both, says Carroll. 

“At the local level, people’s voices have a lot of power,” says Carroll. “At the same time, so much of the drivers of this system are decisions that are made at the state or the federal level.”

One of the greatest ways to battle industrial animal agriculture is by bolstering sustainable farm systems through policy. For example, the USDA is currently re-evaluating its Packers and Stockyards Act. Anyone can contact their legislators to voice their support of policies that can create long-lasting change.

“We can and need to change the language of the law so that farmers have actual legal avenues to challenge price discrimination from consolidation,” says Carroll.

Additionally, the Farm Bill is a giant piece of legislation passed once approximately every five years, and it affects everything to do with our food system. One of the Land Stewardship Project’s priorities for the Farm Bill is to stop using conservation funding for factory farms. Millions of dollars of this funding goes to large-scale CAFOs instead of helping smaller farmers expand their sustainable practices. 

The use of conservation funding for large-scale CAFOs is something that community advocates around the country know all too well. Often, this takes the shape of anaerobic digesters at large CAFOs, which convert animal manure into methane gas, to be used as energy.

Rania Masri, PhD, co-director of the North Carolina Environmental Justice Network, says that biogas gets touted as a clean energy solution when really it’s the complete opposite.

“That concept, in and of itself, sounds great, but when we look into the details, we see that in North Carolina, biogas promotion is specifically designed to financially incentivize and increase the profit of industrial agriculture,” says Masri. “So, in that way, what it ends up doing is increasing methane production rather than decreasing it, increasing pollution in communities rather than decreasing it, and threatening communities with the possibility of methane explosion.”

Organizing against false solutions

In places where clusters of large-scale CAFOs are already established, organizers try to prevent existing CAFOs from expanding. In recent years, this has included advocacy against building anaerobic biogas digesters at large CAFOs. 

Federal and state governments have put forth biogas technology as a way to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture. But advocates such as SRAP and Friends of the Earth say that biogas production does not erase the environmental impact of CAFOs. Instead, this industry creates a market for the manure systems that are most detrimental to human health. 

By incentivizing manure production, biogas encourages mega-dairies to grow in size. 

In areas such as California’s Central Valley, parts of the midwest, and eastern North Carolina, advocates are speaking up against digesters. In this work, communities have to go up against not just industrial animal production giants, but also Big Oil—which has a direct interest in seeing the biogas market grow.

“It’s important that when you’re organizing about this stuff, you’re super clear with the community members about what you’re going up against,” says Leslie Martinez, community engagement specialist for Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability (LCJA). “You’re going up against Goliath.”

LCJA addresses systemic injustice, particularly in California’s rural and low-income regions, and biogas is one of the issues on which Martinez works closely with community members. Martinez is based in California’s San Joaquin Valley, where there is a high concentration of mega-dairies. In the small towns throughout the valley, people may live next to as many as two dozen of these operations. No one knows the negative impacts of living next to mega-dairies better than people who actually do. They experience the air and water pollution firsthand.

“Communities who live next to dairies have a lot of expertise,” says Martinez.

And yet, this technology is part of both state and federal plans to decrease greenhouse gas emissions. New Mexico recently passed a bill called the Clean Transportation Fuel Standard, intended to support the development of clean energy in the state. 

California has its own Low Carbon Fuel Standard, something that has turned out to bolster mega-dairy CAFOs by supporting the development of anaerobic digesters. To resist the impacts of digesters, it’s important to know how the rules surrounding the industry are made.

“If you’re an organizer, I think step one is to figure out how decisions get made,” says Martinez. “But [it’s] also important to talk to someone who has been through this, who has been through a regulation so you can also understand the weird politics about it.”

Martinez and LCJA have had individual victories against CAFO expansions, but when it comes to biogas advocacy, it has been difficult to get the California Air Resources Board to take the community’s concerns about public health into consideration. 

“It’s business as usual,” says Martinez. “But what about the fact that this business as usual is bad?”

As an organizer, Martinez has experienced how things like this frequently get presented through a narrow lens, such as focusing on creating methane gas without acknowledging community impact. She recommends organizers and communities push for a more holistic approach. A good question to keep coming back to when speaking to industry or government officials is, ‘how would that impact community?’

“The other thing I encourage organizers to do is to stop thinking about things in silos. The bureaucracy creates things in silos to make it difficult for communities to make change, and at the end of the day, we know that there needs to be comprehensive reform around how we are doing dairies in California.”

Becoming an advocate

When Mary Dougherty first heard of the plan to build a 26,000-hog CAFO in her home of Bayfield County, Wisconsin, she was concerned. Other parts of Minnesota had been through this. In Kewaunee County, there were more cows than people and nitrate pollution made the water unsafe to drink in many private wells. It’s still that way, today.

Dougherty knew it was bad news. What she didn’t know was what to do about it. 

She had never thought of herself as an organizer or an environmentalist. She ran a restaurant. She published a cookbook. She was a mom to five kids. Of all the hats she wore, organizer wasn’t one of them.

“I had no idea about any of this stuff,” says Dougherty. “Literally zero—less than zero probably. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing.”

But she had to learn. There are only about 16,000 people in Bayfield County, so the idea of there being more hogs than humans was frightening. The town of Bayfield is perched on the edge of Lake Superior. Even though she didn’t think of herself as an environmentalist, many people in Bayfield shared the same love for the lake and the surrounding landscape. The acute threat posed by CAFO pollution had to be addressed.

Now senior regional representative for the Socially Responsible Agriculture Project, Dougherty first got involved with the organization because it was who she reached out to for assistance.

“I got involved with SRAP because I called for help,” says Dougherty. “I have such a really deep appreciation for the space [people are] in when they call because I was in that space in 2015.”

Industrial agriculture is more “industry” than “farming,” says Dougherty. “Industry is hiding behind a beloved American archetype of the American farmer. And they are causing great harm across this country, because they’re not farmers, they’re industrial operations that come with all of the risks that accompany all industrial operations.”

The impact of this is two-fold—it leads to people supporting large-scale corporate farms because they think they’re supporting the family farmer. But it also means that these operations aren’t subject to the same regulations and monitoring as manufacturing industries. As agricultural operations, large CAFOs get away with more self-reporting and self-regulation.

Dougherty receives calls about impending CAFOs, and in places where CAFOs are already established, anaerobic digesters for biogas. 

For the average person to begin organizing against a CAFO or digester is like going into a whole new world where they don’t speak the language, says Dougherty. This new world is filled with things such as public records requests, zoning codes, and manure management plans.

Having been through the situation herself and supported others in similar situations, Dougherty says the most important thing to do first is listen to the community. She calls this a “tell me more” approach.

“What the Community Support program does is … hold space for folks, as they orient themselves to this huge fight they’re gonna find themselves in,” says Dougherty. 

When things were beginning in Bayfield, these early conversations were like the community’s compass rose. They asked themselves questions such as “who are we” and “what do we value?” And only then, says Dougherty, could they move on to “what are we going to do about it?”

Bayfield residents came together on the common ground of wanting to protect Lake Superior and the surrounding landscape. And what they did about it was they started a petition to enact a moratorium on siting CAFOs in Bayfield County. 

“This is ground that we all can stand on and agree, yes, this works for us. And once we’ve defined that ground, then we go on to the work of how we’re going to protect this place.”

The county board of supervisors passed the moratorium, stopping the clock temporarily. During that time, the board set up a study committee, which ended up recommending two ordinances that would further regulate any future CAFOs in Bayfield County. The 26,000-hog CAFO was not built in Bayfield County—but it did find another home in Burnett County.

Bayfield’s victory shows what communities are capable of. And the re-siting of the CAFO in a neighboring county demonstrates why so many advocates are pushing for systemic change as well. 

Back in Linn County, Oregon, Farmers Against Foster Farms was working towards both—a bill to protect not only its county but give other Oregon counties the ability to defend themselves as well.

In Oregon, the story is not over

Finding out about the planned chicken operation galvanized Linn County residents—many of them farmers themselves—to organize into a group called Farmers Against Foster Farms. They made a website and an email listserv, created yard signs and a Facebook page. The three planned sites were a concern, but they also wanted a way to address the issue more generally, before future sites were even chosen.

Starla Tillinghast, a Linn County farmer and member of Farmers Against Foster Farms, knew that many of the issues they were concerned about, such as environmental pollution and health effects, could be partially addressed with “setbacks.” A setback is a legally required distance between a CAFO and a property line. Oregon’s was on the lower end—a couple of dozen feet. Tillinghast began looking at other agricultural states to see what their required setbacks were. Other states had greater setbacks, and Tillinghast thought that this information could help Oregon follow suit.

“I went and looked up setbacks all across the nation, and I wrote that out in a table,” says Tillinghast. “I brought it to the planner, and I brought it to the county commissioners.”

When they went to the Linn County commissioners with their concerns, they were faced with this issue: Oregon counties did not have “local control” or the ability to make decisions about these matters at the county level. When decisions about CAFOs are made at the state level, it makes it easier for industry to get a toehold in desirable areas.

They campaigned in coalition with other groups and, in August 2023, Oregon passed Senate Bill 85. One of the things it did was give counties local control. Another key part of its passing made it illegal for corporate farms to access groundwater without a permit, which Kimbirauskas suspects led two of the three potential Foster Farms sites to pull their permit applications. The third was granted and then paused—to be under review until October 2024. 

In December, the county commissioners voted in favor of a one-mile setback for any new or expanding CAFOs—a huge victory for the group.

But after the decision, there was a lot of pushback. The county commissioners, who had passed the decision but had yet to codify it, reopened the topic for public comment and set another meeting for June, wherein the commissioners would either uphold the previous decision or walk it back.

The comments poured in. The Albany Democrat-Herald reports that nearly 200 people wrote in, both supporting and opposing the setback rule, most in opposition being members of a Facebook group called “Families for Affordable Food.” This group mischaracterizes what the setback would actually do, implying it would hinder new farms and ranches in the area, when the focus is actually on large livestock operations.

It wasn’t just people in Linn County who wrote in, nor even just in Oregon. People wrote in from the Midwest and the East Coast, above Oregon in Washington and below in California, signifying the cross-country nature of the resistance to factory farming.

“The whole nation is watching us,” said Commissioner Sherrie Sprenger. “It’s a big deal.”

In the end, they voted to maintain the one-mile setback, but only for poultry CAFOs. This is a victory for the group, as well as an indication that more work will need to be done to make the case for holding that setback for dairy and hog CAFOs as well.

“I feel uneasy…This story may not be finished,” wrote Tillinghast to Modern Farmer in an email. “But probably no [Foster Farms] CAFOs in Linn County for 2024 anyway.”

The post Factory Farms Make Bad Neighbors. Meet the People Who Are Fighting Back appeared first on Modern Farmer.

That’s how a farmer who used to work for Perdue described his chicken house—a sight so upsetting that it led him to transition out of this kind of work, often referred to as “factory farming.” 

Factory farming is a colloquial term, one meant to evoke the mechanized and impersonal nature of the process—although the phrase itself is somewhat vague. How big of an operation are we talking about, and why is it a problem? To get at the heart of the issue, it helps to be more specific.

What the term is actually referring to can be more or less encapsulated in large-scale CAFOs, or concentrated animal feeding operations. 

Concentrated animal feeding operations

CAFOs are defined by the EPA as intensive feeding operations where many animals are confined and fed for at least 45 days per year (though it can be much more) and inevitably their manure and waste come in contact with ground and surface water. 

There are small, medium and large CAFOs, with the largest of these embodying the truest definition of a “factory farm.” A large CAFO is at least 1,000 “animal units. ”An animal unit is roughly 1,000 lbs of live animal so to be classified as a large CAFO an operation would need to have at least:

Or combinations of all types of animals totaling 1,000 animal units. 

The largest of these CAFOs hold tens of thousands of animals in one place. 

Rationalized as a way to feed more people, large CAFOs are pervasive in our food system. But industrial animal agriculture comes with a lot of downsides.

What’s the problem?

The main problems with concentrated animal agriculture are its impacts on human health, its impact on the environment, and its threats to animal welfare. Many of these issues can be boiled down to the fact that these operations produce a lot of manure in one place. And those pollutants are released directly into the air and water. A single large CAFO can produce as much waste as a human city but without the same sewage treatment processes in place.

Human Health

For people who live near these CAFOs, pollution of the air and water pose serious health concerns. Respiratory issues such as asthma can be caused or made worse, and nitrate pollution in water can cause conditions such as blue baby syndrome. Although it can be difficult to prove causation, there have been many instances of serious issues believed to be caused by living close to CAFOs, such as cancer, miscarriages, and more. In the US, research has indicated that the impacts of agriculture on air quality lead to 17,900 deaths per year.

Additionally, these large-scale animal operations are often built in communities of color. For example, in California’s Central Valley, people of color are 1.29 times more likely to live within three  miles of a large dairy CAFO than white residents. With examples of this spanning the country, from California to North Carolina, this kind of pollution is a pattern of environmental injustice.

Farmer Health and Well-being  

Often, the farmers who enter into contracts with big meat companies such as  Tyson or Perdue find themselves taking on extensive debt to keep up with the equipment demands of the company. Due to the pay system that some of these companies use, farmers don’t make enough money to get out of debt. Instead, the company keeps the profits while the farmers shoulder the overhead costs. Ultimately, contract farming has caused many producers to lose their farms.

Environment 

Air and waterways can be seriously polluted by CAFOs. In Iowa, the state with the most hog waste in the country, the number of polluted waterways has increased dramatically in the last few decades. In North Carolina, flooding caused by Hurricane Matthew had caused substantial pollution when hog waste overflowed from their lagoons. The reason CAFOs are designated by the EPA is because the Clean Water Act specifically regulates waste and pollutants in our water and this concentration of animals and their waste is seen as a major source of potential pollution.

Animal Welfare 

In these operations, chickens, cows, and hogs are kept in conditions where they can hardly move or stand up. They are dirty and ill for most of their lives. Animal rights groups have long sounded the alarm on these conditions, but Ag-gag laws are in place in many states in an attempt to prevent these conditions from being documented.

Additional Issues

Living near a large CAFO can impact people in a lot of other ways,  too. There is an ever-present bad smell, flies, property values go down, mental health implications, and more. Even if you do not live next to a large CAFO, the issues with this type of animal production can include the spread of disease and strain on water supply.

No. Advocates would not equate large-scale CAFOs with farming at all. There are many farms—farms that practice animal agriculture—that operate in a way that protects the environment, practices responsible animal care, and does not harm the human communities close to them. These farmers are in a different category from industrial animal agriculture, which many farmers and advocates in this space would say is actually not agriculture at all, but more similar to manufacturing—hence the “factory” moniker. 

Still, this industry will often present itself as representative of the American farmer. As a result, critics are branded as “anti-agriculture” when in fact, the opposite is true. What many advocates call for is not the end of farming, but the end of a brand of food production that harms more than it helps.

The post Factory Farms Explained appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Standing knee-deep in an emerald expanse, a row of trees offering respite from the sweltering heat, Rosa Morales diligently relocates chipilín, a Central American legume, from one bed of soil to another. The 34-year-old has been coming to the Campesinos’ Garden run by the Farmworker Association of Florida in Apopka for the last six months, taking home a bit of produce each time she visits. The small plot that hugs a soccer field and community center is an increasingly vital source of food to feed her family. 

It also makes her think of Guatemala, where she grew up surrounded by plants. “It reminds me of working the earth there,” Morales said in Spanish. 

Tending to the peaceful community garden is a far cry from the harvesting Morales does for her livelihood. Ever since moving to the United States 16 years ago, Morales has been a farmworker at local nurseries and farms. She takes seasonal jobs that allow her the flexibility and income to care for her five children, who range from 18 months to 15 years old. 

This year, she picked blueberries until the season ended in May, earning $1 for every pound she gathered. On a good day, she earned about two-thirds of the state’s minimum hourly wage of $12. For that, Morales toiled in brutal heat, with little in the way of protection from the sun, pesticides, or herbicides. With scant water available, the risk of dehydration or heat stroke was never far from her mind. But these are the sorts of things she must endure to ensure her family is fed. “I don’t really have many options,” she said. 

Now, she’s grappling with rising food prices, a burden that isn’t relieved by state or federal safety nets. Her husband works as a roofer, but as climate change diminishes crop yields and intensifies extreme weather, there’s been less work for the two of them. They have struggled to cover the rent, let alone the family’s ballooning grocery bill. 

“It’s hard,” she said. “It’s really, really hot … the heat is increasing, but the salaries aren’t.” The Campesinos’ Garden helps fill in the gap between her wages and the cost of food.

Her story highlights a hidden but mounting crisis: The very people who ensure the rest of the country has food to eat are going hungry. Although no one can say for sure how many farmworkers are food insecure (local studies suggest it ranges from 52 to 82 percent), advocates are sure the number is climbing, driven in no small part by climate change. 

The 2.4 million or so farmworkers who are the backbone of America’s agricultural industry earn among the lowest wages in the country. The average American household spends more than $1,000 a month on groceries, an almost unimaginable sum for families bringing home as little as $20,000 a year, especially when food prices have jumped more than 25 percent since 2019.  Grappling with these escalating costs is not a challenge limited to farmworkers, of course — the Department of Agriculture says getting enough to eat is a financial struggle for more than 44 million people. But farmworkers are particularly vulnerable because they are largely invisible in the American political system.

“When we talk about supply chains and food prices going up, we are not thinking about the people who are producing that food, or getting it off the fields and onto our plates,” said Nezahualcoyotl Xiuhtecutli. 

Xiuhtecutli works with the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition to protect farmworkers from the occupational risks and exploitation they face. Few people beyond the workers themselves recognize that hunger is a problem for the community, he said — or that it’s exacerbated by climate change. The diminished yields that can follow periods of extreme heat and the disruptions caused by floods, hurricanes, and the like inevitably lead to less work, further exacerbating the crisis.

There isn’t a lot of aid available, either. Enrolling in federal assistance programs is out of the  question for the roughly 40 percent of farmworkers without work authorization or for those who fear reprisals or sanctions. Even those who are entitled to such help may be reluctant to seek it. In lieu of these resources, a rising number of advocacy organizations are filling the gaps left by government programs by way of food pantries, collaborative food systems, and community gardens across America.

“Even though [farmworkers] are doing this job with food, they still have little access to it,” said Xiuhtecutli. “And now they have to choose between paying rent, paying gas to and from work, and utilities, or any of those things. And food? It’s not at the top of that list.”

∴

Historically, hunger rates among farmworkers, as with other low-income communities, have been at their worst during the winter due to the inherent seasonality of a job that revolves around growing seasons. But climate change and inflation have made food insecurity a growing, year-round problem. 

In September, torrential rain caused heavy flooding across western Massachusetts. The inundation decimated farmland already ravaged by a series of storms. “It impacted people’s ability to make money and then be able to support their families,” Claudia Rosales said in Spanish. “People do not have access to basic food.” 

As executive director of the Pioneer Valley Workers Center, Rosales fights to expand protections for farmworkers, a community she knows intimately. After immigrating from El Salvador, she spent six years working in vegetable farms, flower nurseries, and tobacco fields across Connecticut and Massachusetts, and knows what it’s like to experience food insecurity. She also understands how other exploitative conditions, such as a lack of protective gear or accessible bathrooms, can add to the stress of simply trying to feed a family. Rosales remembers how, when her kids got sick, she was afraid she’d get fired if she took them to the doctor instead of going to work. (Employers harassed her and threatened to deport her if she tried to do anything about it, she said.) The need to put food on the table left her feeling like she had no choice but to tolerate the abuse.   

“I know what it’s like, how much my people suffer,” said Rosales. “We’re not recognized as essential … but without us, there would not be food on the tables across this country.” 

 The floodwaters have long since receded and many farms are once again producing crops, but labor advocates like Rosales say the region’s farmworkers still have not recovered. Federal and state disaster assistance helps those with damaged homes, businesses, or personal property, but does not typically support workers. Under federal law, if agricultural workers with a temporary visa lose their job when a flood or storm wipes out a harvest, they are owed up to 75 percent of the wages they were entitled to before the disaster, alongside other expenses. They aren’t always paid, however. “Last year, there were emergency funds because of the flooding here in Massachusetts that never actually made it to the pockets of workers,” Rosales said. 

The heat wave that recently scorched parts of Massachusetts likely reduced worker productivity and is poised to trigger more crop loss, further limiting workers’ ability to make ends meet. “Climate-related events impact people economically, and so that then means limited access to food and being able to afford basic needs,” said Rosales, forcing workers to make difficult decisions on what they spend their money on — and what they don’t.  

The impossible choice between buying food or paying other bills is something that social scientists have been studying for years. Research has shown, for example, that low-income families often buy less food during cold weather to keep the heat on. But climate change has given rise to a new area to examine: how extreme heat can trigger caloric and nutritional deficits. A 2023 study of 150 countries revealed that unusually hot weather can, within days, create higher risks of food insecurity by limiting the ability to earn enough money to pay for groceries. 

It’s a trend Parker Gilkesson Davis, a senior policy analyst studying economic inequities at the nonprofit Center for Law and Social Policy, is seeing escalate nationwide, particularly as utility bills surge. “Families are definitely having to grapple with ‘What am I going to pay for?’” she said. “People, at the end of the month, are not eating as much, having makeshift meals, and not what we consider a full meal.” 

Federal programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, are designed to help at times like these. More than 41 million people nationwide rely on the monthly grocery stipends, which are based on income, family size, and some expenses. But one national survey of nearly 3,700 farmworkers found just 12.2 percent used SNAP. Many farmworkers and migrant workers do not qualify because of their immigration status, and those who do often hesitate to use the program out of fear that enrolling could jeopardize their status. Even workers with temporary legal status like a working visa, or those considered a “qualified immigrant,” typically must wait five years before they can begin receiving SNAP benefits. Just six states provide nutrition assistance to populations, like undocumented farmworkers, ineligible for the federal program.

The expiration of COVID-era benefit programs, surging food costs, and international conflicts last year forced millions more Americans into a state of food insecurity, but no one can say just how many are farmworkers. That’s because such data is almost nonexistent — even though the Agriculture Department tracks annual national statistics on the issue. Lisa Ramirez, the director of the USDA’s Office of Partnerships and Public Engagement, acknowledged that the lack of data on hunger rates for farmworkers should be addressed on a federal level and said there is a “desire” to do something about it internally. But she didn’t clarify what specifically is being done. “We know that food insecurity is a problem,” said Ramirez, who is a former farmworker herself. “I wouldn’t be able to point to statistics directly, because I don’t have [that] data.” 

Without that insight, little progress can be made to address the crisis, leaving the bulk of the problem to be tackled by labor and hunger relief organizations nationwide.

“My guess is it would be the lack of interest or will — sort of like a willful ignorance — to better understand and protect these populations,” said social scientist Miranda Carver Martin, who studies food justice and farmworkers at the University of Florida. “Part of it is just a lack of awareness on the part of the general public about the conditions that farmworkers are actually working in. And that correlates to a lack of existing interest or resources available to build an evidence base that reflects those concerns.” 

The lack of empirical information prevented Martin and her colleagues Amr Abd-Elrahman and Paul Monaghan from creating a tool that would identify the vulnerabilities local farmworkers experience before and after a disaster. “What we’ve found is that the tool that we dreamed of, that would sort of comprehensively provide all this data and mapping, is not feasible right now, given the dearth of data,” she noted.

However, Martin and her colleagues did find, in a forthcoming report she shared with Grist, that language barriers often keep farmworkers from getting aid after an extreme weather event. Examining the aftermath of Hurricane Idalia, they found cases of farmworkers in Florida trying, and failing, to get food at emergency stations because so many workers spoke Spanish and instructions were written only in English. She suspects the same impediments may hinder post-disaster hunger relief efforts nationwide.

Martin also believes there is too little focus on the issue, in part because some politicians demonize immigrants and the agriculture industry depends upon cheap labor. It is easier “to pretend that these populations don’t exist,” she said. “These inequities need to be addressed at the federal level. Farmworkers are human beings and our society is treating them like they’re not.” 

∴

Tackling hunger has emerged as one of the biggest priorities for the Pioneer Valley Workers Center that Claudia Rosales leads. Her team feeds farmworker families in Massachusetts through La Despensa del Pueblo, a food pantry that distributes food to roughly 780 people each month.  

The nonprofit launched the pantry in the winter of 2017. When the pandemic struck, it rapidly evolved from a makeshift food bank into a larger operation. But the program ran out of money last month when a key state grant expired, sharply curtailing the amount of food it can distribute. The growing need to feed people also has limited the organization’s ability to focus on its primary goal of community organizing. Rosales wants to see the food bank give way to a more entrepreneurial model that offers farmworkers greater autonomy. 

“For the long term, I’d like to create our own network of cooperatives owned by immigrants, where people can go and grow and harvest their own food and products and really have access to producing their own food and then selling their food to folks within the network,” she said. 

Mónica Ramírez, founder of the national advocacy organization Justice for Migrant Women, is developing something very much like that in Ohio. Ramírez herself hails from a farmworker family. “Both of my parents started working in the fields as children,” she said. “My dad was eight, my mom was five.” Growing up in rural Ohio, Ramírez remembers visiting the one-room shack her father lived in while picking cotton in Mississippi, and spending time with her grandparents who would “pile on a truck” each year and drive from Texas to Ohio to harvest tomatoes and cucumbers all summer. 

The challenges the Ramírez family faced then persist for others today. Food security has grown so tenuous for farmworkers in Fremont, Ohio, where Justice for Migrant Women is based, that the organization has gone beyond collaborating with organizations like Feeding America to design its own hyperlocal food system. These hunger relief efforts are focused on women in the community, who Ramírez says usually face the biggest burdens when a household does not have enough money for food.

Migrant women, she said, “bear the stress of economic insecurity and food insecurity, because they are the ones who are organizing their families and making sure their families have food in the house.” 

Later this month, Ramírez and her team will launch a pilot program out of their office that mimics a farmers market — one in which farmworkers and migrant workers will be encouraged to pick up food provided by a local farmer, at no charge. That allows those visiting the food bank to feel empowered by choice instead of being handed a box with preselected goods, and they hope it will alleviate hunger in a way that preserves a sense of agency for families in need.

Although federal lawmakers have begun at least considering protecting workers from heat exposure and regulators are making progress on a national heat standard, so far there’s been no targeted legislative or regulatory effort to address food insecurity among farmworkers. 

In fact, legislators may be on the verge of making things worse.

In May, the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives Agriculture Committee passed a draft farm bill that would gut SNAP and do little to promote food security. It also would bar state and local governments from adopting farmworker protection standards regulating agricultural production and pesticide use, echoing legislation Florida recently passed. The inclusion of such a provision is “disappointing,” said DeShawn Blanding, a senior Washington representative at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit advocacy organization. He hopes to see the version that eventually emerges from the Democrat-controlled Senate, where it remains stalled, incorporate several other proposed bills aimed at protecting farmworkers and providing a measure of food security.

Those include the Voice for Farm Workers Act, which would shore up funding for several established farmworker support initiatives and expand resources for the Agriculture Department’s farmworker coordinator. This position was created to pinpoint challenges faced by farmworkers and connect them with federal resources, but it has not been “adequately funded and sustained,” according to a 2023 USDA Equity Commission report. Another bill would create an office within the Agriculture Department to act as a liaison to farm and food workers.

These bills, introduced by Democratic Senator Alex Padilla of California, would give lawmakers and policymakers greater visibility into the needs and experiences of farmworkers. But the greatest benefit could come from a third proposal Padilla reintroduced, the Fairness for Farm Workers Act. It would reform the 1938 law that governs the minimum wage and overtime policies for farmworkers while exempting them from labor protections.

“As food prices increase, low-income workers are facing greater rates of food insecurity,” Padilla told Grist. “But roughly half of our nation’s farmworkers are undocumented and unable to access these benefits.” He’d like to see an expedited pathway to citizenship for the over 5 million essential workers, including farmworkers, who lack access to permanent legal status and social safety benefits. “More can be done to address rising food insecurity rates for farmworkers.”

Still, none of these bills squarely addresses farmworker hunger. Without a concerted approach, these efforts, though important, kind of miss the point, Mónica Ramírez said. 

“I just don’t think there’s been a fine point on this issue with food and farmworkers,” she said. “To me it’s kind of ironic. You would think that would be a starting point. What will it take to make sure that the people who are feeding us, who literally sustain us, are not themselves starving?” 

∴

For 68-year-old Jesús Morales, the Campesinos’ Garden in Apopka is a second home. Drawing on his background studying alternative medicine in Jalisco, Mexico, he’s been helping tend the land for the last three years. He particularly likes growing and harvesting moringa, which is used in Mexico to treat a range of ailments. Regular visitors know him as the “plant doctor.” 

“Look around. This is the gift of God,” Morales said in Spanish. “This is a meadow of hospitals, a meadow of medicines. Everything that God has given us for our health and well-being and for our happiness is here, and that’s the most important thing that we have here.”

He came across the headquarters of the state farmworker organization when it hosted free English classes, then learned about its garden. Although it started a decade ago, its purpose has expanded over the years to become a source of food security and sovereignty for local farmworkers. 

The half-acre garden teems with a staggering assortment of produce. Tomatoes, lemons, jalapeños. Nearby trees offer dragonfruit and limes, and there’s even a smattering of papaya plants. The air is thick with the smell of freshly dug soil and hints of herbs like mint and rosemary. Two compost piles sit side by side, and a greenhouse bursts with still more produce. Anyone who visits during bi-monthly public gardening days is encouraged to plant their own seeds and take home anything they care to harvest. 

“The people who come to our community garden, they take buckets with them when they can,” said Ernesto Ruiz, a research coordinator at the Farmworker Association of Florida who oversees the garden. “These are families with six kids, and they work poverty wages. … They love working the land and they love being out there, but food is a huge incentive for them, too.” 

Throughout the week, the nonprofit distributes what Ruiz harvests. The produce it so readily shares is supplemented by regular donations from local supermarkets, which Ruiz often distributes himself.  

But some of the same factors driving farmworkers to hunger have begun to encroach on the garden. Blistering summer heat and earlier, warmer springs have wiped out crops, including several plots of tomatoes, peppers, and cantaloupes. “A lot of plants are dying because it’s so hot, and we’re not getting rains,” said Ruiz. The garden could also use new equipment — the irrigation system is manual while the weed whacker is third-rate, often swapped out for a machete — and funding to hire another person to help Ruiz increase the amount of food grown and expand when the garden is open to the public.

Demand is rising, and with it, pressure to deliver. Federal legislation addressing the low wages that lead to hunger for many farmworkers across the country is a big part of the solution, but so are community-based initiatives like the Campesinos’ Garden, according to Ruiz. “You do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do,” he said. “It’s always the right thing to feed somebody. Always.” 

The post Who is Feeding America’s Farmworkers? appeared first on Modern Farmer.

And despite the name, bird flu doesn’t only impact birds. Since 2022, there have been four cases reported in humans and, more recently, more than 100 herds of dairy cattle in the US alone. The infection has also been found in both the milk and meat of these animals. This month, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency updated its testing eligibility for cattle and said it would now cover some of the testing fees, to ensure any outbreaks are dealt with swiftly. Luckily, in humans, the disease isn’t known to be fatal, but it can lead to high temperatures, breathing trouble, diarrhea, conjunctivitis and potentially more serious complications such as pneumonia or respiratory illness. 

So, what does this mean for your grocery order? Let’s break it down. 

First, poultry. Is it safe to eat?

Yes. Experts say it is highly unlikely that humans can contract the virus from properly cooked meat or eggs. This means cooking eggs until the yolk and whites are firm and chicken to at least 165°F. And to be safe, keep raw poultry away from any other foods. 

But what’s even more important is that infected meat or eggs are very unlikely to reach grocery store shelves in the first place. According to a USDA predictive model, there is a less than five percent chance that infected eggs or meat might make it to the grocery store—and the model also predicts that if that did happen, 98 percent of infected eggs could be recalled immediately. 

But what about milk?

Recent studies of about 300 commercially available dairy products revealed inactive HPAI in one in five samples. That number seems like a lot on the surface, but there’s one key element: pasteurization. There is increasing evidence that the pasteurization process neutralizes the virus, making pasteurized dairy products safe to consume. 

In the 297 samples tested by the USDA, there was no instance of a live, viable virus in any pasteurized product. 

Is beef ok?

As with poultry and eggs, it’s highly unlikely that infected beef would make it to store shelves in the first place. However, if it does, experts also agree that properly cooked beef carries very little risk of transmitting the virus to humans. Cooking your meat to an internal temperature of at least 165 degrees Fahrenheit (74 degrees Celsius) will neutralize avian flu, E Coli and any other bacteria. 

So, what do I need to know?

The main thing to ensure when shopping for or preparing food is that you’re following safe food guidelines. Consuming raw eggs (looking at you, cookie dough) or unpasteurized dairy products could increase your risk of not just HPAI but salmonella, E Coli, listeria or other food-borne illnesses. Raw ground beef can also be a transmitter of those illnesses, so store beef at 40 degrees F or below, and use it within a few days. It’s also best to cook ground beef to an internal temperature of at least 160 degrees F. 

If you are someone who regularly comes in contact with farms, be they poultry or cattle, following a strict biosecurity plan will help reduce the risk of transmitting infections. That means tightening visitor access to your farm, wearing clean boots and clothes and removing or controlling any standing water. In the meantime, officials are looking at several solutions to mitigate these outbreaks, including new vaccines.

The post How Much Do You Really Need to Worry About Bird Flu? appeared first on Modern Farmer.

But the fight with bird flu isn’t over yet, and we may come out on the other side with healthier birds (and new menu options).

Rats with wings

The humble pigeon, thought by many to be a pest, has much to offer us in this fight against bird flu. Pigeons were once revered as war heroes, used to carry messages during the world wars; the Dickin Medal, the highest possible decoration for valor in animals, has been given to 32 pigeons, beginning with Winkie the pigeon in 1942. Before that, we used pigeons for meat and eggs, and squab (juvenile pigeons) remain a delicacy in much of the world. Texts from Spain regarding raising pigeons for their meat date back as far as 60 A.D. 

But today, it’s the pigeons’ DNA that can help us. Pigeons have high numbers of interferon-stimulated genes (which signal to infected cells when a pathogen is present), giving them what researchers hypothesize is an inherent ability to prevent viruses from entering their cells and spreading. After being exposed to bird flu in a lab environment, pigeons showed a low immune response and had low levels of the virus in their bodies. In comparison, chickens and turkeys with the same exposure had high levels of the virus concentrated in their organs, particularly in the brain. 

Further studies have shown pigeons to be resistant and/or minimally susceptible to the virus. One hundred rock pigeons were tested for the virus during the 2022 outbreak; only two were positive. However, their deaths were not attributed to the virus.

Obviously, the poultry industry’s showing no signs of restructuring to push pigeon quesadillas or pigeon tenders as your weeknight dinner. Despite pigeons’ benefits in bird flu resistance, much of our industry is focused around the more traditional chicken and turkey. But for those in favor of pigeon, they claim to reap the benefits. 

Squab Producers of California, founded in 1943, is the largest squab producer in the US, producing more than 400,000 squab yearly. Although SPOC owns a commercial processing plant, the squab are raised in more than 600 different local farms that work together as a co-op, so that the birds don’t have to face the traditional factory farming environment.

The federation’s president, Dalton Rasmussen, notes that the birds produce better when they’re happier—so they try to give each bird a short but sweet life. The birds processed by SPOC spend their short time in small, locally owned farms, often with outdoor flight pens that allow older breeder birds a taste of the good life. “It’s one of the tastiest, tenderest meats that you can get,” says Rasmussen. “It used to be known as the meat of kings, because it was served to royalty all the way back to the Egyptian days.”

Prices for conventional chicken and turkey meat, as well as eggs, have suffered through the bird flu epidemic. In addition, fear associated with the virus has dampened consumers’ enthusiasm for poultry dinners. Tyson, one of the largest poultry producers in the US, reported slipping sales through 2023, leading to the closure of four of its plants. US poultry sales overall declined by 13 percent between 2022 and 2023. It’s hard to say whether it’s impacted squab farmers, with so few commercial farmers to reference, but, so far, there has yet to be a bird flu breakout at any US pigeon farming facility. In an uncertain time of H5N1, we may see more consumers trying pigeon. And with many neighborhoods restricting chicken ownership, maybe we’ll see backyard pigeon roosts gaining in popularity, too.

We can’t change Bird Flu. Can we change chickens?

There are some possible pigeon-less solutions in the works, such as gene editing. However, it’s a tricky business, and it rarely has a guaranteed payoff. 

Scout Thompson, a PhD student in biology at Western University, says the technology might not yet be sophisticated enough to prevent the spread of avian flu. “Even if [gene editing] could successfully eradicate the current strains of concern in domestic flocks, the virus could still persist in wild waterfowl and be reintroduced with mutations.” 

And, with the current state of bird flu infections, that possibility doesn’t seem unlikely. Many different species of waterfowl have already fallen victim, and experts are concerned that migratory patterns of waterfowl may cause seasonal surges in infection. Researchers have begun making progress with the CRISPR gene-editing technique, but we simply don’t yet know if this could result in long-term progress for the battle against H5N1. 

Betting on biosecurity

Vaccines are always an option, but it’s not always possible to mass-vaccinate poultry on the scale that would be required on a factory farm; after a positive test, just one major poultry farm in Texas was forced to cull close to two million chickens. 

But for smaller flocks, vaccines can be a source of hope. “I think we should make it easier for very small flocks to purchase vaccinations, medications and other treatments for their birds,” says Saro Nortrup, an urban flock owner in Nebraska. “Most of these, such as [medication for] Marek’s disease, are very expensive with large dosage options and a very limited shelf life.” 

According to the Rare Breeds Survival Trust, all of the UK’s native breeds of chickens, ducks and geese are under threat from bird flu. While bird flu losses that make the news typically number in the millions, Nortrup noted that any bird’s death can cause a cascade of damage. “If you have a rare breed, for example, the loss of your flock could have a serious impact on the genetic pool of an entire breed.”

Many American producers grew frustrated as it seemed to be an endless wait for bird flu vaccinations that weren’t coming; even now, many farms don’t have access to preventative vaccines. However, renewed interest has led to new developments and increased accessibility for these vaccines; scientists are working on a vaccine for humans, in the case of a potential pandemic if bird flu begins inter-human transmission.

We don’t have all the answers to bird flu yet. But, with so many partial solutions in the works, we’ll find a way to push forward—even if the poultry industry is never quite the same.

Correction: A previous version of this article referred to HPAI as H1N1. That has been corrected to H5N1. 

The post Rats With Wings, Vaccines, And New Breed—2024’s Solutions to the Bird Flu Crisis 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.

That’s a tall order. In 2021, approximately 33.8 million Americans were living in food-insecure households and approximately 600,000 Americans died annually from diet-related disease.

But across North America is a growing cohort of hospitals taking on the challenge and turning hospital food from a blob of green Jell-O to a fresh and tasty meal. Working with FIM, hospitals are filling doctor referrals for farm-share boxes of fresh produce and supplying hospital kitchens with organically grown crops. 

These farms are not simply growing kale. They are producing medicine. 

BMC’s Power Plant Farm

At Boston Medical Center (BMC), sustainability matters. On the roof of BMC’s natural gas-powered heat and electrical power plant, there is a 2,658-square-foot outdoor container farm, aptly named Power Plant Farm. Growing more than 30 varieties of crops, including cucumbers, peppers, tomatoes, squash, herbs and leafy greens, the farm harvested 4,000 pounds of organically grown produce last year.

“[This] represents a more holistic approach to care,” says Sarah Hastings, farm manager. “We are starting from square one, making the message clear that fresh foods help us heal and maintain our well-being.” 

The Preventive Food Pantry is the anchor of BMC’s FIM initiative. “We have more than 1,600 families, who receive about four days worth of food with each visit,” says Hastings. Used by cancer patients, those with heart disease, diabetes or other chronic health conditions, they are referred to the food pantry by their primary caregivers, who write prescriptions for foods promoting physical health, recovery from illness or as a preventative for future health issues. 

Throughout the hospital, patients and families are continually connected to the farm, reinforcing the message that healthy food matters. A large glass window in the waiting area of one of BMC’s buildings allows patients and their families to see the farm. “There is an especially heartwarming connection when patients or their families make it down to the farmer’s market in the foyer after observing the crops from the waiting area,” says Hastings. The farmer’s market operates once a week, with the produce sold at subsidized prices to staff, patients and their families. 

BMC’s Teaching Kitchen also incorporates farm produce into recipe tutorials for patients and their families to help them learn healthy ways of preparing food. For example, patients can attend a class at the Teaching Kitchen before bariatric surgery to help them learn simple ways to prepare food that will help their stomachs heal post-surgery and prevent nutritional deficiencies. 

“The farm brings a lot of excitement to the hospital,” says Hastings. 

The Farm at Trinity Health Ann Arbor

Established in 2010, the Farm at Trinity Health Ann Arbor in Ypsilanti, MI is one of the oldest hospital farms in the US. Leaders of Ann Arbor hospital, according to farm manager Jae Gerhart, started to see an increased rate of diet-related chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease, cancer and diabetes. They decided to use a small portion of the hospital campus to grow nutritional food and act as a community and educational resource geared towards disease prevention. The farm sits on five acres, four of which are used as community gardens or for events. One acre produces food that is designated for FIM’s programs. 

During the growing season, the farm hosts school field trips and summer camps for children aged four to 10. There is a farm-share box program that runs for 36 weeks over the growing season, for which anyone can sign up. For those struggling to afford fresh food, there is the option to sign up for the Farm Share Assistance Program or the Produce Prescription program at no cost. 

“Doctors love the program,” says Gerhart. “More and more, they are asking those social needs questions at a patient’s appointment.”

Gerhart says FIM and farm programs can reduce overall health-care costs associated with diet-related health conditions. “More and more data supports that,” she says.

Researchers at the FIM Institute at Tufts University concur. A 2023 report suggests that FIM interventions, such as medically tailored meals, could eliminate 1.6 million hospitalizations in the US annually and save $13.6 billion in health-care costs per year. Traditionally, individuals experiencing food insecurity spend an extra $1,800 per year in health-care expenditures. Farm share assistance programs could help reduce those costs. 

Salish Sea Regenerative Urban Farm

Changing the paradigm that hospital food has to be mushed peas and frozen carrots, the seven-acre Salish Sea Regenerative Urban Farm (SSRUF) sold organically grown cucumbers, tomatoes and 1,000 pounds of potatoes to British Columbia’s Sechelt Regional Hospital in 2023.

The American Medical Association has long advocated for adding a variety of healthy food choices, including plant-based meals and foods low in fat, sodium and added sugars to hospital menus to assist in better outcomes for patients.

But providing better hospital meals is not as simple as it sounds. The cost of local, sustainably grown foods can be more expensive than tins of marinara sauce or bags of frozen peas, especially for small hospitals with limited budgets. Large hospitals prepare food for hundreds of patients daily, with little turnaround time between breakfast, lunch and dinner. It takes time to chop, wash and cook fresh produce as opposed to opening and plating a bag of prepared salad mix. Many hospitals also have contracts with outside vendors, which makes it hard to incorporate other sources.

The SSRUF was aware of all of these concerns when it approached the small 38-bed hospital with its offer to sell its organically grown food from a farm 30 yards away from the hospital’s kitchen. But, according to Dave Ryan, a board member for the farm society, both the hospital and the regional health authority were very receptive. 

Surveys of the kitchen and care staff at the hospital were done to gauge the response of having local produce available to patients. “The kitchen staff were really excited,” says Barbara Seed, another board member of the farm society. 

The head of hospital food services also did a waste audit with preliminary results indicating that, when the fresh produce was added to meal trays, less food was thrown away. More audits will be needed to provide reliable data, but SSRUF is positive that it will concur with them about the benefits of farm to hospital food.

“It’s obvious,” says Ryan, “where nutrient-dense quality food should be—in a hospital where people have metabolic issues and should be served nutritious food to help recover.” 

The post On the Ground With the Farms Feeding Hospitals and Their Patients appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, the class of chemicals more commonly known as PFAS, are everywhere, not just in the world of agriculture. Since the 1940s, chemical companies such as Chemours, DuPont and 3M have developed more than 14,000 PFAS compounds for use in products as varied as nonstick cookware, electric-vehicle batteries and refrigerators. Because all PFAS contain bonds between carbon and fluorine, among the hardest to break in chemistry, they’ve earned the moniker “forever chemicals” for their remarkable persistence in the environment.

The problems with PFAS are daunting, but people are now mobilizing to reduce the dangers they pose. At the federal level, the EPA recently enacted its first enforceable limits for six PFAS in drinking water, as well as placed two PFAS on the list of hazardous substances covered by the Superfund law. And in communities across the country, researchers and local officials are testing out innovative approaches.

Beth Valentine’s inaugural fund

The leading edge of state-level responses to agricultural PFAS can be found in Maine. In 2022, its legislature became the first in the US to ban the field spreading of PFAS-containing sludge, and earlier this year, its Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry opened applications for the country’s first fund to help farmers deal with PFAS pollution on their land—with $65 million allocated so far.

“There are still many unknowns concerning how PFAS travel through [different substances] and to what extent they are taken up in various food products,” says Beth Valentine, the fund’s director. Because of this uncertainty, Valentine says farmers need time to identify and implement strategies to deal with PFAS.

The bulk of the fund will give farmers financial and technical backing as they plan for changes in their business. About $20 million is also set aside to purchase and manage land that’s too contaminated to work, with the goal of eventually making it suitable for farming again.

While the fund’s initial allocation is expected to last for five years, Valentine says it will seek additional money from state and federal governments, as well as through litigation against PFAS manufacturers, for ongoing operation. “PFAS are nicknamed ‘forever chemicals,’” she say. “Agricultural producers are likely to need support for years to come.”

Jessica Ray’s selective carbon

Scientists know that one widely available technology is pretty good at removing PFAS: activated carbon, a processed charcoal that captures chemicals in countless tiny pores. The issue, says civil and environmental engineer Jessica Ray with the University of Washington, is that activated carbon is even better at removing everything else.

Because PFAS chemicals are usually present at much lower concentrations in wastewater than other pollutants such as drugs and pesticides, Ray explains, those more common contaminants can fill up activated carbon’s filtration capacity first. She and her colleagues have thus been working on a way to make carbon choosier.

Ray describes her approach as “kind of a lock-and-key mechanism for PFAS removal, where we’re building the lock and the PFAS molecule is the key.” She allows a reusable plastic polymer to form around a specific PFAS in the lab, then washes away the chemical, leaving behind microscopic impressions in the polymer like footprints in wet concrete. When the polymer is joined to activated carbon, its tailor-made molecular slots filter out PFAS while snubbing other pollutants.

After proving the concept in a paper published last year, Ray hopes to develop a polymer that targets the six PFAS the EPA now regulates in drinking water. That solution could then be layered atop existing activated carbon filters, making it easier to adopt at scale.

Susie Dai’s friendly fungi

“Human beings are good at producing many new problems,” says Susie Dai about the spread of PFAS. As the associate professor of environmental sciences at Texas A&M University points out, however, the most pernicious part of PFAS chemistry—the “forever” carbon-fluorine bond—is also produced in nature, as part of the toxins made by a handful of mostly tropical plants.

Since those bonds are mirrored in nature, a natural solution also exists to break them, through the decomposing powers of bacteria and fungi. As described in a 2022 paper, Dai’s team took corn harvest wastes and processed them into a material that both filtered PFAS from wastewater and provided a substrate for Irpex lacteus, a fungus also called white rot, which is typically found on hardwoods. After adding PFAS to the medium and letting the fungus grow for two weeks, Dai confirmed that it had started to break down the pollutants. 

But the process needs to happen at a much greater scale and speed to deal with the ubiquitous PFAS pollution introduced by humanity. Going forward, Dai plans to study the biological mechanisms white rot uses to destroy PFAS, with the goal of picking up the pace. “We’re adding an acceleration pedal,” she says. 

An online community 

Today, nearly all Americans have measurable PFAS levels in their blood.

“We’ve all been signed up for the study without our consent,” says Laurel Schaider, PhD, senior scientist at the Silent Spring Institute, a nonprofit research organization dedicated to understanding the links between chemical exposures and health. “We’re all part of this.” 

PFAS-REACH (Research, Education and Action for Community Health) is a collaboration between research partners Silent Spring Institute, Northeastern University and Michigan State University, and community partners Testing for Pease, Slingshot and the Massachusetts Breast Cancer Coalition. The initiative has developed the PFAS Exchange, a free resource for communities affected by PFAS and anyone who wants to learn more about the chemicals.

Among the site’s resources is the Connecting Communities map, led by the PFAS Project Lab. The map is an ArcGIS tool that allows people to see locations of known PFAS contamination, sites of presumed contamination, which states have passed PFAS regulations and conducted testing, locations of health and exposure studies as well as regional advocacy with whom people can connect. 

PFAS Exchange also features the What’s My Exposure? tool. This is for people who have had their water or blood tested for PFAS. Schaider says it’s important to give people not only results but also enough context to understand what those results mean. The What’s My Exposure? tool allows people to enter in their test results and see how they compare to other people and areas.

“They can understand what their results mean—as well as anyone can—and they feel empowered to take action.”

This story is part of our ongoing PFAS series, The PFAS Problem: Demystifying ‘Forever Chemicals’

The post On the Ground with Initiatives Responding to PFAS appeared first on Modern Farmer.